by Karen Hall
One comedian was dressed like the Grim Reaper and carried a handmade sign that said BURN, BABY, BURN, with a lightning bolt through it and a happy face in the corner. By the time Jack somehow made it to his car and got out of there (after almost coldcocking a reporter who wouldn’t stop shoving a microphone in his face), he’d been in such agony, he couldn’t think about anything but finding a bar and getting drunk as fast as he could.
Maybe if he hadn’t been so upset by the last-minute knowledge that Tallen might have saved himself, but chose not to . . . Maybe if he’d been mentally prepared for the scene in the parking lot . . . Maybe if the jerk in the bar had shot his mouth off before Jack had time to get so drunk . . . Maybe if even one element of it had happened differently . . . he might be back at the hotel right now, asleep in Randa’s arms.
But it did happen.
Ever since that night, he’d asked himself how much difference there was between his deed and Tallen’s. The difference was one of degree and circumstance. Fundamentally, they were the same. Jack had wanted to kill the guy. Had tried to. Someone had stopped him; no one had stopped Tallen. Jack was alive and free because a couple of redneck truck drivers had pried him off his victim. But what was the difference between what was in his heart and what was in Tallen’s?
Precious little.
Could he live the rest of his life without acting on it again? He’d fought it all these years with rigid control, convinced that the only way to keep from doing something horrible was to keep from doing anything. Cathy had been right; he did sit on a volcano of rage, all the time. What would happen if his mind slipped into someplace where he wasn’t aware of the danger?
You know what would happen.
I don’t know for sure.
If Cam couldn’t escape it, what makes you think you can?
Jesus. Cam. He’d almost forgotten. When Randa had told him about Cam and the liquor store, he’d immediately written it off as a case of mistaken identity and “his brother was a criminal so he must be, too.” But what if it wasn’t? What if Cam, who didn’t even cheat on his income taxes, really did kill someone? Was it possible?
Look at the facts. Your father probably killed Ethan. He could have killed other people you don’t know about, given all the time he spent away from the house. Tallen went nuts and killed five people. Now Cam’s friends say he went nuts, the cops say he killed someone. What does logic say will happen next?
It was true. Everyone in his family went insane, sooner or later. The men went insane and killed people. Whether it made sense or not, it was undeniably the pattern.
Up ahead, through the heavy morning fog, he saw the dark stairwell of the MARTA entrance, beckoning him underground. He walked faster, eager to accept the offer. He thought of Randa waking up in the hotel room to find him gone. He hoped she’d be too angry to be hurt. He couldn’t stand the thought of causing her pain. Still, it was better than what he might cause her if he stayed.
He would return to his life, just the way it was. Working, eating, sleeping, reading. No human contact. A danger to no one but himself, and free from any ridiculous hope for the future.
You can’t hide from it forever.
No, probably not. But he’d hide as long as he could. And if he took anyone down with him in the end, it wasn’t going to be Randa.
If you had the guts to kill yourself, you wouldn’t have to worry about taking anyone down with you.
It was true. He wasn’t sure whether it was because he was gutless (yes, you chickenshit coward) or just that he wasn’t convinced it was the only answer.
When will you be convinced? When you’re standing next to a corpse?
Shut up! Just shut the hell up! I need time to think.
You mean rationalize.
He reached the stairs and descended, stopping at a machine to buy a token. In his coat and tie, he blended in easily among the morning commuters. He could be any one of them—an accountant, a salesman, a computer programmer—on his way to the same world as everyone else.
But you’re not one of them.
No, he wasn’t. He knew that much. He just wasn’t sure how far it went in the other direction.
Don’t kid yourself. You know.
For a fleeting moment, the voice in his head was Randa’s. He felt her hand on his face, heard her whispering, “It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. It would never be okay.
The train was coming. He could hear the wind whistling through the tunnel. It slid into view and squealed to a halt. The doors hissed open and Jack climbed on board, flowing with the sea of humanity. He sat and waited for the train to move. Away from her.
“The doors are about to close . . .”
The metallic warning evaporated into the air above the indifferent commuters; the doors closed and the train pulled out.
Jack stared blankly at the people surrounding him. The fact that the train was packed was a mocking irony—a cruel wink from a vindictive God. Wherever Jack was headed, he was going alone.
BOOK TWO
Look around: there is someone else, always someone else.
What he breathes is your suffocation,
what he eats is your hunger.
Dying, he takes with him the purest half of your own death.
—Rosario Castellanos, from “The Other”
THE OTHER
ONE
“Father, can I get you a cup of coffee?”
Michael shook his head. “No, thank you.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” He offered the best smile he could muster. The plump storm-trooper-with-a-heart-of-gold nurse had been offering him coffee about every thirty minutes. He almost never wore the collar for exactly this reason: it made people so solicitous he wanted to strangle them. He’d thought about accepting the coffee just to make her stop asking, but he really didn’t want it, and she seemed to be the type who would check to see if he was drinking it and give him grief if he wasn’t. She gave up easily this time and headed back to her station. He breathed a small sigh of relief. All he wanted was to be left alone with his thoughts.
He looked at the clock. His grandfather had been in the operating room for two and a half hours now. The doctor had said it would be between five and eight. Michael wondered how it could take so long just to remove one organ. The doctor had explained it all in a vocabulary that meant nothing to Michael, along with:
“The operative death percentage is high. For someone your grandfather’s age, as high as thirty percent. And you should keep in mind, it’s only a palliative procedure, to prolong life and reduce pain. My best educated guess is that it would give him a couple more months.”
That day the words had been horrifying. Today, a couple of months seemed like an extra lifetime.
Vincent was the only “parent” Michael had ever known. His mother and father had died when he was a toddler, and Vincent had raised him until he’d left home to join the Jesuits. After that, Vincent had been an advisor, a mentor, a friend. Michael couldn’t imagine his life without Vincent in it. He tried not to. The reality of it would be here soon enough.
“How about a homemade honey bun?” She was back. He smiled again and shook his head.
“I don’t think so.”
“You need to eat something. You don’t have a bit of color in your face.”
“I don’t think it’s from hunger.”
She sat down in the chair next to him. “How about a hug from a fat old lady?” She put her arms around him without waiting for a reply. She smelled like a mixture of roses and cheap hand cream. She pulled herself away and looked at him. The pain in her eyes was not forced; it touched him.
“My father was a Methodist minister,” she said. “I used to think, everyone cries on his shoulder, but whose does he cry on?”
Michael could only nod.
“Let me know if you change your mind about the honey bun.”
“I will,” he said through a tight throat. She smiled and was gone
. He stood and made his way down the stark hospital corridor. He couldn’t stand another minute of fluorescent light.
The tiny chapel was dimly lit, which in and of itself was a great relief. He sat in the back pew. There was no place to kneel, as most of the chapel’s visitors were Protestant, but this was his only option. He sat for a while and stared at the cross on the stained-glass window above the altar, wondering what to pray for. For Vincent to survive the operation? Why? To die a slow and torturous death, spending his last days helpless and in unimaginable pain? For Vincent to die now and be spared all that? For God’s will? Wouldn’t that happen anyway?
For the strength to handle whatever lies ahead.
That was it. All he could really hope for.
And considerably more than I deserve.
All day he’d been thinking about something he and Vincent used to do—an old routine, from as far back as he could remember. Every Friday, as soon as they sat down to dinner, Vincent would announce the date, and then ask Michael, “Where are you today?” Michael would give an assessment, recounting the highlights of the week and working them into the context of his life. Vincent would never comment, except for an occasional nod or smile. Scrutiny was unnecessary. The point was to make Michael take a focused look at the big picture. After he’d moved away from home, Michael had continued the practice mentally, by force of habit. For a long time, it had been a comfort—a psychological deep breath. Lately, it seemed more like a type of self-inflicted torture.
How would he answer that question, if Vincent were to ask him today?
I’m a parish priest—the last thing I ever wanted to be—in rural Georgia—the last place I ever wanted to be—because I was stupid enough to pick a fight with my provincial and a vindictive bishop. And I’m mourning things you don’t even know about.
It had been a year of losses. Vincent would be the greatest loss by far, but there were a slew of close seconds. New York was a huge loss, encompassing many smaller ones. He missed everything about the city—even the things he hadn’t particularly liked: the crowds; the subway; the ill-tempered cab drivers. Waking every morning to the familiar sound of the Con Ed “Dig We Must” jackhammers. He missed his work, his friends, and the feeling of having a purpose.
The intensity with which Michael had loved New York was paralleled by the intensity with which he hated Barton, Georgia. He hated the isolation—both the isolation of being the only priest in a tiny parish, and the isolation of being an hour’s drive from a decent bookstore. He didn’t like the work at all. In fact, it was hard to think of what he did as work: endless—and pointless—committee meetings. Listening for hours on end to people confessing to the exact number of damns and hells they’d uttered that week. And then there was the wide assortment of for-this-I-took-Advanced-Greek paperwork that should have been handled by the staff that the parish couldn’t afford. Most of his time this week had been eaten up by a plumbing problem, in the form of a good ol’ boy in bib overalls who wanted $3,500 to hook the rectory’s septic tank up to the county sewer line. Inflamed by Michael’s uncalled-for comment (“That sounds a little steep”), Plumber Jim-Bob had accused Michael of trying to “Jew” him down. Delivered with the appropriate “that ain’t how we do things ’round here” tone, and followed by:
“Maybe y’all can find a Catholic plumber in this county who’ll do the job for free.”
(A snort)
“Hell, if y’all find a Catholic plumber in this county, I’ll do the job for free.”
Even when he managed to block out the surroundings, it was impossible to ignore the fact that there was no one to talk to, no one to have dinner with, no one who might drop by unannounced with an existential crisis and a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch.
Supposedly this torment was only going to last for another month, but he didn’t have a lot of hope that the next assignment would be any better. The powers that be were just keeping him quiet temporarily until they could find a way to keep him quiet permanently. They knew Michael wasn’t going to make a career out of one flaky issue, but he had broken their trust. As one auxiliary bishop had put it, “The last thing we need right now is a loose cannon Jesuit with a fan club.”
And then there was Tess. The fact that she wasn’t first on his list of losses only proved how brutal the list was. With the clarity of hindsight, he knew now he should never have agreed to work with her. He’d told himself it would be okay because it was a short-term assignment. When the assignment had turned into a friendship, he’d ignored the warning voice in the back of his head in favor of the voice in the foreground—the one that said “nothing will happen.” The one that kept saying “nothing will happen” until the morning he woke up in her bed.
When inclined to give himself a break, he remembered there was no coincidence in the timing that connected his fall off the celibacy wagon to the aftermath of the article. The first night he’d stayed at Tess’s apartment was the night he’d found out he was being sent to Deep-in-the-Sticks, Georgia.
His last days in New York had not been pleasant. He and Tess had bickered incessantly. She couldn’t understand why he felt so guilty about his relationship with her, since he’d told her that he thought celibacy was a stupid and antiquated concept. And the big one: Why couldn’t Michael leave the priesthood so they could be together? Couldn’t he accomplish anything he wanted just as easily in a secular context? Michael hadn’t done a very good job of explaining it to her. These weren’t things he could explain on some logical level. He didn’t understand them very well himself.
“You know what it is, Michael? You just have zero interest in living in the real world.”
“Mine is as real as yours. In fact, mine is more real than yours.”
“Well, I’m not allowed on your lofty plane, so how is this going to work?”
When he’d left for Georgia, they’d agreed to three months with no contact, to give him some time and space in which to make a decision. Since then, he’d talked to her only once. He’d called her when Vincent was diagnosed. After the initial awkwardness, she’d been sympathetic and concerned about him. She offered to come down for a few days, but he told her it wasn’t a good idea. It had taken every ounce of willpower he possessed.
He’d been tempted to tell Vincent about Tess, but he’d decided against it. Vincent considered his grandson the Jesuit to be the greatest accomplishment of his life. In fact, no matter what he decided, Michael knew he could never resign while Vincent was still alive. He’d been coasting on that rationalization for months now, but it wouldn’t be available much longer.
God, You know where I am. Please help.
He sighed from somewhere deeper than bone marrow, and willed himself to his feet, to return to the waiting room.
He’d begun to have second thoughts about coffee and a honey bun, but the nurse wasn’t at her station. He looked down the hallway and saw her in front of the door to the operating room, talking to someone . . . the doctor . . . why was the doctor in the hallway, when the operation wasn’t supposed to be over until . . .
Oh, God, no . . . not yet.
The doctor looked up and saw him . . . said something to the nurse. She looked at him, too, and the look on her face told him everything. He nodded to them, slightly; reached into his pocket for the vial of holy oil he’d brought with him, just in case. He felt himself shift into autopilot. Things to do. Rituals to hide behind.
It was early afternoon by the time he was done with all the hospital paperwork and necessary phone calls. He’d gone through it in a daze. Even though he’d known the odds, it had never really hit him he might be doing all this today. By the time everything was wrapped up, the doctors and nurses had moved on to other priorities. He left the hospital alone, unceremoniously.
He was already in the parking lot when he heard the nurse behind him.
“Father Kinney!”
He stopped, turned to her. She was hurrying toward him with an envelope in her hand. Surely there weren’t more paper
s to sign.
“I promised your grandfather I’d give you this if . . . if he didn’t make it . . .”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t open it.”
He took the envelope and thanked her, then accepted her condolences one last time. He waited until she was gone and he was encased in the relative privacy of his car before he opened the envelope. There was no paper, but something solid at the bottom. He turned it over and a microcassette player spilled out. No note, so he assumed the tape inside would explain itself.
So typical of Vincent. He couldn’t leave a note or, God forbid, have an actual conversation. Michael knew what the tape was: Vincent’s assurance that he’d have the last word. A few last pearls of wisdom. Advice. Admonitions (for things it was probably too late to avoid). Michael put the recorder back in the envelope and laid it on the passenger seat. He wasn’t about to listen to it right now. The drive to Vincent’s house already felt like an insurmountable task.
Vincent still owned the house where Michael had grown up. Vincent had designed it himself, in 1945—a year or two before he became the most sought-after architect in the city. He had designed almost a third of the houses in their neighborhood, Branwyn Park, a suburb due north of downtown Atlanta. By now Vincent had restored most of the houses he hadn’t built. In fact, anyone who lived in Branwyn Park and had not had their house restored by Vincent Kinney was announcing the fact that they couldn’t afford it—not the kind of announcement people who lived in Branwyn Park liked to make. Vincent had also designed several of the buildings prominent on the downtown skyline, a couple of churches, and a gorgeous retreat center in the north Georgia mountains. His name was well-known and highly respected in the state, the region, and even the country, among people who knew anything about architecture.
Vincent’s style was clean-lined and no-nonsense. His buildings were an eclectic mix, though all classically inspired. They were variations of his basic prototype, a pared-down Victorian. Vincent’s theory was that Victorian houses had beautiful lines, which were betrayed by “curlicues and jelly-bean colors” that kept them from being taken seriously. Vincent always said he built Victorian houses that didn’t look as if Jack and Jill should live there.
