“Why don’t you take a seat?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“Easy, Aidan, easy. Calm down. Just take a seat.”
“No,” I said again, louder.
“We are going to talk about this. I didn’t know you were here.”
“I thought you expected me. You told me to come.”
Father Greg rubbed his face. “Oh, Aidan.”
“Yesterday. You said, ‘Tomorrow.’ I came.”
“You wouldn’t leave.”
“I don’t understand anymore!”
“Aidan, calm down.”
“I thought it was different. I thought I was different.”
“You are. You are. Let me explain, Aidan.”
I stepped toward the door, but Father Greg pushed me back. I fell onto the couch. “Enough!” Father Greg shouted. He leaned against his desk and rubbed his face. “Just stay seated while we think about all this.”
I was quiet while I tried to catch my breath. Father Greg stared at his feet and nodded to himself. “You don’t want to go home. That’s not what you want, right? You know that.”
I said nothing.
Eventually, he looked up at me. “You are going to be okay.”
“You always say that.”
“Because it’s true, Aidan. It is.”
“No,” I said. “You lied.”
“No. That’s not right. Let me explain this all to you.”
“You lied.”
“No. I didn’t,” Father Greg said. His voice sounded younger—pleading. “I need you to understand me.” He approached me, put his hand on my shoulder, and leaned in closely. He spoke softly, hovering just over my head. “Shhh. Shhh. Hold on. You know who you are talking to here. I’ve never lied to you. Shhh. I care too much about you, you know that. Shhh. Shhh.” He wiped his face with his hand and pulled on all the sagging skin. “There. Settle down now. Good. Just breathe awhile. Good. Yes, good.” He reached up to my face and wiped at my tears with his thumb. He pressed against my cheek and rubbed right down into the corner of my mouth. “You are special, Aidan,” he said softly. “Don’t forget how much I care about you. We just need to remember this. We can understand, right?” His hand went around the back of my head and clutched my hair. He tugged gently. The cloth of his shirtsleeve brushed my forehead. His sweat. Hushed, scotch-stinking breath. I trembled and, after a moment, he continued. “You’ve never told anybody, have you? You’ve never said anything, have you?”
I shook my head.
“You know what they would do to me?” he continued. “You don’t want them to hurt me, do you?”
He leaned back, and I saw the wall beyond him again, and the pictures on it of his worldly travels—El Salvador, Kenya, Senegal, Cambodia, the people, the children, smiling around him. Now Father Greg stood smiling down at me. He touched my forehead with the back of his hand. “You’re on fire, Aidan,” he said. “You’re shaking. Let me get you a glass of water.” His hand felt icy. I couldn’t feel it again.
Father Greg stepped beside the desk. I looked again at the bottle of scotch, and Father Greg followed my glance. “Are you okay?” he asked. I nodded, and I stood. “I guess that’d be good. We’ll both have a little. We understand each other?” I nodded again, and Father Greg relaxed his shoulders. He smiled more as he poured. We swallowed quickly, and I stared down into my empty glass. There were tears in my eyes. “Easy,” Father Greg said, and I listened to that tone shift in his voice again. I squeezed at the glass with both hands and shook. “Aidan. Please.”
When he reached for my shoulder, I smashed the glass down against the edge of his desk, and the shards exploded everywhere. I backed away, and it wasn’t until I saw the blood in my hand that I felt the pain.
Father Greg grabbed me before I moved farther away. He repeated my name again and again with panic. He pulled me closer as he opened drawers, and I wiped my hand down on the desk pad and the notecards and cried at the pain.
“Please,” Father Greg begged. “Let me help you.”
I coughed and tried to pull away, but Father Greg’s grip was too strong. He had no other directions for me, no more words. He pulled a tea towel from the drawer and dabbed my hand. “Aidan, Aidan.” He repeated my name over and over as if it were all he had left to hold on to. I grunted. He looked at my hand and tried to examine it for slivers, but I kept tugging back. It was bleeding quickly, and I turned it and wiped at Father Greg’s sleeve—the pain burned again. “Aidan,” Father Greg said. “Please. Let me take care of you.”
In response, there was a shout from outside the office. “Greg!” The door swung open, and the bright overhead lights from the rectory’s main hall lit up the room. “What the hell is going on here?” Father Dooley asked as he came in.
“He’s cut himself,” Father Greg said.
Father Dooley stared at Father Greg.
“Aidan. He cut himself. I’m trying to help.” Father Greg dabbed at my hand again with the towel and then wrapped it tightly. I couldn’t speak.
“Greg. Stop,” Father Dooley said.
“No, no. No, it’s not that.”
“Shut up,” Father Dooley snapped. “Stop talking. You’re sick, Greg. You’re not well.” He trailed away and shook his head.
“No, no. He’s only cut himself.”
“Greg! Enough!” Father Dooley said. “Aidan,” he continued, “please don’t be afraid. Nothing else is going to happen.” He waited for me. “Please. Let me drive you home.”
Father Greg began again, but Father Dooley cut him off. “Damn it, Greg. This is too much. Let go of him!” Father Greg was about to speak, but he hesitated. His grip slackened, and then he finally let go of me.
“Everything is going to be okay. Please, Aidan. Come here. Come here right now.”
I stepped forward, but as Father Dooley gestured for me, I pushed past him and ran out through the rectory, to the driveway, and down to the sidewalk. The snow-covered lawns looked like a desert. Ornamental bushes became cacti casting hazy shadows across the sand and dust, and I was out there in it like some creature seen only by the light of the moon, wide-eyed, loping through the yards, a pale shadow passing through town.
Blood pooled in my hands and dried in brown threads around my wrist. It was mine, I was sure, cut from the glass, but somehow it felt like his, like he was reaching out, grabbing me, and pulling me back. Aidan. I stuffed my hand in a snowbank, and the cold bit at my skin, but it stopped the bleeding. The wind howled around me, and in it I thought I heard his hushed breath whispering at my neck. I screamed to keep his voice out of my head, and I kept running while the low moon burned an orange ring through the clouds and hovered, like an eye blinking down on me and following me into the night.
After a while, my throat went raw and my face stung with the chill. I found myself standing, shivering, in the pale light beneath a Mobil sign. I had left the church without my coat, gloves, and hat. The smell of gasoline cut through the air, and I realized I had walked out of town to a rest stop near an on-ramp to the highway. Only a few cars were in the lot outside the McDonald’s attached to the gas station. It wasn’t all that late, but there were only a few people inside. My teeth clacked uncontrollably, and I couldn’t hold my hands still. I went into the Mobil Mart and walked up and down the aisles a few times. I bought a burrito and an Irish Crème coffee. I warmed up the burrito in the microwave and watched it grow in the yellow glow.
The attendant didn’t give a shit about me. She sat behind the counter on the other side of the Mobil Mart, talking on her cell phone. I wasn’t even sure there was someone on the other end of the line. She just kept going and going. I took my burrito and coffee over to the window and used a short tower of beer cases for a table. Cars whipped by on I-95. Thoughts charged all around my head, and I kept picturing little objects in Father Greg’s office: the small portrait of St. Augustine on the wall, the jar with pens beside the desk pad, the dull copper studs that ran along the seams of the leather couch—the lit
tle things I had stared at so many times, focused on, and known the texture of.
A white bus pulled off the highway and rumbled down the road. It bounced into the parking lot and dropped off its passengers in front of the McDonald’s. They all got in line behind the counter. Another cup of coffee would have done me good too, or a tab of NoDoz, like truckers pop as they floor it across the country in the dead of night.
The bus rolled forward and parked in front of the diesel tanks. When the driver got out, started the pump, and then made his own way into McDonald’s, I made a break for it. On the side of the bus, bright green and red Chinese characters were painted around a blue sign with double arrows pointing to New York and Boston: the express bus, even more run-down than Greyhound’s.
I kept looking over my shoulder, thinking the driver was going to come out of McDonald’s, but when I hopped on the bus and looked out from the coach, I could see the driver buying cigarettes at the Mobil Mart counter as if nothing was the matter. The back of the bus had a cramped, windowless closet of a bathroom, and I snuck in. It smelled like somebody had just taken a piss in there, only he’d sprayed down the whole room and gotten it everywhere except the pot. Strands of toilet paper stuck to the walls in dissolving clumps. The door didn’t have a lock either—you got it to stay shut by hooking a bungee cord around the handle and stretching it over another one along the wall. I stood there, terrified and paranoid the driver had seen me, until the bus finally started and lurched forward. It stopped again, and I heard people climbing back on board. I stayed in the bathroom until we were rolling down the road and onto the highway, and once we’d been cruising for a while, I opened the door. The bus was mostly empty. People dozed in their seats. I sat down near the bathroom and hugged myself tightly as the bus slowly warmed. It was heading south. The engine hummed, and the tires zoomed a rip-and-thump beat along the road. The seats smelled like Windex and Bounce and some fruity bubble gum air freshener, but nothing felt clean. When I breathed it in, I felt propelled—hurtling forward toward nothing.
+ + +
The highway was swallowed by the city as the expressway dipped down between high concrete walls and sliced through the neighborhoods. Eventually, the bus came to a stop at a clustered corner beneath the massive steel structures of a bridge. Every sign hanging over doorways or taped to storefront windows was written in Chinese. Passengers filed off the bus, and eventually, I did too. I walked through the warren of streets that smelled of fish and gasoline. Fire escapes ran like zippers up and down the tenement building facades. People yelled and shouted over one another everywhere. I was bumped and ignored. My nose hurt in the cold, and no matter how much I wiped at it with the sleeve of my sweatshirt, I couldn’t clear the snot from my lip.
I wandered through the barricaded downtown Manhattan streets, avoiding the clusters of National Guard soldiers around the financial buildings. It was Old Donovan territory, and I pictured him sitting at a desk near one of the windows high up in the office towers, peering out over the glowing city beneath him—lording over the landscape and seeing nothing within it. I yelled, then listened to my voice echoing among the canyon of buildings, but nobody found me or heard me, and eventually, my voice was too raw to leave my throat.
I was exhausted, and I felt noise in my head like the glass that had been in my hand. Dusty tracks of blood still wound around my fingers. I stared down at my hands as if they belonged to someone else. I found a quiet, cobblestoned street and a steam grate for the subway near what looked like an old, unused, brick doorway. I held myself in a ball, but as the gray huffs billowed up from below, I never really fell asleep as the machinery of sirens, brakes, and hissing hydraulics crept inside me like the cold air.
CHAPTER 5
I awoke amid an air of violence. As I crawled out from my little hovel, it all came back to me in flickering bursts: the warm shade of the desk lamp; the green desk pad; glass exploding; Father Greg pressing a tea towel into my hand; a bloody swipe across his shirt. Father Dooley called to me, but somehow it felt like he had been calling to someone else, a stranger—a stranger who’d been keeping all my secrets for me, as if they weren’t mine, as if they’d been locked up inside somebody else, until now.
I cleaned myself in the bathroom of a diner downtown. After breakfast, as I wandered north through the city, I admitted that I didn’t have any other real option: I needed Elena. I’d never been to her home before, but I knew where she lived. It was late afternoon when I finally mustered the energy to descend the stairs of the subway pavilion at Union Square and look for the 4 train to the Bronx. Everywhere, packs of three or four National Guard soldiers stood in their spread-eagled stances with their guns strapped to their shoulders and the barrels pointed toward the ground. They scanned the crowds stoically, waiting patiently for a violence their very presence made seem imminent. The more armed guards I passed in the subway station, the more I glanced around, wondering if they could see something I could not.
It was twilight when I found her street. On the corner, I stopped at a bodega and bought a giant armload of flowers and marched up the street without waiting for my change. I didn’t know what I was doing. Eyes were on me from every direction. I’d never felt my whiteness so strongly until I stood there as the only white person, waiting for the light to change, waiting to find her front door and close it behind me and lock out the rest of the world.
Undercliff Avenue curled away from the bustling neighborhood near the train and wound around the foot of a large hill clustered with old clapboard houses. Like the houses around it, Elena’s had a garage that stood a few yards back from the sidewalk, and a stone staircase climbed a steep slope up to the front stoop. Two stories rose above the front door, and it looked like a little lighthouse on a precipice, if a lighthouse could be a cube with a gabled roof. Even in December, the three-tiered garden embedded in the slope beside the stairs was colorfully alive. Ivy clung to the rocks and evergreen shrubs.
From inside the house, the voice of a swaying balladeer gently rocked. I held my breath and rang the bell. Teresa answered. I recognized her immediately from her picture. She was two years ahead of me in school. A naked strip of scalp divided the perfectly parted hair that fell over her shoulders, but I fixed my eyes on her vibrant sneakers. She crossed one foot over the other as she leaned on the handle of the wooden door.
“Oh my God. What are you doing here?” She looked at the flowers skeptically, and I remained silent. “You okay?”
“I’ve seen your picture,” I said. “You were on the volleyball team this fall.”
She looked at me with a confrontational smile. “Yeah, I’ve seen yours, too,” she said. “You always look like somebody just died.” She cocked her head over her shoulder and yelled up the stairs behind her. “Mami, your other boy is here.” Teresa turned back to me. “She’s on vacation, you know.”
“I know. I just have these,” I said as I held up the bundle of flowers.
Elena came down the flight of stairs from the second floor wearing a snug sweater and powder-puff, fuzzy slippers. She beamed, and her smile comforted me, but I could see the anxiousness in her eyes. “Tere, step back. Let him in,” she said.
“Bienvenido al Bronx,” Teresa said sarcastically.
I squeezed past her, and Elena quickly embraced me. She held me for a while. “M’ijo.” I could feel Teresa staring at my back. I began to release myself, but Elena hugged tighter. She only let go after Teresa pushed by us.
Elena tut-tutted and drew me by the arm into the living room. The smell of sizzling onions was in the air. The crooner’s song ended, and a more bubbly merengue began as I surveyed the couch, the armchair, and the tall, freestanding birdcage by the stereo cabinet. A small forest of plants surrounded the front window that looked down onto the street. A large painting of Mother Mary hung on the wall over the armchair. The gold disk of her halo glimmered faintly. Although her head was humbly pitched down, her eyes looked askance, as if she peered out into the house. Round and bright,
they followed me around the room.
“What a surprise,” Elena said. She was nervous. “Are you here alone?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“How about ‘Why are you here?’ ” Teresa said as she leaned against the doorway to the kitchen.
I handed Elena the oversized bunch of flowers. “Happy holidays,” I said. “Feliz Navidad. I never gave you a present.”
Elena gripped the hem of her sweater. “What a surprise,” she said again. “Gracias. Gracias.” Her hair was down too, and it made her look younger. “I wouldn’t have expected you to give me anything.”
“And come to our home to do it,” Teresa added.
I nodded and wished I had thought of something more to say when I arrived, something to whisk away their questions. I had the urge to speak only in facts. This is a birdcage. There are two birds. Yes, one is blue and one is yellow.
“Tere,” Elena said, handing her my flowers. “Find a place for these.”
“Did you buy the place out?” Teresa asked me, but she took the flowers and stepped into the kitchen.
She banged around the cupboards as Elena walked me to the couch and sat me down. “M’ijo,” she said with a sad smile, “I’m happy to see you.” She hugged me again and then sat back. “Why didn’t you call to tell me you were coming? Your mother . . . ,” she began, but she trailed off. She sighed and looked toward the front window, a dark wall now, speckled only with a few dots of light from other windows down the hill and the faint orange glow from the streetlamp. “I am confused,” Elena said.
The Gospel of Winter Page 7
