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Five hundred days til Dora Kelly Lange dies though she don’t know it yet, and the sky’s the kind of clear blue it makes your heart feel good to look at. She’s got her divorce papers on the seat of the car beside her (in four hundred days she’ll let her licence expire, but she don’t know that yet either) and there’s this great song on the radio, she can’t remember the name of it but she knows the words – more than half of them anyway, enough to belt out as she rides the highway down from Abbeville. Free. She’s free. Charlie’s just a name now on a piece of paper, the Lange something she’s gonna shrug off just as soon as she can spare the money. “Freedom don’t come free,” she says out loud, and makes herself laugh hard enough that she almost misses her exit.
Seven thousand, two hundred and twenty-two days til Dora Kelly dies, and lately she’s been thinking a lot about sin: since the weekend when in their catechism class Sister Felicity told them it was a sin to take communion without a clear conscience, which is why they’d make their First Confession before their First Holy Communion. Dora went home and sat in her closet, breathing in the comfortable smell of her own clothes and mothballs, and wondered if maybe she should find a way to drop out. Because Daddy said –
“What if it’s a secret,” she asked Sister Felicity the next week after catechism class, “what if the sin you done’s a secret, and someone might get in trouble if you tell?”
“The sin you did, Dora Kelly; or more strictly, the sin you committed,” said Sister Felicity distractedly, hunting through her desk for something or other. “And you’re telling God through the priest, and no one else will ever know. He won’t shout at you, or be mad if you’re sorry – ah, there,” she said, fishing out a KitKat. “Run along, Dora Kelly. Nothing you can have done’s so bad.”
Dora was a good girl, so Dora went. She looked back, though, from the doorway, and Sister Felicity had a finger of KitKat in her hand, a piece already bitten out. Her eyes were closed, and she looked – Dora didn’t have the words for it, but it reminded her how she felt when Momma brushed her hair, or when she ran a blade of grass up and down her leg in the yard on a warm day. She looked real happy, she guessed.
So she made her first confession, and after a list of little sins she took a breath and talked about bathtime. Father Michael was awful kind about it, and patted her hand and said she didn’t need to worry, he wouldn’t tell no one. But two days later a policeman came round asking all sorts of questions, and Momma said what she’d say again and again: “What kind of man wouldn’t bathe his own child?” Dora’s tummy hurt with the way Momma said Daddy might have to go away if they didn’t fix this, so she told the policeman she’d made it all up.
Now the police have stopped calling round, and today Dora’s making her First Holy Communion, dress so white it could hurt her eyes if she let it, and she’s feeling good, hair brushed out like a halo. She’s taken her bath by herself for three weeks and that’s part of the feeling good, like maybe confession does work, because she’s clean.
Seven thousand, two hundred and fifteen days til Dora Kelly dies, and Momma says – “I don’t think we should go to St Bernard’s no more. We’ll go on over to Holy Cross,” even though that’s in Lafayette and Dora can see the steeple of St Bernard’s from their house, if she stands on the john and leans out of the bathroom window. Which she did last night, after bathtime, when Daddy came in and shut the door.
“I don’t wanna go to church no more,” says Dora, giving up on priests and confessions and all of that, throwing her good white patent First Holy Communion shoes down the hall.
“It’s okay, Lucille,” says Daddy, after Momma threatens to paddle her, “Dori can stay home with me.”
Thirty days til Dora Lange dies and though she don’t know it yet, she wouldn’t be too surprised. Dora dropped out in the tenth grade but she’s always been a thinker. “Your rich inner world,” said a john one time, laughing at her as she daydreamed after sex, but he had no idea and Dora liked it that way. She sprawls across her bed and she writes out words from that book she’s read:
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.
She draws little black stars all around them, thinking of Carla and her neck tattoos, remembering how she sat with her when she got them way-back-when. She told Carla she was going to church, told her she was saved, but Dora ain’t stupid. She don’t understand the history in this book, The King in Yellow, but she knows Carcosa’s about getting lost, not found. Maybe that ain’t so bad, though. Maybe lost is better. Maybe lost is freedom.
Twenty-eight days til Dora Lange dies, and she calls up Charlie, last time she’ll ever speak to him and part of her knows that, cos Dora ain’t stupid even if her report cards were all Cs, even if after her death one detective will say she fried her brains and the other’ll say she was just an easy target.
“I’m gonna become a nun,” she blurts out, having lost the thread of whatever Charlie’s talking about. She’s doing that a lot, these days. Losing things.
“Say what?” says Charlie, doing that half-laugh she’s hated since she was fifteen, the laugh that says she’s stupid.
“Gonna be a nun,” she says, remembering Sister Felicity, the look on her face when she ate her KitKat. It’s a dumb thing to remember, but every time she’s thought about happiness the past few years she’s thought about the sister at her desk, neat blue and white habit, sunlight streaming onto her desk and her face as she ate that candy bar. Ecstatic. “I met a king,” she says, and her throat suddenly feels tight. Save me, Charlie, she thinks, but Charlie just laughs again, a stupid honking laugh, and she tells him she don’t have his money and he can go screw himself and she hangs up. Charlie couldn’t save himself, and he’d never given a shit about saving her neither. The sun’s real low in the sky now, and her skin’s all prickle and itch. She’ll go and see the King, course she will, even though Dora ain’t stupid and she knows that things are starting to close in.
Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.
Three thousand, three hundred and forty-seven days til Dora Kelly dies, though after today she’ll be Dora Lange. People’ll say they’ll hitched up too quick, and most everyone thinks she’s got a baby on the way. But Dora’s been taking her pill since that scare two years ago when her period was five days late, cos Charlie thinks rubbers spoil the mood. He’s her first and only, she ain’t even kissed no one but him (unless you count bathtime, but Dora don’t think about that no more, she don’t), and she hopes that’s true til she dies. She’s got on a dress like something from a magazine, big puffed sleeves with bows at the elbows and she thinks maybe she looks a bit like Lady Di. Dora saw some of the Royal Wedding on the TV back when she was fourteen, and ever since that’s been her dream for when she got hitched. And ok, she ain’t being watched by millions, and Charlie’s swell but he’s no prince. But she gets married in a church cos Momma wants it, first time she’s been in years, and her dress is so white it could hurt her eyes if she let it and she feels clean, clean, clean.