We did that for a moment, her regarding me and me regarding her back, and in a lightning flash, I understood the message she was sending. She was inviting me in. Daring me to venture into her territory. She was taunting me to learn all the secrets she’d kept from me and Danny and Mom. But I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to know any more of my grandmother’s secrets.
One was enough.
Chapter Three
My grandmother, Dove Jarrod, the prominent evangelist and faith healer, died at a ripe old age—eighty-nine, ninety-five, or ninety-eight, depending on who was telling the story and when they were telling it.
At the time, she held a place of honor in certain religious circles. She was regarded by her faithful followers as a miracle worker who could heal any ailment that afflicted a body. Many said that under her touch, asthma and diabetes submitted to the perfect will of God and disappeared. That in the presence of the glory of the Almighty, stunted limbs grew and tumors shrunk. She was a faithful saint, a revered elder, and everyone agreed that living to Dove’s age was a reward for being an obedient servant of the Lord.
But even back then, when I was just a kid of sixteen, I knew better.
My grandmother wasn’t a saint. She wasn’t even one of the good guys. She was a con artist and a liar, and she told me herself, straight out, two years before her death. She might’ve been known as a worker of miracles, but she was a fraud. The humbug behind the curtain, the Professor Marvel working the levers, putting on a show for the gullible crowd. And being a coward as well, she chose to reveal this information only to me.
She and I were never close, but she wasn’t close with her own daughter, my mother, either. She’d gotten pregnant later in life, as had my mom, both in their early forties. And sometimes I wondered if, in my grandmother’s case, she’d meant to at all. At any rate, she lived in Alabama my entire childhood and every year dutifully sent my brother and me extravagant gifts for birthdays and Christmases. A couple of times, we all three flew to Alabama for visits, but the stays were always brief and rather formal. Even as a kid, it struck me as odd that she’d chosen to live so far away from her family.
“She was born down there,” my mother told me. “In a psychiatric hospital of all places. She has very close ties to many of the people there.”
Apparently, many years ago, my grandmother had gotten mixed up in some trouble with the women in a family down there and felt responsible to stick close and try to help them. I wondered how she could feel more duty toward people she wasn’t related to than us. When I was fourteen—old enough to access my mother’s travel account and book myself on a flight—I went to Alabama and found out. It wasn’t that Dove loved those people more than us. It was that she could be her true self with them. And she had to lie to us.
Here’s what I figured out. Pretending you’re someone you’re not for a couple of days is doable. But lying all day every day to the people you love is unbearable, and Dove couldn’t do it. Additionally, she knew that for her daughter, my mother, faith was everything. It smoothed the rough edges of her depression and anxiety, got her out of bed each morning. I think my grandmother understood that if she had been around more—if she’d made the effort to be closer to us all and somehow the truth came out—my mother’s faith would’ve shattered.
So Dove stayed in Alabama. She kept up a regular and cheery, if somewhat superficial, correspondence with us, and Mom stayed safe in her make-believe world and all was well. Until it wasn’t.
When I was sixteen, Dove decided rather abruptly to move back to Pasadena, into the stately gray-shingled home she and her late husband had bought back in the forties and that the foundation had maintained for her during all her travels. Almost as soon as she was situated, she called and asked me to lunch. I knew what she was up to. She’d chosen me as the keeper of her secret—and now that she was back, she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to betray her.
I told her I had to study. It was an excuse, but it was for the best. If my grandmother had looked me in the eye, she would’ve seen the truth—that I was ashamed to be related to her. That I believed she had ruined my life. That I would keep her secret, but I hated her.
A few weeks later, on a chilly October night, she passed. Went to be with the Lord—was how I put it to Mom’s colleagues at the Charles and Dove Jarrod Foundation when I phoned the next day. Mom had started to make the calls, but when I found her, she was sitting on the side of her bed, holding the receiver, trembling and staring into space. I hung up the phone, gently tucked her under the covers, and finished the job myself.
I relayed the news: Dove went peacefully in her sleep, in the privacy of her home. At eight o’clock the next morning, she was discovered by her housekeeper, who called 911. A deputy ME from Los Angeles County arrived, and after a cursory examination of the body, notified the funeral director, releasing it to the care of Arroyo Valley Mortuary.
Two days later, Dove was laid to rest at Forest Lawn in Glendale alongside my grandfather, who’d died back in the late seventies. The graveside service was private but dignified, befitting a minor celebrity of her stature. Just family and a few foundation employees in attendance. Danny was in one of his bad cycles of drinking back then and hadn’t answered any of my phone calls, so it was just Mom and me.
That morning, I gave Mom a pill, then dressed her in one of her trim black pantsuits. I helped her apply mascara and her favorite coral lipstick and then put up her hair. I drove us to the cemetery and handled the greeting of the mourners as they arrived. She didn’t utter a word the whole time.
In fact, my mother stood dry-eyed throughout the pastor’s message. It was only when he said the benediction that she finally turned to the small group gathered around the open grave and spoke.
“The girl has not died but is asleep.”
Everyone froze. Chills raced up my spine. Her voice sounded so strange. Like it was coming from someone I’d never known.
“Matthew 9:24,” she said, then lifted one finger and sliced it back and forth across the crowd. “You all know the scripture. She isn’t dead. So stop crying. Stop crying!”
I turned cold, the reality of what was happening dawning over me.
“She can see us all.” Mom’s voice was now a full octave higher. “Every one of us, right now, right here. And she is watching what we do. The foundation is all we have left of my mother. Of Dove. It is our duty to keep up the work. Until the trumpet blows. Until the glorious day of resurrection.”
I glanced at the others, desperate for help, but they were hanging on to my mother’s every word.
“We keep up the work,” she went on. “We keep up the work or I will . . . I will die too . . .” At this she let out a long, shrill, keening sob and collapsed on the ground.
The pastor raced to help her up and together we bundled her into my car. “It’s up to you now, Eve.” He patted me gently on the shoulder. “You’re the keeper of the flame.”
I know there were other things said to me that day, but his were the words that burned into my brain. Because he was right. My mother was so fragile, helpless. If she was to keep the foundation going, someone would have to keep her going. With Danny out of commission, that person was me.