The Gospel of Winter

by Brendan Kiely

  Father Greg cocked a half smile. “If that’s the case, I’d like your help tying up some loose ends, then. Can we discuss it more back at the office?”

  “I need to get my homework done before going back to school,” I said. “I’m back at CDA on Wednesday.”

  “As he should,” Mother said. “I’m glad.”

  “Well, I see. Fine. But then there’s another matter I’d like to discuss with you,” Father Greg said to her. “Especially if Aidan isn’t coming back to work. And since Jack isn’t around, I suppose I need to be speaking with you. It’s the matter of your family’s gift this year.”

  Mother sucked in a breath and straightened. Father Greg put up his hands defensively. “No, I don’t mean right now, Gwen. I only mention it because Jack usually prefers to get it on the books before year’s end. Tax purposes. You understand. Maybe this is something useful for you, too, when thinking about your new business?”

  Mother stared him down. “I understand perfectly well. I’ll be making the decisions now, Father. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to excuse us. It’s getting late.”

  “I’m glad to see you moving forward with such determination, Gwen.” Father Greg smiled. “A role model.”

  We were all cordial and pleasant as we said our good-byes, and I even mustered something that resembled a smile as I shook Father Greg’s hand again. It was so familiar; I almost wanted to lean in for a hug. How many times had I allowed myself to fall into his embrace? I felt sick and left for the bathroom before he’d closed the door behind him.

  Whatever whiff of confidence I’d had while he’d been there evaporated when Mother left. It was dark out when I watched her car disappear down the street, and although I went up to my bedroom, in my mind I was back in Father Greg’s office as he quoted Matthew 28:20: “And I will be with you always to the end of age.” Then he was up and around his desk, perched on the edge of it, leaning forward, his breath close to me. He reminded me that God worked through him and that he would in no way abandon me, and that love, like faith, is being sure of what we hope for. I believed I was loved.

  I still had the throbbing wish that things hadn’t changed—that we were still at the Christmas party and he was leading me outside and there was no one else around and he was making me laugh and giving me advice so I wouldn’t hate Old Donovan or Mother, and advice to help me cope with my new friends—and even more, a wish that I’d never seen him with James, and after that, that I’d never wiped my blood on his shirt. Why did I have to accept the truth that I’d been a part of it all too? When I thought of Father Greg now, I felt his hands on my arms, pulling me closer, bruising me in a squeeze. There was so much more. The truth doesn’t always have to get smashed into us for us to recognize it, does it?

  I stared at my bedroom walls and hoped something would jump to life. I wanted the sheets of computer paper stacked up on my desk to lift and spin up in the air, a voice to emerge from within the whirling dervish and speak to me, tell me what to do, for all the books to fall off my shelves and highlighted passages to reveal themselves to me as they spread out on the floor. It was a kind of prayer, I think, or an all-out begging, for words to find me—the words I knew I needed to deliver to Mother. But they never appeared. Instead, I could only see the monster she’d see me as, if I told her, and I wanted the strength to avoid that for both of us.

  I sat in my reading chair and cried, until I pictured Mother onstage, Odette in Swan Lake, the glistening white costume, legs intertwined, both feet balanced on her toes, prepared for her aggressive pointe-shoe attack across the stage. She seemed so much stronger to me now. I could see the ferocity in her eyes. They were my eyes too, I thought, and like her, I would have to push forward.

  CHAPTER 7

  Mother and I prepared separately for New Year’s. Her countdown began sometime in the early afternoon as she modeled a number of outfits and asked my opinion. A friend of hers had planned a night down in the city. She had reserved two spots at a cocktail bar, called in a favor to get a table at a small Italian restaurant I’d never heard of, and accepted invitations for the two of them to attend a party thrown by one of Mother’s former dance colleagues in an apartment on Seventy-Second Street with views over the park. Mother’s anticipation of their plans derailed her decision-making abilities. She showed me formal gowns I’d never seen her wear. She paraded a small army of boots, pumps, flats, and heels that looked impossible to walk in, although she marched back and forth across the balcony above the foyer with renewed confidence. Fuck. You! the heels shouted, as if they were calling all the way across the Atlantic to Old Donovan.

  “Is this me?” Mother asked as she walked past me.

  “Who do you want to be?”

  “Just like that.” She laughed. “I get to choose, don’t I?”

  They took a car to the city and were gone shortly after dark. Instead of deciding how to present myself, I spent my time figuring out which small bottles of liquor to take from Old Donovan’s bar, which cigars to take from his humidor, and how to fit them all in the pockets of my coat with the last of my Adderall and whichever other pills I found in Mother’s cabinet without looking like a kleptomaniac clown waddling around a psychotic circus. Loaded down, I sat on the stoop smoking one of Mother’s cigarettes and waited for Mark to pick me up.

  I almost thought Mark wasn’t going to show up, but eventually his Audi sped up the driveway and hugged the curve around to the front of the house. The music was loud in the car. He opened the passenger door. “Do you mind putting that out?” he said, pointing to the cigarette. “It’s supposed to be my car, but it isn’t, if you know what I mean.” I flicked it away and got in. He didn’t say much as we took off through town, only asked if I’d mind making a pit stop before heading to the party. He left the music blasting, and we cruised over by the golf course and parked on a spur just off the bridge. It was a dirt lane leading down to a spit along the river that was just large enough to be a put-in for a rowboat. Mark cut the engine. We got out and leaned back against the front grille, surveying the river as it emptied into the harbor. He lit a thin joint and nursed it to life.

  “Dude,” he said. “I apologize for my mood. I was a little fucked off earlier. God was pronouncing his commandments today. I can’t even get in my own car without thinking he’s in there watching me sometimes, following me everywhere with that fat fucking frown of his.”

  “God?”

  “My old man. He thinks he is. He expects us all to obey his every breath.”

  “That sounds familiar,” I said. I inhaled and held it for a moment before exhaling, like I’d seen him do earlier. “Only, mine is gone for good now.”

  “You’re lucky, then.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Once Mark and I had finished the joint by the river, we were back in the car and on the way to the party. Feingold’s place was a couple of towns up the coast and only a few blocks from the ocean. The houses in his neighborhood were nearly as large as mine, but they were stacked more closely together. The lights were out in most of them, but Feingold’s illuminated the neighborhood. It sat on a hill, and cars lined both sides of the street and packed the driveway, too. Mark drove past it and parked around the corner, away from the rest of the cars. I didn’t notice my leg was bouncing until Mark glanced down at it, and when I stopped I felt the urge welling up in me again quickly. I took a breath. Before we got out, I showed him what I had on me.

  “I’m a goddamn pharmaceutical convention tonight,” I said. “Do you want anything?”

  “Nah, dude,” Mark said. “I just smoke pot. It quiets me, in a way.” I nodded, but before I put the baggie away he added, “But go for it if it’s your thing, man.”

  “I have Vicodin.”

  He nodded. “Maybe later.”

  “This is me,” I said, shaking out an Adderall. “It makes me feel prepared.”

  “Yeah.” He was quiet while I crushed the pill on a piece of paper on the dashboard, rolled the sheet into a cone, and
did the whole thing in one big bump. Mark nodded his head as if there was still a beat in the car that he was following. I balled the paper up and pocketed it when I finished. “Everything’s cool,” Mark said when we got out of the car. “Let’s just have each other’s backs tonight. Never know at these things.” We gripped hands in that way that looks like we were about to arm wrestle, and I was relieved Mark was taking me along with him to the party and I didn’t have to go alone.

  As we climbed the driveway the music and noise grew. On the porch, a group of kids stood around smoking, and Mark introduced me to a couple of seniors from CDA I didn’t know. He knew them from the swim team. Mark hit the joint that moved around the crowd, and I bummed a cigarette from someone else. Through the windows on the first floor, I could see people dancing, and more were standing around the windows of the second floor. Mark leaned back against the side of the house, smiled vaguely, and let the conversation roll. He nodded occasionally, as if he knew something we all didn’t. I did my best to join in but found myself talking quickly. After another cigarette, I asked Mark if he wanted to go find Josie and Sophie, and we made our way into the crowd.

  The rooms were lit by dull lamps with green-, purple-, and yellow-colored bulbs, giving the house the atmosphere of a phosphorescent-lit greenhouse. In the semidarkness, people shouted over the hip-hop blasting from the living room, and some were dancing, writhing with their legs squeezed between someone else’s. Plastic cups swayed overhead. The kitchen beyond was slightly brighter, and three guys I didn’t know circled the keg and rapped along with the lyrics of the song. One held the tube from the tap in front of his face and shouted at it. Sophie sat on the counter, her big, searching eyes fluttering at two guys who leaned toward her. Her hair was shorter than it had been a few days before, and it made her look older, or at least less innocent. One of them had his hand on her jeans. “They are soft,” he said as we approached.

  She laughed quickly and dismissively. She was backed up against the cupboards, and she held a fake smile. When she saw us, she brightened. “These guys go to my school,” she said as an introduction, pointing to us. She kicked forward, jumped off the counter, and threw an arm around each of our necks. “Oh my God, get me out of here,” she whispered.

  Mark got a hand beneath one leg, I copied him, and we carried her across the kitchen, back to the keg. She held her cup aloft like the queen of Egypt. Eventually, she found a clean one for me, and after we’d filled our cups we ducked back into another large room with a television showing the celebrations in cities across the world. It was just past midnight in Rio de Janeiro, and the streets were packed with colorful revelers. As Sophie caught us up on what we’d missed, I looked around and wondered if this was how everyone else but me spent most of their weekends. Most people were shouting nonsense at one another, but what did it matter? They were all doing it together, weren’t they? No one feels lonely at a masquerade, even if no one really knows who each other is. I was at a party. People wanted me there with them—this was real. I felt like Mother, rising and spinning and spinning among the other dancers.

  When our cups were empty again, I asked if we should go find Josie. Sophie rolled her eyes. Mark laughed genuinely for the first time since we’d gotten to the party. Sophie looked at him. “She probably needs the company, though, even if she doesn’t realize it.”

  I followed them as they wound through the party on the first floor. We found her on the screened-in porch smoking a cigarette with some other girls from CDA. Her eyes caught the lights of the party inside and glinted like ice in the night.

  “Feingold’s letting you smoke in here?” Mark asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s kind of like we’re outside.”

  “Where the hell is Feingold?” Mark asked. “Guy’s throwing a party, and I haven’t even said hello to him yet.” He looked around the porch. “I know I sound like a weirdo, but maybe we should find out from him if it’s cool to smoke here. I mean, it’s his house.”

  “No, you’re right,” Josie said. She put out the cigarette in the base of a potted plant, opened the back screen door, and flung the butt into the backyard. “I just bummed one of these to take a break, I guess. The cold air’s nice.”

  “Yeah.” Sophie grinned. “Where’s Dustin?”

  “He took off somewhere. I’m sure he’ll come looking for me later.” She wrapped arms with Sophie. “Especially after he’s had a few more drinks.”

  Josie suggested we get some more of our own, and we slipped back through the party and went down to the dimly lit basement. Dustin wasn’t there, but we did find another bar, and more people mixing noxious cocktails with whatever the hell they wanted. After the four of us huddled around the bar and I fixed everyone except Mark a drink, I felt a hand come down on my back and the deep voice of Craig Riggs over my shoulder.

  “Dude,” he said quietly. “Nice to see you here. You interested in anything?”

  I thought about stepping away, finding somewhere private like we usually did at CDA, like his car in the junior parking lot or in the locker room while everyone else was out at practice, but Riggs tucked a long brown curl behind his ear and leaned closer. “Everybody here cool?” he asked.

  I bought another stash of Adderall from Riggs, and still feeling vaguely in charge, I marched the four of us to the bathroom in the basement. Once inside, with the door locked behind us, I broke up what was left of my old stash, ground down a few of the new pills, and laid out the lines on the back of a box of tissues. I rolled up a bill and busted the first rail. The girls followed me, but not Mark. He wouldn’t touch it. He took a hit of weed from his bat instead. We each did a second round before we left the room, and I felt a pop and gush stronger than any high I’d had before.

  The four of us climbed back up to the living room and discovered that the New Year was about to arrive off the coast of Canada at St. John’s. We danced with one another feverishly, grinding our teeth and talking faster than words could make it to our lips. Mark and I traded off dancing with Josie and Sophie, and at one point Mark and I danced together too, an awkward brotherly shuffle in which we clashed forearms like a pair of victorious gladiators. The four of us were sweaty and thirsty, and only after we stepped onto the back porch again, with fresh drinks, did we realize it was nearing midnight in New York.

  “I guess I should go find my boyfriend,” Josie said. She’d gotten half a pack of cigarettes from a girl who was now throwing up in the backyard behind a bush, and she and I stood on the step below the open door and shared one.

  “He should be looking for you,” I said.

  “Oh my God.” Sophie laughed. “The thing is, Josie, Aidan’s right.”

  “You know what?” Mark said. “Fuck Dustin, all right?”

  Josie sighed. “Please don’t say that.”

  “No.” Mark stepped down to her and held her by the arm. “I’m serious. Fuck him.”

  Josie smiled and tipped her head to the side. It was the side I never saw in English class, the underside, the track from the chin to the base of the throat. Why, I wondered, are our most vulnerable spots also the most seductive? I looked up into the sky, wanting to be made to feel small enough that my memories would be insignificant against the vastness around me. I searched for stars through the light pollution. Mark kept talking.

  “Look,” he said, “we’re all right here. We’re having a great time without him. So are you.”

  From inside the house, people shouted that it was almost time. The television was turned up, and the music turned off. More and more people crowded into the large back room with the TV. I reached over to Josie. “I’m starting over this year,” I said. “It’s all my mother talks about, but I see her point, I think.” She shivered, and I put my arm around her. “Let’s all go in,” I said. “It’s freezing out here.”

  The room off the porch was jammed with people cheering at the television, yelling back at the crowds that flashed in Times Square. Little jolts from the Adderall still buzzed through m
e, and I felt confident holding Josie’s hand as we walked. She withdrew it as we entered the room, and Mark put his arm over my shoulder instead. Sophie squeezed between us, and we lifted her again so she soared over the bodies. She pumped her arms and rallied the crowd, and I wondered if this was how everyone else felt most of the time and why, although I was a part of it now, hollering at the television with everyone else, I still felt a hole widening within me. I shouted “Three minutes!” with everyone else, and yet that hole was like the tunnel left behind by something burrowing within me. I could picture that thing inside me, a small beast chomping and gnawing its way from my stomach up to my heart. I didn’t want to think about Father Greg. I didn’t want him anywhere near me. I only wanted crowds and cheers and Josie, Sophie, Mark, and me in a knot of linked arms, but he was inside me, his whisper, I know you, I’m here for you, Aidan. I’m here. It was like there were two Aidans at the party: the one stomping and shouting and chanting “New Year, New Year, New Year!” and the one standing quietly in the darkness, listening to Father Greg, being told how the secret makes it meaningful.

  Bottles of beer and wine and champagne went around the room. Cups sloshed and banged together prematurely. There was too much noise, and it took me a few seconds to realize that Mark was shouting at me. “Where the hell is Feingold?” he repeated, and I tried to scan the crowd, but Sophie wavered on our shoulders. We shifted our balance and kept her propped up as people began the countdown. As the ball dropped on television I thought of Mother down in the city, the same energetic recklessness doing a dervish spin through everyone at her party, the same hope and resolution repeating in her as was repeating in me: Please please please, everybody, see the cheer. Nobody notice anything else.