“I know,” I said. At last I turned on the ignition and as we backed out of the lot, I started to say more, but stopped and so we drove back through town, past the harbor, a charged stillness between us, thick with all that had remained unspoken. I dropped him at his house. Again he was the one to break the silence. “I’m sorry, Mr. Light.” We locked eyes then, just the once as he got out of the car, but in that moment an understanding, a knowing without words, passed between us and an agreement was struck. We would not tell anyone what had happened. I knew that someday I would ask him how he had come to have Lucy’s Yoda, why he had lied to the police, questions that didn’t matter at that moment, just as perhaps someday I would be able to tell Sophie how often those months I had been wondering what we were capable of and what we were not, of the time in those woods with Duane, my Saint Sebastian, of how close I had come to destroying everything. Of course, before the day ended, I was to learn so much more about what we truly are capable of and what we can endure. Of what we are willing to risk. To destroy.
I watched Duane as he disappeared through the front door and then, with nowhere else to go, I headed toward home.
These thoughts were in my mind as I drove onto Governors Street and turned into our drive and saw Rain LaBrea running from the house next door. She was crying, but between sobs she managed to get the words out. “It’s Mr. Hayes,” she cried. “He killed Lucy.”
I couldn’t process the words, my brain slowed.
“He did. Look.” She held out her hand and the sun glinted on the silver chain. “He had this. He had Lucy’s Lucky Strike stone. The one I gave to her.”
I took the gun from my pocket and walked across his front yard. I followed their voices to the bedroom. Father Gervase saw me first.
“Will,” he said.
Payton saw me then, and his eyes widened as I raised the gun and aimed at his heart. “Christ,” he said.
Father Gervase stood between us, his hands raised palms upturned toward me.
“Get out of the way, Father,” I said.
“You’re not going to shoot me, are you?” he said and smiled.
“That’s not my intention. But I need to you to step out of the way.”
“You don’t want to do this, Will.”
Hayes made a sound, started to speak.
“Shut up,” I said. “Don’t say a fucking word.” Vengeance was mine. All the months of being paralyzed by inaction and impotence lifted, and it felt so good. Try to understand that. One shot, I thought, one single shot in the chest. If justice were true, before his body was found our daughter’s killer should rot on the ground, abandoned and alone as she had, but I would have to settle for his death. And then it would be over.
“You need to think this through,” the priest said.
“I’m done thinking.”
He smiled again, that gentle smile I remembered from the first time he came to the house in May, as if we shared a secret. “This isn’t you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Vengeance is not yours, Will.”
“I’ll shoot, I swear I will, Father. I have nothing to lose.”
“There is always something more to lose, Will.”
“Why do you care?”
He didn’t answer, but took a step toward me. “Stay back,” I said.
But he continued walking to me, slowly but without hesitation. He reached for the gun, but I held it steady on him, and behind him, on Payton Hayes.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
“This is not your business,” I said to the priest. “It has nothing to do with you.”
Father Gervase started to speak but Payton cut him off. “You can relax, Father. He won’t shoot me.”
At the smugness in his voice, my finger tightened on the trigger.
Even now the weeks that immediately followed remain a blur, a filmy distortion of one man crumpled on the carpet, a circle of crimson, and later, the blurry confusion of the trial. Some parts of memory I am relieved to have blocked, details that cannot be borne or I would not be able to walk upright.
I do remember how Payton had laughed when I pointed the gun, his arrogance. “Go ahead, shoot. You’ll be the one facing a murder charge, not me.”
I did shoot him then. The report echoed, muffling the cry from Father Gervase, reverberating in my ears.
“Jesus,” Payton said. He stared at his thigh, at the spread of blood on his clothes. “Are you crazy?”
I was satisfied to hear all the smugness gone, saw fear in his eyes.
“Give me the gun, Will,” Father Gervase said.
I brushed aside his words. No one existed in that room except Payton Hayes and me. “Tell me why,” I said, my voice steady, my purpose clear. “Tell me why or I swear to God, the next shot will go straight through your chest.”
I saw him weighing his options. Saw the moment he believed me and then, instantly, trusted his own ability to save himself, to say what he needed to now and later deal with whatever the future held and, believed in his power to avoid answering to his sins.
“It was her fault,” he said. “Your daughter should have minded her own business. Such a meddler.”
He talked then as if he couldn’t wait to get it out. How Gabi Russell had told Lucy about her secret affair with him, how he, and not one of the high school boys, was the father of Gabi’s child. Lucy, trusting Lucy, who wanted only to help a friend and make things right, had taken it upon herself to confront him, to make him take responsibility.
I could see it, so true of our Lucy, so innocent, so confident of the goodness in everyone that she held not a speck of suspicion when she arranged to meet him when she should have been at the hockey scrimmage, not even suspicious when she got in his car and he had driven to Dogtown. What was his plan? Had he known even then that he was going to kill her?
“She said if I didn’t confess about everything, she would do it herself,” Payton was saying. “Who the hell was she to say that? I told her it wasn’t her business, that it would ruin my life. I told her that but she wouldn’t listen. Just kept insisting. Do the right thing she kept saying. As if it were that simple. It was the way she kept insisting, the way she wouldn’t even consider my side of things that made me strike her. And when she started to run, of course, I had no choice but to kill her.”
The way he spoke, the details told in such a matter-of-fact manner chilled me. In the relating of the story, his confidence had returned and with it his arrogance. “You should have taught your daughter to mind her own business,” he said. “Then none of this would have happened.”
There was a buzzing in my ears, blocking out sound for a moment, the sound of water rushing as if I were swimming in the sea. I raised the barrel and aimed true.
Beside me, Father Gervase cried out. Justice was served. The trial was a sideshow as I’m sure you can imagine.
Months passed. And gradually, but sooner than you might think possible given all that had happened, we adapted and we managed to carve out a precarious new normalcy. Sophie moved back home. She gained weight, her belly again slightly mounded in the way I loved, and I teased her that this was evidence of my good cooking. We smiled about that later. Eventually, not long after the trial, she got back to work on finishing her book, her way to honor our daughter, and I returned to the boat barn and worked on the panels of the saints, their faces holding both agony and ecstasy, sorrow and joy. Some days she would come with me and sit in the rocking chair I had carted there for her, and she would watch quietly as the saints grew to their sixty-foot fullness. And so both of us, in our own way, and in our own time, experienced the remarkable resiliency of the human body and mind and our capacity to not only endure but to heal.
Some nights, when my determination to block them was weakest, thoughts would creep in of all Lucy had endured those moments in the woods with Payton Hayes, and I would recall, too, the long-ago nights when I would wander around Port Fortune searching faces for a sign of evil, a mark to show me who had killed ou
r daughter, and it sickened me to think he had been there all along. Right next door, nodding to me when we crossed paths, waving while watering his lawn, posing as a saint, evil concealed. For evil exists. It is not a theological question. It exists.
But so does goodness, so does goodness. I would remind myself of this on those dark nights of the soul. And in the darkness, as if they were talismans, I would draw close to me thoughts of Sophie and Lucy and Father Gervase, and the faces of the ancient saints.
EPILOGUE
“This is a most extraordinary day,” Cardinal Kneeland intones.
On this extraordinary day, the archbishop gazes down on those gathered in the cathedral, looks out at the ordinary people who occupy the pews. Two years have passed since he set all in motion by sending a parish priest on a mission to ask Will Light to paint saints for this cathedral, although there are those who would say all that followed really started months before that with the murder of Lucy Light. Now, along with the invited dignitaries and the media, the governor and the members of the Arts and Furnishings Committee, they have gathered here, the curious and the faithful. And the people Will has painted.
There in the first pew, which has been set aside for the models, sits Mary Silveria, the young widow with three children whom Will has always thought of as his first saint. Her youngest, the infant he had saved from falling that distant day in the grocery store, is now a chubby toddler and sits next to his older sister, who has outgrown her love of red licorice. Lick wish. Next to them sits Constantos Anastas, who posed as Martin de Porres and to whom, within the year, Mary will be wed. The beekeeper and the baker and the clerk from the coffee shop are there. And Elaine Neal, the bookstore owner whose arthritis is now so advanced she is confined to a wheelchair, and Joseph Souza, who runs the bait shop near the harbor. Alonzo Americo has closed the bakery for this day and, with his wife and seven sons, sits with head tilted up, scanning the panels as if looking through a family album. It is his youngest son who first locates his father’s face among the saints. Yes, there he is, the third figure in the first panel to the left of the altar. Saint Crispin. The widower Jules Cavanaugh sits alone. When he locates Saint Ambrose, he thinks of how proud his wife would have been at this moment, and his eyes grow moist. Next to him, Harold Weaver is moved to whisper a prayer. And him, not even a Catholic.
Lena MacDougall believes they should have been given better seating and leans over to whisper this to Miriam Endelheim, with whom, improbably, she has found more in common that she would have once believed possible. Miriam—Saint Elizabeth—smiles gently and pats Lena’s hand in consolation.
Teachers and students from the school are there. And Coach Davis. And Jared Phillips, for whom Lucy had broken a promise to her parents and gone for a ride with him so they could talk about holding a fund-raiser for SADD. Tracy Ramos, Will Light’s Rose of Lima, is here with her child. And here is the LaBrea family. Rain, now a high school senior, sits between her mother and Dr. Mallory, the family she was born into and the family she created, the mother who gave her life and the little woman who helped her return to life during a dark time of despair. She is clad, without a word of argument, in a dress. And heels. In one hand she holds the Lucky Strike stone Lucy had given her when they became sworn sisters. Her brother is here too, home from college for this celebration, and is accompanied by his partner, a boy who no longer remains Duane’s secret, the secret he once confided only to Lucy Light. There is something in his hand, too. Yoda, returned to him by Lucy’s parents.
The archbishop takes his seat, and the cathedral choir begins to sing. Will sits in his chair next to Cardinal Kneeland and lets the anthem wash over him, recognizes it as one Sophie used to teach the high school chorus for one of the holiday concerts. He scans the crowds, looking for each of his models, and then lifts his eyes to the six panels. Forty-two saints. A saint for everything and everyone, Sophie had once told him. Saints who, when tested, discovered what they were capable of and what they were not, as Will and Sophie have these past two years. He closes his eyes against the memory of that afternoon in his neighbor’s bedroom, the gun in his raised hand, the barrel pointing straight at Payton Hayes. He had thought himself capable of it, welcomed it even, this act of killing the man who had murdered his daughter and left her body to lie in the woods. And only Father Gervase had stopped him, falling to the floor, crying out in pain.
Sophie is there. Will smiles as he looks down at her. And at their son, the child conceived that long ago weekend at the cottage in Maine.
There are those missing in this gathering, among them Leon Newell, who only last month died of stomach cancer, although Jossie has come. “Wouldn’t for the world miss a chance to see old Leon as a saint,” she told her friends. Cancer has also claimed Lorna Vogler who posed as Catherine. Payton Hayes is not there, of course. Nor the saint he was to represent.
Among the absent but ever present is, of course, Lucy. Father Gervase—the little priest who, shortly after rescuing Rain LaBrea, had died of a massive coronary and in doing so saved Will—is not here. But his presence, like Lucy’s, is here. Will raises his eyes to look at the final figure in the end panel, the unnamed saint representing the potential in everyone, and gazes into the face of Father Gervase. From high above them the little priest stands, the only one among them with hands not clasped but with arms held wide, seeming to offer a benediction to them all.
Doughnuts in air.
Do not despair.
“Do you believe in coincidence?” the priest had asked Will one day. And another time, if he believed in miracles.
“Not the kind you mean, Father,” he’d replied.
“Tell me, then, what kind?”
“The fact that there exists in the desert a certain insect, the cochineal, that lives on cacti and the bodies of the female produce a dye the most stunning shade of red,” he’d said. “That’s miracle enough for me.”
“Ah yes,” the priest had responded. “Ordinary miracles.”
The words seem to float down over the crowd, bathing each one. Sinners and saints.
Ordinary. Miracles.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to:
The artist John Nava. The idea for this book was birthed after I watched Divining the Human: The Cathedral Tapestries of John Nava, a documentary about the creation of Nava’s massive and innovative tapestries that hang in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles.
The entire team at Lake Union, most especially my editor Kelli Martin, whose unwavering belief in and vision for this novel sustained me, whose brilliant comments guided me, and whose wit made the process a joy; copy editors extraordinaire Jessica Fogleman and Katherine Faydash, and artist Rex Bonomelli for the stunning cover, Ashley Vanicek for her publicity expertise, and Gabriella Dumpit for her author relations care. Working with them was an author’s dream.
My agent Deborah Schneider, the best of agents who never stopped believing.
The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia, and the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, both of which granted me multiple residencies and the time and space in which to write a large part of this work.
The multitude of people who during the writing of this book and with great generosity shared their knowledge on a multitude of subjects that included art and religion, betrayal and forgiveness, doubt and faith, violence and its effect on families and communities, police procedure, adolescent therapy, and grief. In particular I want to thank Jack and Kathleen Mortell, David and Toni Mathis, Sandell Morse, Jane Hamilton, Ann Hood, Sara Young, Margaret Moore, Nita Finn (LICSW), Larry Thomas, Cleveland Morris, David Tierney, Lisa Boes, Father Marck Chmurski, Father Thomas Kelly, and Chatham Police Sergeant Andrew Goddard. The expertise is theirs, any errors of fact are mine.
My home team who helped keep the ship on course in both storms and fair skies: Christopher Mortell, Ignacio Mortell, Kate and Chris Harlow, Dr. Mark Griffin, Dr. Mita
Gupta, Ginny Bernard, Kim Roderiques, Steve Crocker, Lane Byrd, Pete Higgins, Bob Vath, and computer guru Jimmy Fallon.
And, as always, my family: Hillary, Hope, and Chris.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2016 Kim Roderiques
Bestselling author Anne D. LeClaire has written eight novels, including Entering Normal, The Lavender Hour, and Leaving Eden, as well as her critically acclaimed memoir, Listening Below the Noise: The Transformative Power of Silence. Known for her exquisite and lyrical writing, the former op-ed columnist has been published in Redbook, the Boston Globe, Yoga Journal, and the New York Times.
A Distinguished Fellow at the Ragdale Foundation, LeClaire teaches creative-writing workshops around the globe. She is also a dynamic speaker—leading popular seminars and workshops exploring silence, creativity, and deep listening. LeClaire has been a visiting lecturer at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Tennessee, and Columbia College and was a featured presenter at the Lincoln Center.
A former reporter, print journalist, radio broadcaster, and private pilot, LeClaire lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where she leads silent retreats, practices yoga, and plays the washboard.
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