The Halo Effect: A Novel

by Anne D. LeClaire

  I passed familiar places—the Crow’s Nest, the market, the town’s historical museum, and next to it the art museum. I passed, too, new places—a yoga studio where there had once been a dentist, a yarn shop. I continued past the town line and went on with no destination in mind. For the rest of the morning, I walked. And into the afternoon. I walked past hunger and thirst. My feet grew sore and my breath more labored, but still I kept going. Twice a cramp seized my left calf, a sign I knew indicated dehydration, but I did not stop for water. Twice, cars stopped, and each time a familiar face asked if I needed a lift home, offers I refused. Later, I would trace the route in my car and discover I had walked for more than thirty miles.

  At last, well after dark, nearly disoriented with exhaustion and dehydration, I walked toward the next open business I saw, a gas station and convenience store. I went in and called for a taxi. Even exhaustion had not lessened or numbed the despair, despair as thoroughly a part of me as muscle and marrow.

  At home, I managed to climb the stairs to my room and fell fully clothed on the bed. Just as I closed my eyes, the scene from the market played out behind my lids. I saw the woman from the market and saw again the moment the baby had slipped from her arms, my own reflexive action in reaching for the child, the damp weight in my arms. I recalled how the woman’s shock so quickly turned to gratitude and how her eyes had looked into mine holding both serenity and something very much like sorrow. Again a twinge of recognition hit me, something faint about her expression, her eyes, but it eluded me. And then I recalled the ribbon of her laughter following me as I left the market. At last I escaped into a fitful sleep.

  I woke at dawn and knew a half-conscious and too-brief moment of peace before awareness snapped in. Another long and pointless day stretched in front of me. More than one person had told me it would get better, that time did heal. As if such a thing were possible. Did pain ever become bearable? Fainter? I couldn’t imagine.

  I forced myself to move, to go through the morning routine. Shaved. Made coffee. Toast. I poured a second mug and carried it with me up to the studio where the oyster painting waited on the easel. Work I knew I would never finish. I straightened my worktable, cleaned brushes, moved about my space seeking purpose. I sorted through a stack of CDs, rejecting Schumann and Saint-Saëns, Bizet and Barber, settling at last on Chopin. I sat in the chair by the window and closed my eyes as the notes of the Concerto No. 2 filled the room. I stayed there for long moments. A ray of the morning sun cut through the pane and heated a stripe across my legs. Finally, I stirred and retrieved a sketch pad and drawing pencil. I have often wondered what led my actions that morning, for looking back I recall my sense of feeling almost in a trance. Certainly it was nothing I planned.

  I hadn’t attempted a portrait in months, and the work was halting at first. Outside, a car horn sounded, but absorbed in my task, I barely heard it. Gradually, my gestures grew sure, and an image appeared on the page as if rising up from beneath the surface of the paper. Raven hair framed a face more round than oval; the eyes, too, were round. And dark. There was something faintly foreign about her, suggesting a heritage either Portuguese or Italian. The likeness was not exact; I saw this even before it was completed. I was working from memory, and the line of the jaw was not precise, the arch of the brow not quite right, but I had captured something there that I had seen in the woman’s features, the face both serene and sad.

  “Will?”

  I was so startled my hand jerked on the pad and left a ragged pencil line. I looked up and saw Sophie in the doorway.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I phoned but I guess you didn’t hear.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t mean to disturb your work.”

  “You didn’t. I was taking a break.” I set the drawing on the table, fought a growing dread. Were we going to argue again?

  She was wearing a summery dress in some kind of gossamer material that danced around her as she approached the easel and looked at the abandoned still life. “This is good,” she said. “Remember the critic who said you understood light like the masters did? It was in that feature in the Times, I think. Remember?”

  “Yes.” So long ago. Before.

  “He was right. You do.”

  I didn’t tell her I no longer cared about the painting.

  She picked out a brush from a jar of brushes and rolled the handle in her fingers, a delaying tactic. I realized she was nervous.

  “What is it, Sophie?”

  “I’m going to go away for a while.”

  “Where?” I kept my voice steady although the shock of her words ran through me.

  “Maine.”

  “How long?”

  She played with the brush, smoothed the bristles. “Two months.”

  “For the summer then.”

  “Maybe longer.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m not going to Amy’s. I’m going with a friend.”

  “A friend?”

  “Yes. Joan Laurant. She’s rented a place in Rockport for the summer, and she asked me if I wanted to come along. Apparently it’s one of those old farmhouses with dozens of rooms and property that goes down to the water.”

  Joan. I recalled the way she’d barged in last winter and pulled Sophie from her bed and taken her to the gym to box.

  “I need this, Will. I need to get away to think.”

  “You could have gone to Amy’s.” You could have gone with me. We could have rented a place together.

  “I wasn’t planning to go at all. This just came up. And when Joan asked me, I thought, Why not? And then I knew it was exactly what I needed. Time away from here.” She looked at me a little shyly. “I might even try to write.”

  Write what? I wanted to ask. “And you can’t do that here?”

  She replaced the brush on the table, her confidence returned. “I’m not here to ask permission, Will. I just wanted to see you before I went. To let you know where I’ll be.”

  “It’s settled then? That’s it? No discussion?”

  She opened her bag and pulled out a notebook page. “I’ve written down the address. The phone number at the rental. I’ll have my cell, but service is spotty there.”

  I stared at the paper.

  “Do you want me to leave it here, or shall I put it on the kitchen table?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” So this was a done deal.

  “And Amy will always be able to reach me. Their house is only seven miles from where I’ll be.”

  “When are you leaving?” I asked.

  But Sophie didn’t hear me. “Oh,” she said, her voice soft. “This is lovely.” She was looking at the sketch I had set on the table. “I didn’t know you knew her, Will.”

  “Who? Knew who?”

  “Mary.” She picked up the pad and carried it to the window for better light. The skirt of her dress whispered around her legs. “Mary Silveria.”

  I realized then why the woman in the market had seemed familiar. In midwinter, Sophie and I, along with most of Port Fortune, had stood in line outside the funeral home, all waiting to go in to the wake for her husband. I hadn’t wanted to go. I really didn’t know the family, but Sophie had insisted. The woman was a parishioner at Holy Apostles. Her husband’s boat had gone down off Georges Bank. The line of mourners had inched along until finally we were inside, standing before the woman who gazed at us with grief-stunned eyes, hands cupped in front of her swollen belly. Sophie hadn’t told me she was pregnant. “I don’t. Not really. I saw her yesterday and was just fooling around with it.”

  “It’s good.”

  “Just a sketch,” I said, my voice dismissive.

  Sophie put the pad back on the table and came to me, slipped her arms around me. I felt, beneath my fingers, the sheerness of the dress, the strength of her body. I didn’t want to let her go.

  “Take care, Will,” she said. “Be well.”

  My throat thickened. “You too, Sophie. I love you.”

>   “I love you too, Will.”

  And then she was gone, leaving me alone to wonder how much love could withstand.

  A great restlessness took hold for which I had no outlet. I replayed the scene, trying to make sense of it. I picked up the paper on which she had jotted down the address and fought the urge to tear it to shreds. I looked at the address: 13 End of the Road. An odd name. And not a good omen. Then my gaze fell, as Sophie’s had, to the drawing on my sketch pad. Now I had a name for the woman. I again recalled her standing in the funeral home, pregnant and bereft. And then pictured her as she had been in the market, a widow with two toddlers and an infant in her arms. Then I heard the echo of her laughter, light and joy-filled. How was it possible? How had this woman, widowed too young and left with three children, been able to not only go on but to come alive to joy? And for a moment, one single moment, the darkness that had filled me, the despair and grief that were as much a part of me as bone and marrow, lifted, warming me with a lightness of being as surely as earlier that morning a ray of light had streamed through the studio window, heating my leg.

  I stared at the drawing as if the answer was held there, but the image stared silently back at me. Even as I put it away, her gaze stayed with me, haunting, beseeching. What did she want of me? What did any of them want of me? This woman? Father Gervase? Sophie? Couldn’t they understand I had nothing left to give?

  Then, as if the priest were standing there in the attic room with me, Father Gervase’s words echoed in the silent studio.

  The saints were ordinary people.

  The saints were us.

  You do paint saints.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  But I did not paint saints. Or anything else.

  After Sophie left for Maine, I closed the door to my studio and walked away. If I’d had a deadbolt on the door, I would have shot it home. I no longer climbed the flight of stairs to the top floor each morning. Instead, I poured my energy into chores that had been neglected for months. A faucet that dripped in the first-floor bathroom off the kitchen. The peeling paint on the sill over the kitchen sink. Tasks that required nothing of me but mindless labor. I finally got around to properly repairing a broken window in the dining room. Earlier in the spring someone had thrown a baseball through it, leaving a perfect hole in the center with a web of cracks radiating from it. The ball had landed on the table, chipping the ceramic bowl we had brought home from a trip to Italy. I had been infuriated that we were targets of such an act of vandalism and wanted to call the police, but Sophie had convinced me to let it go. “What on earth do you think they can do about it?” she’d said, her voice tinged with a bitterness she rarely betrayed. “If they can’t find who killed Lucy, I doubt they will find who did this.” There was no arguing with that, so I’d patched the worst of it with duct tape and waited for the new pane I ordered to come in, but I never got around to replacing it. So last week I had retrieved it from the basement and carried it outside, where I set it on the grass while I went to get the stepladder from the garden shed. As I’d worked cutting out the old putty, setting in the new pane, inserting glazier’s points to hold it in place until the new putty set, I’d felt the ever-present anger stir that someone would target us for such vandalism. A boy, I’d imagined, one with an arm strong enough to hurl the ball across the yard, although it was far too late to do anything about it at that point.

  Another day last week, looking for yet another chore to fill the time and searching for hedge clippers to tackle the shrubs along the back of the property, I found a pile of stakes in the shed and impulsively took them to mark off the lines for a patio in the backyard that I had once considered constructing. I had gotten as far as plotting the design for the bricks, a basket-weave pattern. I’d imagined it as a place where we could gather in the late afternoons or where Lucy could spend time with her friends. Before. I ordered four pallets of bricks, and while waiting for them to be delivered, I prepped the space, cutting up sod and leveling the ground (my father had drilled the importance of careful preparation necessary for every job, telling me that was where a project failed or succeeded), and was aware occasionally of eyes on me, in that inexplicable way one had when being watched. Once I saw Payton Hayes watching from his kitchen window. He’d waved and moments later appeared to ask if I wanted a beer or cold drink. We had spoken only once since I had seen him in his office. He had phoned to see how I had made out with Gillian Donaldson. I’d given him a brief report, and we had each gone back to our own lives.

  The only other witnesses to my work were the finches that nested in the elm and the two ropes of Lucy’s swing, which, with the seat now gone, swayed freely from a limb like severed arteries. Sometimes I would catch their movement out of the edge of my vision and imagined Lucy sitting in her swing watching me in silent companionship, a thought that brought sharp pain, but also an odd and completely unexpected comfort.

  Once started, I worked on the patio obsessively, plying trowel and level and spreading stone dust, bending to the precise task of laying bricks in the pattern I had devised. It occurred to me it was a futile task as I no longer had a family to gather there, but still as the work progressed I felt the stirrings of something, not quite excitement or pleasure and certainly not joy, but a stirring nonetheless. At first I put it down to the satisfaction of doing the work, physical labor that helped me sleep better at night, but when I tracked it back to the first faint stirrings, I thought of the woman in the market, her laughter, the quick drawing I’d done of her.

  You do paint saints.

  Do it for Lucy.

  I resisted. You have no idea how I resisted. I wanted none of it. Even the thought of agreeing to accept the commission caused a hot flush of irritation, as if it would indicate an acceptance of a religion I didn’t believe in and a church I didn’t belong to, surrendering to something I couldn’t name.

  What are you afraid of?

  The more I struggled and resisted, the stronger the ghost echoes grew and the more a possibility took shape in my mind just as the patio took shape beneath my hands.

  The saints were ordinary people.

  You do paint saints.

  Wherever I went these words of Father Gervase’s stayed with me, a ghost staking out territory in my head as certainly as I had staked out the space for the bricks I now laid. If I were a more fanciful man—or a more superstitious one—I would say it was as if the little priest had put a curse on me.

  I began to see saints.

  I saw them in the streets and shops of Port Fortune. It wasn’t that I was visualizing dead people in halos and robes, but instead flashes of something in the features of my fellow townspeople, glimpses that briefly transformed a face, revealing an essence of goodness or virtue or a wisdom born of pain. They fit no single profile. They were men and women and even youth with expressions that were worn or serene, gaunt or well-nourished, naïve or experienced, happy or worried or bitter. They were white, and black, and varying shades of brown. Ordinary people going about their daily business and spanning all of life’s stages. A hefty boy on a trail bike. A fisherman with a face seamed with a web of deep lines. A balding man with stooped shoulders sitting at the bar in the coffee shop. One night I again saw, sitting on the wooden fence at the playground, the slight-framed teen with an expression at once desperate and proud and lonely, and I’d been reminded of the martyred youth who’d been pierced with arrows in the book of saints Father Gervase had brought to my house. Saint Sebastian.

  The saints are us.

  The irony was bitter. In the past months, ever since Lucy’s murder, I had looked into the faces of the townspeople and seen only the possibility of cruelty and alienation, mean-spiritedness and the real potential for evil. Now, as if I possessed the vision of some other person—some stranger, a madman or monk—I began to see in them a fleeting aura of the possibility of goodness. A sort of halo effect. Regardless of what life had taught me, of what I had learned of humanity and its potential for pettiness, for betrayal a
nd greed and envy and the most grievous of human sins, it seemed anyone might appear a saint. I remembered what the priest had told me. Saints come from every page in history and from every part of the globe.

  The saints are ordinary people.

  Gradually, despite my deep reluctance and resistance, a vision took shape. A gathering of the saints. Not on individual canvases but in two triptychs. Six panels. All ages and colors. Receiving Communion.

  For Lucy.

  And then, one day when the last brick was laid and the patio finished, without forethought or conscious intention, I climbed the stairs to the third-floor studio and unlocked the door.

  PART TWO

  SAINTS

  Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

  —Oscar Wilde

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  As always, with the arrival of summer, Port Fortune geared up for the influx of tourists and seasonal residents.

  As if a page had been turned and in concert everyone had exhaled a long-held breath, the paranoia and fear that had held townspeople in its grip through the past months eased. Even the drama of the pregnant teenagers had morphed into something like acceptance, and after the birth of the babies, attention shifted to caring for the infants. There were hastily arranged marriages, one adoption, and two girls who remained single and kept their sons to raise alone. And as if by tacit agreement, there had grown a consensus among the townspeople that Lucy Light had been murdered by a stranger, an addict who had been passing through, and as awful as it was—those things happened, just look at the news—it was an aberration that wouldn’t be repeated. In the face of the unimaginable, towns, like individuals, find ways to accommodate and compromise and go on. The green ribbons that girded trees throughout the town had faded to the palest yellow, their edges tattered and defeated. People again grew careless about locking their doors and relaxed the vigilance with which they watched over their daughters.