The Halo Effect: A Novel

by Anne D. LeClaire

  “Shall I get the drinks, or are you ready to order?”

  “I’ll have the seared tuna on greens,” Will said.

  “I’ll have the same,” Father Gervase said, although he was no longer hungry. He groped for a topic of conversation and settled on the weather, the first and last resort of the desperate. “A good rain this morning,” he said. “For the gardens.”

  “We could use more,” Will said.

  “Yes. It’s been a dry summer. One might even say arid. And after the spring rains, I had hopes for a good season for the gardens.”

  Their salads arrived, and the priest welcomed the reprieve from having to make conversation. He unfolded his napkin and spread it on his lap, relieved that Will seemed content to eat in silence. So many people didn’t. The tuna was rare in the middle, and he wanted to send it back to the kitchen for further grilling, but Will was eating his, and again Father Gervase was reluctant to make a fuss. He shook salt on the slab of fish, then sliced a portion from the edge where it was most cooked. “How is Sophia?” he asked.

  “She’s in Maine. A friend has a cottage up there, and she went up to work on a project.”

  “A project?”

  “Writing. It’s a project exploring violence in our culture and the effect of it on all of us. She is especially focusing on violence against our children.”

  “Good for her. The world could use more voices of conscience sitting on its shoulders. She’s that rare person, you know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An activist without anger.”

  “Is that what she is?”

  “I think so, yes. You know sometimes we go through an experience—a betrayal, a grievous loss—and we are left wondering how anything worthwhile can possibly come out of it.” He took Will’s silence as encouragement to continue. “But it is possible to emerge from such an experience with a greater capacity for compassion, you see. To have a change of heart or mind we could never have anticipated. It seems to me that is what has happened to Sophia. She has had a conversion experience. What we call a metnois.”

  “Yes, well, no offense, Father, but I’m not in the mood for a sermon.”

  “No. Well, I meant no offense. I certainly didn’t intend to invite you for dinner and then spend our time together preaching.” Invite you. There it was again, the implicit intention that he would treat. He removed his glasses—it was a puzzlement to him how they were always smudged—and reached into his pocket for the green silk square to clean them. As he lifted it to clean the lenses, an object fell to the table. Across from him, Will made a sound.

  “What is—what is that?”

  “This?” Father Gervase picked up the little Yoda figure. For no good reason, he had developed the silly habit of carrying it around with him.

  “Where did you get that?” Will asked, his voice so agitated the older couple at the back table looked over.

  “Why I . . .” The priest paused. “Why I don’t remember exactly.”

  Will reached for it, and as Father Gervase surrendered it he felt the trembling in the artist’s hand.

  Will lifted it closer to his face, turned it over. “Where did you get this?” he asked again, his voice stricken.

  The priest’s brow furrowed with concentration. How had he come to have it? Had he picked it up somewhere on the parish grounds? On the street? “I don’t remember exactly,” he said, puzzled by Will’s agitation.

  “Please,” Will said. “Try to remember.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Did—did Lucy give it to you?”

  It took a minute for him to follow Will’s question. “Lucy? Your daughter?”

  “Yes.” Will clasped his fingers tightly around the toy. “This belonged to her.”

  “Are you sure?” Father Gervase said and immediately regretted the question.

  “Absolutely.” Will opened his fingers. “Here,” he said, “this ear that’s missing its tip. And here, on the bottom, the little mark. Lucy did that. This is hers. Did she give it to you?”

  “No.” That much he was sure of. He’d only started carrying it around in recent weeks. Could it really have belonged to Lucy? How was that possible? But Will Light was so certain.

  The waitress approached the table but, sensing Will’s distress, turned away. He closed his fingers tightly around the figure and shut his eyes, clearly trying to gain composure. “Think,” he urged. “Try to remember.”

  Try to remember? As if it were that easy. He could recall so much from the past. The hazel of his sister’s eyes. The bibbed red-gingham apron his mother wore when she kneaded bread. The smell of rising yeast in their kitchen. The soft surrender of Cynthia Gibbons’s lips, though more than four decades had passed since that swift kiss. The sound of his brother’s laughter. His father’s handshake when he’d left home for the seminary. The warm halls of the seminary, steam heat fueled by the boiler in the stone-lined basement. All those were so easily retrieved that they might have happened yesterday. But more recent memories, things that in fact had happened yesterday—or last week—he found tucked in a vault beyond his reach. He stared at the tiny figure the artist held and tried to remember how it might have come into his possession, but this attempt was futile.

  “Here,” he said. “If it belonged to Lucy, you should have it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  It was futile to remain any longer in Lucy’s bedroom.

  I’d been sitting there on her bed for at least an hour, and it was growing dark but I didn’t switch on a light. I stared at the tiny Yoda as if somehow I could be able to decipher the puzzle of how it had come to be in Father Gervase’s possession. For it was her Yoda. Of that there was no doubt. For perhaps the hundredth time since the priest had handed it to me, I turned it over—as if to verify what I knew was there but couldn’t quite believe—and stared at the sole of one little reptilian foot, saw the three interwoven Ls, the personal logo Lucy had created for herself. Like a brand cowboys used to mark cattle, she had explained.

  Lucy had fallen for Yoda when she was ten. I could recall as clearly as if it had been only last week the night she and seven friends had been having a sleepover with pizza and a marathon Star Wars viewing party. Once, in a lull between DVDs and as I was leaving the room after delivering the girls two more pizzas, I’d overheard bits of their conversation.

  “Who would you rather have as a boyfriend,” one girl said. “Luke Skywalker or Han Solo?”

  The responses seemed to be evenly divided, and I remember wondering if this foretold their future dating choices—good guy or bad boy—and I’d hung at the door, ridiculously anxious about Lucy’s response.

  “Yoda,” she had said.

  “Yeew,” one of the other girls said. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope,” Lucy had said. “He’s the smartest and most interesting of all.”

  I relayed the conversation to Sophie, who chided me for eavesdropping on the girls, but a few days later she had surprised Lucy with a miniature Yoda. Feel the force, Lucy would say in her raspy Yoda imitation, holding the little Jedi in her hand.

  Was it possible that she had given it to the priest? I didn’t believe that. It had been a gift from her mother, one she treasured, a talisman that, she once explained, when she needed clarity would help her find courage and truth. At the time, her words had stung slightly, as if my job had been appropriated by a child’s plaything. And now it had appeared—all those months after her death. I couldn’t imagine what that might mean or what, if anything, I should do about it. I cupped it in dry palms and ran a thumb over the small rough spot where once a section of a pale green ear had been affixed. When I returned home after my dinner with Father Gervase, I had been tempted to call Sophie and relate this latest development but on reflection had repressed the urge. What would be the point? To have her again fall into magical thinking and see this as some kind of mystical sign when in reality it was just one more mystery that, like our daughter’s death, was unlikely
to be solved?

  Do you believe the dead have an ability to communicate with us?

  Several months after Lucy’s death, we had been lying in bed—this was before she had moved to the guest room—and I was just dropping off when Sophie spoke.

  “What?” I’d said.

  “The dead,” she said, her voice fully awake. “Do you believe they have the ability to communicate with us?”

  I’d pulled myself back from sleep and turned to hold her. “Don’t do this, Soph.”

  “I’m serious, Will. Haven’t you wondered too?”

  “No. No, I haven’t.”

  “But what if it’s possible, Will?”

  “It isn’t.”

  “You’re so absolutely convinced? So sure? I mean, people have experienced it.”

  “Documented, I’m sure,” I’d said, not even trying to keep the cynicism from my voice. Although I understood Sophie’s need to find some source of consolation, I wanted to shake her out of this delusional thinking. I saw only more pain and disappointment ahead for her if she continued to grasp onto this path of wishful thinking, more pain I was powerless to prevent.

  “How can you be so sure? I’ve been praying, you know. I’ve been praying for Lucy to send us a sign.”

  “Jesus, Sophie,” I’d said before I could stop myself.

  Her voice had grown soft. “You know how she loved gray seals. When I walk by the harbor, I always look for a seal. I look for one to swim close to shore. Something to let us know she’s all right.”

  How “all right” do you expect her to be, I’d thought. She’s dead. Dead and gone from us forever. In the past months, people had told me it would get better with time, but that wasn’t true. It actually got worse because there was no magical thinking. Lucy was never coming home. There would be no signs. No communication from beyond the grave. She was gone.

  “Oh, come on, Sophie. Signs?” I didn’t believe in that shite, the last resort of the gullible and desperate.

  “Yes.” Her head on the pillow was turned toward mine, and her face, lit by moonlight, shone with a hope I found both heartbreaking and infuriating and made me want to simultaneously hold her and shake her. “Signs of something meaningful,” she continued. “A connection only those lost to us would know of. I remember reading of one instance about a woman whose father loved white owls, and on the morning of her birthday exactly one year after he died a white owl appeared in a tree outside her kitchen window. There are a lot of stories like that.”

  “Don’t, Soph,” I said. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

  So I didn’t phone Sophie. No matter how much she wanted to believe in signs and the sudden surfacing of clues to her death, I knew the mysterious appearance of Lucy’s Yoda wasn’t going to make a rat’s ass of difference. Finally I rose, crossed the darkened room, and placed Yoda on the shelf where her other treasures remained displayed. At some point in a future I could not imagine I supposed we would have to empty her room, clear out the very last of her clothes from the closet and the dresser drawers. All would disappear. We would fold her favorite larkspur-blue sweater and place it in a carton with the rest, box up toys and treasures, her books and makeup. And with each item, over and over, Sophie and I would have the torturous conversation about what to do with it all, all those objects that held no meaning for anyone but us. I couldn’t bear to think of another child having any of Lucy’s belongings but found it equally intolerable to think of throwing away any of it, even a half-used tube of pink lip gloss. Someday, perhaps. But not then. Not then. The idea was beyond painful, and I knew enough not to bring it up with Sophie. In the past months I had experienced grief, but below and running through the grief I was left with loss. Loss was forever. There in my daughter’s room the truth of that tightened my heart. My throat closed against a salty burn, and I left the room. I was not a crying man. Sophie had wept enough for both of us.

  I spent a dreamless night. It was late morning by the time I headed out to the boat barn on the wharf. As I walked, I noted again how the landscape of the town had changed. Each year, new shops replaced older, long-familiar storefronts. I passed a yarn shop once the site of a small, independent five-and-dime. Next to it, in a space formerly occupied by a shoe repair place, stood a boutique decorator fabrics store. Farther on in the spot where one of the churches used to run a consignment store there was a coffee shop where a single cup cost as much as I paid for a sandwich. I approached the wharf, aware as always of the drone of the ice machines over at Cape Port Ice that hummed without ceasing. As I keyed the lock, I sensed a slight presence behind me but didn’t turn. I was in no mood to see anyone, especially the little priest.

  “Mr. Light?”

  But it was not Father Gervase. I managed to conceal my surprise. “Hey there,” I said, using a low tone I might have used to approach a wild and wary creature. I slid the door open and motioned for the boy to precede me. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  Duane shrugged his thin shoulders, the perfected teenage gesture of apathy and indifference, one, I suddenly thought, that Lucy had never incorporated in her lexicon of body language. Would she have as she grew older? At sixteen? Seventeen? I didn’t think so. I would never know. I studied the boy. “Let me guess. It wasn’t your idea to come here today.”

  “Yeah.” Duane looked around, watched while I set down my camera case, switched on the fans. “My mom was pretty insistent.”

  I could well imagine. I remembered Beth LaBrea’s pushy attitude, the way she had bulldozed the boy, and again, as I had then, I felt a surge of protectiveness and an equally unexpected urge to comfort that surprised me. Sophie had always been more at ease, more intuitive, around teenagers and children than I had. I tried to remember what Sophie had told me about the boy. He had sung in the chorus. That was about it, although I had the sense that she liked him. “But what about you? Do you think you might like to give it a try?”

  Again the shrug.

  “Because if you don’t want to do it, I can let you off the hook.”

  For the first time, the boy looked directly at me, and again I could see how much he resembled his mother. “How?”

  “Well, let me see. I guess I could tell her I already have all the models I need.”

  “Do you?”

  “Well, no.” I laughed. “But no one has to know that.”

  Duane considered this and then asked, “What would I have to do?”

  I kept my tone casual. “Very little, actually. I’d take some photos of you, studies really, focusing on your face and hands and feet. I’ll tell you what—why don’t you take a look at some of the studies I’ve already done. There are several pinned to that board on the wall over there and some more on the table.” I was surprised by how very much I wanted Duane to say yes. “That will give you an idea of how I go about it.”

  Duane glanced over to where I was pointing. “Okay, I guess.” He approached the table, his yellow high-tops moving silently on the wood floor.

  “The completed project will consist of six panels,” I told him. “There are seven saints represented in each panel.” I reached for a folder from one pile and took out a small working sketch. “To begin I take a series of photos of each model and draw from them. For example, this is Saint Monica.”

  The boy bent over the sketch. “I know her.” He took the sketch with slender fingers tipped with oval nails. “That’s Mrs. Neal. From the bookstore.”

  “Right.” I opened another folder. “Brendan, patron saint of sailors,” I said.

  Duane made a small sound close to a chuckle. “That’s pretty funny. Seeing Leon Newell as a saint. I mean, isn’t he kind of a—”

  “Scoundrel?”

  “Yeah.” Duane smiled, and his face was transformed.

  “Well, you don’t have to be virtuous to be a saint. In fact, you’d be surprised. As it turns out, some were pretty rowdy. Prostitutes and thieves.”

  “Really?” Duane crossed to where I had pinned a draft of the panels on
the rough planks of the wall. “This is bigger than I thought it would be,” he said.

  “Actually, this is a third of the size of what the completed work will be. When done, the canvases will measure sixty feet in height.”

  “Wow. That big?”

  “We’ll have to roll them and transport them to get them to the cathedral in a moving van. They’ll be framed there.”

  Duane studied the six groupings. Beneath each figure was the name of a saint. He took his time, stopping once to say, “I never heard of some of these. I mean Crispin? Ambrose?” When he got to the last figure, he leaned in. “How come this one on the end has a question mark beneath it?”

  “Because that one doesn’t have a name. As Father Gervase put it, that figure is to represent the potential for sainthood in all of us.”

  “I’m not much for that stuff. I mean, my family is Catholic, but I don’t go to church much anymore.” The boy retreated, closed into himself. “I mean, when did that shit ever help anyone?”

  “Belief in a faith is not a job requirement, Duane. Not for the models and fortunately not for me. Do you want to see which saint I had in mind for you?”

  The boy leveled his eyes at me, coolly appraising, and for an instant I believed I had lost him. And then he said, “Sure. Why not?”

  From the other bench, I retrieved an oversized book, which I thumbed open. Duane stared at the photo of the young saint lashed to a tree and pierced with arrows. “Jesus.” The word was one soft breath. He pulled back. His reaction was not unlike my own when I’d first looked at the book Father Gervase had left at my home. The endless depictions of torture.

  “Who is he?”

  “Saint Sebastian. There’s not a lot known about him. He was a soldier in the Roman army, and when he refused to renounce his Christian faith, he was shot with arrows and then clubbed to death.”

  “Jesus,” Duane said again.

  “Sebastian was an enduring theme for artists. Botticelli and Andrea Mantegna. And Antonello da Messina.” I opened a second book, flipped to a page. “The one you were looking at is by El Greco. Here’s one by Hans Memling.”