True Confessions of a Heartless Girl by Martha Brooks

Author:Martha Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV039130
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
Published: 2003-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

13

Noreen looked down. The fine hairs along her bare arms were singed. The awful smell reminded her that something had just happened that couldn’t be fixed. It wasn’t so much the destroyed chair or rug — although these were bad enough — it was the burned-up photographs. Especially the one of Del and his brother waving down at some unknown photographer with all of the sky behind them. When she closed her eyes she could still see their uplifted arms and hands, their young man smiles.

Lynda wasn’t at home and Del could not be reached. Just now Dolores had gone back into the kitchen of the Molly Thorvaldson Cafe to write a note. Apparently after this she and Dolores were going to church.

Noreen sat down to wait on the same stool she’d sat on when she arrived, scared and cold and wet, two nights before. She recalled being out on the highway, windshield wipers clapping back and forth, the terror of being totally lost, the white truck appearing in the rain and cutting her off. A sudden wing of blinding water. Losing control. Driving off the road, through a ditch and miraculously coming up unhurt on the other side. Then finding this town, the cafe lights beckoning like some weird spacecraft in the darkness.

She buried her face in her hands. She hadn’t meant anybody any harm and now look what had happened.

She stood up, went to the window by the door, stared mournfully out at the day. The rain had stopped. The sun had come out, burning heat through the trees, sucking the moisture right back up into the brilliant blue prairie sky. She saw the way the fierce naked light hit the empty street. She saw the sky with its thin line of evaporating clouds and tried to think about her-self in the future. But no image would come. There was no image of Noreen Stall, hugely pregnant with Wesley Cuthand’s child. Or with a flat stomach, in some other place, with some other guy. Nothing. The emptiness of it all filled her with dread.

Right then and there she wanted to get down on her knees and pray to something for help. Except not to a boring old man with a beard, sitting in a chair. But what if God was a woman? What would She look like? Noreen tried to imagine Her. Pictured Her rising up from under the grass, Her head popping out of a hill. Then maybe She would grow tall, Her shoulders rounded with spilling dirt. Her hair would be trees and flowers and long prairie grasses. Her feet would be lakes and rivers and oceans. She would wear a crown of sky, with winds and stars and moon and sun and darkness and planets. She would have a pregnant belly, so big that on stormy days, if you looked up into the sky, you would be inside Her, inside God, and the lightning flashing across would be Her veins.

She stood there looking out, not seeing the street, but seeing God.

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