“Good,” the priest said, as if the officer would show up, playing out the pretense his own mother maintained back in Milwaukee when she waited until after eleven on the Sabbath to phone his brother, as if Joe had actually gone to a ten o’clock Mass. Father Gervase waited until he had gone, then shifted the car into gear, pulled back onto the street, and headed, as was inevitable, to Holy Apostles.
The church rose on the hill, visible even from the harbor, and the priest was pleased by the sight of it. It had been built by Italian stonemasons at the turn of the century and seemed to him to be what a church should be—solid and traditional with the patina of age and prayer. There was nothing modern or stark about it, unlike the new cathedral in the city, whose interior was all steel arches and ribs and seemed to the priest like the innards of a ship before the deck was in place. It was this exact echoing starkness that concerned the archbishop, whose solution was to fill the walls with canvases of the saints. “Paintings of saints,” he’d told the Arts and Furnishings Committee. “In the tradition of Catholic wall art. And aren’t we fortunate to have one of the most noted portrait artists in the country living not a half hour away, a man whose work has been compared to the Flemish masters.”
The committee’s vote had been unanimous.
Now the only one who wouldn’t cooperate was Will Light.
Father Gervase realized his approach to Will had been ineffective, weak, lacking the details that might have made the artist accept. He should have explained why Will had specifically been chosen by the archbishop and the head of the committee. And although matters of finance would naturally be the purview of Cardinal Kneeland, he could have hinted at the size of the commission.
Father Gervase sat for a moment outside the rectory. The next time they must select someone else to approach Will Light, for without a doubt there would be another attempt. The archbishop was a man accustomed to getting his way, and he was determined to have his way on this business. But with a sinking heart, the priest suspected he would be directed to return. The heft of his own failures and weaknesses weighed heavily.
At last, he got out of the sedan, uncharacteristically slamming the door behind him, a sound that echoed on and on.
CHAPTER FOUR
Again, the slamming of a car door broke into my focus, reminding me why I usually kept the window shut, the outer world completely muted.
I assumed it was Father Gervase returning on the transparent pretext of picking up the book he had so conveniently left behind. Well, I thought, I’ll be damned if I’ll answer the door. I waited for the chime, wondering how persistent the priest would prove to be. Minutes passed, and when the bell did not sound a trace of concern shadowed my irritation. Had he fallen? Had a heart attack? Stroke? I hoped the hell not, but I remembered the priest’s ashy complexion and pictured him slumped on the steps. I set down my brush and crossed to the window, but when I looked down on the drive I saw not Father Gervase’s car but Sophie’s green VW Bug and again was taken by a clutch of emotions too complicated to separate.
Sophie was nowhere in sight. But she was home, and the tight fist beneath my ribs released. And why shouldn’t she be here? This was still her home too. So far we had avoided speaking about what the future held. At least she hadn’t spoken to me of it. I had no idea what she told others, what she confided to her friends and her therapist any more than I had a clue of what our future held, but it was clear that our marriage was undergoing a slow and sad erosion, and I felt unequal to the chore of shoring up the ground, making it solid again. Although I knew better than to hope we could return to how we had once been—hope, that sucker’s emotion, the resort of fools that led only to more heartbreak and in the end proved as useless as saints—I couldn’t still the flicker of possibility at the sight of her car in the drive. For the second time that day, I wrapped my brush and descended, remembering to switch off the fan and close the window before I left. The stair runner muffled my steps, and when I reached the first-floor landing I saw that Sophie had not heard me. She stood in the foyer holding The Illustrated Book of the Saints. I watched her, attentive as a spy, as she leafed through several pages. She wore faded gray tights and a matching T-shirt with a purple logo across the chest that I didn’t recognize. Some abstract design, as I remember. In the past week she’d had her hair cut, and the style struck me as too severe. Still, in spite of the hair and our rift, heat tightened my belly. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had sex. What I remembered was how in the first days following Lucy’s murder when I sought, needed the connection and comfort of sex, I had reached for her and her shocked rejection in response. Was that the beginning, the first crack in the mortar that had connected us, too swift and silent to be noted for what it was?
Finally she sensed me and looked up. “Hi.”
“Hi.” My awkwardness was a third presence in the hall. I didn’t know how I was supposed to be, how to be natural with her. Should I have hugged her? Kissed her? The moment passed.
“I rang, but you didn’t answer,” she said. “I didn’t want to surprise you, but I won’t take long. I just stopped by to pick up a couple of things.”
“No problem.” I was irritated by my uncertainty, by my complicated emotions, and by her composure, the way the ball now always seemed to be in her court.
“I won’t be long.”
So. Not coming home. “I was finishing up anyway,” I said. Christ, we were so goddamn formal, it absolutely killed me, but I was determined to stay calm and to be civil. To prove to her that I was changing, that I could be what she needed. If she needed her space for a while—her space, we used to joke about couples who talked like that—well, then I would go along with it. Whatever it took so that space wouldn’t turn into an unbreachable rift. Mortar not just cracked but crumbled. In spite of everything, what it came down to was I couldn’t stand to lose her too.
“How’s it going? The work?”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s going.”
“Good. That’s good. I’m glad for you.”
What’s happening here? What’s happened to us? “Look, I really was about ready to knock off for the day. Why don’t we have a glass of wine?”
She lifted an eyebrow. For Christ’s sake, it’s just wine, I wanted to say. But I’d be damned if I’d start justifying. “Or tea if you prefer.”
She hesitated, looked down at the book she still held. I could see her struggle with the decision, and then she attempted a smile. “Wine would be welcome, Will. It’s been a tough day.”
I was able to breathe again. I expected her to follow me to the kitchen, but she went into the living room, as if she were a guest in the house, for Christ’s sake, and I swung back to irritation. I grabbed a bottle of Cab from the rack and chose two goblets from a shelf. They were hand blown, part of a collection begun when we’d started dating. Whenever we took a weekend away, we’d buy two matching wine goblets as souvenirs instead of the usual tourist crap, a tradition we continued after we married. I can still recall where each pair came from. Block Island. Provincetown. San Francisco. The East Village. The anniversary trip to Florence. The squat-stemmed glasses in my hands came from a craft show in Quebec City, goblets that once represented the future we were building, a future as it turned out that was as fragile as crystal.
When I returned to the living room, she was sitting in one of the Morris chairs, lost in thought, staring intently into the far distance. Again, as I had in the foyer, I studied my wife. She had changed, and it was more than the haircut. I searched for the words. Seriously self-contained. No laughter shining in her eyes, though that had been gone for some months. I tried to see in her something of the woman I’d married, the girl who laughed with ease of a child, who wore not only her heart on her sleeve but her mind and soul as well, nothing concealed, the person I’d tried to comfort through the long fall and winter just past when we were fellow survivors clinging to the lifeboat of each other. I remembered that day last November when I had come down from the studio i
n the midafternoon to find her in the kitchen sobbing. She’d been dressed in a blue sweater the shade of cornflowers that fell softly to her hips and a charcoal skirt, black boots, an outfit she’d chosen for lunch with Jan and Alicia, an outing I had encouraged and taken as a sign that she was on steadier ground. “What’s wrong?” I’d asked. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Between shuddering sobs, she’d related the story, how in the middle of lunch, she had broken down and fled to the restroom of the restaurant until she could regain control. Later, on the way back to the table, she’d overheard Alicia saying, “I don’t know what to do with Sophie. She’s a mess. She’s just a mess.” I had held her, let her cry, her tears wet on my shirt. “I’m not a mess,” she kept repeating. “I’m not. Can’t they understand that I’m grieving?”
“Alicia is an ass,” I’d said. It was Alicia, I remembered, who early on had told me grief was like having a house burn down. It took a long time before you realized what you had lost. For an instant I feared I might strike her. “I know exactly what I have lost,” I managed before I walked away. I recalled, too, the day in mid-December, the first day Sophie had said she was not going back to school. She’d notified the superintendent that she was quitting. “You quit?” I’d had absolutely no idea she was even thinking of this. Her counselor had encouraged her to return to work, had told her the routine of work might be helpful, and although I admit I had had some reservations, I’d supported her decision. After all, she loved her job as choral director at the school. She loved the kids. How many times had she said it was the kids who made the job worthwhile? The rest of it—administration, rules, regulations—were joy robbers.
“I can’t do it anymore,” she’d told me.
“It’s okay,” I’d said. I’d assumed she no longer had the energy to fight the battles her job entailed: convincing the school committee that the majority of choral music was sacred but that this didn’t mean she was trying to bring religion into the school, battling the athletic department for a share of the students’ free time after classes.
“It’s not okay.”
I’d tried to embrace her, as I had after that lunch with Alicia, but this time she’d escaped my arms. I’d struggled to think of what to say, to find some way to go on, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She walked up the stairs to Lucy’s room and crawled into Lucy’s bed. “It still smells of her,” she whispered to me when I went to find her, and her words struck me hard. Lucy’s smell. The fruity mix of apple-scented shampoo and the deodorant that smelled faintly of baby powder and beneath this the singular indefinable scent that was our daughter.
Sophie stayed there that night. And the next. And for weeks after, long after the last traces of our daughter clung to the bed linens. I’d tended to her, bringing her soups and bowls of milk and toast, as if she were an invalid, one suffering a terrible and terminal illness. I was helpless in the face of this collapse.
During those weeks, her sister, Amy, drove down from Maine for several weekends, dismayed and worried about Sophie’s condition and as helpless as I had been in the face of it. I fielded calls. She didn’t want to speak to anyone, not her friends or her parents, who phoned from Arizona, or her therapist, who called regularly, or Amy, who, after she returned to Maine, called each night.
“Please,” I’d begged as the weeks passed. “Please. At least come downstairs.”
“I can’t,” she’d say. “I can’t do any of it, Will. Surviving is the most I can manage right now.” I saw then, as some part of me had known all along, that our journey through these days was a solitary one. Separate lifeboats.
It was someone from school who pulled her from—if not grief, at least from the bed. Joan Laurant showed up at the door one Saturday morning early in March and asked to see Sophie. “She’s not available,” I’d told her. “She’s still in bed.”
Joan was the high school PE teacher, and according to Sophie she never really fit in with the rest of the faculty. “It isn’t because she’s a lesbian,” Sophie said. “It’s that she’s incapable of putting up with the bullshit the job requires. If they didn’t want to risk a lawsuit, she probably would have been fired.”
Now she stood in our foyer, a fit and attractive woman, brusque nearly to the point of rudeness. Before I could stop her, she’d brushed aside my concerns and charged up the stairs like a train without brakes. As if guided by radar, she’d gone directly to Lucy’s room, where Sophie lay, duvet pulled nearly over her head. Joan took one look at the lump that was my wife and said, “Come on. Let’s go. We’re going out.”
Sophie stared over the edge of the blanket, listless and wan.
“Get up, kiddo. We’re going to go fight.”
“What?”
“Fight. You know. Punch. Jab. Hit. Box. Fight.”
I’d started to intercede, to protect Sophie from this bullying, but to my astonishment, she’d risen obediently, as docile as a dairy cow, and—not changing out of the tatty sweats she’d slept in for weeks—headed out with Joan. Later she told me they’d gone to a gym where she had laced on gloves and punched a body bag until she was so exhausted her arms trembled and she could no longer lift them.
Now I shook off the memory and crossed to Sophie with the wine. “I assumed you’d want red.” She reached for it, gave me a tired smile. She had said it had been a bad day, and I saw the truth of that in her face. She still held the book and raised it toward me, a question in her eyes. I took a swallow of wine, made myself wait until she had a sip before taking a second, then asked, “Did you know he was coming?”
“Who?”
“Father Gervase?”
She placed her glass on the table. “He was here? He brought this?” Her surprise seemed genuine, but I didn’t totally trust it. I knew she continued to go to Mass each Sunday and talked with the priest.
“He left it.”
“Why?”
“The archbishop of Boston sent him. Apparently he wants to meet with me about painting portraits for the new cathedral in the city. A series of the saints.”
“Really?”
“So your priest tells me.”
“And the book is for research?” She couldn’t mask the hope in her eyes.
“No. I need to return it. In fact, if you want to drop it by the rectory, I’d appreciate it.”
Her chest rose, then fell in a silent sigh. “You’ve decided not to accept the offer? Just like that?”
“Yes.”
“It could be major,” she said. “For your career.”
I didn’t bother to respond. I’d had that kind of attention before. In the end, like so many things, it had proved empty.
“We could use the money.”
I couldn’t argue with her about that. In the past months, without her working, with me no longer arranging openings, pursuing commissions, funds had flowed steadily out. Savings that had once seemed more than comfortable had dwindled. Only the fund we had established for Lucy’s college tuition remained untouched, now designated as a reward fund for anyone with information leading to the arrest of her killer.
“If the church has money to throw around,” I said, “let them give it to the poor. Let them hand it over to the victims of pedophile priests.”
“Right,” she said. She leveled her gaze at me, and I could see that I had again disappointed and saddened her. I watched her place the book carefully on the end table next to her wine.
I sat in the other Morris chair, allowed myself another swallow. “Shall I build a fire?”
“Oh, don’t bother.”
“It’s no bother.”
“I can’t stay.”
“Can’t? Or don’t want to?”
“Will,” she said, her voice soft but steady. “Please. Let’s don’t start.”
“Right,” I said. I looked at her and again thought that it was like gazing at a stranger. It wasn’t even the haircut or the self-control. Even the contours of her body had changed. Once she’d been soft, womanly. I remembered with a p
ang that was physical how I used to hold her, stroke her curves, her stomach, and once more felt the hot dart of desire that refused to be extinguished in spite of everything. Even now I remain amazed at how persistent our most primitive desires are. Sex. Survival. Revenge. “I’m getting a pot,” she would say when she caught herself in the mirror as she climbed out of the bath or as she undressed for bed. “You’re not,” I’d respond, not in any automatic, husbandly, reassuring way but because I truly loved her body, the slight rise, the mound of her belly. I couldn’t have imagined her with plank-flat abs, couldn’t understand the appeal of that. “You have a body born to make love to,” I’d tell her back in a time that was far distant. Now she was thinner, her chiseled arms evidence of the hours she spent in the gym. She had taken up kickboxing, she had told me, and could bench-press a hundred and ten pounds. She wanted me to be proud of this, but I couldn’t. Couldn’t even fake it. I resented the way her body had been transformed. This woman I did not know. I wanted my wife back. I felt the impossible longing to have my life back. My old safe, comfortable life.
Recently—the previous week? Over the weekend?—Sophie’s photo had been in one of the Boston papers. She was a font of information. Nearly eight hundred thousand children go missing every year. Two thousand a day. Twenty thousand children murdered in past years, she’d told the reporter. Twenty thousand. The figures had shocked me. Still, I deeply resented how this had transformed Lucy into a symbol, a statistic. A month before, Sophie had been interviewed on the noon news of the local NBC affiliate. She had become a media icon. Practically beatified. The Voice of Our Murdered Children, they called her. I had watched the show, amazed at how articulate she had become, how fierce, Sophie who used to have a glass of wine to fortify herself before attending school committee meetings. She had coined a term to describe the culture that allowed the abuse and killing of children, a culture that glorified death and violence in games and movies and television. Murdertainment. She’d told reporters that speaking about this was a way something positive could rise from the loss of our daughter. When she talked about what had happened to Lucy and other children, her anger was apparent, but it hadn’t consumed her. In some way, it had made her stronger. The balance between us had shifted precariously.
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