Unspoken Fear

by Hunter Morgan

  The look Mattie gave him broke Noah's heart. Mattie's face rarely showed emotion, but Noah knew Mattie was hurting, hurting because of him. "Mattie, it's good to see you."

  For years, it had been debated just how much Mattie McConnell understood because he had been born intellectually disabled. But Noah knew from experience that Mattie comprehended far more than he let on or others gave him credit for. Diagnosed as an autistic savant and only two years Noah's junior, Noah had grown up with him and, in time, had become his caretaker of sorts after the death of Mattie's father in an accident at the church. Noah and Mattie had been through a lot together, and even though Mattie wasn’t verbal, they had found ways over the years to communicate. Noah owed Mattie more than he was offering right now, he knew that; he just couldn't bring himself to give more, and the look on Mattie's face conveyed the man's understanding of that fact, at least on some level.

  "I missed you, Mattie," Noah said simply, walking toward the front steps with Chester dancing along beside him.

  Mattie just stared with big, puppy brown eyes. He looked much older than the last time Noah had seen him. His face was craggier, his brown hair was sprinkled with gray, not unlike Noah's own hair, and he'd put on weight. He'd always been a big man at six feet tall and stocky, but now he seemed massive... soft.

  "Missed me too, didn't you?" Noah wanted to reach out and hug him, but he couldn't bring himself to do it.

  The screen door squeaked open, startling Noah, and he glanced up to see Rachel coming out of the house, a glass in each hand. "Tea?" She raised both hands.

  Noah nodded.

  "Go on inside, Mattie," Rachel said. "Go see Mrs. Santori. She has cookies for you and Mallory." When he hesitated, seeming torn between the cookies and Noah, Rachel lifted her chin in the direction of the screen door that had just slapped shut. "Go on, before Mallory eats them all."

  Noah watched Mattie shuffle by him. "So Consuelo and Mateo are still here?"

  She brushed past him, headed for the big rockers around the corner of the porch. "Still here. You don't think I could have done this alone, do you?"

  She didn't look at him, but he saw her square her shoulders inside the slim, peach-colored T-shirt. She was thinner than he remembered her and somehow seemed more delicate, but her face was still the same. With her shoulder-length honey blond hair and green eyes, she was just as beautiful now at forty as she had been at fourteen, the first time he had kissed her.

  "I suppose." He followed her to the chairs, dropped his gym bag, and sat down on the edge of his father's rocker, mostly because he didn't know what else to do. He was as nervous right now as he could ever remember being. Funny what time and murder and a prison sentence would do to a man.

  Rachel set one of the glasses on a wooden table between the two chairs and took a sip as she slid into his mother's rocker.

  "She's very pretty, you know. Mallory." He took the glass she had left for him and sipped the sweet tea. It was his mother's recipe.

  "More important, she's smart," she said.

  She looked at him, her eyes filled with a mixture of pride and something else he couldn't recognize. What was it? Fear? Fear of him? He certainly hoped not.

  He held the dimpled, amber-colored glass between his hands, savoring its coolness, and gazed out over the vegetable garden in the side yard. It was no longer planted in rows the way his mother had, and his grandmother before her, but had been turned into raised beds instead. There wasn't much planted yet, but one of the beds had a plastic hothouse cover and he could see green seedlings poking through the soil. "I didn't know you had a daughter, Rachel."

  She glanced in the direction of the garden, sliding back in the chair and setting it in motion. "Because I didn't want you to."

  He stared at the porch's plank floor painted gunmetal gray, not knowing how to respond. He wanted to ask her whose child Mallory was, of course, but considering the circumstances, he knew he had no right. He glanced at her left hand—no wedding band. The one he had given her with the Celtic love knot was long gone, of course, but it hadn't been replaced by another.

  He was quiet for a moment, wanting to press her further, but instead he changed the subject. "Mattie's here with you. Does he come often?"

  "He lives here."

  "Lives here?" He met her gaze, just for a second, then glanced away.

  Mattie had lived in the basement of the church, first with his father, then alone. He had been the St. Paul congregation's responsibility for years, but the day-to-day care had fallen to Noah, so just as Noah had failed Rachel, he had failed Mattie as well.

  "He was devastated after your arrest. Inconsolable." Her voice was flat—his beloved Rachel, who had once been so full of life, so full of emotion. Of joy. And he would have to live the rest of his life knowing he had done this to her.

  "No one knew what to do with him," Rachel continued. "The new priest couldn't be held responsible, so the state social welfare system was called in. They put him in a group home on the west side of the county, but it didn't work out."

  "Why not?"

  "He kept running away. They moved him to another facility up in Kent County after he'd taken off twice more, thinking that if he didn't recognize landmarks, he'd stay put. He was missing three days, and somehow, he found his way back to Stephen Kill. We still don't know how he got here, but he was dirty and scared."

  "So you took him in."

  "The state didn't know what to do with him. They were talking about a group home in New Jersey. It wasn't a place he could play the organ, and you know how much he needs that, so I convinced the state to allow me to have guardianship of him."

  "That was good of you, Rachel."

  She frowned. "It wasn't that hard. I mean, it wasn't like anyone else wanted him." She was quiet for a moment, lost in her thoughts. "He settled well here after a few false starts. We tried a regular bedroom in the house, but he didn't like it. There wasn't enough room for his shelves of Bibles, so we fixed up a nice space in the barn cellar; it looks just like the church basement." Her mouth turned up in a half smile. "Added some walls, because you know how open spaces scare him, a bathroom, some more electrical outlets, and a bed. It might not seem like much, but for Mattie…"

  "It's home," he finished for her.

  Then, again, there was silence between them. Both sipped their tea.

  "Are... did you remarry?" he asked after a while. His voice sounded strange in his head. Ethereal and far removed.

  "Nope." She continued to rock, sipping her tea. "Not like I've had a lot of time for dating. You know how much work this place is to keep up, and I've been doing it myself, Noah. I've been doing it myself for a long time. If it wasn't for the Santoris—"

  "I know," he interrupted. "Thank you." It was lame, but he didn't know what else to say. He'd been living like a man floating beneath ice for so long that he felt numb. He didn't know how to express himself any longer. He wasn't even sure he had anything inside him left to express, either feelings or opinions.

  She set down her glass. "I felt it was the least I could do for Joanne and Mark. It didn't seem right to let the place run down, not after they worked so hard for forty years. You'll get a better price this way when you sell."

  "I'm not selling." He was startled by the sense of determination he heard in his voice.

  "Not selling?" She sprang out of the chair and turned to lean back against the painted porch rail, sliding her hands into her jeans pockets. "What do you mean you're not selling?"

  It was his turn to shrug. "I'm not selling. I need a job, now that I'm no longer employed on the road-cleaning crew with DOC." It was a lame joke. "I thought I would keep the vineyard. Continue to grow the grapes, maybe even start making wine again rather than just selling our grapes."

  After his parents' murder, he hadn't been able to bring himself to start the fall winemaking process and had sold the grapes to a vineyard in southern Pennsylvania. By then, their second son Isaac was already dead and his life had begun to spir
al out of control.

  "You can't make wine," she said, looking at him as if he'd grown another head. "You're an alcoholic."

  "I'll get a taster."

  She groaned, gripping the wooden rail with both slender hands, and looked away. "That's a bad plan, Noah. An alcoholic should not surround himself with alcohol... not one who means to stay sober, at least."

  He sat back in the rocker, even more determined now that he'd said it out loud. "Pretty decent hair shirt, if you ask me."

  She looked at him, her green eyes angry. "I'm not going to sit here and watch you do this to yourself. I'm leaving. I've got several job offers."

  "I'm sorry to hear that." He leaned forward on his bony knees, lacing his fingers together, almost as if in prayer. But not in prayer. Not ever in prayer again.

  "So that's it?" Rachel crossed her arms over her chest, looking away, then directly at him. "It's not even up for discussion?"

  "Think they're going to give me my old job back at the church?" He was quiet for a moment, watching her. "Didn't think so," he said when she didn't answer.

  "I thought you said you were sober and you wanted to stay that way."

  "I am. I do. I will. I've already got info on when AA meets. Noon, three days a week at the Elks' lodge. Once a week at St. Paul's of course, but I'm not sure that would be appropriate. There's also a group that meets at the Grange twice a week."

  "And your sponsor approved of this idea?"

  "No, but he's not offering me a job, either."

  "Noah, this is crazy." Her hands fell to her sides and she took a step toward him. "You have a master's degree—"

  "In divinity," he interrupted. "Not a lot of job opportunities for priests who have committed murder."

  "Don't say that." She closed her eyes.

  "Why not? It's true. It's one of the things they teach you in AA—you have to admit to your truths, no matter how painful they might be."

  "I should check on Mallory."

  She started past him, and Noah stood abruptly, almost knocking into her. He went to raise his hand, to catch hers. He wanted to tell her again how truly sorry he was for what he had done, but the words sounded so pathetic, so inadequate, that he let her pass.

  Chapter 2

  Supper seemed long and more than a little awkward. Noah was thankful when Rachel excused herself from the table under the pretext of getting Mallory's bath started, leaving Noah and Mattie alone in the large eat-in kitchen to clear the table and load the dishwasher. Mrs. Santori had served the meal of baked chicken, fresh asparagus, and new potatoes but then excused herself for the evening to eat with her husband, as had been her routine for years. She had given Noah the cold shoulder since he'd arrived, remaining polite but aloof, but he told himself that was to be expected. He knew the sixty-year-old Mrs. Santori blamed him for his parents' deaths no matter what anyone else said.

  For a moment Noah just sat there staring at the French country, blue and white checked wallpaper and listened to Mallory chatter as her mother led her away. He didn't know what was stopping him from getting up except that it had been a long time since he'd had a meal in which he could excuse himself without the approval of an armed guard.

  He rose slowly, testing the waters, still half expecting a dozen pairs of eyes to glance his way. "So Mattie, I saw the organ in the living room. You're still playing on Sunday mornings, aren't you?" He stacked his dirty plate on Rachel's. The food had smelled delicious, the best in... well, five years, three months and seventeen days, but it had tasted like sawdust in his mouth. Neither he nor Rachel had eaten much.

  Mattie rose slowly like a mountain from one of the delicate antique ladder-back chairs Rachel had refinished, taking his time as he placed his fork and knife carefully on his plate. Mattie was slow to learn, but once he had mastered something, he could do it over and over again in exactly the same way, day after day, year after year. He nodded.

  "Good. I'm glad, because you know I always thought you played so beautifully. Quite a bit better than Mrs. Long; she's not always on key, is she?" Not expecting any type of response, Noah carried the two stoneware plates to the sink, balancing the Incredibles plastic child's plate on top. Apparently, his release from prison had not affected Mallory's appetite, as her plate looked as if it had been licked clean by the Chesapeake Bay Retriever currently waiting on the back porch to be let in.

  Noah stood at the sink, scraped the scraps into the little covered pail on the counter, and rinsed off the plates. Mattie walked in his slow, lumbering, foot-scuffing manner from the table, left his plate on the counter, and shuffled back to the table to retrieve the iced tea glasses.

  "Look, Mattie, I want you to know how sorry I am about all this. About leaving you so suddenly, staying away so long." Noah exhaled, struggling for the right words as he gazed over the sink, out the open window. It was almost dark, and he could see light seeping from the small rectangular cellar windows of the barn where Mattie slept. "And I know... I know you probably don't understand all that's happened, but I..." He looked over his shoulder at Mattie, who stood halfway between the table and the sink, a glass in each hand, staring at the floor in front of him.

  Mattie was listening.

  "What I did, Mattie, was wrong. It... it was terrible. Unforgivable." Noah's voice caught in his throat, and he gave himself a moment to recompose. "But I can't change what happened, you have to understand that. All I can do is move on from here, and I know you're angry with me, and you have every right to be, but... but I hope we can be friends again." He glanced at the man who had never spoken a word in his life. "Truth is, I need you, Mattie. I need a friend. Bad. So you think you can do that?" Noah took the dirty glasses from his hand, trying to make eye contact with him. "Can you find it in your heart to be my friend again?"

  Mattie slowly lifted his heavy-lidded gaze. He didn't nod yes, but he didn't shake his head no either.

  Noah managed a smile. "You think about it, okay, buddy?"

  Mattie shuffled back to the table to retrieve Mallory's plastic tumbler with the masked, caped cartoon figures on it that matched her plate.

  Noah turned back to the sink feeling a slight lifting in the heaviness he carried in his chest, a weight he'd been carrying so long that he'd grown far too used to its burden.

  * * *

  Mallory, seated naked in half a bathtub of water, grabbed a rubber shark and held it under the water, shaking it violently as if the animal were in the throes of a kill. "Who's the man, Mama?"

  Rachel drew back, raising her hands, trying unsuccessfully to keep from getting splashed. "I told you, his name is Noah and this is his vineyard and his house."

  "I thought the vineyawd was Grandma and Grandpa Heaven's."

  "It was," Rachel answered patiently. She'd given up a year ago trying to explain it was Grandma and Grandpa in heaven and that heaven was not their surname. "But now it's Noah's."

  Her little girl raised the toy shark out of the water, looking up with quite a serious face for a preschooler. "Does he want my bedwoom?"

  Rachel looked away, shaking her head. "No."

  "Is he going to sleep in youwrs?"

  Mallory's innocent words stung, and Rachel struggled not to react. She was determined not to allow Noah, or what a mess he had made of their lives, to affect her daughter. "No, Mallory. He's going to sleep downstairs in the spare bedroom."

  Mallory pushed the shark under the water again, making it swim toward a floating Barbie doll whose hair had been shorn by a pair of blunt-nosed safety scissors guaranteed not to cut anything but paper. "Thewre's a lot of junk in the spawre woom."

  "Room, Mallory. Room, and I'll clean it out, okay?" Rachel reached for the no-tears shampoo that smelled of pineapple and mango. Mallory's preschool teacher had suggested it was time the little girl begin seeing a speech therapist. Rachel wasn't ready to do that, not yet, but it was tense times like this when Mallory's lack of ability to pronounce Rs and Ls made her a little crazy. "Did you wash your hair?"

  Ma
llory tried to ease the shark's jaws around the Barbie's head, but when it didn't fit, she grabbed the doll and popped its head inside the shark's mouth. "Is Noah gonna be my daddy?"

  "No. No, of course not. What makes you say such a thing?" Rachel squirted some shampoo on top of the little, wet, blond head and began to work up the lather with her free hand.

  "Ma-wee-a got a daddy when he got out of pwison."

  Rachel froze. Maria was Mrs. Santori's granddaughter, the daughter of her worthless youngest child, Connie. Connie lived with at least two different men a year, dragging her daughter from rundown mobile home to rundown mobile home with frequent stops at the old motel on the edge of town. Maria only made it to preschool half the time. "What are you talking about?" Rachel set down the shampoo bottle and picked up a plastic cup off the edge of the tub. "Tip your head back."

  Mallory followed her mother's bidding. "Ma-wee-a's new daddy is Shawntew. He come from the pwison where we picked up Mistah Noah."

  Rachel dumped the water over Mallory's head. "How do you know?" She grimaced, scooping up another cup of water. "How did you even know that was the prison?"

  "It wooked wike on Shawshank Pension."

  "You watched Shawshank Redemption?"

  "It's Mattie's favowit."

  "I told Mrs. Santori she needed to keep a better eye on what the two of you are watching on TV"

  "It wasn't on TV, it was a DBD," Mallory explained.

  "Mallory," Rachel groaned. "A DVD is still TV, and it doesn't matter. That is not an appropriate movie for a four-year-old. Now stand up." She tossed the cup into the water and got to her feet, grabbing a folded towel off the toilet seat.

  Mallory stood.

  "Leave the shark."

  The little girl let it fall with a big splash. "Bye, hawk."

  "Out," Rachel ordered.

  Mallory climbed out of the tub and allowed her mother to wrap her up in the big, green beach towel. "Mattie covers my eyes in the bad parts," she said softly, looking up at her mother. "He knows 'cause of the music."