Free A Master Plan for Rescue by Janis Cooke Newman Page A

stare at the ceiling of Good Shepherd, as if they believed the Holy Spirit might be hiding behind the burnt-out lightbulbs and cobwebs of the building’s chandelier.
    And now we were seated with them. My mother wearing the black dress that was too hot, even for this early in the morning, and me in my black Mass pants and a long-sleeved shirt, the code-o-graph in my pocket, my father’s messages sticking to my sweating chest.
    Father Barry came up the aisle swinging the censer, filling the already hot church with the smell of incense—that sweetish scent like candy you think will taste better than it does. He moved behind the row of wilting carnations to the altar and began the Mass, and though I tried not to hear it, my mother’s voice rose above even the loudest of the Desperate Catholics.
    It was not so much her voice, but what lay beneath it that disturbed me. The undertone that was asking—no, not asking, begging—God to protect me from German bombs dropping from the sky, and subway trains screaming into stations. Spare me from polio and tuberculosis and pneumonia, and a score of other diseases that had probably long since disappeared. And already my mother was looking up at that burnt-out chandelier with such concentration, I wanted to shake her and tell her there was nothing up there except spiders and dust.
    It was time to kneel, but I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed by my mother’s voice. I sat in the row of Desperate Catholics, the only one silent, the only one motionless. And the more my mother beseeched God to watch over me, the more the terrible hum of her undertone worked its way beneath my skin, slipped into my bloodstream like one of the illnesses from which she was trying to protect me. Until I was sure that if I did not stop her, everything she was attempting to save me from would happen.
    I felt the skin of my mother’s lips under my fingers, rough and chapped from so many days spent smoking and staring at the ceiling, so many days of begging God for favors. The raised bits of dry skin were like the peaks and valleys on the edges of my father’s film strips, the secret code I’d deciphered in the blackness of the Paradise darkroom.
Kodak Ektapan
, I thought.
Ilford Delta.
It was as if I was determining how long my mother would have to stay in the dark with the developing chemicals. But my mother had already spent her time in the dark, already done the work of becoming herself in reverse.
    My mother placed her hand over mine and gently removed it from her mouth. She touched the side of my face with her fingertips. But her lips were already back to saying the Mass, already caught up with Father Barry, as if she’d never stopped saying it inside her head.
    I was in the aisle before I knew I’d stood. Running past the early morning Mass-goers, my footsteps a pounding heartbeat beneath their holy repetitions. I burst through the church’s double doors into the bright hot day like someone coming up for air, ran all the way home, rubbing my hand against the side of my pants to scrape away the feeling of my mother’s mouth.
    Once inside the apartment, I went straight to my mother’s room and opened the door to my father’s closet. I wanted to touch my father’s clothes. Bury my face in those brown shirts he used to wear, shirts that smelled so strongly of the developing chemicals, it was like standing inside the Paradise darkroom. I wanted to run my hands over the white shirts, too. Those shirts with their colonies of brown spots. Shirts he’d bought, knowing they’d be ruined, just to make it easier for me to find him.
    But my father’s closet was empty.
    Everything had vanished. Even his hats—tan for summer, brown for winter. Hats that smelled of Wildroot Cream-Oil and my father’s head.
    I craned my neck and searched the shelf. The photographs were gone. The portraits people had refused because he’d captured something about them they hadn’t wanted to look at. The photographs that showed