Any Bitter Thing

by Monica Wood

  “Don’t you have a rattle or something?” said the mother, who was sitting near the wall, a kitten-motif diaper bag laid across her lap. “I’ve got her shaky-bunny in my bag.”

  “Are you kidding?” Drew said, clicking away, “this kid’s a natural.”

  Which made the mother smile despite herself, but I could see that Drew was not going to sell a single print of an art baby in black draping to a woman who had picked out a diaper bag adorned with pink cats.

  “I could sing,” said the mother. “She’d laugh her head off.”.

  “‘We are met on a great battlefield of that war,’” Drew intoned. “‘We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final’—Hey, Lizzy.” Something in the uptick of his voice, the surprise or pleasure of seeing me, made the baby smile. Me, too.

  “Look! Look!” the mother said, pointing wildly. “Oh, shoot. You missed it.”

  Drew put down his camera and picked up the baby, who gazed at him moony-eyed, as if he were Abraham Lincoln in the flesh. “There you go,” he said, handing her back. “I’ll call when the proofs are ready.”

  The mother stood up, clutching the baby, uncertain. “But you didn’t get any of her smiling. I kind of wanted to see her smiling.” She frowned at her baby, who had so easily switched allegiance.

  “Trust me,” Drew said. “I know what I’m doing. You’ll be stunned.”

  She would be. Mariette had a portrait of Paulie at six months, his face emerging from a severe darkness that made him look like a baby vampire staring down the dawn. It was warped and beautiful, and except for Charlie we all agreed it captured Paulie’s bloodthirsty insistence on being adored.

  As the mother slumped out the door, another mother was pulling into the driveway in a minivan thrumming with children.

  “What are you doing home?” Drew asked, kissing me on the cheek.

  “I wanted to see you.”

  He checked his watch. “I’m booked till five. I squeezed in my postponements from Friday.”

  “I figured. It’s okay. I think I’ll just take a nap.”

  The side door tumbled open, expelling a trio of baying children and their mother, who was reciting a long list of apologies in advance.

  “Mrs. Case?” Drew asked.

  “Yes,” she sighed, as if she really wanted to say no but knew there was no point in lying.

  “Who’ve we got here?” he asked, as I sidled out of the office and closed the door, sitting just outside in a square of sunlight that melted in through the kitchen windows. After a moment, Mr. Peachy padded in, glad to see me. He stamped all over my lap, then collapsed in a heap.

  “‘Fourscore and seven years ago,’” came Drew’s voice from the other side. I had often imagined him at work but had never witnessed him with a client. I realized then how truly misplaced he was, and how heroically he’d figured out how to endure.

  I sat through two more exchanges of vehicles in our driveway, unable to leave the sound of my husband’s voice and the things I was learning, marveling at the myriad ways he managed to find a way around the obstacle of his own unwillingness. Listening to his dramatic monologues and the occasional suggestions from befuddled mothers, I recognized that he was turning the whole enterprise into a private joke. And another thing: he had a great memory. As babies came and went, he recited most of the Bill of Rights, a three-stanza poem in an Irish accent, and the introduction from the owner’s manual that had come with our microwave oven. His miniature clients fell silent under this twisted spell.

  He was good with children.

  At five-fifteen the last mother—they were all mothers, not a single father—buckled up her brood and drove off. Drew came out, surprised to find me still sitting there. Even the cat had gotten bored and sought other rooms.

  I looked up. “We’re going to have to get you moved back to Boston, Drew Mitchell”

  “It’s not so bad. No one threw up on me today.”

  “You didn’t hear me. We’re going to have to get you moved back to Boston.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Rick’s been trying to cram a leave of absence down my throat ever since I came back. But it struck me today that I could just take it,” I said. “I could just—quit.” I showed him the scrap of paper bearing Father Mike’s address.

  He emitted a low whistle. “Is it really him?”

  “I had Wally Tibbetts on the case.”

  “The Nobel-wannabe kid?”

  I nodded.

  Drew examined the paper. “He’s married?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Did you call?”

  “No. Does it take more guts to call him, or to let him be?”

  He didn’t say anything, just crouched down next to me and took my hand.

  “There’s nothing to hold me here now,” I said.

  “There’s Mariette,” he reminded me. “Charlie. Paulie. Mrs. Blanchard. All your students.”

  “I meant nothing invisible.”

  He sat down then, the two of us now sharing a square of light.

  “Do the Yeats poem again,” I said. “You know that part I mean?”

  He pressed my hand to his knee, but we didn’t look at each other, we looked straight ahead, into a kitchen overstuffed with our conjoined possessions. “‘But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you . . .’” he recited, turning my hand palm up, “‘. . . and loved the sorrows of your changing face.’”

  I swooned against his shoulder; I’d been raised for romance. Father Mike used to quote Yeats, too, teasing me to sleep: Brown penny, brown penny, brown penny! I am looped in the loops of her hair. . .

  “What are we going to do, Lizzy?” He meant packing up, picking up, moving away, being married for many decades. Maybe he even meant our future children. I said, “Let’s just stay here a minute. I like this spot.”

  He put his arm around me and there we stayed, on the white tiles of linoleum, above us a counter that housed forty frayed potholders and a cappuccino machine still in the box.

  Mariette’s car pulled up a while later. “Am I interrupting something?” she asked, finding us on the floor.

  I’m leaving you, I thought, staring up at her. Forgive me.

  “Maman wants to see us,” she said.

  Drew started to get up.

  She said, “Just me and Lizzy.”

  “What’s going on?” Drew asked.

  “He was her best friend.” She turned to me. “She’s having a little trouble believing this.”

  I showed Mariette the square of lime-green paper.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, turning it over. Then she was coaxing me up, pulling on my hand, her own hands so strong and capable, like her mother’s. “Come show her, Lizzy.”

  Because Mariette was my best friend, my oldest and in most ways my only friend, and because I was leaving her and she did not yet know this, I let her pull me up, embrace me briefly, and lead me back.

  VESPERS

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  From The Liturgy of the Hours:

  He is not a God of the dead, but a God of the living:

  for to Him all things are alive.

  Back at the beginning, in that first harrowing year of nonstop driving, he paused in Minnesota for a single day, arriving at dawn, penetrating the small city of Bryce Crossing in a car he bought from a lot in Boise. The car made too much noise as he passed the prudish cloister of Sacred Heart School for Girls. He parked across the road from the stone wall on which a plaque extolled the Lord’s munificence and the school’s ideals. He saw not a soul all day. Perhaps school was out of session—a spring vacation, or a national holiday; he had lost his notions of time. By nightfall, a city cop stopped to ask what he was doing.

  Resting, he said. I’m just resting.

  In front of a girls’ school? Move along, friend, before I start asking questions you don’t wanna answer.

  Fueled by humiliation, he fled the city, the state, driving bleary-eyed, stopping one night here, one night t
here, landing in a place called Holmes, Illinois, where he worked for three months breaking down boxes in a food-canning plant and living in a car with a leaky fuel tank. From there he lurched from city to city, loading fish into refrigerator trucks, making computer chips in a cold, echoey room, running the cash register at a hardware store, cutting lengths of cotton twill at a fabric shop, living alone in dark apartments, refusing himself the most basic pleasures: music, books, a kitchen table, a cat. His Breviary was his sole comfort, its leather casings decomposing over the piled-up years. He read surreptitiously during a shift at a Burger King or in a clamorous tenth-grade classroom where he substituted for the history teacher. He had been pronounced dead, after all—a pronouncement he deserved—and this twilight life settled upon him as an imitation of death. The one light, weak indeed, came in through his daily offices. During the Invitatory he asked, Let her forget me. Or: Let her thrive. Which, he understood, was the same request.

  Her birthdays arrived as an annual aching in his body—something like the smell of snow coming usually triggered it—until it came to him that his child was about to turn ten, thirteen, seventeen, twenty. He posted cards to Vivienne from each new address, afraid to disappear entirely from the world, calling her only on his most insupportable days, though she asked him not to. In time, her voice lost the power to destroy him. In his layman’s life he learned the layman’s lesson: passion fades.

  He discovered, also, that the human spirit is not built for endless despair. He took up books again, found movie houses or art galleries to sustain him through the thing that appeared more and more to be his actual life. He settled in East Cleveland, in a derelict apartment near the Good Deeds shelter where he worked a seventy-five-hour week. At the corner diner they welcomed him as a certain type of regular—friendly enough, but close-lipped.

  He was sitting near the door in his usual booth, cherry-red vinyl left over from the forties. It was year twelve of his exile. Idly he watched a harried woman in a boiled-wool jacket fidgeting in the takeout line—her name would turn out to be Frannie—but he was thinking of Lizzy, whose twenty-first birthday had just passed. “Emancipation” was the legal term. There was no authority Celie could now enlist who would have the least interest in a twenty-one-year-old woman. So. He was thinking about resurrection.

  Oh, ho, a resurrection, is it? We ‘re Jesus Christ himself now, are we?

  This was Jack Derocher, his former confessor, the only person he ever talked to frankly, if only in his head. People looked at him sometimes; he wondered if his lips moved.

  Let me rephrase.

  Please do.

  Reconnection. I’ve been thinking about reconnection.

  Much better. You sound human, at least.

  How do I reconnect a cord so irrevocably severed?

  What’s with the passive voice?

  Fine. How do I reconnect a cord that I—I myself, Jack—so irrevocably severed?

  Easy. You go back.

  For a moment he suspended his disbelief and it seemed easy: go back.

  Then, if she doesn’t die of shock, you explain that you accepted twelve years of exile to save her from those fanged beasts at DHS.

  Why so snide? It’s the truth.

  As far as it goes. You’ve had twelve years to simplify your story.

  You’re hard on me, Jack.

  Damn straight. You thought you could have it all, Mike. Did having a child spoil you for making choices?

  What are you talking about?

  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. You walked straight into the big trap of the Ninth Commandment. And I’ve gotta tell you, it was hard to watch, the pillar of strength throwing himself at temptation just to prove he could resist. You think I couldn’t hear between the lines, Mike, all those casual conversations, my neighbor this, my neighbor that?

  I did resist. What would you know about it? I passed the test, Jack. Give me credit for something.

  Sure. You passed the test of temptation, over and over, to be perfectly fair. I’m glad to give you that. But in the meantime you let a jackass like Ray Blanchard get away with his macho bullshit just so you could look like a hero by contrast. Father Wonderful. Friend and confessor. Only you didn’t court confession from her, did you, Mike? You courted adoration. And boy oh boy, did you ever do the job. When she needed a hero she knew just where to come running.

  She needed a priest, Jack. When she came running, she needed a priest.

  Mike. She needed a guy who could keep a secret.

  His life had become a badly sutured wound that occasionally seeped, and today was a seeping day that made him want impossible things.

  The kid’s twenty-one, Mike. She did okay without you. Leave it.

  Jack Derocher was more compassionate in real life. It hurt to hear him talk this way. But how could he, or anyone, know what it is to be accused? How could he, or anyone, understand what happens afterward? How you look back with spoiled eyes, second-guessing. Weighing everything. Reconsidering. Once somebody believes your intentions to be impure, it changes how you see yourself, the accusation flies around and then lands like a crow on your shoulder. You can’t shake it off. You wonder what made your love so desperate and gushing. What impelled you to admire her child’s body in the bath, the seal-slick purity of it, the strength it seemed to be acquiring, its miraculous shape-shifting? You wonder why you loved her sweaty socks, her smell as you tucked her in, her breath after she ate a plum. How can you help but wonder? You could not pass her in a room without touching your hand to her head, your thumb to her chin. What did all that mean? Tainted, all ofit, your dearest memories stained for good. How can you be the same kind of father after that?

  Leave resurrection to Jesus, Mike, and salvage what you can. Those cracked souls at the shelter could use your help. It’s not too late to do some good in this world.

  He looked up, bereft, to find the woman in boiled wool pawing through a tote bag, hands quaking. She looked his age, though he would find out later that she was younger by eight years, exhausted from tending her husband’s cancer. That she had a little boy named David. That she had been driving around the city for an hour, a temporary respite far from her neighborhood in Conlin. That she passed the diner with its incongruous gingham curtains and filagreed OPEN sign and suddenly craved a glazed doughnut. That her reserves ran out entirely while waiting in the takeout line; that the room tilted as she wheeled toward him, the cherry-red seat making a soft groan as she landed, sitting up, facing him. That his face looked so lifeless she thought he was the Angel of Death come to tell her that Alfred had expired the second she left the house, her punishment for wanting a doughnut.

  She stared at him rudely, as if he were the one who had taken the wrong seat.

  —Excuse me but I can’t stand up, she said. All I wanted was an hour of peace.

  He set down his cup, taking in the sweet, blanched apple of her face.

  —I’m a priest, he told her. The words emerged strangled, for the priesthood felt like another child he abandoned.

  He corrected himself:

  —I used to be a priest.

  —I used to be a Catholic, she said. And began to weep. The timbre of her voice reminded him of Vivienne, but the way she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand looked more like Lizzy. He surrendered his handkerchief, aware of a faint dislodging, a frail internal forward motion that he only dimly recognized as hope.

  This moment returns to him as he pulls into Conlin from his all-night journey. Oriole Street swings into sight, identical trash cans silhouetted at the ends of identical driveways. Frannie—the kind, solid soul who married him—will be waiting, wanting to know how his niece fared after her accident, this niece she has never heard of, this niece whose name has not once crossed his lips. And he will have to go inside his clean, warm, predictable house to tell his wife the truth of where he has been.

  After anointing her, after fleeting through the corridors and down the ziggurat of hospital stairways, he stands in
the middle-of-the-night quiet, recovering his breath. He is still holding the angel, her gown aglitter in the parking-lot lights. Benumbed, he staggers to the car, praying for her. All those bandages! Those poor, spindly, encased limbs. That awful contraption, his little lamb on a spit.

  He left his pills in the motel. What day is this? Has he been gone one day, or two? He puts the car into gear, intending to drive south as fast as he can without getting stopped.

  North he goes. As he knew he would.

  Approaching the valley, he recognizes the ridge along Route 9, a service station he always favored, a nursing home he once visited regularly. A field that used to be filled with cows is now filled with driveways. Breathing in concert with the up-and-down road, he senses river, melting field, thawing ground. He looks for the shoe shop on the banks, the lights from third shift, and then remembers it has turned itself into a school.

  God feels like a part of him that has been gutted and left to rot.

  The town, as he rounds the long bend of the river, looks tucked into the glowering dark, innocent as a postcard. The diner abides, and Hinton Variety. Who would know him now, his hair so thin and gray, his face so thin and gray, thick, thumbprinted eyeglasses that express the mire of middle age?

  Ears ringing with anxiety, he crosses the bridge into Stanton and creeps toward her address. Her silhouette, unmistakable, faces out from a lighted window, as if she has been waiting, exactly there, since the phone call. He gets out, looks up, strains to see through the tunnel of dark. She has become old, too: a softening at the shoulders, a rumpling in her once-starched frame; but her face still burns in that old way, he knows it even in this blackness. He can tell from here. They lock eyes—in the dark, even at a distance, they sense each other, two stranded souls in God’s stranded universe. Her head swivels slightly, an exhausted no. He retakes the wheel and eases away.