And almost everything but the happy did come again.
“I don’t know what you think of me, Father. You must judge me. How can you not?” During a lull in the afternoon, after lunch, before vespers, when the children were having a short siesta, she and Father Emilio, with the tiny shadow that was Nalini, were taking a short walk in the monastery gardens before it downpoured again.
“I have nothing but profound sympathy for you,” Father Emilio said. “Do you judge yourself?”
“Oddly, only since I’ve been here.”
“That seems odd to you?” Father Emilio shrugged.
“A little bit. After all,” said Larissa, “this place is completely removed from anything I’ve ever known. I can’t figure out what’s stirring my conscience. Nothing in it is familiar, nothing rouses the senses or the memories.”
“Nothing?”
Larissa chuckled. “No, and I must admit I’m not a fan of the vinegar and the pickled fish. Though I enjoy the coconut.”
“But the thick liver sauce poured over the crispy suckling pig, that doesn’t move your conscience?” Father Emilio smiled a little.
“No.” Larissa chewed her lip. “You know…I really didn’t mean for it to happen. This thing with Kai.”
“Didn’t you?”
“My pockets weren’t empty and the devil wasn’t dancing in them. I had a good life.”
“Yes. Che was quite envious of you, or so she would tell me. I kept telling her to struggle is okay, too.”
Larissa shook her head. “I’ve had both. Believe me, a comfortable life is better.”
“That’s what Che told me too, and she hadn’t had both.”
“She was still right.”
“Was she? Your life got easy—and empty—and your soul started looking for a way out. The question you have to ask yourself is why? Larissa, you had love in every room in your house. Why wasn’t that love enough?”
Larissa frowned. She didn’t like the formulation, the premise, the implied conclusion. “That’s not true,” she said. “It was enough. It had nothing to do with that.”
“Didn’t it? What then?”
“I told you, I just wasn’t vigilant enough.”
“True, vigilance is essential in virtue.”
“It’s not about virtue,” Larissa frowned. “It’s about what feels right in your heart. But in the beginning, I wasn’t guarded enough. I should’ve been more careful. I should’ve never pretended to myself even for a moment it was nothing. Now it’s too late, but that’s how it happened.”
Father Emilio nodded. “That’s how it always happens. I kept telling Che to be careful with Lorenzo, to guard herself against his destructive passions. All she wanted was not to struggle. I said to her, but Che, when you’re struggling, conflicted, in a panic, you’re always calling on God, praying to him, begging him for help, and few things please our Lord more than to give solace to the souls that cry for him.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you find yourself closer to God when things aren’t going as well?” Father Emilio asked carefully.
“Hmm,” Larissa replied in a ponder. “Not particularly. I feel angrier, I think. When life’s in the crapper, I feel like I can’t believe this has happened to me. Like it’s proof of the random, unfair nature of it all.”
Father Emilio stared somberly ahead, his head shaking slightly.
“I really don’t think God has any time for me, Father,” said Larissa.
“Never, or not now?”
“Not now especially. But I guess what I’m trying to say is, never.”
“You think He has no time for you,” asked Father Emilio. “Or…do you perhaps have no time for Him?”
She smiled restlessly. “You’re right. It’s probably mutual.”
Father Emilio shook his head. “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
Larissa waved her hand. “Ah. He’s got no sympathy for the likes of me. Not when compared to Benji and Bayani.” Bayani caught hemorrhagic fever and had to be quarantined. Benji was the malformed infant playing baby Jesus, missing, among other things, the part of his jaw that allowed him to drink from a bottle. Milk had to be dripped into the open cavity that was his mouth.
“You’re right, Benji and Bayani receive extra grace from our Lord. But let me ask you, have you read the Bible much? At night after evening prayer, do you open it?”
Larissa didn’t want to admit to him that she didn’t, that instead she feverishly wrote and wrote and wrote her own testament to the rover on the Ducati, the wrangler of horses, the builder of barns, the taker of hearts.
“I didn’t think so,” said Father Emilio. “Because if you did, you would notice something very striking in all the stories of the Bible, Larissa, in the Old Covenant and certainly in the Book of Books, and that is: there is
no one
, no matter how small, how seemingly insignificant, how sinful, who is not fixed and fortified with everlasting and personal compassion from God. Not the woman at the well, not the blind leper, not the tax collector or the Pharisee, not Nicodemus or Job, or Joshua or Jonah, or the girl who died. No one is cast away from God’s grace. No one. If you read it, that’s what should jump out at you. How full of intimate profound mercy God is to all souls. So yes to Benji and Bayani, but also to Nalini, and to you too, Larissa. Whatever joy or sorrow touches you, it touches God, too.”
They made circles through the grounds, walking slowly. Larissa didn’t want the rains to come. She liked talking to this man. She held on to Nalini’s hand.
“In a regular day filled with small moments of outward insignificance,” she told him as if reciting from her own new covenant, “one nothing led to another, and suddenly he was in my car, and suddenly he was in my heart.”
“And nothing became everything.”
“Yes. But he loved me, Father! And I loved him. I know I once loved my husband—”
“
Just
your husband?”
“No—you’re right.” Letting go of Nalini’s hand, Larissa wrapped her arms around her sinking stomach. “But suddenly my whole self belonged to another person.”
“No, Larissa,” Father Emilio said. “Then, as now, your whole self belonged only to you.”
She didn’t know what he meant. But he was a priest. He didn’t know what it was like to love. She didn’t want to say this out loud. In the beginning, Kai and I had breathtaking fire, she wanted to say to him. We were all ablaze, and I was eighteen with him, an eighteen I’d never been. He was a joy above all joys.
“The question is,” said Father Emilio, “what remains after that inauspicious beginning? What’s left?”
Was he being ironic with her?
Inauspicious?
Ominous? Foreboding? Sometimes she couldn’t tell. “Love is left,” said Larissa. “That love you keep talking about. That’s how I know it was real.”
“Does he still love you?”
“I hope so.” Larissa bent downcast, undeniably upset and disordered by the absence of letters, by her inability to speak to Kai by phone. “We’re fully committed to one another,” she said. “We have one life.”
“Have you noticed how often people make promises they
can’t keep? Look,” said Father Emilio, “can I ask you a hypothetical question? If you had known then that you would never see your children again—never!—would you
still
have done it?”
Larissa didn’t look at him. She didn’t even nod or shrug. It had started to rain, blessedly, and they went inside.
What if the answer was
yes
?
In this manner Larissa moved toward another winter, counting out the days until October 20, toward another falling of the leaves, other daffodils in other deserted towns on other continents. Or was it toward summer, the greening of the trees, the blooming of the flowers, the glow that sprung from renewal?
She dreamed she lost them and she kept opening and closing her cupboards, opening and closing her drawers, walking into people’s houses, then walking out, looking in cars, in bars, in woods and bushes. She just kept wandering, her hands opening, closing things. What are you looking for, Father Emilio once asked. My children, she replied. I seem to have misplaced them. I put them somewhere and can’t remember where.
5
Jared Stark
“W
hat is she doing?” Larissa asked Father Emilio one afternoon.
“Why is she always sitting apart? Here, or outside on the steps. Why doesn’t she go play with other kids?”
“She does. She plays all the time.”
“She always comes back here.”
“Yes. During her moments of solitude, she does. She is waiting.”
“Solitude? She is
five
. Waiting for what?”
“We all need to sit and think in the silence. The child sits and waits for her mother to come back.”
“Oh my God!” Larissa stared at Nalini on the bench playing with sticks. “Is
that
what she’s doing?”
“Of course. What did you think she was doing?”
The rains didn’t come every day now. It was still warm and humid but without the torrents.
“I don’t know. Just sitting?” Lowering her voice to almost a whisper, Larissa said, “Do you think it’s feasible? I mean, you don’t think it would be better for Nalini to know the truth?”
“I tried telling her the truth.” Father Emilio smiled ruefully. “But Nalini sees it differently. She tells me her mother often
comes to her in dreams, and vows to return to her as soon as she is able.”
“Oh, Father,” Larissa said, “why do you let her believe this nonsense? I don’t think it’s kind. You should disabuse her of the notion.”
“Why would I? I don’t know for sure Che won’t come back. She might.”
“Come on now. If she’s not back already…”
“She could be in prison.”
“She would’ve written,” said Larissa. “Che was the best letter writer.” Unlike the horse rider from Pooncarie. “And you know how she felt about having a child. If she were in prison, or alive, she would’ve written her daughter.”
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?”
“So you agree with me, Father. Talk to her. Honestly, it’s not good for her to do this. It’s not healthy.”
“Well,” Father Emilio drew out, “you may be right.”
“You know I’m right.”
“Except for one example that makes me want to give the benefit of the doubt to Nalini.” He tapped Larissa’s arm. “
You
.”
“Me? What do
I
have to do with Nalini?”
“You’re not dead,” said Father Emilio. “You’re not even in prison. And yet
you
have not written to your children.”
There was that sensation again, of precipitous calamitous falling, the stomach dropping out. “That’s different. I’m different. I don’t know what to say to them…you’re comparing two totally separate situations, there’s no comparison, two totally…I don’t even know—”
“I agree with you,” he interrupted her stammerings. “I would prefer if Nalini had someone to take care of her. But I can’t get an adoption placement for her without the mother’s death certificate, which I don’t have. She certainly does need someone, though.” They both gazed at the little girl. “She is such a vulnerable child. Then, of course,” he added, “are all children.”
“I still don’t understand where Che could’ve gotten the money for bail from,” said Larissa. “She was always penniless and frantic. I mean, it’s inconceivable that Lorenzo could’ve made bail. Did he sell his kidney or something?”
Father Emilio said nothing, but his gaze lifted from Nalini across the yard to Larissa next to him. “Do you really want to know how Lorenzo made bail?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
He stood up. “Come with me. Nalini, we’ll be right back,” he called out to the girl. “Stay where you are.”
“Okay, Papa.” She got up from her bench and followed them inside.
He sighed. “Sit outside, okay? I have to talk to Larissa in private.”
“Okay, Papa.” She slid down onto the floor, the two sticks in her hands prancing, all saddled up, as if in dressage.
In the rectory, with the door closed, Father Emilio turned to Larissa. “Your husband was the one who sent Che the money for Lorenzo’s bail.”
“
What
?”
“Yes. He sent the money, care of this church, for Lorenzo’s bail.”
“That’s impossible!” Her hand flew up to steady her thumping heart. “He didn’t know anything—he knew nothing about Che’s—when did he do this?”
“Five years ago.”
A stunned Larissa collapsed against the chair. She found this inconceivable and wrong, the connection between that world and this one, like a seance gone awry. She thought she was a ghost, and suddenly Jared’s material presence made itself known, and with his presence the presence of the other thing, the thing that constantly made her feel like she was plunging from the skies.
“You want to see what else he sent?”
“Father!” she cried, putting out her hand to stop him. She was terrified he was about to fling at her the painted hands of her children, their painted feet, with helpless words scrawled in their unformed handwriting.
Mommy, where are you? I miss you
. There were some things Larissa could not endure. This was one of them. “Please…have mercy…no.” She could take anything but a physical reminder of them.
From a safe behind his wood desk, Father Emilio pulled out a white business envelope and handed it to Larissa.
“I will not look at photographs,” she said, her voice hoarse and low.
“Don’t worry, no photographs. Look inside.”
In the envelope was a stack of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. “Money?”
“There’s four thousand dollars in there,” Father Emilio said, “marked for Che and the child, with your Summit, New Jersey address and your phone number. Che had asked for a plane ticket to come stay with you. Jared sent her a note explaining your silence and your absence, but he did send her the money for the tickets.” The priest pointed to the envelope in Larissa’s hands. “The note is in there if you want to read it.”
I’m not sure I do, Larissa mouthed inaudibly. I’m not sure I can. I’m pretty sure I can’t. I’m certain I don’t.
After sitting in the chair a while, almost hoping to be stung by a mosquito and get dengue fever—bonecrushing pain, fever, rash, seeping hemorrhage—for she imagined it to be better than this, Larissa opened the folded piece of paper. In Jared crisp firm block letter handwriting, the note read,