“But neither can we martyr ourselves on that cross; we can’t keep self-flagellating, provided we are truly remorseful and willing to make amends. Do you know what became of Jack?”
“He’s a pediatrician in Newark, family, three kids.”
“Well, who knows. God might have taken that very moment to plant a seed so that Jack grew up wanting to protect and heal children. It’s all very mysterious, this great weaving, isn’t it?”
“Trust God, you’re saying.”
“Clever woman. Now, this brings me to something else. I wonder if these feelings might not be about your own lack of connection with God. Is that possible? Do you feel deeply connected to God? What’s your personal prayer life like these days?”
Eileen was about to say it was fine, but as she opened her mouth, she realized it wasn’t. She said, “I don’t know. I thought it was all right, but I don’t know. Maybe I don’t feel” — she was surprised to realize her hands were trembling — “like I’ve ever really been in God’s presence.” She put her hand over her mouth. “Is that possible? I mean, after all these years?”
Felida reached out and took her hand. “The silence of God. Oh, this is a terrible place to be. Full of fear and helplessness. We all experience it at one time or another. Even Mother Teresa suffered unspeakably, and for decades, with a sense of being left in the darkness without God’s presence.”
Eileen plucked another tissue from the nearby box.
“Remember that the longing you feel right now, this great hole in your soul, if you will, is God’s longing for you.”
“I should know all this, at my age, shouldn’t I?”
“Oh, you do know it. But life, as you also know, is cyclical. A spiral dance, as some call it. We go around and round, coming back to familiar spiritual territory, although never in precisely the same way. As Heraclitus put it, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’ Perhaps now the invitation is for you to rest there for a while. It’s not as though you have much choice, is it? But you can rail against it —”
“Like Angela’s doing — railing against her dark feelings.”
“Well, we don’t know what God wants for her, do we? Not every marriage should survive.”
“I’ve said that to her, I even said it before she destroyed her marriage, but she’s just so hell-bent, you’ll pardon the expression, on having her own way. I fear she’ll run before she learns, before she realizes.”
“And that’s what frustrates you? That she discounts God’s will, seeking only her own?”
She hated to say it, because even as Felida asked the question, she knew not only what the answer was, but what it meant. “Yes, I think so.”
“And so, I might suggest, you are feeling some frustration with yourself. If you are experiencing God’s silence, and this guilt, and this anger, it’s very difficult to know what God wishes for us, and we’re uncomfortable experiencing the silence fully, uncomfortable accepting it. Have you ever heard the story of the Hassidic Jews who were imprisoned in a terrible jail? All of them struggled to rise above their suffering and keep a gentle and joyful outlook, except for one Rabbi, who wept. When his followers asked why he didn’t accept these hardships as signs of God’s love he replied, ‘When God sends bitterness, the least I can do is to feel it.’”
Eileen was able to smile through her tears.
“So, perhaps all that you feel is as much for your own soul as for that of Angela’s or even little Jack, who may be grown now, but still lives as that little boy in your heart. I think, when you come to terms with that, Eileen, when you bring even this despair to God and let God heal it, you will also be able to trust that God holds not only you in a loving embrace, but also everyone else, always.”
Felida let go of Eileen’s hand and poured her more tea. “Drink that. It’s the British in me. I believe in tea and prayer. Spend some time with St. John of the Cross, and his dark night of the soul. ‘Endurance of darkness is preparation for great light.’ The gift of tears. The gift of holy desperation. And remember, my dear, even Jesus wept.”
An hour later, as Eileen was leaving, the lights came back on and the sky cleared, showing stars and a full moon. The air smelled washed and rinsed with rosewater, the scent rising up from the plants that edged the walkway. She drove back to Trenton feeling that perhaps all would be well after all and perhaps she didn’t have to hold the reins of life quite so tightly. As Felida said, it wasn’t her job to control life, but to be of service to God’s will that the world be filled with good. All she needed to do was her own small part and to trust.
Angela
It was just before ten in the morning. Angela turned into the driveway and parked. Getting out, she looked at the headlight, all fixed now, shiny and new. The scratches and dents to the bumper and hood were gone. Not a sign of anything wrong with the car at all. The man at the body shop had even been solicitous when she told him she’d hit a deer.
“You’re lucky,” he’d said, whistling through his bottom teeth, his square jaw jutting out. “My neighbour hit a buck a couple of years back. Head and antlers came right in through the window and stuck him through the shoulder.”
“Oh my God!”
“He’s all right,” said the man, who smelled like cigarettes and gasoline, which was surely a dangerous combination. “Doesn’t like driving at night anymore, though.”
“I’m with him.”
And that was all.
Philip, true to his word, had set up a bank account in her name. He’d cancelled the credit card she’d been using, but it hadn’t been much trouble getting another. He’d told her to keep the car, for now, whatever that meant. When she went back to the garage a few days later to pick it up, she decided she’d pay cash. It made her flush, this covering of her tracks, but she had nightmares about being dragged away in handcuffs, being locked in a small room with an angry mob outside. She handed the money over and if the mechanic noticed her fingers were trembling, he said nothing except that since she was paying cash, he’d knock off the tax.
So, with the SUV all bright and shiny in the driveway, which she hoped was the last of all this, she climbed up to her little apartment. Three weeks. That’s all. And yet her mark was on the place now. Philip had refused to let her come by the house, which was fine with her. Going back there, to that now-foreign land of dinner parties and charity boards, seemed far too wide a chasm to cross. Neither did Philip have any interest in seeing her, so he had sent a UPS delivery with some of her things. Sweaters and dresses (she couldn’t imagine wearing them again) and shoes and pants and shorts and workout gear, all tossed into boxes without being folded, her toiletries (including a bottle of Coco that had broken in transit, the perfume infusing an acrid reek on her pajamas and slippers), yoga mat, and some old DVDs; a few books: Eat, Pray, Love and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and The Handmaid’s Tale and Under the Tuscan Sun. She couldn’t help but believe Philip had chosen them for irony’s sake. Well, let him. And so, these things were strewn about the place. Clothes on chairs, books on the table, next to her laptop and a half-eaten bowl of chicken soup. The place had an undernote of stale Coco.
She had gone, at Sister Eileen’s urging, to a few more meetings, but doubted she’d go again. She didn’t want a drink. Never craved one like the poor people in those rooms. She wanted only to be left alone.
Her phone rang. She looked at the ID. Apparently, Sister Eileen didn’t want her to be alone.
“Hi, Eileen.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“I wondered if you’d given any thought to seeing George Clarence?”
“I’ve thought about it nonstop. And I want to. I do.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“But if I do, well, that’s an admission, isn’t it? I still want to set up a fund for him, you know, for his care and his sister and all that, but I think it’s best I do it through a lawyer, you know
, anonymously. And it will have to wait until the divorce, I suppose. But I have access to money. You got the PayPal transfer for him, right?”
“I did. And he’s most grateful. I didn’t tell him who it was from, of course. But I know he’d like to thank you in person.”
“I wouldn’t have to tell him?”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
What was this weariness in Eileen’s voice? It was unlike her.
“I’ll give it some more thought.”
There was a pause. A waiting. Angela could practically hear Eileen putting her thoughts in order. “Are you okay? Is everything okay?” The room looked darker. Clouds moving in outside, rain on the way.
“Angela, I think you should also know that I’ve been asked to go to the police station this afternoon at two and answer a few questions about the accident.”
Angela, who had been standing by the table, now sat, hard, on the chair. “Oh God.”
“As I said, I’m not going to implicate you. You know you can trust me, but I also will not lie.”
“What are you going to say, then?” She had been an idiot to trust this nun. Why should a nun be any more trustworthy than anyone else? “I’d think you would have had some experience in the church with lying and keeping things covered up.” She balled her hand up into a fist and rapped her index finger on her forehead. “No, sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just a shock, you know. I’m scared. I know you won’t, I mean, you promised.”
“And I will keep the promise.” A deep intake of breath. “But you must be prepared, Angela.”
“For what? You think they know? Then why aren’t they coming for me? Why are they asking you questions?”
“I met a detective when I first visited George. He was curious about my interest in the case and I don’t think he believed, at least not entirely, that I didn’t have some information. I’m also, well, I’m also wondering if he doesn’t think I was somehow more directly involved.”
Angela was chewing the side of her thumb. “He thinks you might have been driving?”
“It’s possible. I really don’t know. I’ll call you afterward. Angela, do this for me, will you? Consider what your life will be like if you keep this secret, even if you do get away with it. Even if you have no legal repercussions from this, you will still have to live with it. Of course, if the police investigation does eventually lead to you, the fact you haven’t come in willingly will make things worse, I suspect, but let’s for a moment assume it does not, and that you are never held accountable … do you think you can live with that, or will it haunt you? That in fact you will be doing yourself a disservice? It may seem as though being found out would be the worst thing, and it would be very hard; your friends and family would know, and you may even do a little time in jail.”
Angela sobbed, and it was all she could do not to cut off the call and throw the phone across the room. She should never, ever, have told Eileen. A moment of weakness. Shock-induced. She would leave now. Never see Eileen again. Why not? What was holding her here? She had to rouse herself from this lethargy.
“Angela, please don’t panic. Breathe. Breathe. Are you there? Can you hear me? All right, just consider, please, that the invitation from God in this terrible moment may be to claim yourself more fully, good and bad, as we all are. I envision this awful time as an open door, a threshold to cross, into a new house where you needn’t drag all the old things that no longer serve you. Remember that what God wants for you is so much more wonderful than you could ever imagine. Can you remember that?”
The rain had started. Thick, fat drops slapping on the roof and the windows like jellyfish. God wanted wonders for her? Nothing looked like wonder. Abandonment. Rejection. Connor. Carsten. Philip. Deedee. All those empty chairs. Wheelchairs. The sound of metal against metal. A row of tiny black ants marched along the floor at the base of the kitchen cabinets, disappearing into a crack on the quarter-round. She wanted to smash them, to smear their bodies into black mush.
“Yes,” she managed. “Call me when you know more, okay? I have to go now.”
They ended the call and Angela wobbled into the bathroom. Her stomach was sloshing, roiling. She bent over the sink and spit a couple of times, breathing through her mouth. No, she wasn’t going to vomit. She sat down on the toilet and began to cry.
The small apartment seemed full of dark corners. It would never be clean enough. There, behind the bathroom door, was a patch of greyish, sticky buildup of something. Old soap. Hair. Flakes of skin, no doubt. Wasn’t there some nonsense about all the world, even, or maybe even especially, the dust floating in the air being made out of the same stuff as stars? Well, if so, the stars were disgusting. The world was disgusting. Animals, insects, humans, all disgusting, with their fluids and smells and wrinkles and flaps and folds, their clacking teeth and beaks. Stars gave the impression of something serene and coldly clean, something noble, even. Humans were anything but. Selfish and cruel and untrustworthy. Vile, really. She had read somewhere once that you could think of the very worst possible thing a human could do to another human being — boiling alive, flaying, rape of children, burning, knives in eyeballs — whatever it was that haunted your darkest nightmares, and you could rest assured that at that very same moment someone, somewhere, was doing precisely that thing to someone else.
Snot was dripping from her nose. Her eyes were wet and red and sore. Her mouth tasted like bile. Dry skin flaked around her fingernails and a hangnail had ripped, blood rimming the cuticle. The inside of her left wrist showed bluish-green veins through the pale skin. She ran her finger over them, and they moved slightly, like worms on wet pavement. The skin was thin as onion peel. The veins so vulnerable.
It wasn’t the world and all that was in it she found so revolting, she realized, it was her own appalling self. Liar and cheat. Coward and selfish pig. Criminal. A person who, even now, would let a friend walk into a police station so she didn’t have to.
“No,” she said and stood up. She pushed her not-exactly-clean hair off her forehead and looked at herself in the mirror. Jesus, but she was a mess. From an emotional remove, she wondered if she cared enough to do something about it. Shower? Makeup? Hairdresser? Laughable, all that. No, she did not care.
She had said no, but she wasn’t sure what it referred to. No, she wasn’t that repulsed by herself? She was that repulsed. No, she wouldn’t let Sister Eileen walk into the police station alone? She would. No, she would be different, a different person, almost resurrected, almost, she snorted, born again? Certainly no.
No. Just no. No to every fucking thing and every fucking person and that was all. No. She would prefer not to, all things considered.
She wandered out of the bathroom into the bedroom and curled up on the bed, listening to the rain, harder, sharper now, against the windows. The light in the apartment was dim, watery itself. Angela’s throat constricted, and her stomach lurched, but it was not bile that rose, it was something else, something not quite physical, but rather a cloud, a fog, shadow … and like brown churning water crashing through a dam, frothing and full of buried debris and hidden currents, ready to crush bone and suck everything under, despair convulsed her. It wrapped around her like an ice-water-soaked blanket. It covered her eyes and ears and nose and mouth, and she felt as though she were drowning under the frigid weight of it and didn’t mind. She didn’t mind one bit. It would be a relief. To die. To sleep. For it all to be done.
She spasmed with the force, groaning. She slithered to the side of the bed, onto her knees, shaking and sobbing.
She had to move, to act, to run. Something.
Angela snatched up her purse. She stood still. Where was she going? Somewhere.
The sound of Mrs. Simonofsky’s vacuum cleaner rose up through the floorboards and then went silent. If the landlady was home, she’d have to sneak out. Acknowledging she didn’t want Mrs. Simonofsky to know she was leaving made Angela admit she was thinking of running out on all this. The eagle-ey
ed old lady would see her with a suitcase and then what? Fine. No suitcase. Rain jacket. Stuff a couple of pairs of underwear and a T-shirt in a shopping tote. Toothbrush. Jesus, every time she did this she took less and less.
Sure enough, Mrs. Simonofsky must have heard her feet on the stairs. Angela waved, and kept walking to the car. She imagined Mrs. Simonofsky being questioned by the police. “No, Officer, I don’t know where she went, but she looked suspicious, I will tell you that!” But by then Angela would be halfway to … where? She’d know when she got there.
SHE WAS NEARLY AT BELMAR by the time she realized that was where she was headed. The beach. She parked, stowing her tote in the trunk, walked to the grey booth on the boardwalk and paid the freckled, red-haired girl inside nine dollars for a beach badge. The rain was a fine drizzle, the sky a moody pewter.
“Not much of a day for a swim,” said the girl as she handed Angela the turquoise badge.
Angela pinned it to her rain jacket. “I’m not swimming.”
“Some surfers out there,” the girl said, pointing.
“Thanks.”
Angela walked up the beach, away from the surfers. A woman jogged by. An elderly couple held hands and strolled, wearing American flag windbreakers. They looked happy. The air smelled of salt and iodine and the sand was hard-packed under her feet. A family had set up under a large green umbrella, and two little round-bellied boys ran back and forth at the edge of the waves, shrieking like the gulls whirling above them, oblivious in their joy to the inclement weather. One waved a yellow plastic shovel. A flock of sanderlings, legs flying, dashed into and out of the foam. The misty rain soaked her hair and forced her to wipe her eyes. Another jogger, this one a tattooed male with a bushy black beard glinting in the rain, and earbuds. He nodded at her.
Angela walked until she came to a jetty. She climbed up and walked to the end, where the only thing she could see before her was the sea and sky. The clouds were low and heavy, and the horizon shrouded. A foghorn lowed. She sat and drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. She was damp all through, below the hem of her jacket, but the day was warm and she didn’t care. The jacket was long enough to cover her behind at least.
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