Before I Wake (26 page)

Karen smiled and shook her head. “Did they ever forgive you?”

I nodded. “Oh yeah. Christmas is hard though. It's like ‘This is Bob, my cross-dressing son, and this is Sparkle, she paints rocks and this is Mary—'” I dropped my voice to a dramatic whisper. “‘
She's a lawyer
.'”

We both laughed for a long time.

“I'm just kidding,” I finally gasped. “I don't really have any brothers or sisters.”

This just started us off laughing again, and it was a long time before either of us was able to speak. The sense that there might be anything strange in the two of us sitting there over dinner had completely disappeared.

“I always wanted to write,” Karen said, the smile vanishing from her face.

“I thought you wrote for the
Sentinel,
before Sherry was born?” I took a small bite of my salad.

“I did.” She shook her head. “I got the job at the paper to make ends meet while Simon was in law school.” She toyed with her fork. “No, I always wanted to be a
Writer.
You know, capital W. Short stories, fiction, maybe a novel.” She shrugged, as if that part of her no longer existed.

“Why don't you? Write, I mean.”

“I did, for a while. Well, all through school I did. I did an English degree, took courses in creative writing. I spent as
much time writing stories as I did writing papers.”

“Did you get anything published?”

“A few things here and there. I never really sent stuff out.”

“Why not?”

“I'm not sure. I guess it seems pretty stupid now that I didn't.”

“That's okay,” I said.

She shook her head, staring at me. “No. No, it's not. I see you, I look at you and I realize how, how…jealous I am. Beginning your career. Doing what you want. So many options.”

I braced myself.

“I look at you and I realize that somewhere I got off track, I guess.”

“So get back on.”

She gave a single, sharp laugh. “Right. In my spare time.”

My turn to shrug and take another bite.

“You're really something, you know that?”

I looked up and she was smiling. I didn't speak, uncertain what she meant, what to say.

“I can see why Simon loves you,” she said.

“Karen, I—”

She shook her head. “No, don't. Please don't. I know. I know it goes deeper than my husband having an affair with someone at his office. I know that there's more to it than sex, than staying late after work, lying to me on the telephone.” She smiled a little at my expression. “I think I knew, even before the accident, that something was going on.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“What's he like when he's with you?” She shifted in her chair.

Stalling, I set my knife and fork on the edge of the plate, dabbed the corners of my mouth with the napkin and picked up my wineglass. I really didn't want to talk about Simon with his wife, but I couldn't see any way to avoid it. “He's, I mean, he's, well, he's just Simon, I guess…”

Karen leaned across the table and took my hand, squeezing it.

I took a deep breath. “It's hard to describe. I mean, I don't know what he's like with you. How that compares. With me, he's gentle, I guess. I mean, he never raises his voice. Never seems to get upset. I've seen him in court: I know how he can get. You know, how cold. How precise. How vicious. I've never seen that, except in court.”

She looked at me like I was describing a stranger. I tried again. “He listens. And he talks to me. I feel like we've got…like we had…a real connection.” I shook my head. “I'm sorry.”

“You got him playing his guitar again.”

“Guitar?”

“Yeah. The other day he went up to the attic and got his old guitar down. I hadn't heard him play since university.”

“I didn't even know he played,” I said.

“He's a man with a lot of secrets,” she said, almost without bitterness.

“I never used to think so. I always thought that we were really open. With one another, I mean. The problem, I think, is that Simon doesn't really know himself.”

She shook her head.

“That's what I told him this morning. I told him—” I braced myself. “I told him that I loved him, but that I didn't really think that he knew what he wanted, and that I didn't want to…”

I couldn't finish the sentence. Instead, I reached for the bottle of wine in the center of the table and filled my glass, carefully looking away from Karen.

When I looked back, her eyes were focused on my face. I couldn't even guess what she might have been thinking.

LEO

I sat in the van in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven where Father Peter had told me to wait, trying to remember everything he had said. I tried to think it through. It all made so much sense
when he was talking. All that stuff about people attacking our faith, about the forces of darkness being loosed upon the earth. You just needed to watch the news at dinnertime to know that he was telling the truth.

But that little girl…

I kept the picture of Sherilyn Barrett from the newspaper under the work orders on my clipboard so I could look at it, look at her beautiful sweet face. How could she could be evil?

That sweet little girl…

But no. Father Peter said she wasn't a little girl anymore, not since the accident. That was when the Beast took her, deceiving people with these false healings, luring them away from the truth and finding a home in the darkness within them.

Evil can wear so many different faces.

Somebody knocked on the window and I jumped. I thought for a second it might be the Dark One, called by my thoughts of him.

It was Father Peter. He waved for me to follow him.

I locked the door and had to hustle to catch up. Hustle hustle hustle, don't be late.

He led me up the street and into an alley. Piles of garbage leaned against the walls of an old church. The windows were all boarded up. When I caught up to him, he was unlocking a door with a ring of keys.

“A donation,” he said, as he pulled the door open. “From a true believer.”

The basement was as full of garbage and mess as the alley. It looked like a bookstore or something. There were boxes of books everywhere, stacks of records and magazines falling on the floor. The air stunk like cat pee and rotting meat. I coughed a little to keep from throwing up, and Father Peter looked at me.

Something slithered through the garbage. A rat, maybe? A serpent?

“Look at this place.” He shook his head. He touched a stack of books and scrunched up his face. “How could anyone who
claimed to truly love God allow this to happen to one of His holy places?”

I didn't know the answer.

“One of the oldest buildings in the city, a house of God, now no better than a dung heap. There's no history here. No legacy.” He shook his head. “Even the Romans left the temples alone, and we do this to ourselves.”

I didn't understand what he meant, and I think he could tell.

“Someone told me that there used to be a fitness club in this building. They did aerobics where people used to come to worship. Looking for salvation in the flesh, in the sin. Vanity. And now this. Somebody selling this smut, this sleaze, in the basement of a church.”

He struck a match on the wall and lit a candle. He held it high as we went farther into the basement. It smelled even worse. The candle made long shadows on the piles of garbage.

“But that's all right,” he said, as if he was talking to himself. “We'll clean it out. I've known places like this before. Basements and sewers. Caves and catacombs. Sometimes what we have to do is best done in darkness, where no one can see us, don't you think, Leo?”

“I guess so.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

He turned toward me, holding the candle between us. In the candlelight, his face looked even more like a skull.

“You do know what I'm talking about, don't you, Leo?” he asked, his teeth sharp and shiny. “You're a part of this now.”

I nodded. I knew it. I was part of it. He trusted me.

“That's good, that's good.” He seemed to look into me, without blinking. “Because there is going to come a time when I call on you, Leo. When I will have need of you. And I need to know that when that time comes, I'll be able to rely on you to do what needs to be done. I can rely on you, can't I, Leo?”

I thought of the photo of the little girl from the newspaper, of the evil that was hidden inside her, just waiting to get hold
of anyone who touched her, anyone fooled by her innocence. The mask of the Beast.

I bowed my head. “You can count on me, Father.”

KAREN

Closing the door and locking it, I watched as Mary edged her way through the small crowd of protestors on the sidewalk. I waited until she reached her car safely before I turned off the front light.

After feeding Sherry and changing her, checking her stats, I kissed her on the forehead, saying “Goodnight, sweetheart,” then I climbed up the stairs to my bedroom.

The house was completely, absurdly still. I was aware of the silence in a way I hadn't been since just after Simon left. I went downstairs to check Sherry again. Back in bed, I couldn't find a comfortable position, twisting from side to side, flipping my pillow, throwing off the comforter to cool off, pulling it back up when I got too cold.

Finally, I gave up. Sleep wasn't coming, and I didn't want to read in bed. I pulled on my robe and went down to the kitchen.

The ceiling light turned the darkened patio door into a mirror. I kept catching glimpses of my reflection as I looked in the drawer under the phone for some paper and a pen.

Back in Sherry's room, I took the largest of her books from the basket beside the bed and set it on my lap. Centering the paper on the book, I took the cap off the pen and began to write.

“Once upon a time, there was a princess in a kingdom by the sea. Beset by…”

 

December 10-23

 

Victoria New Sentinel
Tuesday, December 10, 1996
Can she heal the sick?
Controversy surrounds “miracle child”
~City Desk~

The parents of four-year-old Sherilyn Barrett, comatose since a car accident last April, opened their Fernwood home to a steady line of injured and ill pilgrims yesterday. Following reports that Barrett had seemingly cured several people…

SIMON

I stopped short as I turned the corner onto Shakespeare at about 7:30 a.m. There was a crowd in front of the house, and judging from the garbage and the lawn chairs, they had been there all night.

They had leaned their signs against the fence, and most of them were hunched over steaming takeout cups. They were dressed for the weather, but they still seemed cold, stomping their feet and rubbing their arms.

I was in front of Cecil's place next door when they noticed me.

“It's the father!”

The crowd surged toward me, the protestors coming into focus.

A woman in a floral dress with a heavy brown coat shouted, “How can you do this to your child?”

“Why?” screamed a man with a close-cropped beard and glasses, wearing thick socks in his sandals.

“Liar!” said a pretty blond girl in her mid-teens.

I kept walking. I never thought they'd touch me. So when hands shoved my chest, grabbed my arms, I stumbled and lost my balance, almost fell.

“Sinner!”

I righted myself, then lowered my shoulder and pushed through them to the gate.

The protestors shouted behind me, waving their fists and signs, but no one followed me into the yard.

“Are you all right?” The question came from a young woman in a wheelchair, first in the line of six pilgrims at the base of the ramp. The words were thick and hesitant and it was clearly difficult for her to speak.

It took me a moment to answer. “Yes. I am,” I said. “Did they do that to you too? Block your way into the yard?”

She nodded.

I let myself into the house with a key I hadn't used in months.

“Karen?” I called as I slipped off my shoes.

“I'm with Sherry.”

She was smoothing a new nightgown over Sherry's legs.

“How long have those people been out there?”

“The protestors?” She drew the covers up. “Most of the night,” she said. “A few of them, at least. More have been arriving since it got light.”

I shook my head. “They blocked the gate. I had a hard time getting through. Apparently they've been doing it to the pilgrims as well.”

“Are you all right? Is anyone hurt?”

I rested my hand on Sherry's leg, reassuring myself. “They pushed me around a bit. I'm going to call the police.”

“They were already here.”

“What?”

“It was a busy day.”

She started by telling me about the previous day with the
pilgrims, about Dr. McKinley losing his job. I stopped her when she told me about her confrontation with Father Peter.

“Why didn't you call me?” I asked. “My cell was on.”

“It wasn't exactly the best day for you either.”

“I would have come.”

“I know.”

I didn't say anything when she told me about Mary staying for dinner, and she didn't volunteer any details. I was surprised to hear that John Richards had come to the house.

“So he just wanted to ask some questions?”

She nodded. “He said there wasn't an investigation, but that someone else might be in touch. He said you should call him.”

I had already planned to, the moment she mentioned his name. “I will,” I said, trying to ignore the sick feeling in my stomach. “In the meantime…” I squeezed Sherry's leg.

“Yeah.” She picked up a bundled diaper from the bed. “Let's get ready for the day.”

By 9:30, when Ruth, Stephen and Jamie had all arrived, the lineup of pilgrims reached the gate.

Shortly before ten, the television trucks and Father Peter arrived in such close succession it was as if they had planned it. No sooner had the crews readied their cameras than the protestors began singing. Up came the signs:
WORSHIP NOT FALSE IDOLS
.
PROPHET, NOT PROFIT
. There must have been two dozen of them, marching along the sidewalk, across the width of the front lawn, shouting and chanting and singing.

Father Peter stood away from the group, watching them from the rear of a plumber's van. Out of range of the cameras.

“We're ready,” Karen said. I let the blind fall back against the front window and turned to face her.

“What should I do?”

“Do you want to start off by keeping records at the door? Jamie set up a clipboard yesterday.”

The shouting and chanting was gaining in force and volume as the protestors tried to drive the pilgrims away from the
house. The pilgrims ignored them as best they could, and the protestors increased the pressure, leering into the yard, singing hymns. The television cameras devoured it all.

Then Karen opened the front door, and the day's parade of the sick and the dying began.

I spent the morning taking down information as the pilgrims passed through the foyer. I assumed, initially, that it would be better to keep my distance, to maintain my objectivity. Dispassionate distance is one of the first skills you learn as a lawyer: don't fall for a client.

I kept my head down, my eyes focused on my clipboard, only glancing up when someone new came though the door.

“Your name is?”

I was pleased with how smoothly everything was going: by noon, I had more than twenty names on my list.

And then Lorraine Coombs touched my arm.

I was writing her name when I felt her fingers just above my wrist. Her touch was hot, sticky.

I glanced up and met her eyes, liquid blue and bright. She smiled. Her skin was bright red, damp with sweat. With one hand, she clutched the handle of her walker as if she might collapse without it. With the other, she had reached out.

I couldn't look away.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“As good as I've been in a while,” she said, still smiling.

“Can I get you anything? Water, or—”

“No, that's fine.”

I set the clipboard down and tucked the pen into my pocket. “Let me help you,” I said.

She took my arm, and we walked, halting step by halting step, to see Sherry.

“Thank you,” she said in the doorway to Sherry's room, her face lighting up when she saw my daughter.

“You're welcome.”

After that, I began to notice how each pilgrim's face lit with
hope and desperation when they first saw her. None of them were reluctant, none of them reserved. They hoped—no, they believed. They believed that my daughter could save them, that her touch could help them reclaim their lives.

I envied them their faith, the clarity of their belief.

After the last pilgrim left at three, I followed Karen to the kitchen.

She had been the very embodiment of strength and balance through the day. She seemed to be everywhere at once, and nothing seemed to throw her off. She was in the front yard, talking with the pilgrims as they waited in line, learning their names, their stories. She was at the gate, helping them push past the protestors into the yard. She was in Sherry's room, checking on our girl. She was taking over from Ruth, from Dr. McKinley, from Jamie and even me, when we needed a break. I never saw her flag.

We left Ruth and Dr. McKinley working with Sherry, and Jamie sorting through the information that we had collected about the people who had come through the house. I was pouring her a cup of coffee when she asked, “It's amazing, isn't it?”

She was sitting at the table, and I set the mug in front of her.

“It is. I wasn't expecting it to be like this.”

“Like what?”

I sat down across from her.

“So personal, I guess,” I said, sipping my coffee. “I've seen a lot of people who were sick or hurt. I've done the best I can for them; that's been my job. But with the case work, it's so clinical, so detached. I've never felt…connected like this.”

She smiled a little and nodded. “It's important, this. What we're doing.”

“Yeah. Maybe that's what I was trying to say. It feels like I've spent my whole life focused on what was important to me, and there was a whole world out there that I wasn't even really aware of.”

I was trying, but that wasn't quite what I meant.

Seeing my daughter through the eyes of the pilgrims was a revelation. I had fed Sherry and washed her and dressed her, had sung her to sleep and sung to her when I knew that she would not awaken. She was a beautiful little girl who smelled of shampoo and soap and milky skin, whose laughter had sounded like singing. I had been there at her birth. I had been there at the moment of her death, and when she had come back.

In the eyes of the pilgrims, though, she was something else, something more. At some point in the last few days, she had stopped being my little girl alone and had become a vessel for their hopes and their faith, a glowing symbol where once there had been a child who liked to fill her pockets with stones.

I struggled to reconcile the two visions of Sherry in my mind—I wanted to deny the pilgrims their beliefs, to preserve the image of my daughter as just a little girl, but I couldn't.

I tried again. “It's…”

“Real,” she said.

Our eyes met across the table.

“Real,” I said.

KAREN

“Simon's gone?” Jamie asked as I came back into the kitchen.

I nodded. “Guitar case in hand. A wandering ministrel he.”

Jamie smiled.

“It was hard.”

“Having him here?”

“Letting him go,” I said. “I wanted him to stay.”

“That wouldn't—”

I shook my head. “No. That wouldn't have been good.”

“You don't want to rush into anything.”

I couldn't help but smile. “Yes,” I said. “Yes I do. That's the whole problem.”

SIMON

I stopped at McDonald's on the walk back downtown and wolfed down a burger and fries without even tasting them. But even with the stop, the six o'clock news was just starting as I turned on the TV in my hotel room.

We were about three stories in—not breaking news, but ahead of the first commercial. The piece was short: the pilgrims from the morning, some file footage of the accident scene, Father Peter's protestors singing their hymns on the sidewalk. He was nowhere to be seen—he had a knack for disappearing when cameras turned to him.

After the story, I shut off the television.

I had arranged to meet John Richards in the hotel bar at eight, and I had no idea what to do with myself before then.

I stretched out on the bed. I was exhausted, but when I closed my eyes my mind sprang to life—no chance of sleep.

I unpacked the bag I had brought from Karen's, refolding the clothes and tucking them into the battered dresser under the TV. I stacked the books on the bedside table, reading each back cover before I put it down in hopes that something would appeal. Nothing did.

Turning the television on again, I flipped through to the top of the dial and back again. Nothing.

I took my time showering, just standing for a while in the hot water as it washed the day away. I toweled off thoroughly, put on a clean shirt, checked my watch.

6:47.

I was at a complete loss.

Hair still damp, I paced around the room, replaying the day in my mind, thinking about the pilgrims: their faces, their eyes, their hope, their faith.

Everything that had consumed me up to now seemed a thin veneer hiding the true texture of the world. A gaudy surface designed to distract, to keep me from pulling aside the curtain, to keep me from looking for the deeper truths I was sensing now.

I sat down on the bed and opened the guitar case. My fingers started picking out a blues, but I stopped myself. The idea of sitting alone in a hotel room playing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” was too trite to bear.

Then I remembered that among the books I had brought from the house was a collection of Child ballads. I riffled through the pages. There.

I cracked the spine and started to play.

 

The wind doth blow today, my love

And a few small drops of rain;

I never had but one true-love

In cold grave she was lain.

 

There were secrets in ancient songs like the ones Francis Child collected; secrets that I couldn't explain, that I didn't understand. They were all story songs, and you always knew where you were going, verse to verse. But there was an entire world just under the surface. A world of ghosts and angels and demons pulling the strings, all with their own stories, their own motivations, impossible for the characters—or the listeners—to fully understand.