When her small box was packed and she finally turned around, she saw me holding the cross and looking at her. “Have you been reading the news at all?” I asked. She ignored me, took the cross from my hands, and dropped it in the box on the bed. She pulled a pair of shoes out from beneath the bed. “Elena, come on. Why aren’t you looking at me?”
“M’ijo,” Elena said finally. She stopped fidgeting. “I do not want to talk about any of that.”
“Well, I think I need to.”
“No,” she said. “Not to me. You need to talk to a priest. Talk to Father Dooley. Remember?”
“Them?”
“I have gone to church every day and prayed.” Elena held herself very still and breathed through her nose. “Because God knows best. He knows best, and I keep my faith in him.”
I was shaking and sweating. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I need to tell someone. It’s about Father Greg.”
Elena held up one finger at me. “No, m’ijo. No. You need to tell another priest. Do not tell me.”
“No. Please, I need you to listen.” I walked over to her, but she put her hand up to block me. She grabbed the two boxes off the bed and held them in her arms.
“No. I can’t do this. I have been praying—that is all I can do. I have been praying, and I will continue to do that. I didn’t think I was going to see you today. I can’t do this.” She turned and walked toward the door, but I yelled to her.
“What? What are you saying?”
She turned back. “You have to talk to a priest. I struggled, but you have to learn to accept certain things. My priest has told me. There are some bad apples, but they do not ruin the whole barrel.” She stepped out the door. “Please. I have to go. I can’t do this.”
I ran over and grabbed her arm. She yelped. “Did you know?” I asked her. Elena pushed my hand away, but I grabbed her again. “Did you know?”
She stayed silent for a moment. “I washed your clothes. I watched him drive you home. I saw how you looked at him. It wasn’t right. But you also stayed, m’ijo. You stayed. God has his reasons for all things, and I believe in him. I will always trust in him.”
She went quickly down the stairs to the driveway. I followed slowly and stood on the landing at the top of the stairs. Elena threw the boxes into the trunk, and I began to cry. She walked back to the foot of the stairs and stared up at me. “Please, m’ijo. Father Dooley will help you. Please go talk to him.”
Tears clouded my eyes. I slumped down onto the step and leaned against the railing. “That’s what you’ve always said. ‘Go to the church.’ ”
“No,” Elena said loudly. “No. I have struggled, m’ijo.” She waved her hand above her head. “I’m in pain too. But I believe in the Church. God will provide the way. He will. You have to believe that too, m’ijo.”
“Fuck.” I began sobbing. “Mark.”
Elena began to climb the stairs to me, but Mother came out the kitchen door and yelled to us. “What’s going on out here?” she asked as she jogged toward us. “Elena? What is going on?” Mother looked up at me crying and shook her head. “My God, this is just enough. Get ahold of yourself, Aidan. Elena’s leaving. She’s not your mother. She’s your nanny, for Christ’s sake! Get a grip.”
“We have to talk,” I said down to her, but I didn’t move. I leaned against the railing.
“Aidan Donovan, you get ahold of yourself this minute. I have my first official party tonight, and I have to get going to make sure everything is in order. The world can’t slow down because you can’t grow up.” She turned to Elena. “All right, enough of this. You’ve made me late enough. Do you have everything?” Elena nodded. “Then it’s time to go,” Mother continued. “I’m sorry it had to end this way, Elena, but this is just ridiculous.”
Elena hesitated and then moved up the stairs to me. She held me, and I cried into her shoulder. “You will be okay,” she said. “I am sorry. Te quiero. I do. I’m sorry, m’ijo.”
Mother yelled up again. Elena pulled away and didn’t look back. She passed Mother without saying a word. It wasn’t until she backed up, swung the car around, and then sped off down the driveway that I realized I hadn’t actually said the words I needed to to her. They were still lodged in me like shards of broken glass in my throat. She hadn’t let me tell her. Now she was gone.
Mother chastised me again. “Not now,” she said, holding up her hand. “I have to go. We’ll discuss all this more tonight.” She pulled keys from her purse. “It’s only a cocktail party, so I won’t be home too late. But what’s done is done, Aidan. She’s gone. You must move ahead,” she said with new command in her voice. “Get going to school.”
She marched into the garage. A few moments later, she backed out in Old Donovan’s silver Lexus. She didn’t beep or roll down her window. She righted the car, and she sped off as quickly as Elena had. I watched her taillights disappear around the corner, and she might as well have been steering toward her own Brussels.
When I got to school, all I could think about was Mark. His locker was near the chemistry lab, and before I went in for class, I found myself staring at it, remembering the way he would hunch toward it. He wasn’t there, but I imagined Mark gripping the door of his locker with one amber hand. He ran his hand through his tight curls, and they all fell back exactly into place. I could hear him humming, calming himself as he often would, but the distance he put between himself and those around him lost its air of confidence. To me, he was now the feral, frightened Mark I’d seen the other night, trying to warm himself on the cold rooftop, looking up at me with a face like a prayer. He was sick with fear. I understood. I knew it well. I needed to tell him.
I looked for him all day, but he was absent, his third day in a row—there was no way for him to escape the consequences now. Josie was absent too, and nothing could ease the pain in my stomach. It felt empty and rotted. Nothing could fill it. The gulps of water at the fountain did nothing to take it away. I didn’t feel like I was moving. Rather, the world was moving around me. I couldn’t animate or make a decision: The bell rang, so I walked; my teacher said, “Take out your books,” so I flipped to the last assignment and poised my hand in the gutter between the pages. I sat there in the lab and waited for something to crush me and turn me back into dust.
Outside, it began to snow. Fat flakes quickly clouded the windows. I sank low on my stool and stared at the chain of little tubes and balls of the model molecules on the lab table in front of me. I was afraid to speak and afraid to make eye contact with anyone in chemistry class. I was afraid of what I’d say now if I saw them, afraid of what I’d make real by finally telling them what I needed to say. In church, stepping into the confessional, what you say is whispered up into the ether, taken like a breath up into the deep lungs of God, or so I was once made to believe, as if what we did with the lives we lived disappeared into the vastness of eternity and our meaning and purpose was to recognize the greater design, revere it and remain anonymous within it. But I could not allow myself to pretend to believe any of that anymore.
Instead, I thought of Most Precious Blood and whichever parish Father Greg worked in before, and the one before that, passing from town to town like a disease, invisible to most of us, but not everyone, walking into party after party hand-first, shaking and backslapping his way from family to family until it was my turn to endure the stink of his whispers and be told to believe it was gospel. He had infected me, and now he was in me, a part of me, forever. He couldn’t hurt me any more than he already had. I wanted the chance to tell him no, to say, I’m not afraid anymore, to blow his rancid breath right back in his face and watch him and Father Dooley and all of them—all the sick, sociopathic old men who had watched us rot from afar while they let the Father Gregs sweep through our neighborhoods like a plague—feel the pain they’d delivered to us. It wasn’t biblical; it wasn’t an act of God. It was human; they couldn’t hide behind a metaphor forever. Fuck hope and despair. We live in a world of consequence an
d effect. Look what they had done.
As I left class, I knew people were staring at me. I was ready to rip a locker door off its hinges and smash something with it, and I might have if I hadn’t seen Sophie leaning against Mark’s locker, hiding her face in her hands. I scared her when I said her name, and at first she stepped back. I thought Josie had probably already told her what I had done, and I expected her to yell or walk away, but instead she grabbed me into a fierce hug and would not let go.
“Do you know what happened to Mark?” she asked. I hesitated, holding her tightly, trying to say it, but I couldn’t. “He’s in the hospital,” she said. “He fell into the river beneath Stonebrook yesterday. He hasn’t woken up yet.”
“Fell? From the bridge?” I asked, but I didn’t ask any more. Neither of us moved, and Sophie cried softly on my shoulder as she explained how her father had told her what he’d learned at the hospital the night before. Mark was in a coma from head trauma and hypothermia. He was lucky to have been found and pulled from the river as quickly as he had been. We continued to hold each other as we heard the bell ring for the next class.
“Does Josie know?” I finally asked.
“No, she hasn’t been returning my calls since last night.” Sophie stepped out of the hug. “What the hell is going on?” she asked, looking up at me. “I don’t understand. Why would he do that? What the hell is the matter? What was wrong? Could I have done something?”
The door to the chemistry lab opened, and Ms. Richards stepped into the hallway. “Hey,” she said. “Sophie. Aidan. What are you doing in the hallway? Get to class.”
Sophie shook her head. “I’m glad my dad told me, but I don’t think I can do this,” she said to me. “I think I’m going to go home. I don’t understand. I just don’t understand.”
“Hey!” Ms. Richards yelled. “Did you not hear me? Do I have to call Dean Berne?”
All I could hear and see was Mark again, on the edge of the roof, shouting, and then later, after, when he said he could never be free. I hadn’t realized then from what, or from whom, but as we stood next to his locker I thought about how many times Mark must have stared into it and wondered if he should finally tell someone about what had happened between him and Father Greg.
I hit the lockers with the side of my fist. Ms. Richards yelled again, but I ignored her. “I can’t do this anymore!” Sophie looked at me, terrified. “I can’t!” I shouted. I left the two of them in the hallway and ran down the flights of stairs to the ground floor, out the door, and into the falling snow.
+ + +
Father Greg needed to know what I planned to do next. He wouldn’t just read about it in the papers. I wanted him to hear it from me. When I got there, the church parking lot was also empty, except for the parish car that was buried beneath a thin coating of snow. The building was completely dark except for two lights in the rectory out back. I trudged up the slope of the driveway, toward the side door to the rectory, carving small trenches in the snow as I walked. The door was locked, and I slammed the underside of my fist against it as hard as I could. I banged harder and harder on the door until I heard the metal bar squeak on the other side and the door pushed open toward me. Father Dooley braced himself against the cold wind that rushed into the rectory, and he gathered the collar of his robe up around his neck. He held his cane in the same hand so it pressed against his chest, pointing at the floor ceremoniously. He leaned heavily on the door while the wind whipped the fine hair on his head.
He was hunched over more than usual, and the wind blew up into his bathrobe, too, ruffling the flannel around his legs. He was dressed beneath the robe, and I had the impression he had just dragged himself out of an armchair, possibly even a nap. “Well, get in here before the wind blows me over,” he said.
He slammed the door shut behind me and caught his breath. “I’m surprised to see you here.” He leaned on the door as if he waited to open it again soon. Then he composed himself. “The doors are always open to you here,” he said more confidently. “I’m glad you know that. It’s a welcome surprise is what I mean.”
I pressed the leather of my gloves against my lips and blew, cupping and recupping my hands, trying to bring some warmth back into my fingertips. Father Dooley swayed briefly and pitched forward onto his cane, releasing his robe, letting it open, revealing the loose, threadbare sweater beneath it and the woolen pants that billowed around his spindly legs. I paced around the foyer until I finally fixed myself beside the railing to the stairwell that led down to the basement. The weak sunlight was dimmed by the storm, and inside most of the lights were off. Only the lamplight from Father Dooley’s office and the Sunday school room at the other end of the rectory diffused into the main hall and just barely lit the foyer and stairwell. I could see the pale gray slab of the landing below, and although beyond the turn of the stairs and the rest was completely dark, it was all too easy to recall Father Greg’s forefinger pointing and beckoning me to follow him farther.
“You don’t look well,” Father Dooley said behind me, breaking the silence. He came around and stood in the doorway to the main hall, the weak light from his office on his back. He looked at the floor, but his voice was soft and concerned, or he presented it that way at least. It had that tentative tone of pity. “Are you okay? Do you want a cup of tea? I made a pot a little while ago. There’s plenty left. Let’s go inside.”
“No.” I gripped the railing and didn’t move.
“Please. Let’s talk. I’m glad you came. It’ll be good for us to talk here. Let’s go to my office.”
“No.”
“Help an old man off his legs, Aidan. Come on.” He smiled at me but let it drop after a moment. “Let’s go back to my office,” he continued. “It’ll do us both some good.”
“No!” I found myself trembling, turning back to the stairwell, unable to make out the familiar fixtures on the wall down into the basement.
Father Dooley breathed heavily behind me. He sighed. “Did you come here for a particular reason, Aidan? I want to help you. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but I do.”
“I’m not staying,” I said, although it was hard to put any force in my words. “Get Father Greg in here. I want him to hear this too. I’m not keeping quiet anymore,” I said. “I can’t.”
“Now, Aidan.” I’d heard that tone of voice too many times. “Aidan, please. We should talk about this.”
“I’m going to.”
“There’s no reason to fear,” Father Dooley said slowly. “You are okay now. We have to think about the future, Aidan.”
“Get Father Greg!” I yelled. “I want to say it to his face.”
Father Dooley tried to draw himself up a little. He held his cane with two hands and leaned closer. “Please,” he said, almost hushing me. “Let’s go back to my office, Aidan.”
Every time I heard my name, I heard Father Greg’s voice—cold whispers, broken promises, and the long, twisted plot of a lie. I slammed the railing. “There’s nothing else left. Get him. I need to tell him what he did. He needs to hear it. He did it.”
“Nothing left? Aidan, there’s the bigger picture. The tradition. The church. All those schools. The children.”
“What about me?”
Father Dooley took a step closer. “Calm down, Aidan. Father Greg is gone. He won’t be coming back. He’s been transferred. He’s in Canada, Aidan. Now, please. Let’s calm down. We can talk about this. You’re okay, Aidan.” He came closer and put his hand on my shoulder.
I buckled. “Canada? You sent him to Canada?”
“He was transferred. Eventually, he’ll be back in Africa,” Father Dooley said. He smiled. “I told you I would protect you, Aidan. I told you I cared. Now, let’s calm down. Think of all that work he has done. All that work that you have done with him. There’s so much more, Aidan. Why tear down all that has been good?”
“He needs to hear this. I need to tell him. He’s done this. It’s his fault. I don’t want to hurt anyone else,” I
cried.
“Aidan, you asked me to make sure you never saw him again. I understood you. You’ll just have to talk to me, instead. It’s good. I’m here to help you.”
His grip was weak, but his voice was calm and level, and the more I heard it, the more it felt like a squeeze around my throat. “Let go,” I said.
He did immediately and stepped back. He rubbed his jaw, and his hand shook. “Aidan. There are other ways of thinking about this. Remember St. Francis rebuilding the church? Remember that we are talking about love, divine love? God’s love. That’s what we’re talking about. That is larger than the indiscretions of human beings. That is worth protecting, Aidan. It is larger than us.”
He walked toward the main hall, and I shouted at his back. “That’s what you are always talking about. All of you. Love?” I looked into the basement and looked back. “Love?” I shouted, and rattled the railing. “I am sick of lying. I won’t do it anymore. I don’t know how you do it.”
Father Dooley turned around in the doorway. “Aidan, don’t yell at me. Can’t you see the position I’m in? What am I supposed to do? I believe in this church—the Catholic Church, Aidan. It is bigger than you or me or Father Greg. It’s universal. I serve the Church, Aidan. I believe in the compassion. I believe in that love. I believe in the Church.” He leaned against the door frame and shook his cane at me. There were tears in his eyes. “Believe me,” he said. “Please.”
I stepped toward him. He gestured for me to quiet down, but I ignored him. “Do you know how many times Father Greg told me that?” I yelled. “Where does the line get drawn? Why do I have to be expendable?”
“That’s not the only way to look at it.”
“How can you hold it all in? All of it. Don’t you just want to scream?”
Father Dooley stood rigid, as if every muscle in his body flexed and he’d lost his ability to move. “There are consequences, Aidan. You have to understand. Please. Think about everyone else involved. Think about all the other people.”
The Gospel of Winter Page 21
