The Devoted

by Blair Hurley

  In the parking lot, Jennifer was waiting for him. They stood wondering what to do. Paul looked around at the rear walls of the familiar dusty stores, their loading docks and dumpsters. The smell of dollar slices and laundromat in the air. Cold rain slipping down his collar.

  And then the back door was opening and the roshi was coming out with a trash bag, heading for the dumpsters. And Paul was running toward him. He grabbed the shoulders of the roshi’s robes and shook him. Under the robes, he wasn’t large; he was light, and seemed to rattle inside like a dry seedpod. Not much to him, after all.

  “I swear, I don’t know where she is,” he gasped. “I went looking for her the same way you did. Two days ago, I went to New York to bring her back. But she was gone.”

  Paul imagined what he might do. He could see, as he had just a few other times in his life, how violence could happen between two people, how it could be simple and easy. He could imagine his fist connecting with the man’s mouth, how the little bones might break in his own hand. The smell of blood filling the air. Bright clean splash of pain.

  “You’re wrong,” Paul said finally. The roshi seemed to be shrinking by the moment, disappearing into his voluminous robes. “You don’t know a thing about me. Or her.”

  He knew that this puffy-robed bastard had no idea where she was. Somehow this holy fool had lost his hold on her, the same way Paul had.

  “Do you?” the roshi panted.

  Paul released him slowly. He and Jennifer returned to her car and sat in the ticking silence for a long time. Jennifer’s hand on his arm was trembling.

  “I think I can still make the late train,” he said.

  His knees were shaking beneath him. There were things he needed to tell someone, things that only Nicole might understand. He wanted to pray, but it was hard when you weren’t used to doing it. Let the brothers and the sisters find each other, and deliver us— He did not finish the thought.

  NICOLE

  It was just in time for the evening rush at South Station. Nicole watched warmed-over food glow red under the heat lamps like coals in a dozen home fires. She walked quickly, looking all around herself for faces she knew, for her Master snapping at her heels.

  Here, everyone was waiting, like her. The parents with kids, letting them eat pizza because their train was delayed; the businessmen rapt with their phones; the grandparents with their carpetbags; the college students visiting home. The smell of salt, coffee, doughnuts, socks. In the corners, people sat on the floor with their hands out. Here, Nicole could press herself into the crush before the giant black flipboard, the board of God, the board of missed or kept appointments, of dinners sitting cold or still warm, of husbands and wives looking at their watches and then out the window. She could jostle among the others and be wrapped in people, surrounded by the warmth and pressure of their worries.

  But a public place like this wasn’t safe. She waited tensely for her commuter rail connection, watching a chess grandmaster sweep a circle of tables, claiming pawns and rooks from the boards of hopeful players. He did not even look up to see whom he was defeating.

  She could picture her Master striding through the crowds, hands hidden in his wide-sleeved robes. The people would part for him. He would not need to be violent; he need not even take her hand. He need only wait, and she would come to him, because he had her, he had her always. And if she paused to think about it, remember that all of her secrets and private shames were now his—she might lose her strength entirely.

  In Waban, the key to her childhood house wasn’t hiding under a flower pot or a stray brick. Of course, why would it still be there? Did she think that no time had passed since they’d pulled all those white sheets over the furniture, locked up and driven away with the promise to sell?

  She told herself, You have to be smart. You have to be wily. You have to survive, the way you used to know how to do.

  She stood on the old brick stoop for a little while, considering, while clouds gathered over her head.

  It took her until the rain started to gather the nerve to smash a window. Drenched instantly in the downpour, she chose one in the living room, hammered a pane out with a rock, then unlatched it and hefted it open. These damn warped windows. She had to use almost all her strength to heave and wrench it open, marshaling the last of it to crawl inside.

  She stayed on all fours on the floor for a long moment, listening warily to the sounds of the empty house, of rain drumming on the roof, pattering through the broken windowpane. She stayed still, dripping on the dusty hardwood floor.

  Besides a cleaner or real-estate agent or two, and occasional visits from Paul, she doubted anyone had been here in years. The house was perfectly preserved, still and empty except for its ghostly sheeted chairs and tables. She swept one sheet off the couch and wrapped it around herself to still her shivering.

  When she was a little drier and braver, she walked through the house, trailing the sheet behind her. Paul had taken some furniture, but you could fit only so much into a New York townhouse. She went through each room, trailing her fingers across the covered walnut backs of chairs. Here was the dark, empty dining room, the den with its white shelves bare of books, the kitchen with its dated pink tile. She crept upstairs, listening for the ghosts of sneakers pounding, the hair dryer going in the bathroom, her mother humming Que sera, sera . . .

  Her room was untouched. Here was the narrow little bed she had grown up in, with its headboard of dark glossy spindles; here was the Monet poster still stuck with art gum to the wall, the aging mirror going spotty in places. She looked at herself, wet and ragged and with sharp ravines carved beneath her eyes. What was that corner of something tucked behind the frame? She pulled gently, extracting a photograph of herself and Paul in bathing suits, standing by the shore of a lake she didn’t remember, squinting lazily into the sun.

  The house would keep her safe for a while.

  The power had been disconnected, and as night drew on she sat in the blackness, bundled in sheets. She had to make her plan. Perhaps she could get away on a technicality, some forgotten rule in the master-student handbook; or maybe bolder action was required.

  If the neighbors saw someone squatting in the house, they’d call Paul; then the jig would be up. So she lay low that night, sneaking out only once, near dawn, to get a burrito from the all-night place at the bottom of the hill. She saw that St. Augustine’s had finally been demolished; caution tape and a chain-link fence announced the future home of Evergreen Apartments. She remembered the priest at the Communion on the Common who’d said that sacred ground could not be unconsecrated. So what was it now?

  In her closet, behind the loose board, she found her trove of books on Buddhism stolen from the library. She spread them out on the carpet and flipped through the pages, reading her scribbled notes in the margins. She read urgently, looking for clues. What had she said to herself when she was young and enlightenment was just around the next block in the neighborhood? Here was her notebook of collected sayings of Western sages like Gary Snyder and Bertrand Russell, all those writers lusting after Shangri-La. She read a copied-out quotation from Peter Matthiessen: Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. . . . The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day . . . we become seekers.

  Next to it, she had written the living light!!!

  And here she had copied down a Thich Nhat Hanh quotation in her little girl’s handwriting as carefully as a catechism: Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth. She could see the budding runaway here, the hunger to make her life a testament to that daring search. How had she possibly found the courage to walk out of this bedroom, out that front door, get into a car, and drive away?

  In her parents’ room, an abandoned bed frame still leaned up on the wall. She opened the drawers of the built-in vanity one by one, finding a stack of old Cuisine magaz
ines. This was the magazine that had run her mother’s food column. She flipped through the pages, startled to find a photo of herself sneaking a faded strawberry out of a bowl even with her eyes. Far above, her father lowered a steaming plate. His eyes glowed blue, the only vibrant color remaining. She closed the magazine and shoved it back into its drawer.

  For a moment she thought, Sean could come. He could protect me. He could get me out of this. She imagined it briefly: how nice it would be to stand behind him while he delivered a stern, threatening pronouncement, pounding a fist into a palm, saying the things men could say to each other. If you ever come near her again . . .

  But she rejected the thought. What could he possibly do? He was not Jules, not her strongman for hire. Besides, her Master could not be intimidated by tough talk. He held her on a different leash. She listened to rain lashing the windows through the afternoon while she planned and fretted.

  She didn’t know how to arm herself.

  But she knew whom she needed to ask.

  In the fall of their last year together, she padded into the back hall for her private meeting with the Master, and the door to his meeting room was closed. It hadn’t been closed in years. She pressed her ear to the door and heard her Master speaking, delivering a lecture on emptiness. Who was in there, receiving his lesson? She couldn’t interrupt. She waited while the afternoon shadows crept across the floor, listening to the familiar hum of his voice, the beginning of the Heart Sutra chant. The body is emptiness and emptiness is the body. She chanted along, working her prayer beads in her fingers.

  The chant broke, and a girl’s high, bubbling laugh spilled under the door. Her Master answered it with a wry chuckle. There was someone in there who knew how to make him laugh. She worked the beads faster and faster. Her pulse, throbbing in her ears, set the time. It felt like she was a kid again, listening in dark hallways while her parents fought about things she didn’t understand.

  The door opened and Helen, one of the newer girls, stepped out. “Oh. It’s Nicole, right? Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  She scrambled up; her foot was asleep, and she almost fell over. “No problem, I was just passing—” They both knew how long the private meeting had gone on. Whatever she planned to say was foolish.

  “He’s all yours,” Helen said, and smiled a narrow cat’s-eye smile, and tripped off down the hall, her skinny legs knocking together in their ankle boots, every detail of her walk, the float of her hair, the young slump of her posture suddenly exact in Nicole’s vision.

  “Ah, Nicole.” Her Master was in the doorframe, a private amusement still on his lips. “We’ll have to be brief today.”

  That was when she first recognized that all the patience in the world might not be enough to keep his attention. That all the spiritual purity of their relationship might just boil down to desire and need.

  Her escape plans might have begun then. But he wasn’t about to let her go so easily, she saw now. Love was about possession. What a man really wanted was to know that you were his, and for you to surrender, gladly, to that ownership. He’d shaped her like clay, and she’d let him; there was so little left that wasn’t his.

  In the afternoon, she walked to the station and caught a train into the city. She got off near Boston University and walked down the quiet back streets of student housing. Each house looked the same, in equal states of neglect. She wasn’t sure if she would remember which was the right one. But no—there was the house with the sagging deck, a ribbon of caution tape strung haphazardly across the railing. She stilled a deep trembling in her legs and picked her way up the muddy lawn, knocking on the door.

  A young man answered. She didn’t remember his face; students moved through these houses so swiftly. Could he have been at the Christmas party? “I’m looking for Helen,” she said firmly.

  He turned his head to yell, but she was already coming down the stairs. Helen. She was in a hoodie and jeans, her face unwashed and sleepy, her hair drawn into an oily ponytail. But still sharp-featured and lovely. Deadly. “This is a surprise,” she said.

  Nicole drew a deep breath. “I need your help.”

  Helen belted a coat and they walked slowly around the block, hands in their pockets. “I thought you’d left,” Helen said.

  “I did.”

  “Our zazen isn’t the same without you,” Helen said. She worked at the sash of her coat. “I hope you haven’t stopped practicing. If you started your own Zendo, I know people would come.”

  “I need to know what happened after I left. I need to know what he thinks.”

  “After you left? Things got weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  She tucked a long ribbon of hair behind her ear. “He’s crazy about you. He doesn’t really have any interest in anything else. He was asking everyone if they had a number for you. I think he finally got it from Buffy. Then he started telling me things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “About his former lives, he claimed. He said that in another life, he had been a warrior and killed people. And now he had a karmic debt he had to repay in this life, and he had to save lives and protect them from harm. He got very angry and said, Am I not tending to the sick? All of you, you’re all sick. You’d die without me.” Helen shivered. “He really thinks that. He thinks that losing you would—well, he thinks you’d die. But he also said that without you, his teaching was meaningless. You were the one he was going to perfect. Listen, the only secret I can give you is, don’t go see him, Nicole. Just don’t. Walk away.”

  Nicole stiffened, trying to hide the cold that had slid through her body, seemed to lie right next to her bones. “What are you afraid will happen?” She didn’t know if Helen could be trusted.

  The girl took her hand. Helen, she saw, did not want to be cruel, had only been trying it on as something that grown-up women did, and this small thing, this hand in hers, this urgent rush of her voice in Nicole’s ear, was unexpectedly touching. “I’m afraid that if you see him, you won’t be able to control yourself. I don’t know. I’m afraid he’ll say one word and you’ll fall in line.”

  She swallowed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I will.”

  “Stay the night here and you’ll be safe.”

  Helen was asking her not to go, trying to protect her the same way Paul would if she let him. Boston traffic fled by. College students were waking up in the late afternoon, planning their nightly bar crawls, their frattish parties. Nicole remembered stepping out her door at this time as a teenager, the sun going, all the danger, the excitement, the promise in the air. She knew she was going to go to him. Nothing could prevent it now.

  Helen could see that, too. “Nicole, if you’re walking down the road and you see the Buddha—”

  “Kill the Buddha. I know.” She pressed Helen’s small white hands in her own. Then she walked away without looking back. One more Irish good-bye, for luck.

  Dear Sean,

  When the Buddha is at the end of his life, he lies down in a wooded grove and rests his head on his hand. He is surrounded by an army of grief-stricken monks. Closest of all is Ananda, the monk with the eidetic memory, the one who knows all the stories and will recite them for others. That is why all the Buddhist Scripture begins with the phrase “Thus have I heard.” Ananda has been with the Buddha for his entire adult life. He has followed him on every journey, has faithfully soaked up every word. And now he weeps.

  “It’s okay, Ananda,” the Buddha tells him. “It’s okay. Don’t cry.” Even he cannot prevent the journey that happens next. But for all their teaching, the parting doesn’t get any easier. Ananda knows all of the stories, and when you know them all, you can’t help but fall in love.

  I know you aren’t reading this letter because I’m not sending it. I haven’t sent any of them. But I write you anyway, telling you the story. I tell and tell and tell.

  Do you remember when you held me in your arms and asked me to stay? And I couldn’t?

  Will you forgive me for ne
eding to go?

  Will you think about the way my hand fits inside your hand like two seashells? Or maybe you’ll think about how afraid I was when we were walking on that steep, rocky jetty by the ocean. I wasn’t afraid of falling. I was afraid when I looked at you with the wind whipping your hair. I saw how easily my happiness could become wrapped up in yours. You knew I was afraid and held my arm but you didn’t know why.

  HOME

  Through the window of the Peaceful Healing Zen Center, Nicole could see the afternoon class wrapping up; the students were coming out of their meditation as from ether, blinking and dreamy. She could see Buffy, lean and fit in her tracksuit, checking her pulse; George and Frances, yawning in sync.

  Amy with the heavy black mascara and the dry, amused smile, Amy with cancer, was no longer there.

  At the front of the room, the Master raised his hands and spoke. Nicole watched his lips move without sound. At any moment he could glance out the window and see her staring in. The danger thrilled her.

  She stepped away before anyone recognized her, but turned back at the corner to watch them leave. They moved in a block along the sidewalk at first, laughing and talking animatedly. The first feeling after zazen was elation: you were liberated, giddy, overflowing with words. Then you got quiet. She watched the group break apart, students heading for their cars. If the session was bad, you walked with your face blank, you pawed restlessly at your phone as you sat in traffic. At home you picked a fight with your lover, couldn’t bear folding laundry, stared at TV without seeing until bed. You were a failure, Buddhism was nonsense, you had better ways to waste your time.

  But if the session was good—

  Then you kept blinking in the late afternoon light and stumbling a bit, like you’d just come out of a movie theater. Colors hurt and sounds stroked your skin. You smelled onions frying at the restaurant next door and felt hungry for them as though you had discovered hunger. Crossing the bridge, you paused and watched the river glitter in the sunset and the little boats scudding near the horizon, and you kept having to pull yourself back in, because you seemed to be diffusing outward, ready to join up with the jumping atoms all around you, bleeding out into the bay.