Aftertime

there would be that one perfect thing. The one thing that was the way it ought to be. You know?”

And the thing was, not only did Cass know but Gloria’s explanation was dead-on. She’d had the same complicated regret herself, over and over, the mourning for some small thing not because she missed the object itself but because in that moment everything seemed off. All solutions were imperfect solutions. And that wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily, because you learned to improvise, you learned to make do. Except for once in a while when it hit you like this.

“I know,” she said, and touched Gloria, gently.

Gloria looked at her, then looked at the arm where Cass had touched her, and her eyes clouded and she picked at her crusty chapped lip. “Why do you want to go in there? It’s not nice there.”

“Oh, I don’t. That’s not why I’m here. I don’t want to join. I’m looking for my daughter. Ruthie.”

As she said the name the feeling was there again, the fear that Ruthie was not in the great looming stadium, that she was nowhere near here. Maybe she was nowhere at all anymore.

Gloria put a hand to her cheek and frowned. “How old is your daughter?”

“Almost three.” Three in September, if anyone was still keeping track by then.

Gloria shook her head. “There’s little ones there. But they change all their names when they’re baptized.”

“Baptized?”

“Yes. Into the Order. In the ceremony, where they take their first communion and get their new names.” There was a note of sympathy in her voice, and she fixed her troubled gaze on Cass, her confusion momentarily lessened. “Tell me about your little girl. What does she look like?”

So Cass told: the hair so pale in the sun that it looked like flashing dimes. The rosebud mouth that could crumple into a wobbly frown one moment and lift into a blazing smile the next. The fold in her chubby arms where the baby fat was still smooth and soft.

As she talked Cass found herself speeding up, panicking, with the knowledge that her baby was months older now, that the rounded elbows and dimpled knees might have disappeared, that her hair would be longer and she would have a dozen new freckles and have learned to do things Cass couldn’t even imagine. Cass couldn’t know all the ways Ruthie would have grown and changed, and it felt like a betrayal.

“I don’t know,” Gloria said, interrupting Cass midsentence, shaking her head. “It’s too hard to know. And they change them. They mix them up like they mix me up. I heard talk.”

“What do you mean? What kind of talk?”

Gloria twisted her mouth into an expression of fury. “Hypocritical talk,” she spat. “The kind I can’t stand. The kind that drove me right back out here.”

Right back to the bottle-she didn’t say it, but it was clear to Cass, and Cass didn’t judge. She knew how it was-the filament that wasn’t strong enough, the way it stretched and stretched before it snapped, leaving you hurtling through the air toward devastation.

Still, there was hope. There were girls in the Convent, and one of them could be Ruthie, and she would find out, but she needed Gloria to focus. They approached an old picnic bench set on uneven ground under a dead pepper tree. “Let’s sit,” she suggested, sweeping dirt and twigs off the splintered wood, and Gloria sat, her expression troubled and confused.

“What kind of talk did you hear?” Cass pleaded, hoping the woman could keep it together a little longer.

“Talk talk,” Gloria muttered. She found a groove in the weathered wood with her forefinger. Her hands were surprisingly elegant, unlined and narrow with long fingers and neat nails. She rubbed at the groove gently, seemingly oblivious to the splintered edges. “They said I didn’t have enough faith. I said they didn’t have enough faith. I know what I know. I watched…the sun painted the rocks and I saw God, I told them that but they said I didn’t have the faith. I wouldn’t drink the essence so they said I didn’t have the faith.”

“Saw God…Gloria, when did you see God?”

Gloria’s skittering gaze landed on her and stayed, like a butterfly on a coneflower, skittish. “Matthew. Before Matthew…before he was gone.”

“Who was Matthew?”

“Matthew?” Gloria glared at her, affronted, and Cass watched her awareness fade in the eddies and whorls of memory. “I married him…we went to Yosemite. I watched God, in the mornings, the way he painted the rocks with the sun. Matthew was there. We were happy.” She startled out of her reverie and seemed surprised to find Cass there. “I married him,” she repeated, sternly. “We were happy. They can’t tell me I don’t have faith.”

Her twitching fingers went to her mouth again, covering, pinching, worrying, and Cass could sense Gloria turning inward again. Who knew what happened to Matthew…maybe he was Gloria’s childhood sweetheart, dead twenty years in an accident. Or maybe he’d been taken, or died of fever only months ago. Either way, Gloria wore the loss like an amulet, a token against the weight of Aftertime.

“I’m sorry about Matthew,” Cass said gently.

Gloria made a sound in her throat and nodded, dropping her hands to her lap. She only wanted to be heard, Cass thought-only that. And for things to be different. What anyone wanted.

But Cass needed more from her. “I’m so sorry to ask. But is there anything else you can tell me about what goes on in there? With the babies, the little girls? How they’re cared for, where they end up?”

Gloria was shaking her head before Cass finished speaking.

“Not little girls, not,” she mumbled. “Not little girls anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“When they’re done, when they’re baptized. They’re only vessels. There’s nothing left inside.”

30

“WHAT,” CASS MANAGED TO WHISPER, HER throat twisting closed.

“‘Be thou a vessel of innocence,’” Gloria chanted softly. The skin twitched near her left eye. “‘Scoured clean of this world.’ They baptized them.”

“What else did they do?”

“The hair and the dress,” Gloria mumbled. “All the little dresses. White for purity. Purity for innocence. And no talking. No, no, no talking.”

“They put them in baptism dresses?” Cass repeated, scrambling to make sense of Gloria’s tormented muttering. “And there’s no talking during the ceremony. And what happens next?”

“Scoured clean.”

The phrase raised the hairs along her arm. “What does that mean, Gloria? They…wash or scrub them somehow?”

Gloria peeked at Cass, her darting eyes bright with her fevered thoughts. “You won’t know her,” she said sadly. “Don’t go. She’s not yours anymore. She’s innocent now. And they hide them.”

Ruthie was always innocent, Cass wanted to scream, wanted to make Gloria see her the way she had been, in her denim overalls and tiny little flowered t-shirt, falling asleep in Cass’s lap. But Gloria pushed herself off the bench and started walking again, her footsteps unsteady and lurching.

Cass went after her, put a hand on her arm. Gloria yanked away from her touch, crossing her arms tightly in front of her, shaking her head.

“Please,” Cass said. “Just-just tell me what you can. Anything, just help me get in there.”

“You can’t go in. You don’t believe.”

“I-” Cass stopped herself, considered her words. The wrong ones would make Gloria retreat even further. The haze of broken memories and tangled thoughts around Gloria seemed to condense and retreat when Cass was too direct, when she brought up specifics. But specifics were what she needed, a plan for gaining entry. “Did you believe?”

Gloria was silent for a moment. She touched her weathered fingertips to the chain link of the fence and let them trail along the metal-surely Gloria wasn’t the only resident who walked off her next-day ills around this track.