by Monica Wood
Within a matter of hours, Charlie broke. Charlie, who granted bonuses to his employees with every uptick in sales, who changed the oil for the fries twice as often as required, who confessed full sales tax on his IRS forms. Charlie Pelletier, spectacularly ill-equipped to live with “knowledge,” called the police.
Charlie and Mariette hired a trial lawyer from Portland, a silk-suit type with notorious courtroom smarts, but in the airless weeks that followed, the case would become a low-key affair, legally speaking. No public trial, just a manslaughter charge and a dragged-out cycle of meetings convened for the purpose of detangling the State of Maine criminal code. I took the sick leave I had so long resisted, and Mariette, too, stayed out of school, emerging from her house only when necessary, the way people do during ice storms. We spoke on the phone, our conversations afflicted by unbearable pauses. Because her mother had been excised from the complicated infrastructure of our friendship, our footing shifted fatally. Our past had been altered without warning and no longer held. We could no longer speak easily about that which most defined us.
In the local news, the case unfolded more theatrically, fascinating if you didn’t know the players and soul-crushing if you did. A son-in-law’s sensational report. A body exhumed near a Catholic church, a backhoe piercing the half-frozen ground. Dry-eyed confession from the widow—nicest woman, you’d never guess. A few rotted threads of clothing in the grave. A body decomposed beyond its ability to speak. A host of legal ambiguities. In short, a protracted mess that produced a welter of “facts.”
Good guy. Drinker. Fisherman. Layabout. Wife-beater. Churchgoer.
All the usual flapping jaws. How did she manage it? A woman that size? A hole that deep? A truck that heavy? But then, a witness. The statute of limitations expired long ago on accessory, obstruction. He’s coming back anyway.
Confessor. Friend. Accomplice. Lover. A dead man bent on living again.
Wait, wait, isn’t that the same guy, the priest who—?
The facts don’t square.
Nothing rings entirely true. Because nothing is.
The night after Charlie made the call that would set into motion the mud-stuck wheels of justice, he returned to our house to tell Drew and me what he had done. “Mariette can’t stop crying,” he said wearily. “In a couple of days it’ll hit the papers.” He rested his blunt brown eyes on me. “I’m sorry about all this, Lizzy.”
It took me a second to realize he was referring to my own impending discomfort in town, my old story about to rise from the mire. He propped his meaty hands on our table and pushed himself to standing. All at once he seemed to require extra shoring for the simplest movements, his bulk no longer able to take itself for granted.
“So. That’s it,” he said. “Come on, Paulie-boy.”
Paulie, who was in the living room making spit-drawings on the window, caught sight of his coat dangling from his father’s hand and hotfooted up the stairs to the nether reaches of the house. Charlie sighed. “I haven’t got the juice to go after him.”
“Leave him here,” Drew said. “We’ll take him home when he winds down.”
Too worn out to entertain other options, Charlie consented. Drew went after Paulie to keep him from our dresser drawers, and I walked Charlie to the door. “She still loves me, right?” he asked. The door made a wintry cracking as he opened it.
“She’d be a fool not to, Charlie.”
He took this in without comment. After a moment, he said, “I’ll have to sell the business. I don’t see how we can stay here now.”
For Charlie, moving would mean leaving his parents and brothers, his customers and employees, the streets and river and hills he had been born into. He’d planned to run for selectman when he reached thirty-five and turn himself into the guardian of the law, custodian of the town hall, friend to the people. Now he was going to be part of a story these same people told at parties.
The yard sheened with fresh snowfall, the kind that stayed. “It’s hard to imagine this place could even exist without all of us here,” I said.
But we would find, soon enough, that it could. The shape of the hills and the course of the river would not vary. We could scatter like fall leaves—Drew and I to Boston; Mariette and Charlie to northern Maine, where they would make room for Mrs. Blanchard after her three months served—and our town would abide unchanged. But at this moment, in the silence of a lasting snow, I preferred to believe things otherwise.
Charlie made a move toward the driveway. I called after him, “Kiss your wife for me.”
“Lizzy,” he said, turning around, “they’ll be taking statements right away. Mariette wanted you to know.”
I hugged myself against the encroaching cold. “Why would they want to talk to me?”
“Not you. Your uncle. He’ll be contacted before week’s end.” We locked eyes a moment, but there wasn’t a thing to say. Charlie lurched back toward me, gave me a squeeze, then hiked up his collar and went home.
The square of lime-green paper lay on my kitchen windowsill, after two days already soft from overhandling, lifting a little whenever we opened or closed the nearby door. I had been waiting, returning to that fluttering scrap as if it were a page in a prayer book, and it struck me now that my waiting felt the way religion once had—the promise of a perfect reunion that lay perpetually in the future. Even as a child saying my nightly prayers, I dreaded Heaven, afraid my own parents might not recognize me after so long.
After supper Drew shuttled Paulie back home. The paper rustled as the door swung shut. Father Mike’s name, joined with a woman’s, looked like a piece of code. An odd humming began in the back of my throat, and I caught myself at something I hadn’t done in twenty-one years. A single line from the Prayer to St. Bartholomew came winging back, unaltered: “Keep us ever guileless, and innocent as doves.”
It rang twice. A child answered.
MATINS
THIRTY
I saw a one-hundred-fifteen-year-old woman on television once, one of those balding, toothless Russians who surface every so often to recommend yogurt or vodka as the secret to long life. Instead, she reminisced about her baby brother, who fell through the ice and drowned when she was eight years old and he was five. He had the prettiest hair, she said to the translator, it was the color of yellow and smelled like the hay in the barn. This creaky, spotted woman with a face so old it had all but melted off her skull remembered a smell from one hundred and seven years past. I thought, I know what you mean. One hundred and seven years is nothing.
He arrived in the afternoon, under a bleached winter sunlight. His wife came with him, and her son, a serious child named David who stared at me in undisguised wonder the whole time he spent in my house. I served cranberry muffins that I made myself, some milk for the child, and coffee that I’d made with crushed eggshells, though I did not tell. Also, I pretended not to remember that he took his coffee black. I did not wish to wound him with echoes of intimacy.
On the phone he had said, Can you forgive me?
And I said, I’m afraid not.
Then I opened my door and saw what a penance such as his could do to the mortal flesh. Most of the color had bled from his eyes and his once-ruddy cheeks. His copper-threaded hair had gone a lifeless gray. He was gaunt, and shorter than I remembered. His glasses tilted weakly. His sole remaining beauty was an essential kindness that still showed in the particular way the bones met in his face. Otherwise, he seemed crumbled before his time, intentionally so, as if fixed on decomposing along with the man he had buried.
He was hard to look at if you’d had something else in mind all this time. I didn’t know what to call him.
He beheld me with a sorrowful calm that made me calm in turn. I was aware of my own changed, adult face, which he kissed just above the scar. His parched lips burned me.
“Lizzy,” he said, his voice cracking.
He put out his hands and I took them, forgiving him already. His hands felt dry and ridged, not at all how I rem
embered them, except for the tattered nails. Once, I had known his step before it landed. I had drifted into sleep on the tide of his voice. I had not wholly understood where he left off and I began.
“This is my husband,” I said, as Drew put out his hand. These moments seemed glimpsed and tottering; I was trying to recall them even as I lived them.
They shook hands: the man who left, and the man who stayed.
His wife, Frannie—middle-aged, short-haired, puppy-faced—said, “Hello, hello.” I liked her button earrings, her homely purse. Everyone stepped inside.
“What are we?” the boy asked, as we milled in the entryway. He was twelve but looked younger. Pale and dartlike in his narrow blue jacket.
“What do you mean?” I said. Father Mike put a hand on his stepson’s shoulder, a gesture that had often marshaled my own courage, as it did now for the boy’s.
The boy said, “Are we relatives?”
“Sure,” I told him, looking into his elfin face. “I guess we’d be cousins.”
This seemed to satisfy him. He believed me. Then he glanced up at his new father, just to make sure.
Frannie seemed glad to be in my house, to meet my husband and see my things. She, too, had been living with a ghost; perhaps my presence gave him form. I served the muffins and poured the coffee. Daylight carpeted through the windows as if in search of us.
We talked about the recent snow. The drive from Ohio. The changes in town. When Mr. Peachy sidled into the room and hopped onto Father Mike’s empty lap, my uncle chuckled in a way that startled me.
I thought, That sounds just like my uncle. I began to see him then, his latter-day self bleeding through the veneer of his present-day self, like a painting beneath a painting.
“He loves cats,” I said to Frannie.
“Oh, yes, I know,” she said. “I’m allergic, unfortunately.” She put up her hand. “It’s okay, don’t move him. For short periods, it’s fine. I can’t live with cats, that’s all.”
“Dogs either,” the boy said morosely.
With forced brightness, Frannie told him, “Life’s full of sacrifices.”
Drew rescued the ensuing silence by offering to show the boy his studio. Frannie got up, too. She watched us for just a moment—with an alertness that made me feel benevolently memorized—before leaving us there alone.
“He seems like a sweet boy,” I said to Father Mike. His eyes seemed to lurch behind his glasses in the way I felt my own eyes doing. Trying to see, then see harder.
“He is. He’s a sweet boy.”
“What happened to his father?”
“Cancer.” He reminded me of a held-back dam.
“I guess it must have been hard on him.”
“It was. Frannie, too. They lost a good man.”
What followed felt like the opposite of silence.
“Did you ever think of me?” I asked.
His face was fully emerging now; this was surely the man, I could see it, who used to be my young and dashing uncle. I half expected to hear his younger voice, those round and doting tones, but all he managed was a graveled “yes” that sounded like the groan of a long-tethered dog.
He used to say I beg your pardon after a sneeze. He used to hide presents inside other presents, a doll inside a new pillowcase, a bike horn inside a new lunch box. There remained always more magic in the magic trick of our existence. Everything I shook rattled with possibility.
“Have you seen her yet?” I asked after some moments.
He regarded me in that seeing-harder way. “I saw the district attorney’s people. It looks as if they’ll go easy, especially after all this time.” He paused. “Ray had a history. You children didn’t know.”
“I remember a bag of peas.” I didn’t elaborate, preferring to let Ray Blanchard rest in peace.
Other memories arrived instead. The brushed fedora Father Mike sacrificed to a snowman that took seven weeks to melt. How he kept his eyes open when saying yes, closed when saying no. A church picnic, not my first but the first I remember well, the croquet game set up, the races and whistles, the tables dragged up from the parish hall and set with flapping paper tablecloths. The grand prize was a sugary, hill-shaped blueberry pie. We formed our team of two and won everything—the three-legged race, the horseshoe tournament, the balloon toss. They let him win because he was Father. I knew this and he didn’t. He thought we won because I was irresistible to the judges—parish ladies all, mothers with soft hands. After that fragile day of favor we lugged back to the house, spent and happy, and gorged ourselves on our prize.
“Her sister made a statement, too,” he said. “You remember Pauline?”
“of course I remember Pauline,” I said. “I remember everything.”
And this—this very moment—would compose part of that everything. His pressed blue shirt, the pleated skin at the base of his neck, the thin and glinting rims of his glasses, all of this was mine.
“I have a thousand memories,” I said.
He whispered, “Good ones, Lizzy, I hope.” His hands opened, a priestly gesture of praise, or offering, or submission. His palms were the color of unlighted candles.
“Father,” I said. “How could it be otherwise?”
As he wiped his eyes I caught sight of his ring, the flash of cat that my mother had found so enchanting. It came over me then—almost before I fully registered that he was sitting in a stuffed chair, drinking coffee that had been ground with eggshells, petting a cat that drowsed on his lap, a living tableau from the frozen past—that I was happy to see him. Desperately, bloom-ingly happy.
He rested his drained eyes upon me. “Do you remember the caseworker who came to the house, Lizzy?”
I nodded. “It was quite a while before I put it together.”
His face rushed with color. “I wanted,” he said, “at the very least, to protect your innocence.”
We fell silent at the word “innocence.” For my part, I conjured a painted kitchen chair with a white sticker reading la chaise.
“Mrs. Blanchard told me I was your penance,” I said. “Is that true?”
He set the cat down as if it were a piece of crockery he was being careful not to break, then dropped his face into his hands and wept. My first memory reeled in—my only uncle, asking my permission to cry. I slid off the chair and sheltered him into my arms. He was shockingly slight, his spine a beaded line, though possibly the sensation of smallness was only that I had grown while he had not. How could he be this small? I rested my cheek on the eroding rack of his shoulder and found some comfort there.
“I’m so happy to see you,” I whispered. “You can’t imagine.”
He clutched me with the fervency of the dying, and I felt like the single thing tethering him to Earth. From the reach of childhood there washed through me an old surprise, an intimate, potent, and all but forgotten sensation: power.
He prayed then, in his old way —our old way—asking for the simple mercy of God. I believe we received it. The room had lost its bright afternoon light, and my worldly goods—my chairs and lamps and curtain rods and drapes—had taken on the colorlessness of early dusk and an aspect of steadfast waiting that I associated with convalescence. I helped him up, or he helped me.
He asked me again to forgive him, and this time I said yes.
When Drew and Frannie and her son joined us again they were chatting—easily, it seemed to me—the boy atwitter with discovery after seeing Drew’s darkroom, all those chemicals and attendant paraphernalia. He had a voice like a cricket, though I guessed in a year’s time he would begin to sound more like a man. Father Mike and I had seated ourselves again, facing each other in a soft silence, preparing ourselves, I understand now, for a journey we have yet to complete, though it looks to me as though we will. The five of us reassembled, snapping lamps on, mustering our most romantic hopes for connection, in the way we would continue to, like all willing but scattered families.
“She looks like her mother,” Father Mike said to Fran
nie.
Everyone turned to me. I think I smiled, as my mother would have. The moment seemed to call for a toast, so I took my husband’s hand, lifted my cup, and recited the only one I knew.
“All joy, all love, all good wishes to you,” I said.
And my uncle said, “In God’s good name.”
After that, I asked for a story about my parents.
We begin there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted, first and always, to Gail Hochman, not only for her expertise as an agent but for her sharp editorial eye; and to the incomparable Jay Schaefer, my editor for six years now, which in the book business is a very long time. I appreciate my Chronicle Books family, especially Steve Mockus; and my paperback champions at Ballantine, especially Allison Dickens. For enhancing my understanding of the priesthood, thanks to Eddie Hurley. For guidance on French Canadian language and culture, gros bisous to Theresa Vaillancourt and Denise Vaillancourt. For help with certain plot points, thanks to Geoff Rushlau and Don Marsh. Much appreciation, also, to my readers: Dan Abbott, Anne Wood, Monty Leitch, Paul Doiron, and Jessica Roy; and my listener, Mary Jane Johnson.