The Salt God's Daughter by Ilie Ruby Page B

change of clothes, shall we? We have lots of clothes for girls your age.”
    Sister Mary firmly took my hand, and Dolly’s, as we turned to leave. Dolly sloughed off Sister’s hand on the way out, but my grip remained firm, unwilling to let go. I hardly noticed the eclipse, the threshold that I knew my mother had somehow been waiting for, the in-between place necessary for an escape. How else could she get out of this life and call it a coincidence?

Chapter Eight
    November 1980
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    T HE BEAVER MOON signaled a time to set traps to ensure warmth for the coming winter. The story fit well into my mother’s formula—which I wouldn’t understand until years later—which was to combine deep-seated neglect with stunning moments of maternal protection. It was this dichotomy that she hoped would protect us. It made it confusing for everyone, most of all Dolly and me. Years before, my mother had made sure we’d be cared for in the event that anything happened to her. She had once begged Sister Mary to take us in, knowing that we would need warmth in the winter.
    Years before, Sister had given us a medallion of St. Augustine. She had talked to my mother for an hour as Dolly and I waited in the foyer, knees tucked to our chests, staring up at two large golden angels on the gilded mirror. “They’re meshugenah ,” Dolly had whispered.
    On an inordinately humid November day, Dolly and I walked through the heavy wooden doors of the Bethesda Home for Young Girls in Long Beach, a privately funded residential home run by three nuns. “Bethesda” meant “house of mercy.” But the secret was that we were the ones offering
mercy. The nuns needed us as much as we needed them. The Home was fenced in by fuchsia bougainvillea bushes with the hugest blossoms I had ever seen. I fixated on the succulent petals, naming them. Afterglow , I thought to myself, oddly calm given the weight of loss I felt. I preferred not to feel, instead focusing on how these flowers forced open their petals. I recognized the heavy bloomer with little foliage that climbed thirstily along the fence of this strangely familiar place that would be our new home.
    Dolly and I held hands in the foyer, staring at the mirror with the two angels sculpted into the frame. I now recognized archangel Michael, who looked down on us ominously with wings outstretched, waving a sword of protection. And next to him, archangel Gabriel, holding a bouquet of lilies, a symbol of purity, chastity, and innocence.
    I remembered these angels from before.
    After the shooting at the Twin Palms, our mother had frantically rushed in, thinking this a church, and begged Sister Mary to take us, just temporarily. Though Sister refused—the home was not equipped for little girls—she talked with my mother. It was on that day that my mother wrote up guardianship papers. Sister Mary, when she heard we had no family to speak of, promised to be “next of kin” and to keep us together if anything should happen to my mother. From that day forward, we belonged to a nun we would not meet for the next several years. My mother never updated the papers. Sister Mary never imagined that the overwhelmed young mother with the crazy sea lion story would take her up on an offer made wholly in haste and purely out of sympathy.
    â€œThey need serious help,” Dolly whispered.
    â€œWhere to begin?” I whispered. Dolly smiled through her tears, sobbing then into her arm. I willed myself not to cry.
    This group of three nuns were peculiar-looking, foreign creatures that smiled, lips pursed. Next to Sister Mary, Sister
Zora stood with folded hands, wearing a hand-size leather bag around her neck—a hippie nun. “Welcome,” she said. Sister Elizabeth, who sat in a wheelchair, never smiled. I noticed that the style here seemed to be to smile without ever showing any teeth. Sister Mary waved her fingers as she spoke about the rules of the