RAY TOOK US TO HIS MOTHER’S HOUSE.
That sounds like a happy and convivial event, except that you’ll remember that Nina and I were the subjects of a murder investigation, and he had been told to quit getting involved with the subjects or he’d be sent home with his ass in a sling.
I could have argued, but I didn’t. I was done trying to save Ray from himself. He wasn’t giving me the courtesy of trusting me, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that the dressing-down he had gotten from Detective Bert was an act staged for my benefit. I thought it unorthodox that Ray would take us to his mother’s house, but nothing I had experienced in my forty-eight hours in Salt Lake City had made much more sense than that, so I just smiled when I saw the lady and said, “Hi. I’m Em Hansen. It’s nice of you to have us here.”
“Call me Ava,” she said. She was beautiful. Stunning. A monument to expensive cosmetics, healthy eating, comfortable living, and extraordinary genetics. It was clear where Ray had gotten his looks. She had the same high coloring, the same cheekbones, the same tilt to the corners of her eyes. I would have felt intimidated if the circumstances of our meeting hadn’t been so far past normal experience as to seem absurd. She examined me carefully. “Welcome to our home,” she continued.
“I’ll put you girls in the guest room at the end of the upstairs hall.”
Girls? What the hell.
Nina and I followed her up a short flight of carpeted stairs. “I have a change of clothes you can put on, Nina,” Ava was saying. “You’re a little bit smaller than any of my daughters, but I’ve saved some of their clothes from when they were younger. Are you about a size four?”
Nina had been bearing up pretty well since we had left the morgue, silently crying now and then but mostly just being silent, and had made her entry into Ava’s deluxe spick-and-span home with only a modicum of cowering astonishment. But now she turned her head toward Ava, her eyes growing wide with something that looked pretty close to terror.
I said, “I don’t think she knows her dress size, Ava. She’s very clever, makes her own clothes.” What I didn’t say was,
And I’ll bet there is no pattern available for this dowdy, highcollared style.
“Well, we’ll just see what we can find, then,” Ava said kindly.
By the time we reached the room, Nina’s expression had shifted from uncertainty to awe. “Pretty,” she said, taking in with widening eyes the stately glamour of the six-bedroom house.
It was a handsome, spacious house, elegantly and expensively decorated, and the guest room had the diaphanous atmosphere of a butterfly’s garden. The curtains, bedding, and table skirts were done in tasteful floral prints, the walls were painted a gentle shade of pink, and the carpeting sank deliciously beneath my feet. Two windows stood open to the west, taking in the late-afternoon air and a spectacular view of the sun dipping low over the Oquirrh Mountains. Great Salt Lake shone golden with the light to the northwest. In the near ground, a small but well-kept garden encircled a swimming
pool, and birds twittered as they grouped for the coming night. The whole setting worked on me like a balm. I wanted to sit down in the comfortable overstuffed chair by the windows and maybe stay there a year or two.
Ava got Nina set up with towels and soap for a good scrub in the tub in the private bathroom connected to the guest room. “You just turn these handles,” Ava said. “This one’s hot water and this one’s cold. Use as much as you like, dear.” I had to hand it to Ava; she was getting Nina’s measure pretty quickly. And when Nina began to look agitated, Ava beat a hasty retreat so she could disrobe in private. She grabbed a box of gauze out of a drawer on her way, and without comment, she redressed my thumb, which had begun to get grubby.
Thus reconstituted, I followed Ava downstairs to the living room, which enjoyed a cathedral ceiling and views west toward the Oquirrhs, north toward Salt Lake City, and east onto the steep rampart of the Wasatch Range. The sun had just kissed the crests of the Oquirrhs, shedding a deep rosy glow onto the Wasatch front. I decided that the couch would do as nicely as the overstuffed chair upstairs and so I sat there.
“Can I get you some refreshment?” Ava inquired.
“This view is refreshment enough. Thank you,” I answered, and as she began to leave the room, I added, “And thank you, really, for having us here. Ray must have told you there is some danger involved. He took all precautions to make sure we weren’t followed here, and he is good at what he does, but still …”
Ava turned and looked at me, drawing her already splendid body up into a near parody of good posture. “He’s a good boy,” she said. “He wouldn’t bring danger here, however slight, unless he had a very good reason.”
Boys. Girls. “Do you have other children?” I asked.
“Four girls. Three of them will be here for dinner.” She smiled fleetingly, a quick, polite crimp of her lower face muscles.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me …” She faded through an archway into the kitchen beyond.
“I’d be glad to help you,” I called after her.
“No need to, my dear. It’s all but ready and the table is set.”
I dully realized that if the table was already set, this meant she had known Nina and I were coming. I tried to remember if Ray had stopped at a phone to tell her. I leaned back, resting my neck on the soft back of the couch. I could not recall a moment after our visit to Temple Square when he could have done that.
As the red glow of the evening sun faded from the Wasatch, I drifted into sleep.
NINA WOKE ME a half hour later. “Dinner’s ready,” she whispered excitedly.
Dinner was going to be exciting? I fought to reorient myself in this room, in this house, in this city, in this life. “Who … what’s going on?” I mumbled. I had been sleeping hard.
“Ray,” Nina whispered. Same excitement.
“Excuse me, Nina,” I said, “but Ray what?” I looked around the room. He wasn’t there.
“I understand now,” she said cryptically.
“Understand what?”
“I thought you
knew
each other already.”
“Huh?”
“There’s such … interest between you. I thought you’d been together for a while, that it was all decided. Now I
understand.”
I sat forward in the couch, instantly grouchy. “Good. That’s one of us. Understand
what,
Nina?”
“You just
met.
It
isn’t
all decided. But it
will
be.”
“Nina, you lost me. What on earth are you talking about?”
“What in
heaven.”
“Nina!”
“You were
meant
for each other. Heavenly Father—”
“Nina,” I said impatiently, “I think you need to understand that I’m not a Mormon.”
“Then you’ll
become
a Mormon, and then he can help you know what to think afterward.”
I sighed. Ray might have the authority in this town to tell me what to do, but there was no way
anyone
was going to tell me what to think. “I am not a Mormon, and … and I’m pretty sure I could never be one.”
Nina giggled. “Oh, silly, why not?”
“With respect, Nina, because I don’t believe what Mormons believe.”
Nina smiled and shook her head at me, as if I were a recalcitrant child. “You never know till you try!”
Try believing?
“Well, thanks, but I’m used to a different way of life.” My words doubled back on me: I hadn’t tried much else, had I? An argumentative sliver of my mind added,
So what are you saying? You’re stuck on being lonely and tense the rest of your life?
I felt for a moment as if I’d been trout fishing and had stepped on an unseen rock beneath the waters and it had rolled. Snapping away from these fatigue-charged thoughts, I said, “Ray’s married, Nina, and that’s really all that matters. I … where I come from, men only have one wife.” I said it like that should end the conversation. It did not. As Nina continued to smile smugly, I insisted, “The man’s wearing a wedding ring, Nina. In my book, that means, Hands off.”
“Well, yes, Ray’s married, and he wears that ring in honor of his
first
wife, but even if you only want him to have
one
wife in
this
life,
that
shouldn’t stop you.”
“Nina, you’re not making any kind of sense I can follow.”
Nina smiled beatifically. “Ray’s first wife died.”
My pulse quickened. I felt an odd mix of panic and hope. “Dead? How do you know?”
“I know because I asked Kirsten. I
knew
you’d want to know but wouldn’t
ask.
You’re so polite about
asking
things.”
My mind was racing.
He’s single!
my heart said.
He scares me!
my stomach screamed. “But … then why the ring?”
“Well, because Ray married in the Temple, sealed for all time and eternity to his first wife. She’s waiting for him in the Celestial Kingdom.”
I closed my eyes. “Let me get this straight,” I said slowly. “Ray’s wife died, but they’re still married, because they vowed ‘forever’ and not just till death us do part.’ Did I get that right?”
“Yes!” Nina was pleased. Her student was catching her lessons well.
“Well then, if he marries again, is the new wife also forever?”
“If he’s sealed to her, yes!”
You’re getting it!
her tone said.
I opened my eyes and stared into hers, incredulous. “So then, even if he didn’t seal to the second wife, in the eyes of the church, he’d be practicing polygamy?”
“Mm-hm.”
I opened my eyes and looked at Nina. “And if he didn’t seal to wife two, then when he dies, he leaves her and goes back to wife one, in a sense.” Part of me was immediately thinking,
So who cares what he believes? Enjoy what’s here and now and let the chips fall when he dies,
while another part of me was screaming,
Oh sure, just hook up with a guy who believes A while I think B. What a recipe for success. Hell, the whole reason I feel so attracted to him is that he detests untruth as much as I do.
As I realized what I was realizing, that in this one fundamental way Ray and I were like twins born to separate families,
both wary even of our own reflections in the mirror, Nina cocked her head to one side. “But why wouldn’t you want to be sealed to him?” she asked. “He’s going to be a god in the next life.”
DINNER BEGAN AS DISCONCERTINGLY EASY AND PLEASANT as the house was serene and lovely. I say disconcerting because I’m not good at being … well, at ease. My social confidence is not titanic on the best of occasions, and here I was, walking into a brand-new context with a man I found entirely too attractive, and meeting his family, all at once, just after finding out that he was, er, available, and therefore, based on his recent behavior, possibly … interested in me.
There were eleven people present. Ava explained that it was Mormon tradition to gather on Monday evenings, something called “family home evening.” The sisters and their miscellaneous families had filed in full of hugs and kisses for Ava. Only one son-in-law out of a possible two appeared, and Ray’s father was also absent. The call of business must have taken priority, I decided.
Ray sat at one end of the long blond maple table and Ava sat at the other. Down one side sat sister number one, a gorgeous brunette named Chloe, with her two older children in booster seat and high chair (her third child lay sleeping in a playpen behind her, sucking peacefully on a pacifier, and she was visibly pregnant with a fourth); and sister number two, another gorgeous brunette named Katie. Katie’s year-old child
slept next to Chloe’s in the playpen. On my side of the table sat Nina (scrubbed pink, her fine, straight hair flying about with static), looking awkward and slightly uncertain in a spiffy lavender frock with a ruffled collar; Katie’s husband, a stiff-looking young man named Enos; and sister number four, a teenager just blooming into the family good looks. This was Kirsten, whom Nina had grilled for details of her brother’s love life. Sister number three, Annette, I was proudly informed, was away on mission.
Dinner began with grace said by Ray, all holding hands, heads bowed. I clenched my teeth. Even if I hadn’t been experiencing the feelings I had for Ray, this would have been a dichotomous moment for me, as I both enjoyed being included and wished I wasn’t being subjected to someone else’s ecclesiastical language. The “Dear Heavenly Father” stuff was beginning to wear thin.
In my parents’ house, God was a name taken in vain just before “damn it,” Father was what I called my dad when I was in trouble, and church was a place you went to watch the neighbors get married or eulogized. On the other hand, I felt giddily grateful to sit with a family who got along together, as dinner at our house was a time of great tension, during which my father and I stared into our plates or out the window, avoiding my mother’s gibes. My mother, who had a tongue as sharp as a filleting knife, would sear us with her eyes, saving the full heat of her discontent for times when, if things didn’t go her way, she could stalk out of the room without forsaking nourishment.
Ray’s family seemed to enjoy its own company. There were smiles and looks of contentment all around, and while corrections were offered to children who shrieked or ate messily, these admonishments were matter-of-fact, not shaming or charged with negative emotion. I cynically searched each face for signs of strain but found none. Enos seemed a bit absent,
and one of Chloe’s kids was having a hard time of it, but, I was assured, the poor thing was coming down with a cold. In my mother’s house, a cold was greeted as a character flaw. I began to feel so soothed by this family’s harmony that it gave me the jitters.
Each time I looked up from my plate, I caught someone looking at me.
I’ll bet you find me interesting, I thought. Here I am, the murder suspect your darling Ray brought home. I’m ill-dressed, bandaged, and plain as mud. You’re wondering just like I am, What can he possibly see in her?
I tried to think positively, to give this family the benefit of the doubt, but my none-too-sturdy self-esteem was making heavy work of trying to keep its spirits up. As dinner hummed along, I grew so unsettled that I tried to distract myself with thoughts about the George Dishey case. “Did anyone catch the news this evening?” I asked.
Nobody had. “Why?” asked Katie. “Did something important happen today?”
I glanced at Ray, who did not lift his eyes from his plate. That meant he had not told them what had happened at Snowbird. That was work; this was family. Had he told them anything about the murder, or about my involvement in it?
Yes, Ava seemed to know what I was talking about when I mentioned danger … .
“Well,” I said, choosing polite phrasing, “I’d been hoping to catch coverage of a press conference up in Snowbird. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists is having a meeting there. Paleontologists are almost by definition evolutionists, and I understand they were going to debate a group of creationists. It was supposed to be on the news.”
Katie said, “Enos doesn’t believe that Heavenly Father wants us to waste time on such thoughts. Isn’t that right, Enos?”
Enos took a bite of casserole and nodded sagely.
Katie’s rote answer chafed me, like a grass seed working its way inside a sock. I studied her for a moment. Her splendid looks seemed to mask a slightly acid disposition, hidden behind a lovely smile but given away by a subtle droop to the corners of her eyes. How old was she? Not more than early twenties, and she had a child already. Had she gone to college? She glanced at me over her chewing for a moment. There was a glint of challenge beneath those heavy eyelids.
“Where does the Mormon church stand on evolution?” I asked. I told myself that I just wanted to know. Brigham Young University had a thriving geology department, so that meant the Mormon church was okay with evolution, right? I was annoyed too quickly to admit to myself that Katie had hit a sore spot I had been too preoccupied to remember to cover.
Everyone was quiet for a moment. Ray squeezed his eyes shut for an instant, opened them, stared wide-eyed into his plate, and chewed.
Katie cleared her throat. “What’s evolution got to do with dinosaurs?” she asked.
“Everything,” I answered. “That’s the whole game with paleontology—to try to understand how all the different species evolved, and how some of them went extinct. Isn’t that so, Nina?” I smiled at her, sure she would chime in with something George had taught her. “What did George tell you about that?”
Nina swallowed a noodle, smiled wistfully, and said, “They drowned in the Flood.”
That did not compute, so I ignored it for the moment. There was something more than a bit apples and oranges about Nina, this naïve young thing in rags who claimed to be the widow of one of the best-known paleontologists of his day. Did she mean Noah’s Flood? Would he have told her that as a joke? Was she being funny? “Does the Mormon church teach creationism?” I asked no one in particular.
“What is the teaching on that, Ray?” Ava asked evenly.
I was beginning to wonder where Mr. Ava was, or, more specifically, how long he’d been gone. Ray was sitting in what I presumed to be his father’s chair, and being asked likewise to embody his authority. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “There is no policy on that,” he said simply.
“The church has better things to think about,” Enos added.
“Oh,” I said. I said “Oh,” instead of the response that crowded into my head about five seconds later, which was,
Isn’t the church even half as fascinated as I am with the question of how we all got here?
But by the time that thought had entered my mind, I had decided it was time to keep my mouth shut before I got any more than my foot caught in it.
Someone asked someone else to please pass the butter, and I got to looking around the walls of the room, kind of abstracting myself from the group to give myself a chance to calm down, and I noticed a portrait over the sideboard of a very plain man with eyeglasses and a gentle, patriarchal smile. Beneath the portrait, on a special shelf beside a lit candle, lay leather-bound copies of The Book of Mormon and a volume entitled
Doctrine and Covenants,
all carefully arranged and lovingly displayed. Resting on bows that had been artfully tipped up onto the books was the pair of eyeglasses depicted in the portrait, cocked and ready, as if their owner might at any moment return and lift them to his eyes. The tableau had the flavor of a private altar. I concluded that Ray’s father was dead.
Katie spoke again, her tone a bit too studiedly light just to be joking. “So Em, you believe we’re descended from monkeys?”
“No,” I answered evenly, “but I do believe that monkeys and humans are descended from a common ancestor.”
Katie laughed. Her mother shot her a warning look that said, Be polite to our guest, but Katie said, “Then you think Adam and Eve were the parents of monkeys.”
I stopped with a forkful of carrots halfway to my mouth. I had heard that some people believe the Adam and Eve story literally, but until that moment, I had not met that belief in direct conversation. I put down my fork and folded my hands on the edge of the table. “Let me tell you what I believe, Katie, and you can tell me what you believe, or not, whatever you please. I believe in evolution, but let me define my terms: evolution is change through time.”
Katie rotated her head slightly to one side in an expression of doubt.
I said, “I believe what I can observe directly, and as a scientist, I hold this empiricism to an even higher standard, requiring that the phenomena I observe be repeatable. Only then can I be sure to observe objectively, and consider all possible variables so I can hope to sort out cause and effect.”
“What do you observe about this family?” Katie asked.
She may not have gone to college and learned to stretch her mind around alternative beliefs, but she wasn’t stupid. I smelled a trap, but I was beginning to get riled and ran right into it. “Well, I look around this table and I see Ava’s striking good looks repeated in all of her children—the wonderful angles of the bone structure, the beautiful coloring, the tilt to the corners of the eyes—and yet I also see other traits she doesn’t have. For one thing, Chloe has her father’s nose—that is Mr. Raymond in that portrait there, isn’t it?—or should I say, a nose very much like her father’s, and I can see ears shaped like his in his grandson.”
“And?”
I raised my hands and interwove the fingers, taking care not to alternate them evenly. “I know from the work of other scientists—men and women whose work I trust—that each time an egg and a sperm unite, DNA reshuffles their coding information like a deck of cards, taking some traits from each parent to form a new individual. That’s change, through time.
With each generation, with each new
individual,
there is change from its parents. That’s all evolution is. I can observe the results, and so can every person alive. We all say, ‘He has Grampa’s ears,’ and ‘She has Papa’s nose,’ so in a sense, there’s a scientist in every one of us, an observer. Perhaps this shuffling, this process of evolution, is entirely random. Perhaps it is driven by divine plan. That, I don’t know. That, I haven’t personally observed, one way or the other. I would suggest that a divine plan, if it doesn’t follow the system of physical laws that have always been present, is subjective, and therefore not repeatable or without unobservable variables.”
Katie smiled, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Of course it’s by divine plan. Heavenly Father rewards us for living a worthy life by giving us beautiful children.”
Here, Ray shot her a look. Perhaps there was a Mormon teaching against arrogance. Whatever was behind that look, Ray, as usual, was communicating more with his body than with words.
“Listen, I didn’t mean to start a big debate,” I said, feeling like shit because I certainly had. “I’m a scientist. I practice the scientific method, which is designed to test ideas scientists have regarding observations we have made. That’s all it does. And these observations are made with our five senses, or with instrumented extensions of them. If you have a sixth sense that tells you why you’ve inherited this trait or that, I can’t argue.”
Katie smiled sweetly and nodded.
I stared across the table at her, thinking,
You’d damned well better be glad there’s a scientific method, sister, because if you value your children’s capacity to transmit your good looks to another generation, you’ll be glad to know that there are scientists hard at work on your behalf. They’re studying such interesting phenomena as the drop by half in our lifetime, of the concentration of sperm in the average human male’s semen. That’s half his firepower gone; how far do you think that trend can run before you
wind up with no grandchildren? And you grew up here in Utah, where there have been aboveground nuclear tests just upwind, and scientists are out there with Geiger counters.
Here I dropped my mental tirade, because, of course, scientists were the ones who had made those bomb tests possible in the first place. Sometimes it’s best to keep one’s mouth shut. I counted to ten and then tried to shift the conversation away from my beliefs to hers by asking, “What exactly does the Mormon church teach about the origin of life?”
Nina answered in a singsong voice, “We believe that Heavenly Father created the heavens, the earth, and all living things in six days. It’s just over six thousand years old.” Then, with great enthusiasm, she concluded, “We’re in the final millennium!”
A chunk of carrot lodged in my throat. All eyes turned toward Nina. Her face had brightened and a gentle smile had found its way to her lips. She was looking heavenward, her hands clutched ecstatically to her breast.