The Garden of Happy Endings

by Barbara O'Neal

  The death of one small human seemed very small in comparison. Going inside to have a shower, she focused on that.

  And on Kiki. For Kiki, she could do this.

  * * *

  Every single member of the congregation came to the funeral, nearly all of them dressed in bright spring colors at Julia’s request. The sanctuary was filled with carnations, which had been Kiki’s favorite, and Elsa had woven some pink ones into her hair.

  The day before, Elsa and Julia had gone over the service, what Julia and her family needed. Julia had been adamant that it needed to be an uplifting celebration of Kiki’s life, rather than a dark, dour, howling marker of loss. “That isn’t who we are,” she said, and paused to keep her voice clear. “It isn’t who Kiki was.”

  It was never easy to preside over the funeral of a young person. Kiki’s friends looked stunned or raw in their bright Easter clothes, and they had all brought mementos and cards to pile on the coffin, which was, of course, closed.

  Complicating this funeral were the throngs of media outside the church. They gave lip service to the grief of the attendees, but in fact, the story was violent, mysterious, and tragic. It also played hard on the fears of every mother and young woman in the Seattle area. In all, a winning formula for news. Elsa had set strict boundaries on how close the reporters could come to the church, and had asked for the burliest members of the congregation to enforce those boundaries. They had gladly agreed.

  Elsa sat in her chair on the dais as the music team led the mourners in song, a traditional favorite that Kiki had loved singing. For a moment, Elsa was overcome, thinking of her standing on the dais to sing with the youth group, and it seemed to strike others, too, especially her friends, who sat together in a tight huddle right behind the family. They leaned on one another, pressing tissues to their faces. They had a presentation planned, which Elsa had encouraged.

  When it came time for her to speak, Elsa looked out at the expectant faces. She walked to the podium, entirely empty, and stared into the sea that blurred in front of her. Light fell through the windows in red and blue and yellow bars, touching faces, the coffin, and Julia.

  At last a sentence came to her. “Spirit fashioned Kiki Peterson out of dragon dust and unicorns, belly laughter and a graceful paintbrush.” In the faces, she saw a sudden wash of tears in many eyes, but also ease, and she continued without even knowing what she said. Continued with the words that came from some other part of her, speaking them with a sturdy voice and laughter and even some tears. She would never remember a word of it.

  It was not until the evening that she collapsed, alone in her little house, with the great darkness of a black hole sucking her soul into it so she could not even feel. She fumbled with the cigarettes and took them outside to the cold night. It was not raining, and the sky was thick with stars. They gave her no comfort.

  She lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply, feeling the chemicals ease her panic almost instantly, leaving behind a depth of loneliness that nearly brought her to her knees. The vast, empty universe mocked her with light from stars that had been dead a billion years, and a darkness that held no life at all.

  No life. No spirit. Nothing but unfeeling dust, formed by accident into life on this tiny planet in a far little corner of the universe.

  Alone.

  Twice before, she’d felt this engulfing recognition that God was only a construct to help humans make sense of their short, tragic lives. Twice she had weathered it and come back. This time, she saw the truth all too clearly—there was nothing.

  Finished with the cigarette, she put the butt in a coffee can and crossed her arms, looking up. Emptiness looked back.

  But God or not, there was a congregation of humans who needed her. She would not abandon them, no matter what her personal feelings were.

  She would not abandon them.

  Chapter Three

  Joaquin Gallegos, known to all as Father Jack, liked to run in the early morning to prepare himself for the day ahead. He’d been a devoted runner since winning his first blue ribbons on track days in elementary school. His fleet feet had snared the scholarships that had made college possible. Made his life possible.

  This Thursday morning in late November, his heart was heavy as he rolled from his bed and washed his face, then pulled on his running pants and a warm fleece jacket one of his brothers had given him a couple of Christmases back. The shoes were his one indulgence, a new pair every three months that provided his long narrow feet and high arches with serious support.

  From the top of his bureau, he picked up the rosary beads he’d bought so long ago in Roncesvalles, Spain, before beginning the pilgrimage that had changed his life.

  The world was still covered in eggplant shadows as he loped out the front door of the rectory and ran through the sleeping streets. It was snowing lightly, but with a certain steady intent that made plain there would be piles of snow by evening. It was good to be back in Pueblo, after so many years away. He’d been deeply pleased when the bishop offered him this church in a challenged neighborhood in his hometown two years before. He loved Pueblo, loved being close by his siblings and large extended family, who were so proud of him, the priest.

  With his thumb, he caught the first bead of his rosary and began to quietly chant the Lord’s Prayer, then the Hail Mary’s and the Glory Be’s, sliding the beads around his wrist, each one worn smooth by his touch over the years. Sixteen years, to be exact.

  His usual run was six miles, a long loop down the levee, around the ditch, and through a sleeping old neighborhood of tiny houses in the shadow of a church, and back to San Roque. He prayed the rosary through the first half, then simply held the beads in his fingers, sliding them comfortingly back and forth across the back of his knuckles, and listened for anything God had to say in return.

  Sometimes it was prosaic, a nudge to check the toilet in the men’s restroom in the basement, or to ask Mrs. Marelli about the lasagna she usually cooked for the monthly potluck. Other times, it was more mysterious, a whisper to look up a passage from the bible, or a visual of a person who needed prayer. He made no claim to getting these communications perfectly right every time, but he did his earnest best.

  It was Elsa who was on his mind this morning. He had dreamed of her last night. Several times over the past few weeks, he’d caught something hushed in her tone, as if she were using her voice to compress something she could not say. In his dream, she was smoking, looking at the moon.

  Joaquin and Elsa had been friends since childhood. They had both been nerdy kids—Joaquin skinny and tall, Elsa one of those invisible girls with braces and crazy black hair and knees that were too big. He at least had had track, but she’d nothing to redeem her in the cutthroat waters of elementary school.

  Today, he rubbed his thumb across the beads and prayed to see the shadows obscuring her faith. To see how to help her heal.

  A warning moved through him. Be ready.

  Be ready. He frowned.

  When he was seven years old, Joaquin had had the measles, a terrible case that nearly killed him, at least by some accounts, and left him with scars on his body, face, arms, chest. Even at the end of grade school, he still wore a T-shirt to the swimming pool. His legs tanned and covered the marks, and anyway, who cared if you had scarred legs?

  At his very sickest, when he’d been limp with a fever that made him delirious, and likely should have had him in the hospital, an angel came and sat with him. He’d been painfully isolated, quarantined from the other children, and his mother was afraid of contagiousness so she barely visited his room.

  The angel didn’t have big white wings or even any wings at all. She wore a long green gown. Light emanated from her skin, and she had very dark clear eyes. She took his hand, cooling the heated, itchy flesh, and said, “Joaquin, you can’t die yet. You have important work to do. One day, you will be a priest and save many lives.”

  He had been delirious, but not that delirious. “No,” he said. Not a priest.
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br />   She just smiled. “You’ll see,” she said, and started to sing the most miraculously beautiful song, as if harps and birds and guitars and the sweetest voices in the heavens were joined together. As she sang, she stroked his forehead and neck, her hands smooth as silk, and he smelled something that even now he couldn’t describe, like brown sugar or simmering cherries.

  He fell asleep, and when he awakened, his fever had broken. His mother brought him food. She asked who he’d been talking to, and Joaquin only shook his head. Obviously he had imagined it.

  But so many years later, he could still close his eyes and see her, exactly as she had been, that angel. Her name was Gabrielle, she said. I will see you again.

  It had been a long time later, but she had returned. And he was a priest now, just as she had said. He did not tell the story, though Elsa knew it. It had marked a breach between them, the loss of the union they had imagined. He had not been able to be there for the crisis of faith she experienced that year, long ago. He had, in part, been the cause of it.

  A bible verse from Ecclesiastes came to him:

  Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble. Likewise, two people lying close together can keep each other warm. But how can one be warm alone? A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer.

  He wiped a droplet of sweat from his forehead. Someone who falls alone. He would call her again this afternoon, make sure she was all right. Push, if he had to, past the barriers she sometimes erected.

  Bring her home.

  He scowled his resistance, a wall of resistance, enormous and hard as brick. No. That was his imagination, the wrong side of him. Instead, he would ask Tamsin to go see her.

  As he looped back up the hill toward the parish, a whisper moved through him one more time.

  Be ready.

  Tamsin swung by Father Jack’s office in the rectory of San Roque Catholic Church. He had called last night to ask if she would come see him.

  It was a blustery day, the sharp wind giving lie to the bright sunlight, and drying out any remaining life in the grass in the lawns, turning the city a uniform pale brown. It would be ugly until it snowed. As she parked, Tamsin shook her head over the vacant lot between the church and a block of three-story apartment buildings. Trash and tumbleweeds blew into the lot, catching on junk of various kinds—discarded tires, unidentifiable wood, a couch where two young thugs sat sharing a joint. They eyed her with faintly hostile expressions as she locked her car—luckily she was driving the ordinary Subaru and not Scott’s BMW—and hurried up the walk.

  Mrs. Timothy sat at the desk, a sixty-something professional secretary who guarded Joaquin as if he were the pope himself. “Is he in?”

  Officiously, she rose and smoothed her gray pencil skirt. “I’ll check. You are?”

  Tamsin smiled. Mrs. Timothy knew very well who she was—she and Scott were enormous donors to the church, and Alexa had been here every Sunday of her life, thanks to Scott. But Tamsin didn’t care for Mass. Didn’t care much for the Catholic Church, or any church for that matter, and she didn’t attend. Mrs. Timothy liked to rub that in. “Tamsin Corsi. He’ll know who I am.” She did not add, as we’ve been friends since childhood. Technically, it was just Joaquin and Elsa who had been friends back then. Tamsin was eight years older, forty-six to their thirty-eight now.

  “I’ll tell him.” She sniffed and knocked on the door of his office.

  A pair of pigeon-breasted Italian women stuck their heads into the office. Sisters, by the look of them, and judging by their aprons, they had landed the plum duties of caring for Father. “Where is Wilma?” one of them asked. “We need to put coffee on the list! He’s almost out!”

  “Do you want me to tell her?”

  The sisters exchanged a worried look. “We’d better wait.”

  Mrs. Timothy came back out, waved a hand. “Father will see you now.”

  Hiding her smile, Tamsin headed for his office.

  Father Jack sat behind the desk and stood up as she came in. He was, they all said, too handsome to be a priest, despite the scarring on his skin from a terrible case of measles when he was a child. Black hair fell in a glossy swath across his forehead. He had large dark eyes that could be sympathetic or furious or inscrutable. “Good morning, Tamsin. I’m so glad to see you.”

  “I have to tell you,” she said, “that field is an eyesore and dangerous and I think we need to do something about it.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “We? If you’d like to head a research committee to see what can be done, that would be terrific.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “ ‘We’ doesn’t always mean somebody else. I can get you a few volunteers.”

  “I don’t even come to church.”

  “That’s all right.” He gestured for her to sit down and took a seat himself. “Lots of other people don’t come to Mass, either, but they do work around the church. What would you like to see done with the field?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about that. It’s just ugly and not very inspiring. Maybe it could be—” She paused, running through possibilities “—a community garden! Wouldn’t that be great?”

  He inclined his head, a quizzical expression on his brow. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  “Sure, why not? We’d have to raze it and bring in some topsoil and, I don’t know, make little plots.” She stopped. “Oh, no you don’t, Mr. Machiavelli. I know you.”

  “You don’t have to commit to anything right now, but what if you just looked into what exactly would be required, and got back to me?”

  Tamsin thought of the garden, the flat-eyed boys, and then the transformation. Maybe she did need a project. “I’ll look into it.”

  He smiled. “Thank you,” he said with emphasis, then sobered. “I asked you here today to talk about Elsa.”

  “Are you worried, too? I can’t put my finger on it, but she just doesn’t sound right.”

  “She’s stopped taking my calls. We usually talk at least once a week, sometimes more.”

  Tamsin blinked. “You do? Even after all this time?”

  As if he saw nothing strange at all in that, he nodded. “We’ve been friends for twenty-seven years. We share a calling.” He shrugged. “It feels very natural.”

  “So when was the last time you talked to her?”

  “She sent me an email about a week ago, but before that, it was at least a couple of weeks. I call, but she doesn’t call back.”

  “That’s not making me any happier.” Tamsin frowned. “She just sounds … weird. Flat. Like she’s not all there.” She made a decision on the spot. “I’m going to fly to Seattle.” She stood. “I’ll let you know what’s going on.”

  “Please. And ask her to get in touch with me. Tell her I’m worried.”

  Elsa had loved Sunday mornings her entire life. As a child, she’d even liked the ritual of a good long bath on Saturday night, and having her hair washed. Of course, she’d hated the pins and curlers her mother had put it up in, hated the way they interfered with sleep—her mother had been at war with Elsa’s hair from babyhood, when she was born with a headful of black corkscrews. But she’d endured even the discomfort of sleeping in rollers for the pleasure of church.

  On Sunday mornings, she liked getting dressed in special clothes, held just for this one sacred day, and then having a better breakfast than usual, after which she went to Sunday school. There she learned about the saints and Jesus and the Blessed Mother, who was always her favorite, with her pretty face and kind eyes. Jesus was good, but he seemed like a teenager, a little aloof and far away, as if he’d want to be with his friends and would be annoyed if she bothered him, as her sister, Tamsin, often was.

  Although no one else in her family had particularly stuck with it—her parents had only gone out of duty—Elsa loved church even when she w
ent alone. She never missed Sunday school, which was where she had met Joaquin in the first place. They were in the same Sunday school class in the fifth grade. He loved it as much as she did.

  Since becoming a minister, Elsa had grown to love Sunday mornings even more. She still had rituals. Her Sunday clothes had become simple linen slacks and tunics in neutral colors, paired with bright scarves. People brought her scarves from their travels now, beautiful things in amazing fabrics and textures. She also had a massive collection of bracelets, but only wore one at a time, since she gestured so much giving her sermons. Gestured and paced and paused and stopped.

  She adored it. Part teaching, part theater, part pure love offering, a way to serve the world and the people in it.

  This gloomy November morning was the first Sunday of Advent. She rose at five, as was her habit. Usually she spent time in meditation before she took a shower, but lately she couldn’t bear to sit in silence in the small room she had set aside for the purpose.

  Instead, she took Charlie for a long walk in the drizzle. He never minded. She had a good raincoat, and the repetitive motion, breathing in the cool air, the stillness of early morning were as steadying for her as meditation.

  When she returned home, she had her shower and let her hair dry, curly and long, over her shoulders. She chose a deep purple scarf of thinnest, airiest silk, in honor of the vestments priests wore at the beginning of Advent. Her bracelet was an enameled purple cuff.

  She could do this.

  It was her habit to eat a good breakfast, oatmeal or eggs, along with strong milky tea and some cheery rock music to raise her energy. Salt-N-Pepa and Cyndi Lauper, Motown and The Cars. Light, happy songs to get her heart into the right space. Her sermons were woven of the challenge of being human and the pleasure of being one with the Divine, and joy was always her goal. Uplift. Happiness. Joyful people could overcome trouble and illness and sorrow. Joy could blot out darkness.