The Gospel of Winter

by Brendan Kiely

  I knocked my ashes into the tray on the bedside table. Beside it was a tall glass of water and a small plastic bottle of Mother’s sleeping pills. I thought about taking one. I probably needed to be knocked out and dropped into a long, dreamless, protective cloud of sleep. There were only two pills left, however. I turned around and pulled back part of the sheets until I found her hand. I squeezed it, and to my relief she squeezed back. She had a weak grip, but there was life left in it. I was cold, or so I told myself, so I climbed under the covers too.

  Old Donovan wasn’t dead, but he’d still left her feeling like a widow, curling up each night with the weight of absence lying beside her, and I wondered if, in her comatose state, she thought I was him, or wanted to believe I was him, filling that space beside her. I guess I wanted to be him in some way, or someone like him—someone who had the luxury of feeling needed.

  I was on my way, I decided. It felt like my own deck was finally clear. I never had to say a word about any of what had happened to me. I could move forward, telling a new story, a better story—one that I could craft completely on my own.

  CHAPTER 12

  The problem is that you don’t always get to write your own story. You get written into some stories, and if you ask why, there isn’t an answer. You don’t have any control, because the forces at work are too large to confront, and sometimes too large even to understand. When Old Donovan had encouraged me to read the paper every morning and become involved, I had thought of myself as an armchair general watching and opining about the war from afar. I didn’t think I would become a participant. Old Donovan must have been used to finding himself as a character—one whose actions or remarks or at least associations were captured in the text of an article. All that time reading the news, it never occurred to me that I would one day find myself a part of it too.

  On Monday morning I flipped open the Times while I ate my cereal. The flakes went soggy as I stared at the headlines and let the details of the article blur into a fuzzy black-and-white haze. A pit widened within me, and I sank deep into it, beyond shouting range, beyond light. The Boston archdiocese was in trouble. The Globe had broken the story the day before. Initially, one priest had been accused of innumerable abuses, then there was another, and within no time the entire archdiocese was embroiled in a scandal, a widespread institutional cover-up, an epidemic of abuse. Abuse. I had a hard time reading the word. It seemed like a misnomer, inaccurate.

  There are times when we all want to tell ourselves, Look at that misfortune over there; thank God that isn’t happening here, to us, to me. You can ignore the bombs and the violence across the ocean until buildings are crumbling in your own country; you can dismiss the gossip about the neighbors across town as melodramatic, until those fists and the screams you’d heard about come barreling into your own home. Then what do you do?

  The scandal wasn’t only in Boston. There was a larger investigation now, and others had already started to speak out. The pages nearly turned themselves, against my will, and I glanced through the articles timidly, forgetting most of the information after my eyes had left the line and moved on, slipping over the words until I got to the bottom of the article and there was a mention of priests in Rhode Island and Connecticut who had also been accused. Another article later in the paper explained it in further detail, and fear stung me up and down my body.

  The article didn’t mention Most Precious Blood or Father Greg—they were all other churches and priests—but as I read, the specter of Most Precious Blood and Father Greg burned like an afterimage on the story. Father Greg’s laughter boomed up and out of the ink stamp of other names in the article. “A gregarious neighbor,” the article said, “a prominent society figure.” It was the language the newspapers used to talk about murderers: “the friendly man next door.”

  I wondered if I should skip school. Missing more days would encourage Mr. Weinstein’s wrath, but even worse, it would rouse suspicion. Everyone knew that I had worked at Most Precious Blood. I wanted to run back over to Josie’s and shave the ice off the tree and see if I couldn’t bring back that image of our bodies pressed together, restore it like an old fresco buried in the vaults of some forgotten city and, by bringing that moment to life again, create a permanent reminder that I, too, was just a normal high school kid who didn’t need to be sent to Bullington, who didn’t need to be cross-examined and strung up in the newspaper headlines and turned into a circus-freak-show act, a beast with a human face prowling a cage, onlookers beyond the bars asking, How did he become that thing, how did he let it happen to himself?

  And they wouldn’t leave me alone. I’ve walked through too many grocery-store lines and looked at all the tabloids featuring pictures of mill workers recently crippled, of celebrities maimed by cosmetic surgery, or children abducted. Everyone wants to gossip about those stories, but nobody wanted to be a part of them. There was something monstrous about all the people involved in those stories—the perpetrators, the families, and the victims themselves—everyone seemed portrayed with fearsome qualities: Nobody wanted to be involved with those kinds of people, and I didn’t either.

  + + +

  When I got to CDA, I knew I couldn’t avoid the story. From outside I could see into the lobby, where small clusters of mothers and nannies chattered softly and eyed each of the students carefully as we passed by. “Awful, just awful,” I heard one mother say as I passed through the doorway. As intangible and immaterial fear might be, it still creates tangible effects. It might as well have a taste and a smell. Father Greg’s stale cigarette breath and the nose-burning stink of scotch followed me into the school.

  As I walked toward Mrs. Perrich’s desk, Hazel, the mother of a sixth grader I had mentored the year before, saw me. She tapped a friend of hers on her shoulder, and they pulled away from their circle of mothers to look at me. “Oh,” Hazel said, pushing a smile into her face that had all the signs of pity I knew so well. She stepped away from her friend and put a hand on my shoulder. “Oh, dear,” she said to me, and then she patted me on the shoulder again. “Look at you. What happened? Are you okay?”

  “Of course,” I said, and then I realized she was talking about my eye. “An accident. On New Year’s,” I said.

  She shook her head gently. “It’s just that people can worry. They can think the worst. You know. The churches,” she said finally. “That scandal. Awful.”

  “It’s so hard to believe,” the other mother said. I didn’t answer; I stared down at her boots. They rose to her calf and were trimmed at the top with a ring of pale fur—I’d seen girls in my own grade wear the same boots. “You just never see these things coming,” she continued. “Not to this extent.”

  Two other mothers now focused their attention on me. Mrs. Perrich was on the phone, but she looked up at me over her glasses as well. “You work at Most Precious Blood, don’t you?” one of them asked me.

  Hazel couldn’t keep her hand off me for too long. She rubbed the side of my arm. “It has to be so hard. I mean, you do work there, right?”

  “Danny was in confirmation classes there,” another mother in the group said. “How many kids go through confirmation class in our community?”

  “I know,” the fourth one said. Then she addressed me. “What grade are you in?”

  “Aidan’s a sophomore,” Hazel answered quickly.

  “Oh, dear,” the fourth mother said. “You work there? Is there any discussion, I mean, are they talking about it?”

  “Teal!” Hazel snapped. “Aidan, it’s none of our business.” The other mothers had already drawn back a little, not rallying around Hazel, but shifting back toward Teal, who stood with her arms folded in front of her.

  I didn’t know any of those mothers, really—I didn’t even know most of their names—and yet they knew I had worked at Most Precious Blood. “I don’t believe anything has happened at Most Precious Blood,” I said. “If nothing’s happened at Most Precious Blood, why does anyone need to talk about it?” My voice grew loude
r as I continued. I could feel the sweat pouring down my back and curling down my forehead. I clenched my fists and jammed them into my pockets so I wouldn’t wipe at my face.

  “Dear,” Hazel said. “Now, dear. It’s okay. We’re not accusing anyone of anything.”

  “No,” I said too loudly. “I’m not either.”

  “Well,” the mother in the furry boots said, “I still think the Parents Association should address this in some way. We need to get people talking about this, and I think it’s pretty obvious that the kids need some kind of conversation about it too.”

  “Absolutely,” Teal said. “Dr. Ridge should call an all-school assembly.”

  “Maybe something in a smaller format,” the other mother said. “This is all pretty sensitive.”

  “Exactly,” Hazel said.

  “Actually,” the mother in the furry boots said, “that’s exactly what Father Greg should do. That’s his responsibility, not only to his parish but to the whole community.”

  “Father Greg didn’t even give Mass on Sunday,” Hazel said. “Father Dooley did.”

  “Father Dooley did?” Teal asked. “Did he say anything about all this?”

  “Please, Teal!” Hazel said.

  Hazel tried to put her arm around me, but I backed away. “I just don’t know what you are talking about,” I said. None of it made sense to me. None of them had been there. Why were they the ones talking about it? Some of them weren’t even Catholic.

  I gestured to the clock in the lobby and broke away from the group of mothers. While the parents were clamoring for assemblies and discussion groups, the students were exactly the opposite. There was more of a hush, and whispers about the students who were associated with Most Precious Blood. I tried to avoid these conversations on my way to class, since there were also plenty of students who knew that I had worked at Most Precious Blood that past summer and fall.

  Nick and Dustin found me in the hall too. Dustin stared right at me but muttered to his buddy over his shoulder. Everywhere I looked, I thought I heard someone saying my name, but when I turned, no one addressed me directly.

  Mr. Weinstein made us do an in-class writing assignment, but I spent the period staring at a blank page, too afraid of the memories that had taken over my mind. Mr. Weinstein sat back in his chair with his hands behind his head in the same way Father Greg used to as he orated in his office, and it reminded me of a conversation I had had with Father Greg early in my work with the campaign. He had been showing me pictures he planned to use in some of the case materials. Children raised their hands eagerly in a classroom. Two students hovered by a computer screen, and one pointed at the screen with a look of newfound recognition on her face. There were more.

  “You know why I like bringing kids like you into this project?” Father Greg had said. “Because you are just like the kids on the other end, and I think it’s important for kids to be helping one another.” He had flipped to a picture with three Latinas in white lab coats and goggles. “Helping others helps ourselves,” Father Greg had continued, and had said this again many times during our work on the campaign. It had been all too easy to believe that the rewards would come back to me, too. Father Greg had promised and reminded me that it was God’s way. I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you received me into your homes.

  At that time, I had believed him because I wanted to, but staring down at the blank page in Mr. Weinstein’s class, I thought about how a belief really begins. It doesn’t hit you like a lightning bolt, smack you off your horse, and fill you with visions of a world tinted with more vibrant colors. Instead, it begins with a desire to see something in that certain light, or to see the world in a certain way. The desire paves the way. It makes you believe the clouds are parting—and parting specifically for you. You need them to, because their doing so, just for you, gives you some incentive, some inspiration to keep going. I believed in Father Greg. He knew that was what I wanted, and he told me to believe in it.

  Mr. Weinstein asked for the essays we’d written, and I handed forward my blank page. Josie looked back over her shoulder at me. What happened? she mouthed.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Mr. Weinstein asked me to be quiet and then began his class. I drifted back into my own mind. Had Father Greg been offering me compassion? Wasn’t that what I was told was paramount in the teachings of Jesus—compassion—and that to act compassionately is our ticket to heaven? But is that really compassion—to extend oneself to others with the assumption that that act will be rewarded? Isn’t the greater leap of faith the act of compassion in the face of nothingness? But who would do that? Who wouldn’t act solely in ways that are best for him or her when the veil has been thrown off and words like love and virtue are left naked in their hypocrisy? Words that Father Greg had used so often now looked corrupted and dangerous. And what about when someone else used them? Why couldn’t I hold them like the threat of the executioners’ ax over someone’s head until he did what I wanted him to?

  I left Mr. Weinstein’s class in a daze. I moved down the hall from one class to the next and saw people glancing in my direction, but they looked away as soon as I looked back at them. It’s not like anybody pointed, but after hearing Teal suggest that people were already talking about Most Precious Blood, I spent the day terrified that people had somehow found out, as if an article somewhere talked specifically about me, an article hungry to expose the freaks and monsters in our midst, an article pointing at me that said, “Don’t let him in, he’ll bring it all with him, it’s contagious”—not understanding anything—and that someone had read that article and told others about it and me, and that all those people had made a phone tree with the entire upper school community at CDA, and finally, some kind of announcement was going to be made over the loudspeakers, I was going to get sent to the office, and then everyone would feel free to point and gawk at that weird, fucked-up creature making his final march down the hall to Mrs. Ackerson’s guidance office, where I’d be told point-blank that kids like me belonged in the care of the experts at Bullington and I’d be given a special dispensation for transferring right then, right there, without even the chance to eat lunch. They would arrange for a car.

  It was impossible to speak to Josie or Sophie. I didn’t want them asking me any questions. I just wanted to be back at Josie’s pool house, swapping smoke in a circle, lost in an easy numbness, but that seemed so long ago now, and I was too worried about Mark. I didn’t see him at school, and by third period I was sure he was absent. It was a small relief. Mark and I hadn’t spoken to each other since I’d seen him on the roof of Coolidge, and I couldn’t be sure what he’d do next. Wasn’t this what he’d been talking about—everybody finding out?

  I excused myself from chemistry class and went down to the middle-school-floor bathroom so none of the kids would bug me or tell anyone. I vomited. After I’d cleaned myself up, I felt a little better, but I waited for the class to come to an end before I went back upstairs to get my books and bag. I skipped lunch and sat in a stall in the third-floor restroom, trying to get ahold of myself. Sweat dripped down my neck and soaked my collar. I loosened the knot of my tie and splashed cold water into my face, splashing and splashing, hosing thick, curly bunches of hair until I could slick it all back like a gangster. I scowled at myself and had the urge to punch that reflection. Instead, I snapped the metal clip off one of my pens and scratched the mirror. I stood back to look at myself in the reflection and saw white gashes slashed across my forehead and cheeks, and one cut down through the yellow bruise around my eye.

  When the bell rang, I dabbed my hair with paper towels and walked to class. I felt better. I can do this, I kept telling myself. Nobody will ever know.

  I called for the car service to pick me up after school, and I snuck out before the end-of-the-day announcements. I played the snob and completely ignored the driver from the backseat. With all the snow nearly melted, the town was stained the filmy pallor of
tobacco teeth. Once the cold passed and the spring thawed the slats in the shutters, the ice melted from the cracks in the streets, and the soil softened and the rich dirt could be raked up to the surface, the landscape companies, house painters, and asphalt trucks would fan out around town. And with surgical precision they would restore succulence and vibrancy to the gardens and plush life to the rolling lawns, the roads would be filled and smoothed, the weather-stripped houses would get the fine brushstrokes that would make them look as fresh as the flowers that lined their driveways, and all signs of decay would disappear. Why couldn’t they come for me, too?

  Because I got home much earlier than usual on a school day, I was surprised to hear the radio in the kitchen and Mother’s voice. I could smell the cigarettes from the foyer as I took off my coat. “Aidan!” Mother yelled as I walked into the library. “Aidan, come in here.” She sat at the table in the breakfast nook, a smoldering ashtray beside her, and she stood abruptly when I entered the kitchen. She was still in her morning workout clothes, and wisps of hair had sprung free from her ponytail. She clasped her hands together, then released them and beckoned me with one, and clasped them again. “Oh. Come here. Please.”

  I hesitated.

  “The stories about the churches,” she continued. She didn’t cross the room, but her legs twitched slightly, like they were ready to run over. I sat down by the butcher block. The distance felt safer. I had reined in all the control I could muster—it was caged within me—but if she crossed the room and put her arms around me, I wasn’t sure I could hold on to it anymore.

  Mother sat down too. “Believe me,” she said. “I worried as soon as I saw it. With you and Most Precious Blood.”

  “People were talking about it in school, too,” I said slowly. I corrected my posture and sat up straight. Mother’s eyes couldn’t meet mine. It was easier for me to stay focused on her, I realized. I was used to lying to her—and knowing I was and not fooling myself otherwise. “But nothing happened at Most Precious Blood. Not while I’ve been there.”