Wendy Hornsby - Telling Lies

The first book in the Maggie MacGowen series, 1992

AFTER the third firebombsmashed through the front windows of my parents’ Berkeley house, I was parked in a walled convent school sixty miles down the Peninsula. Other than swimming and nuns in black habits, there wasn’t much worth remembering about St. Catherine’s Academy for Young Ladies. At least, nothing in relation to what was happening at home. I was still doing time there on December 20, 1969.

It was cold on December 20. That I recall clearly, though most of the details of the day have been either lost to me or distorted by the lies memory plays. Oddly, an anomaly of memory, a few of the ordinary events of the morning have attached themselves to my keener recollection of that evening, little shards of trivia that spill out whenever the horror comes to mind.

If I’d had my cameras then, I might have been able to keep the pieces together more coherently. But I didn’t. The few photographs and bits of film footage I have managed to scrounge all came from sources alien to my point of view. I don’t trust them. Especially where Emily is concerned. And if there is connective tissue in this flawed history, it is Emily.

This I remember about December 20. I was barely sixteen. It was the last day of the fall term and I had a swim meet. The bleachers were unusually full because a lot of families had come to St. Catherine’s to fetch their young home for the holidays. My own parents were still tied up with final exams and holiday preparations. Marc was still in Vietnam. I hadn’t seen my sister, Emily, in the flesh for months, so I hardly expected her to come to anything as unspectacular as a swim meet.

I was swimming a medley, breaststroke and freestyle. The water seemed strangely dense that day and I lagged the field badly. Cold was only part of the problem. I had a lot on my mind: How do you survive at school when the Time editorial for that week is about your big sister and is assigned reading for the entire junior class? I felt isolated, abandoned among the academic virgins.

I had given up halfway through the first lap of my first heat when I heard Emily yelling from the bleachers, “Do it, Maggot. Do it, Maggot. Do it.”

Inciting to riot had certainly developed Emily’s pipes. Every time I raised my head for a breath, I could hear her over every-one else. I counted off my strokes, one, two, three, four, before I earned a breath. All I wanted was to hear her voice, so I stroked faster, harder, slicing through the water, counting to four to earn another earful: “Do it, Maggot.”

I won the heat. Actually, I set a meet record. I don’t know how, exactly, because I wasn’t racing. I was only trying to hear Emily.

When I came out of the water, I found Emily sitting in a clearing among the parents in the bleachers, with her two FBI shadows behind her. I’ve always been a natural showboat, so I should have been having more fun. But I was sixteen, remember. My sister, Emily, could cause me humiliation like no one on earth. And I loved her.

I still loved her. So, there I was, on another December 20, exactly twenty-two years after that day, this time in Los Angeles, cold and wet again, and once more searching for Emily. Only now the crowd was an entire city, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not find her voice anywhere.

It was rush hour and pouring rain. I was somewhere south of Santa Monica, driving Emily’s ancient Volvo station wagon. The gas gauge didn’t seem to function and the oil indicator light kept flashing at me. The last thing I needed was for the car to die on me. Avis at the airport had turned down my Visa and I didn’t have enough cash for a second taxi ride to Emily’s apartment in Chinatown.

It’s not that I was destitute. The week before Christmas my charge cards are usually coaxed out. And so are airport cash machines: I had hit three in a row that were down. So, temporarily, my economic situation was tight. If I’d had a little more warning, I would have been better prepared. Emily’s summons to L.A. hadn’t even left me time to go home to pack a toothbrush and a raincoat.

My destination at the moment was Grace House, a moveable soup kitchen run by a fellowship of nuns. It took getting lost three times before I finally found it in an abandoned bait shop a block south of Ozone Street. Short of cardboard shelters in the alleys, Grace House was unquestionably the most destitute of the places where I might find Emily.

Grace House was also the last place I was going to look for her. I promised this to myself. We’d had a date for four o’clock, and she had missed it. This wasn’t unusual in my experiences with Emily. I had given her an hour, hanging out on the stoop of her building. But waiting is where I generally fail. She had called and said she needed to see me now. And now, one way or another, was what I was holding her to.

Silver needles of rain streaked the dark sky and bedeviled a ragged column of homeless men and women struggling along the street headed toward the light coming from Grace House. Swathed in makeshift raingear, burdened with carts or bundles of possessions, they looked like peasant refugees fleeing from some catastrophe. As I drove past them, I couldn’t help but visualize the scene as it might be on film-an occupational hazard: silver lines against black, the rounded contours of the gray mass of people moving inside the frame. Seen from the perspective of a camera lens, they were no longer individuals. I could deal with them better that way.

I found a place to park at the curb directly in front of Grace House. I got out and made a dash for the sidewalk, seeking shelter under the rotting remains of shop awnings.

“Ma’am? Excuse me, ma’am?” A clean-shaven man wearing a white apron over his jeans and T-shirt intercepted me. “You the caterer, ma’am?”

I thought about the Glad Bag-garbed crowd surging around me and wondered how to respond to this question. Grace House was a seat-of-the-pants, nonprofit operation. True, this was L.A. But how many soup kitchens are catered?

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not the caterer.”

“Elks had a salad bar at their lunch today,” he said. “They said they’d send over the leftovers. They’d better hurry ‘cuz Sister says the soup’s ready.”

“I’m sure you can depend on the Elks,” I said. “I’m looking for Emily Duchamps. Is she here?”

“The doc? Ain’t seen her.”

“Earlier today, maybe?”

He shrugged. “I only got out this morning.”

Out from where I didn’t want to know. I thanked him and pushed through the cluster of smokers finishing their butts be-side the no-smoking sign on the door.

The small storefront was packed. Half-a-dozen women were setting out eating utensils and tending huge, shiny vats of soup. Among them, only one wore a traditional wimple and navy jumper. Civilian dress or not, there is something about nuns, and I couldn’t say what exactly, that tags them as brides of the church. I searched among them for the S.I.C.-Agnes Peter, the Sister in Charge.

Most of the narrow room was taken up with rows of Abbey Rents tables and folding chairs. I spotted Sister Agnes Peter setting up chairs around a back table. She had a helper who was so filthy he could have been white or black-it was impossible to tell. The two of them were sharing a joke about something that I suspect was rather gamey because when I walked up, their laughter devolved into breathy chuckles.

Agnes Peter smiled up at me. In her thrift-shop jeans and sweatshirt, generic short haircut, she was nothing like the knuckle-rapping nuns of St. Catherine’s.