I use my free hand to guide myself along the wall, turning sideways again when the steps become too narrow at the top. The church itself is already dim, since the only light is coming from the candles on the altar, but up here it’s so dark that it’s like being at the bottom of a lake. Pitch black. It takes my eyes a full minute to adjust; after a while, I can make out the organ across the room, a few overturned chairs along the tiered steps. Wait. Were those chairs overturned this morning?
I crouch down, staying as close as possible to the wall that stretches out over the pews below, and start crawling. I can feel the velvety skin of dust against my hands, the scratch of grit against my knees. The faint smell of mildew comes out from somewhere—the cloth-covered pews, maybe?—and for some reason, it’s freezing. If I could actually make anything out up here, I’m sure I would see my breath. Downstairs, the other priest is still droning on: “I myself am the living bread come down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread, he shall live forever; the bread I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” His voice blurs against the microphone; the s dragging in static. Palm, palm, knee, knee. I am getting closer and closer to the organ. Another moment and the enormous instrument is right in front of me. I stop crawling. Wince, as if getting ready for a foot or a fist to come flying out. Then: “James?” The word comes out so softly that, for a moment, I wonder if I’ve even said it. There’s no answer. I creep forward again another inch or so. “James? Are you there? It’s Bird again.”
A rustling sound comes out from behind the organ and then quiets again, but I freeze, every nerve poised. Was that him? Or a mouse? Father Delaney did say it’s been at least four years since anyone’s been up here. And the place is covered with dust. It could definitely be a mouse. Maybe a whole nest of them. I saw a mouse once at Mr. Herron’s place. It was outside, scurrying under the metal fence that separated the back of his yard from the neighbor’s, and so small that if I had stepped on it, I might not have even felt it beneath my shoe. But I screamed like I’d just seen a cobra and ran back inside the house. Mr. Herron laughed about it for weeks afterward, but I didn’t think it was funny. Mice make me crazy.
“Bird?” My name drifts out from the corner, faint as a shadow.
Oh my God. That was his voice. He’s still here. This is still real. “Yeah. It’s me.”
“What are you doing here?”
Good question. Great question actually. I reach around my shoulder for the cross strap of my purse, lift it off as softly as possible. “I just. . . . I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Downstairs, the priest’s voice rises: “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” followed by a murmur of amens. I scoot forward a little more as the collective movement of people rising to their feet sounds below. And all at once, there he is—right in front of me, so close this time that I can reach out and touch him.
Even in the dark, I can see that he is still in pain. His face, damp with sweat, is clenched in a grimace; the edges of his jaw are set tight. He’s leaning against the wall, back arched, the green veins in his neck exposed, as if an invisible foot is pressing down on his chest. On the floor next to him is the gun. “You got any water?” he whispers.
The congregation downstairs begins chanting: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . .”
Water? My hand moves inside my purse; something like relief floods over me as I pull out the half-empty bottle I bought for lunch earlier. James’s eyes, slack and hooded, open wide at the sight of it; he reaches out instinctively, a man dying of thirst. Which, watching his Adam’s apple pulse up and down the length of his throat as he swallows, he may very well be at this point. He drinks the whole thing in less than ten seconds, and then lets his arm drop, panting softly.
“Are you hurt?” I whisper.
He nods, the back of his head sliding up and down the wall.
“Where?”
He points to the lower half of his leg.
“Your leg?” I ask. “Or your foot?”
“Both.” He pauses. “I tripped running up these steps and fell halfway back down the staircase. I can’t believe I made it back up again. I heard something snap. I literally had to drag myself.”
“Do you think it’s broken?”
“Probably. I don’t know. The whole thing just hurts. Bad. I can’t move.”
“. . . We believe in the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.”
I stare at him, not knowing what to say next. What the hell am I trying to do here? Be a hero? A friend? And how long have I been gone? Ma and Angus are going to start getting antsy, wondering where I am. One of the priests starts singing a hymn; other voices join in haltingly, gaining strength. “What are you going to do?” I ask.
“I don’t know yet. I’m trying to figure that out.” James lifts his head a little, looks straight at me. I don’t recognize anything in his eyes anymore. They’re blank, empty as tombs. “You tell anyone I’m here?”
I shake my head.
“You gonna?”
I look at the floor, stare at a dark, kidney-shaped stain on the carpet. Is it blood? Urine? I look back up. Shake my head again, no.
“Come back, then,” he says. “Bring more water.”
“I can’t. I’ll get in trouble.”
“Please. Just for the water. I won’t make it without water, Bird. Please.”
I hesitate for a second. It wouldn’t take long. Just another ten minutes. Maybe I could drop in quick tomorrow morning, before I go to Mr. Herron’s. But then I think of Angus. The apartment with the skylight. And the security deposit. Thirteen more days until I never have to set foot in Mrs. Ross’s office again. I shake my head. “I have a little boy now, James. And I’m already in trouble. I’m on probation. I can’t do anything that’ll get me in more trouble. I just can’t. I’m sorry.”
The last of the hymn drifts down the empty back of the church, a lost kite searching for the door.
“You’re on probation?” James whispers. “For what?”
I drop my eyes, embarrassed. There is nothing he knows about me anymore either. We are two strangers, isolated by life and circumstance and the heavy hand of fate. So it goes. “I wrote some bad checks. It was stupid. I was desperate.”
James studies me for a moment, is still studying me when I lift my eyes again, and for a moment I think of that day on the step when he leaned in, how, with his breath in my ear, every cell under my skin felt as if it were alive and singing. My heart pounds as I catch sight of the crescent moon scar along his eyebrow. It looks smaller somehow, and fainter, too, as if someone took an eraser and tried to rub it off his skin.
“Okay,” James says. “Don’t worry about it, then. I understand. It’s okay.”
It is? Yes, it is. Maybe he has help elsewhere. Another plan in place. He can’t stay here forever. “You’re not gonna stay here, are you?”
He looks down at the floor.
“Maybe you should just turn yourself in.”
“No.” He looks back up, shifting a little, his face wincing with pain, and then settles back against the wall. “No, I’m already looking at jail time for the fight. It’ll be twice as much now that I’ve done this. I’ll figure it out.”
I nod, as if convincing myself that this is exactly what I want to hear. He will figure it out. This is his predicament. He’s the one who’s gotten himself into this. He’ll have to be the one to figure out how to get himself back out of it. I crawl back toward the steps, start my way down, when I hear my name whispered again.
“Bird!”
“Yeah?”
James is leaning to one side, eyeing me carefully. “You hear anything about the other guy?” He hesitates. “That I hurt in the bar? Is he still alive?”
Alive? Jesus, what did he do to him? I stare at the floor, my brain racing. “I don’t know. I haven’t really been . . . listening to the
news or anything. I haven’t heard.”
James tilts his head back, exposing his Adam’s apple again. It is as large as a walnut, the skin over it rough and prickly. A sigh of resignation—or maybe just hopelessness—comes out of him. “Okay,” he says. “All right. Thanks.”
Chapter 14
The rest of the service is interminable, made even longer by the fact that I know James is less than fifty feet away, suffering hideously. The weird thing, though, is that knowing this doesn’t make me want to go back up and help him. It just makes me want to run out of there as fast as possible, get as far away from the whole thing as I physically can. Forget I ever saw him, or that I just went back up and gave him water and admitted that I wanted to see how he was doing. Because now—whether I like it or not, whether I admit it or not—I’ve gotten involved. However extraneously, however unwillingly, I have crossed the line.
It’s amazing how attractive my regular, humdrum life looks to me suddenly, how my plans for going to Target on my lunch break tomorrow—just to walk around the home section and look at curtains and bedsheets—have acquired a whole new appeal. The last time I was there, I saw a Ninja Turtle comforter with matching green sheets and a pillowcase. I was going to put that on layaway for Angus, along with some new pots and pans, maybe even a microwave. Those are the kind of boring, wonderful things I want to do tomorrow. Not this. Not now.
Not ever.
FATHER DELANEY IS thrilled to see us when the service finally comes to a close. He’s out in the vestibule, saying good night to everyone, moving in for his signature hug as people file past. Everyone’s still whispering since the tabernacle holding the Holy Eucharist is open, exposed for adoration over the next forty hours. Father Delaney and Ma exchange a knowing look before he grabs both of her hands and pulls her in. Then he turns to me. “It’s wonderful to see you here, Bird.” I smile and nod, watch as he gets down on one knee in front of Angus. “And you must be Gus. Your grandmother has told me all about you.”
Angus looks up at me, a question mark on his face.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “This is Father Delaney, Angus. He’s in charge of everything here.”
“Oh.” Angus looks down at the floor, shy suddenly. “Hi.”
“You look just like your mother,” Father Delaney says.
Angus looks up, horrified. “I do not! I’m a boy!”
Ma and Father Delaney laugh.
I squeeze Angus’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Boo. He means it as a good thing.” I purse my lips together, look down at the floor.
Father Delaney looks over at me and pats me on the side of the shoulder. “I can’t tell you how nice it was to look out and see you sitting there again, Bird.”
“Thank you.” I stare at his black sneakers, wonder if James can hear us down here, chatting away like old friends. Just another night at the neighborhood rectory. “Is the church open for the whole forty hours?” I hear myself ask suddenly, glancing back up at the priest. “Like . . . the whole time, I mean?”
“Well, it used to be,” Father Delaney says. “That’s the whole point of the service, of course, for someone to be present during the entire forty hours. But we’ve had a few unfortunate incidents over the years, a break-in once, and then another very distressing one that involved an act of vandalism.”
“Oh.” I grimace in accordance with Ma, who murmurs something inaudible and shakes her head.
“So now we have to lock the church between midnight and five A.M.,” Father Delaney continues. “Just for safety purposes.” He beams in Ma’s direction. “There are always a handful of people waiting at the doors when I unlock them in the morning. Always.”
Ma looks down modestly at her shoes.
“I want to go home,” Angus says, pulling on my hand. “I’m tired.”
I could kiss him, right there, in front of everyone. “Me, too,” I say. “Let’s go.”
I START COUNTING silently after we get back in the car, waiting for Ma to start in. It only takes her until seven. “So what did you think?”
“About what?”
“About the service.” She looks out the window casually, adjusting the lapels of her coat, brushing at invisible crumbs with the back of her hand. Just a light conversation between mother and daughter.
“Not much, really. I don’t remember much about the Forty Hours thing, but it seems to be like everything else. Nothing’s changed.”
She fiddles with the scarf around her neck, yanks the edges of it a little too roughly. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning nothing’s changed, Ma. It’s the same old story that it always was. Same prayers, same songs.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“What do you want me to tell you, Ma? That a bolt of lightning hit me during the homily and caused me to see the error of my ways?”
“That would be nice,” Ma says dryly.
“Not gonna happen.”
She shifts her purse onto her lap, touches a piece of hair lightly along the edge of her face. “So, where is this new place you and Angus are moving to?”
I rearrange my hands on the steering wheel, stare at the taillights of the car in front of me until they blur into puddles of red. “It’s up at the lake.”
“Moon Lake?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“How can you afford a place out there? The rent is astronomical.”
I brake in front of a stop sign, look both ways. “It’s an upstairs apartment in a house. The people downstairs are renting it. It’s not so much.”
“How much?” Ma demands.
I shoot her a look that says Stop and You’re being rude and If you keep going like this, we are going to end up fighting in front of Angus for the second time in one night, all in one slight creasing of my eyebrow, the twitch of my left eye, but she only cocks her head and says, “You don’t want to tell me?”
“I can afford it, okay?” I step down on the gas. “I’ve already done the numbers. Don’t worry about it.”
Ma glances back at Angus, who is doing loop-de-loops with his plastic motorcycle along the edge of his booster seat, oblivious to our conversation. Small motor noises are coming out of his mouth; his brow is furrowed in concentration. “Is your seat belt on, young man?” Her voice is too harsh.
I sit up, look at Angus in the rearview mirror. His hands are still, the motorcycle forgotten. He is watching Ma anxiously. “Put your seat belt on, Boo. You know better.” I watch as he sits back, his lower lip pushed out now, listen for the click of the belt.
“He knows about the apartment?” Ma asks in a low voice.
“Well, yeah,” I lie. “Of course.”
“He’s seen it and everything? He likes it?”
“He hasn’t seen it yet.” I’m speaking with the least bit of volume necessary to make myself heard. “But I know he’ll like it. He’ll love it. It’s on the lake, Ma. What’s not to love?”
Ma rests an elbow on the window ledge, stares straight ahead. The windshield turns slick as a light rain begins. I click on my wipers. For a long moment, the only sound is the creak and sigh of the blades moving across the glass. “Two weeks?” she asks finally. “Is that when you said you’d be leaving?”
I nod, lick my lips. Why do I feel as if I am betraying her? It didn’t feel like this when I left the first time. Back then, it was: Good riddance. See you when I see you. Whenever that might be. Which, in a way, is still how I feel.
Except maybe not as much. Maybe not as intensely as before.
“You can come visit us,” I say, looking over at her. “I didn’t really mean it, you know, when I said that earlier about staying out of my life. I was just angry.”
“Oh, I know.” Ma folds her hands, regarding them in her lap like little Easter eggs. Then she looks out the window. “I know.”
Chapter 15
Angus’s bedtime routine rarely, if ever, deviates from the following: a long, sudsy bath that involves me sitting at the edge of the tub for the first twenty minutes
as he plays with his fleet of plastic tugboats, followed by the nonnegotiable three-minute warning, after which he will scream and wail as I wash his hair and pour small buckets of water over his head to rinse him clean. After his bath I clean his ears gently with three separate Q-tips, count aloud to sixty as he brushes his teeth, and tuck him into bed before reading his two favorite books: Curious George Goes to the Library and Imogen’s Antlers. Tonight, he reaches up as I close the second book and touches the edge of my face. “Mom?” he asks.
“Hmm?”
“Do you think Dopester is sad that we forgot to say hi to him this morning?”
I lean down, kiss him hard in the space between his ear and neck. “Maybe. But I think he gets a lot of hi’s in the morning. From all different people. Besides, we can make it up to him tomorrow.”
“How?”
“We’ll pull over and wave at him. And yell real loud so that we make sure he can hear us. Okay?”
Angus’s eyebrows are high on his forehead, his little fists tucked tightly under his chin. “Yeah. That’d be awesome.”
“Okay.” I smooth the lip of covers under his chin, kiss him once more. “Sweet dreams, baby.”
Afterward, I slip into my room and lay down on my bed. Usually once he goes to sleep, I’ll go downstairs and sit with Ma and watch TV for a while. She likes Dancing with the Stars, but she’ll sit with me through an episode of Law & Order, too. Tonight though, the possibility of another tense or unkind word between us feels like too much. I just want to be alone.
Except that as soon as I get into bed and pull up the covers, all I can think about is not being alone. I swore off men after everything happened with Angus, telling myself that it would just be a lot of heartache for a little bit of pleasure. (And sometimes, not even that.) It wasn’t that big of a deal for the first year, and maybe even for part of the second. Between taking care of Angus, working full-time, and then trying to get things straightened out with the probation office, there wasn’t any time to bemoan the fact that I wasn’t going out on any dates. Plus, if I did have any latent sexual desires lingering around, moving in with Ma definitely killed them off. Even if she was one of those progressive thinkers, Ma still wouldn’t be the kind of person you could sit around and talk about getting laid with. When we rent the occasional movie, she’ll jump up as soon as a woman starts unbuttoning her shirt in front of a man and disappear into the kitchen. Her aversion to anything remotely sexual both fascinates and infuriates me. It’s like watching a child walk by an enormous chocolate cake and not only denying herself a piece of it but also refusing to acknowledge its existence. Once, a few months after Angus and I had moved in, I asked her if she’d ever considered dating again after Dad died.
The Odds of You and Me Page 12