The Paper Shepherd

by Olivia Landis

  “Maybe,” Renee said, biting the corner of her mouth nervously. “But, the next day, he went back to school to interview for the seminary.”

  “A Catholic seminary?” Pat asked. Renee nodded. She didn’t have to explain to him, a former Catholic himself, this meant he was destined for a life of celibacy, a life without her.

  “What did you do?” he asked. Renee stared off into empty space.

  “I told him I never wanted to see him again,” she related calmly. “I told him, if he ever came back I would kill him. The thing is, I didn’t really mean it. I just wanted him to go away and give me a chance to think things over. But, he wouldn’t leave. He insisted we talk about it all right then.”

  “Why was it so important to you that he leave?” Pat asked. Renee’s eyes darted around the room.

  “I knew I was going to start crying,” she said quietly. “I didn’t want him to see me cry. He’s never seen me cry, not for years.”

  “You mean, you never cry about anything?”

  “Oh, goodness, no,” Renee responded. “I cry about everything. I cry when I get a bad grade, or when kids pick on me. I even cry at greeting card commercials. I fall apart when I see cute puppies in sit coms. I just don’t cry in front of him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when I was nine, some kids were picking on me. He told me not to cry about it. He promised he’d take care of me. I guess I always figured if he saw me crying, he’d think I was ungrateful and he wouldn’t be my friend anymore.” Renee straightened up and adjusted her robe. Then she cocked her head to the side. “You know, sitting in a psychiatric ward telling that to a doctor, that sounds really stupid,” she admitted. “But, I just kind of thought that since I was nine. You don’t ever go back and change the things you used to think when you were nine unless someone gives you a good reason.” She crossed her arms and started chewing on her thumb nail, her face devoid of any emotion. “I threatened to kill my best friend because I was too embarrassed to let him see how weak I am.” She slowly shook her head. “I guess that’s why Pride is one of the seven deadly sins.” Pat pondered this in silence.

  “And, you haven’t seen him since?” he asked finally. Renee seemed surprised by this sudden shift to the present.

  “Well, I haven’t… I mean. Well, no. I hadn’t,” she said.

  “Until…”

  “Until a week ago,” she confessed. “Somehow he found out I was working in a strip club. He came all the way from Ohio to confront me about it. He said I was a sinner and that I was tempting other people to sin.” Bastard, Pat thought. Who is he to judge? There’s a man I’d like to meet in the desert with an M16.

  “He had no right to do that to you, Ms. Alfred,” Pat said sympathetically.

  “Of course, he did,” Renee said. “I know it’s not a great line of work. But, I was running out of money. I tried everything else. I tried other jobs. I applied for loans. The loan advisor at school laughed at me. She was so rude. She said I had too much money to get a student loan. Can you believe that? Me, too much money. I don’t have anything as collateral for a regular loan. I have an educational account my mom set up for me… It is weird. There are so many restrictions on it and penalties if I try to use it. The lady at the tuition office said she had never seen one so convoluted. She said it looked like it was set up with the intention of making me drop out of college.”

  “Ms. Alfred,” Pat said calmly. “I am not judging your decision to work as a dancer. Okay? I promise you, you don’t need to feel ashamed in front of me. Why don’t you just tell me what happened next?”

  “I told him to leave and he did. No commotion. But I felt so ashamed. I couldn’t dance anymore. I suddenly had stage fright. One of the girls gave me a pill. She told me it was Xanax. I didn’t want to take anything illegal. I mean, I know it is illegal to take a prescription drug if it isn’t yours, but I didn’t want to take anything really illegal. Well, she lied to me. She thought it was Ecstasy. Only, it wasn’t ecstasy.” In fact, Pat knew from the blood tests they had run a few days earlier, it had been some combination of PCP, LSD, and amphetamines. She began hallucinating within a few minutes of taking it. “The rest you probably know better than I do.”

  “It’s quite a journey you’ve taken, Tiar,” Pat said. “Thank you for sharing it with me.” Renee’s head tilted further to the side.

  “What did you say?” Pat looked surprised.

  “That’s quite a journey—quite a story, I mean.”

  “After that.”

  “Thank you?”

  “How is it you can pronounce my name?” the girl interrupted.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Alfred...”

  “No, please, call me by my first name. Just explain to me how you can pronounce it. No one says it right, ever. Not since I left Jordan,” she explained, thinking of all the mispronunciations she had heard since moving back to the United States. She thought of the greater number of people, even friends, who didn’t even try to pronounce it. “I’d almost forgotten what it was supposed to sound like. Something about the R. Like, you say it without really saying it.”

  “I used to be an Arabic translator for the Army,” Pat said modestly, knowing how much trouble he would be in if Dr. Rogers found out he was even talking to this patient, let alone disclosing something about himself.

  “Why did you quit?” Renee asked.

  “It’s really not worth discussing,” Pat said, trying to defuse the conversation.

  “But, you have to be here until five and your pager still hasn’t gone off,” Renee said.

  “Well, frankly, if you must know… I quit because I hate sand,” Pat said flippantly. Renee smiled.

  “Well, that was smart,” Renee said sarcastically. “Why didn’t you learn Russian or something?”

  “Well, I don’t really like snow either,” Pat joked. “And plus, you don’t realize sand sucks so much when it’s between your toes at the beach. But when it’s in your nose, and your lungs and your food, it’s another story.”

  “Why...”

  “Hey, I’m asking the questions here,” Pat interrupted, trying to sound casual.

  “Just one more,” Renee begged. “Why did you join the army?” Pat shrugged.

  “I had just finished college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life,” Pat said. “I knew whatever I was going to do required more school. So, I figured the army would be one way to get money to pay for it. I would have rather had your job, to be honest, but I don’t have the legs for it. Plus, I could never get the tassels to spin in opposite directions.” Renee cracked up.

  “It’s good to see you can actually smile, Tiar,” Pat said. “Dr. Matthew’s and I had a bet going that you couldn’t.”

  “Well, the last time I laughed this much in a hospital, one of my friends got an organ ripped out.” Pat’s face got suddenly serious as he tried not to let his anger show. It just became apparent to him why Tiar seemed so familiar to him. It just became obvious to him why she called nausea medication “anti-emetic”, the medical term. The uncle she had mentioned living with was a doctor. She read medical journals as a teenager.

  “The phone number you game me was disconnected,” he said flatly. Renee looked up at him, at first mystified.

  “What?”

  “I’ve heard of girls giving out fake numbers before, but you could at least have told me your real name, Renee.” Renee shook her head, feeling very stupid for not recognizing him earlier. He had not lost a foot of hair since she had seen him last. In fact, he looked nearly identical with the exception of wearing a suit instead of scrubs. He was even working in the same hospital.

  “Renee is my name. Or, it was... I mean, that’s what I’ve gone by since I got here. I wasn’t kidding when I said no one could say my real first name correctly. Anyway, speaking of real names, you called yourself Joe.”

  “Dr. Fitzwater called me Joe,” Pat corrected. “Usually he called me ‘GI Joe.’ He thought it was really clever because...
”

  “You were in the Army,” Renee finished. They sat in glum silence for what seemed an immeasurably long time. “Just for the record, my phone number wasn’t disconnected when I gave it to you,” she said evenly. “I couldn’t afford to pay my bills after I gave Micah money for the appendectomy.”

  “It takes months for them to cut you off after you stop paying your bills,” Pat objected.

  “Not if you cancel ahead of time,” Renee corrected.

  “Who does that?” Pat asked indignantly.

  “You have to,” Renee insisted. “If you don’t cancel and you know you can’t pay, it’s stealing.” Pat nervously clicked his pen. It was difficult to take the moral high ground with someone who wouldn’t accept a month of free phone service as an oversight.

  “You paid Micah’s hospital bills?” he asked finally. Like so many other things about this patient, her generosity was perplexing considering her self described monetary situation. Renee nodded.

  “I was afraid she’d drop out of school to pay it.”

  “She didn’t have health insurance through school?” Pat asked.

  “She was only part time. They don’t have the same health insurance the full time kids have,” Renee noted. “I was going to have her pay me back. But, after the butchering Dr. Fitzwater made of her abdomen, she had too many scars to go back to work. I just didn’t have the heart to ask her for the money, considering I took her job.”

  “She was a dancer too?” Renee nodded again.

  “For what it’s worth, I was hoping you’d call me back,” she said. “But, I guess it worked out for the best, right? It couldn’t be good for your professional career being associated with some crazy girl who can’t go a year without ending up in a loony bin.” Pat raised his eye brows momentarily, all the anger out of his face.

  “So, where do we go from here?” Renee asked finally.

  “I try to get you out of here,” Pat said. “Without getting myself kicked out of medical school.”

  42

  Jay Holstead looked out his car window at the moonlight shimmering off a new blanket of white snow. He wrapped his fingers around the small box in his pocket. It was Christmas eve and he was on the rural highway between his parents’ house in Hectortown to Jen’s father’s lake house. He and Jen were about to go to their second Christmas celebration. The third would be at Jen’s mother’s house tomorrow. It would be a tiring holiday to cap off a tiring semester. Jay was now a junior at a small liberal arts school two hours away from his home in Hectortown. He had a rigorous schedule of classes, trying to finish a double major in communications and political science. His classes were not nearly as grueling as driving home every weekend to see Jen. The summer before her senior year of high school, he and Jen had been inseparable. In the fall, they made a mutual agreement that he would come home from college once a month to see her but they were both free to see other people. Oddly, neither of them took this opportunity, nor were either of them tempted to. By his spring semester of freshmen year, without even discussing it, Jay doubled his trips home. Now that Jen was studying for her education certification at the local SUNY school, he made the two hour trip every weekend. It was quickly becoming apparent to him he didn’t want to live without her, not even for a day.

  When Jay and Jen first met, Jay initially thought Jen was attractive but superficial. He quickly came to understand that her lack of intellectual sophistication was matched by equally extreme honesty. Her bubbly mind could not dictate any limits her heart would follow which made her seem childish at times. She never stopped sobbing and reciting over the dialogue in movies she treasured. She jumped to absurd conclusions and was mobilized instantly into action like during her senior year when she wanted to organize a boycott of a restaurant she thought gave her best friend a serious case of food poisoning. Her heart was genuine. She was driven, more than anything else, by a firm belief that everyone deserved to be happy.

  Jay glanced over at Jen now, smiling peacefully to herself, no idea the surprise that awaited her when they got to her father’s house. As he looked away, he felt a pang of guilt in his stomach. He was sure Jen would accept his marriage proposal. He was sure that, despite not having spoken for eighteen months, Jen would invite Tiar Alfred to the wedding and maybe ask her to be in the wedding party. Jay could not think about Jen’s friend now without some trepidation. He’d been keeping a horrible secret from the woman he loved, his future bride. He told himself that it was not his business to reveal what he knew, that chivalry necessitated his silence. If he had gone to the Fox Tail himself, he would have to tell Jen. But he hadn’t been there that night when Prentice, Matt, and three of their friends took a road trip to Brighton and made their disquieting discovery. So, Jay reasoned. To me, it’s really just a rumor. Just gossip. I don’t get involved with gossip. This logic was little comfort as he reflected how miserable the discovery would make Jen and how desperate “Ti” must feel to resort to such employment. Jay did not know how long he could plead ignorance of the unpleasant truth. Nor did he know how he would answer if, knowing the truth, Jen asked that her old best friend be in her bridal party regardless.

  Speaking of bridal parties, Jay thought as he drove on, trying to distract himself. Who am I going to have as my best man? Jay had always assumed he would ask one of his friends from his old school in Annandale to be his best man. However, he had not seen or kept up with any of them since high school. When he thought what a Best Man was truly supposed to be, Jay knew exactly who he wanted to ask. He wanted to ask Max Franklin. In truth, they didn’t know each other that well. Jay knew Max not through the things he said or the things he did, but by the leavening effect he seemed to have on everyone else while he was around. He didn’t judge. He didn’t moralize. Despite that, or because of it, people just seemed that much more motivated to be better people when he was around, to examine their own actions and correct what was lacking. Without doubt, when Jay thought of someone he could count on to protect the things he valued most in life, he thought of Max Franklin. The only problem was, Jay thought asking Max to be his best man might be cruel, as though he would be gloating about something he could have and Max never could—a wife. The fact that this was his only hesitation made Jay feel doubly bad for discriminating against Max because of his choice in vocation. Still, Jay reasoned, he would probably just ask his older brother. That will keep mom happy, he relented. As long as Max was there at the wedding, it would all turn out okay.

  Max lay on his bed wondering why, since this morning, it had become slightly unsteady. He was glad that, as usual, he had walked to Buck’s instead of driving. In the seminary now, his behavior outside of class was monitored fairly closely and drinking was extremely limited. Max had lost any tolerance he had built up for alcohol. After three beers with Prentice this evening, he was feeling off balance. He walked home from the bar hoping his lack of surefootedness would be attributed by passers by to the ice accumulated on the side walks. On arriving at his parents’ empty house, he stumbled up stairs and considered briefly playing a few tunes on his guitar before flopping into bed. But his fingers and his soul would not cooperate on a mood or a song and Max lay on his bed while downstairs a mirthless Christmas tree twinkled, it’s sparse decorations unenthusiastically applied. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Meditatively, he traced the path he had made through the cemetery earlier that day. He could almost feel the cold wind on his face and the snow crunch underfoot as he walked alone between the silent head stones. They gray-white sky was featureless overhead as he climbed a hill up to a single stone in a clearing. Deeply engraved into the face of the granite was a single word. Alfred. Lying in bed now, his fingers copied the motion of picking up a handful of dirt and sprinkling it over the hole below. He would bury her again, as he did every night.

  Back in early September when Tony had suggested that Max use guided meditation to neutralize Tiar’s image to himself, Max had thrown himself into the project with his usual dedication and fervor. I
t had nearly ruined his semester as he spent the first month of it distracted and agitated in class, his mind always elsewhere, trying to use reason to overcome his feelings of loss. But, after weeks of trying, it was clear that it wouldn’t work. Max simply couldn’t think of his little bird in any man’s arms without feeling hatred, jealousy, and despair. She was better than all of them, too good for any man on earth, including himself. She deserved someone who could truly appreciate her, who could truly understand her. Max couldn’t think of anyone worthy of Renee except Jesus, their Heavenly Savior. So, he sent Renee off to Jesus, off to Heaven. The first few weeks, he would envision her as she had been at age fifteen, her beautiful peaceful body dressed in her confirmation dress, a clutch of white Cala lilies in her cold, porcelain white hands. She was not the ghoul he had last seen at Brighton, this Jezebel well versed in how to squeeze every penny out of the world, how to survive on ugliness and sin, how to use the sin of others for her own benefit. He imagined her pure, chaste, unspoiled—as she was before he ever touched her as he never should have. Every night he killed her. Every night he buried her. Every night he sent her to the loving arms of their Eternal Brother, Savior, and Lord. At first, Max had to run through an entire wake and a funeral. He would cry curled up in his twin bed in his dorm room for an hour before he fell asleep. By now, she wasn’t even in his dreams anymore, his little bird. The coffin began and ended closed and already lowered into the ground. He merely had to make the walk from the gates of the cemetery and up the short hill before drifting into the oblivion of peaceful slumber. He slept under a blanket of certainty, the sleep of a man who has left no loose ends in his life. He awoke clear headed. He could focus with the precision of a man who has but one destiny awaiting him. He excelled at school once again.

  Jack Franklin sat in his patrol car listening to a football game on the radio and hoped Eleanor was having fun at the hospital Christmas party she was attending. It was the first one she had been to for twenty years, since the last time he had to work on Christmas eve. His rookie years long since over, he had been able to get Christmas eve and Christmas day off for many years. This year, at nearly the last minute, he switched this shift with a younger colleague, a man who had a new born at home, his first Christmas eve as a father. Jack reflected how his own Christmas used to stretch out from the earliest Mass on Christmas eve through the opening of presents and singing of carols Christmas morning until late on the twenty sixth when his family would decorate the ginger bread Eleanor had slaved over the day before. It would now be compacted between the latest of all masses on Christmas day until roughly four hours later when Eleanor drove with a church group to a soup kitchen a few towns away to serve dinner to the less fortunate of the county. Their holiday would be mercifully brief.