Rachel didn’t laugh. She sipped the red syrup. Something was coming.
“Anyway, you don’t have to talk about it,” Carol said. “I probably can’t handle it yet, anyway. I want to be friends, is all. I’ll keep trying.” Carol’s hand was on the armrest of the chair, where it had come to rest when Rachel had pulled back from her.
Rachel was trying to contain everything, but it was coming. Here it came, up into her throat. And now there were tears. “Carol. I’ve spoken with your friend in Athens, Ohio,” she said into the dark room. Oddly, she immediately felt strength come into her as she said it. She watched Carol sink back. “Is this the person from the letters in the suitcase?” She wiped her eyes. “I think so. I think it is.”
Carol sat still.
“None of my business, but he sounded weak. If you’d bled to death on the porch and been buried out at the cemetery, he wouldn’t have been here. He’s a coward.”
Carol was looking down.
“Maybe that’s just the way these things go. The other person can’t really ever be there for you, but in the meantime there’s the illusion.”
Carol looked at her hands in her lap, or pretended to.
“I think we all have secrets, one or two. It’s okay.” Rachel felt strong. Her dark veneer was coming off, as was Carol’s light and friendly fakery. Now Rachel reached over and touched Carol’s hand. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s get it up here in the light of day.” She waited. Nothing. “I looked in the suitcase and got the phone number. I read the letters, I saw the picture in Tampa, Florida. He needed to know what was up with you.” She bent forward trying to get in range of Carol’s averted eyes, but she was frozen in place, and that’s how Rachel left her.
SCARS
FORTY MARTYRS
Carol never understood what happened. A year later, coming up the short, curving sidewalk to Forty Martyrs Catholic Church, still dressed in her yellow jogging suit from the morning run, Carol had one of her periodic flashbacks, this one of Wally’s second lunge at her—it had come in from low, upward toward her face and she’d turned her shoulder into the blade to protect herself. Then she thought of that letter of Nick’s in which he hauled out his most horrible ghost from the war, about the time he had to call artillery fire in on his own unit when his position was being overrun. Thirty-nine of some sixty were killed. That particular letter came to mind, when, for no reason, as sometimes happened, she suddenly recalled turning her shoulder into the knife. You do what you’ve got to do. Not to compare her shoulder wound to the deaths of thirty-nine young men, but anyway, this morning she suddenly saw the parallel.
Her morning run usually took her south, to the highway, then along Route 36 to the university, then up the campus sidewalks to the railroad, and then across to the old Eisner parking lot and down Central to home. This morning as she returned, she’d stopped at the church because Father Kelleher had called her and wanted her to drop by if she could.
The Forty Martyrs rectory was a block-shaped house in tan bricks matching the church next door. The drapes and shades were pulled. The front porch was a grotto of sorts, with a small pond, a statue of the Virgin, many hanging plants, now neglected, and what was once a fountain, now dry and cracking.
She rang the doorbell. Father Kelleher’s dog, Bliss, woofed lazily on the other side of the door, and Carol heard the chain rattling. She pictured the shy priest at an upstairs window, slanting the shade to see who was there.
But, instead, immediately after she rang the doorbell, the door lurched partly open, and she could see his eyes through the crack, right at the level of the taut chain from the lock.
“It’s me,” she said to him.
“It’s okay, girl,” he murmured, his whisper dry and raspy.
“Glad to hear it,” Carol said.
“No—I meant the dog.” He closed the door to undo the chain lock, then opened it wide. He stood there looking at her. “Oh. You knew that.” He smiled hesitantly but fondly, too. He was clearly happy she was there. He turned to lead the way, waving his heavy arm for her to come along. “C’m’ere, lass,” he said. “I want to show you something. Tell me what you think.”
She closed the door and followed him. Although Kelleher had been to her house many times, she hadn’t been in the rectory in years. She and Wally often visited when the previous priest was there. Now the place had become a cave, smelling a little too heavily of both man and dog. The dullness of the rooms seemed to spread to the furnishings themselves, pale greens, stained and dusty browns. The ceiling light in the hallway was dimmed by a collection of dried moth carcasses silhouetted above the glass cover. The ceramic floor had a gritty feel under Carol’s running shoes—she kept thinking she was tracking something in, but looked down and saw her own footprints in the dust. Kelleher was too private and embarrassed to have a housekeeper, too moody to do it himself. By now it was so far ahead of him that the job probably seemed intimidating and would require professionals.
“You got here quick,” he said, his voice so low she wasn’t sure if she was intended to hear. He cleared his throat.
He was fully dressed, all in black with the white Roman collar, but the jacket shoulders were dusted with a sprinkling of oily dandruff, and although he was fairly young, perhaps 60, he walked slumped like an old man, his large, heavy feet shuffling as though he were bone tired. His thick yellowish-gray hair was slicked back and matted. Bliss, a large, ancient Irish setter with scaling skin, lumbered behind him wherever he went, pausing sometimes to scratch or nip at her tail.
“The police are coming,” he muttered as he walked ahead of Carol through the foyer and up the short hallway beside the stairs. “Should have gotten here before you did. I don’t know.”
“The police?”
“Well, yes,” he said. “It seems I’ve been robbed.” Now his voice shook, and in the added light from the office windows Carol was able to see that he was upset. The office had been ransacked. A safe door was visible under the bookshelf, open. On the desk, the lamp was overturned and broken, and papers covered the floor. The desk drawers had actually been thrown, slammed against the wall opposite the desk, and one was in splinters at their feet right next to the door. Carol saw incongruent things in her moment of looking, a black rosary and some dice, an old Bible and a copy of Sports Illustrated, a small plastic model airplane and an aged apple core.
“I got up at the Angelus and said mass before I noticed this. I came back over and found it and I was so mad, Carol. I thought someone had done it while I was over at the church.” He wiped at his face with his jacket sleeve. “They had the place cased, seems like. Yesterday, I was in Springfield, seeing the Bishop again. They must have known.” He seemed short of breath. “Maybe they were here when I got back last night—right here in the house with me.”
He reached under his coat, toward the back, and pulled out a pistol.
“I’ve got this if they come back.” His voice was shaking. Carol thought the gun looked like something John Wilkes Booth might have used—old, oddly shaped, like a child’s cap gun, but there were actual bullets in the fat, round cylinder. She tried to think of something else. She stepped into the debris of the office and automatically moved to set the desk chair back up on its casters.
“Let’s leave it,” he said, his free hand coming up to stop her. “There may be fingerprints or something.” She left it. Bliss was panting in the hallway, her chain clinking on the ceramic tiles.
“Some stuff is gone, far as I can tell. A couple of relics from the parish centennial. Small important things, you know, that collect. Over time.” He smiled painfully.
He looked at her as if she might have an answer. She didn’t.
“Yeah. Okay, let’s go in the other room so we don’t touch anything. I’ve got to sit down. This business has had me dizzy all morning.”
He walked ahead of her as he talked, not looking back. He was carrying the gun in his right hand, holding it limply with the muzzle pointing mostly to the floor
, except when he would gesture with that hand and Carol would see the barrel flash by. She noticed that his finger was actually on the trigger.
In the living room, he half-gestured with his gun-hand toward the empty TV stand in the far corner. “They got the VCR, too, of course. I hated the thing anyway, given to me by the Knights of Columbus. The VCR’s all I lost from in here, I think.” The sitting room seemed even dingier when he clicked on the table lamp, its shade closed at the top by a haze of cobwebs. The room had two enormous windows, completely closed off by heavy, dark green drapes.
“I thought this kind of thing only happened in cities.”
“Did you really? Amazing.” She laughed. “Did they get any money?”
He looked down. “They got Sunday’s collection.” He rubbed his eyes. “Probably a couple thousand dollars. Completely uncounted. There would have been a lot of checks though.”
Father Kelleher looked at her. “The missing stuff from the safe is what worries me. A lot of it can’t be replaced. It means nothing to anybody else but to us it’s priceless. There’s a centennial relic—a lump of gold from the old church that burned. How would you even recognize what it was, sitting there in the safe? I wonder if it was maybe somebody we know.”
He sat down heavily in a big beige easy chair next to the lamp. “Who’d do this?” he said. He set the gun on the table and ran his big hands through his hair. “Who would do this to me?”
He was looking down, talking so quietly that he seemed to be talking to himself.
“Father,” Carol said, “I don’t think whoever did it will be back this morning. If you’d like to put the gun away somewhere.”
Kelleher looked at it, and then at Carol, and then back. He cleared his throat. “I s’pose,” he said. “I suppose that makes sense.” He was looking at it. “I don’t know. A man’s alone all the time—I always think they’ll find me a week later, you know. Decomposing in my chair in the kitchen.” He tossed “decomposing” out like it was silly to think it, but there was distant thunder in his voice, the undertone of a man terrified by the idea. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I mean. Anyway, I get you. I’ll just—” He struggled up out of the chair, pushing with his arms as though he were ninety and the chair wouldn’t let him up. “I’ll put it away. I see that it bothers you. I’ll put it upstairs.” He started in that direction, then stopped and turned around and looked at her. His arms were out, the gun in one hand. “I was so mad. You know what I mean? This morning?”
“You’re taking it personally, Father. It’s a burglary. Sooner or later it happens to everybody.”
“Well, I guess.” He looked at her a moment. “Think it was a parishioner?”
“It could have been anybody. Anyway, give thanks. Somebody up there was looking after you. There was no violence. You’re just fine this morning.”
“Well,” he said. “You’re my parish expert on that—you’re probably right.”
She didn’t know why that whole thing made her an expert on violence, but people would, from time to time, make a reference like that, and she’d learned to expect it. She had a job at the college now, a secretary position in the Education Dean’s office, and all Wally’s faculty friends had dropped in one by one to puzzle on these events and communicate their grief or surprise. It had been almost twelve months, and Carol was still healing in many ways. For instance, the low throbbing aches in her shoulder as she talked with Father Kelleher. Her shoulder always acted up after a morning run.
“Okay, I’ll put it away,” he said.
She sat down in the dim light of the sitting room watching Kelleher head off toward the stairs. Gun in hand, hanging from his index finger, pointing toward the floor. He stopped to peek out the curtain for the police.
Kelleher had been in the town a long time, twenty years. He was a part of the community, even as Protestant as it was. He visited her every day during her recovery, both at the hospital and when she came home. He would walk over in the late afternoon, sometimes with the dog—he would sit in the shade on the porch with her, talking to her and the kids. They would pray together, and he’d tell the kids their guardian angels were protecting them and wouldn’t let anything bad happen again. Kelleher was a good and generous man, working hard to be a good priest.
“How did they get in?” Carol called after him.
“Broke in,” she heard him mumble, lumbering up the stairs to put the gun away. Bliss was following him, also lumbering. He was petting her and Carol could hear the dog responding, claws clicking and sliding on the hardwood floor somewhere above, then pausing to scratch, the chain clinking in that rapid-fire way. Otherwise the house was quiet—the dim religious paintings muted in the clutter, framed prints of Christ appearing, brave men kneeling astonished and humbled before Him, and the Virgin ascending. She imagined Bliss and Father Kelleher in the evenings, whiling away their time.
In the library off the front room there was a phone, and while Kelleher was upstairs, Carol presumed to use it. Her four-year-old answered.
“Hi, Becky, get Stephen will you?”
“Who is this please?”
“This is your––”
“We have to go to the baseball game and after that to Show-Biz Pizza so you better go home now because I have to put on my beautiful coat.”
“Becky. This is Mom.”
“Hi, Mama—guess what.”
“Becky, you aren’t to answer the phone when I’m not home. Get Stephen, please.”
“Guess what, Stephen’s fighting with me.”
“Do you remember, I told you to behave?”
“Mah-am, I am being haved. Stephen––”
“It doesn’t sound like it.”
“Guess what. Stephen ate all the Raisin Bran. He didn’t share and he didn’t say I’m sorry.”
“Well, are you––”
“He hit me with a toothbrush.”
“Well, you get him to the phone.”
She could hear Stephen grab the receiver from his sister, a loud “ouch” in the background. “Mom—I didn’t eat all the Raisin Bran—there was only a bowl left from yesterday.”
“Did you eat it all? Will you turn down the TV—I can’t hear a word.”
He turned it down. “Yeah, I ate it all, but there wasn’t much. Not a great deal anyway.”
“I see. Well, I called to ask if everything was okay, and it appears you have things well under control.”
“Right. No prob.”
“I was being ironic.”
He spelled “ironic” for her.
“Good. Fix your sister some breakfast, can you?”
“There’s nothing left.”
“Fix her a great deal of toast.”
“Mom,” he said in his best complaining voice. “When are you coming home? Don’t forget my game.”
“I’m over at the church—I’m helping Father Kelleher. Now Stevie, I’m having him over for lunch so I’d appreciate it if at least the downstairs were picked up. Dig? The game’s not till four, dear. Can I count on you?”
“Aaaugh. Becky made these messes. I’ve been watching TV.”
“I’ll be home in half an hour, and Father will be with me. Please. The vacuum’s in the––”
“Broom closet. Can Mark come in the house?”
“Not until I get home. Straighten up the downstairs, Stevie—this is a small step for mankind, and call me here if there’s a problem. Father’s number’s––”
“On the fridge. Mark’s already in the house. Should I throw him out?”
“Half an hour. Okay?”
“Okay,” Stephen said, with mountains of hesitation.
“Great. I love ya. Bye.” Carol hung up. She stared at the wall a moment, thinking about him. Fifth grade, and last week a girl had called to speak to him.
Carol had been watching him closely. Her bad day with Wally had also been an unspeakably awful day for Stephen. He sat on the living room couch watching TV that morning, huddled in a blanket with a bowl
of cereal on his lap. His stepfather was stirring around, brooding as usual. First he was out in the garage, then in the study, and finally in the kitchen. Stephen told her he remembered half-noticing Wally coming out of the kitchen carrying a rolled up newspaper.
“I have to give your mother the book section,” he may have said to Stephen as he passed through the living room, heading upstairs.
He went into the master bedroom and waited for Carol, who soon came into the room from the shower dressed only in a towel. He said, “I brought you the book section,” and pulled out the knife. The first lunge caught her in the chest, slightly to the right and pretty high—she heard it go through bones before she felt pain at all. Blood went everywhere. Luckily, in order to stab her again, he had to pull the knife back out, and the body had a way of holding on somehow.
“Goddamn it, Wally, I’m bleeding!” she shrieked at him.
Carol remembered the spit flying and the blood and the surprise of hearing these completely inane words come out of her mouth. She thought they were her last words, and already she heard them with a kind of embarrassed objectivity, body and soul in the first stages of separation, Carol already sinking out of existence. She tried to get to the door. She remembered knowing she was hurt badly. But what she remembered clearest was the fierce anger that came up out of her. Wally’s second lunge was at her face, which was stopped by her shoulder when she turned away. She shoved him back, and he fell to his knees at the edge of the bed. They were two large animals, a vicious fight to the death. Blood was everywhere. Wally looked confused, like she was supposed to be dead already. The knife was on the floor, in the folds of the skidded blue throw rug. He was down on his knees getting it, crying. She remembers looking down on him, his face up and frightened. She went out the bedroom door and down the stairs.
“Stephen!” she was shouting, screaming, the sound of her voice leaving her like an echo. “Get Becky out of here! Run next door, quick!”
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