“Katie,” I say. He stops what he is doing, scissors stilled in his stout grip. I lift my head, eyes finding his in the mirror ahead. “I’ve been wondering why there was never any arrest. No break in the case. Nothing.”
He holds my gaze for a moment, then continues clipping, shortening stray strands over both ears. “Mike, I wish I could tell you.” Regret is true in his voice, his manner. It softens his armored facade. He is flesh and bone and feelings like any other, and I have vexed him. “Why are you asking?”
I can muster sincerity here, if not outright honesty. “Something just brought it to mind. And I wanted…”
He pauses again and fixes on my reflection. “Go ahead, Mike.”
“Could more have been done?” I say it as it must be said, with no intent to accuse, or belittle anything Dave has done for my family. I doubt he slept in those first few weeks after Katie’s murder. Staying with my parents then to help them through the terrible minutes, hours, and days, I often answered the phone only to hand it to my father, Dave Benz on the other end, sharing some morsel of the investigation, I assumed. Things my father kept to himself, burdening neither I or my mother, whose spiral into the fog seemed to accelerate as time spun forward from those days.
When he responds after a moment I know that he has not taken my question wrong. Is not angered or hurt. Saddened, maybe. “If more could have been done, Mike, I would have moved heaven and earth to do it.”
I nod, accepting his assurance. His fingers begin moving again, working the scissors as I stare at his reflection. Without looking to me he puts addendum to his statement. Something that hints at apology.
“I did all I could.”
I sit there, in still silence, letting him finish. He refuses payment when he is done, and pulls me into a full hug before I leave. No half handshake, half embrace that seems the style of displayed male affection in favor these days. It is a true, meaningful gesture, with force and feeling, expressive of this moment, and all between us that have come before.
As I leave, starting the car to drive away, the barber pole winds its candy cane colors in endless spirals. Going nowhere. No different than I, still confronted by two roads born of one. Faced with the decision to choose one.
Or to turn around.
Chapter Twelve
Forgetting To Remember
The TV is on low as I enter the rectory, Father Salas settled deep in a chair in our living room watching Jay wrap up another Tonight Show, some star of the moment and the musical guest gathered around him for one final blast of thanks and adulation. I stand watching, saying nothing, quiet long enough that Tim Salas cranes his neck and looks back to me, puzzled by presence.
“Everything okay?”
I respond with little delay, a nod and soft smile, but add to the gesture no words. Tim turns fully in the overstuffed chair. “I thought you weren’t coming back ‘til tomorrow.”
“It looked like the weather might get iffy,” I explain, lie embracing the truth. Talk of fall snow on any one of the local newscasts gives me cover.
Tim looks to the show again, satisfied with my reply.
“I’m off,” I announce as I mount the stairs, its top three treads creaking beneath my feet. As they have each and every time I traverse from first floor to second, or vice versa. And with every sounding of that soft squeal I am taken back to the house on Arrow Lake. To the four weathered boards that rise from the gravelly beach to the sheltered porch. Boards that gave me my share of splinters as a boy. Boards that released a sopranic moan as I padded up and down countless times on summer days.
I reach the second floor hall and move toward my room at the end, passing a closed door on my right, Jimmy G, Father James Generette, snoring blissfully beyond it, and one slightly cracked on my left. I pause here for a moment, weak light slanting through the thin space between door and jamb. At first I just listen, hearing what I expect. Breathing. Soft. Raspy. Hesitant. Like wind moving timidly through a stand of browning woods. Each quiet draw of air not quite a gasp. Not quite. But close. I have no intention, no desire to part the almost closed door and look within, and am about to continue on to my own room where sleep will welcome me, and I it in equal measure, but I do not take those dozen steps. Something stops me.
A sound.
It comes in metered bursts. Almost lost in the ragged breathing. I know instantly what it is. From unpleasant experience I know what the slow
drip—drip—drip
is.
I put my hand on the door and ease it open, stepping past to find what I already know I will.
Father Augustine Taylor lies on his bed atop the covers in black pants and black shirt. Aged hand outstretched from the bed as if reaching toward the night stand where his clerical collar lay. The stiff white rectangle resting next to a tipped bottle of Cabernet. The remnants within spilling from bottle to floor. Each drop of red liquid splashing on the hardwood below. New stain spreading over old. I step carefully around the bed and lift the bottle. Carry it to the dresser and set it atop, noticing as I do its empty mate in the wastebasket against the wall.
I look back toward him. Sleeping. Though I am not sure any slumber reached through the bottle can be termed peaceful. But it is Father Taylor’s way. His method of escape from the waking world. For how many of his eighty three years he has followed this regimen I cannot say, but in the twelve months he has lived at St. Mary’s there have been but a handful of nights he has not excused himself after dinner to ‘go for a walk’. A walk which, without fail, ends a short time later with his return, a small paper bag from Lawson’s Liquor in his arms, the contents clanking within as he disappears up the stairs. To be found, on occasion, as I have now. Clothed. Passed out. What little alcohol he could not consume draining slowly onto the floor. It would be easy to look upon the sight of him and factor in the event’s familiar frequency and reach to a shallow place to brand Augustine Taylor a pitiful man. A wretched soul.
I might do that. One day. If I should pass my eightieth year and reach the useful end of my service to my church. And if I should find that none of the little family I have left in the world are willing to take me in. And if I am shuffled from parish to parish as space permits. If this lot becomes my future, as it has been Father Taylor’s reality in the waning twilight of his life, then I might judge him in that way.
For now I simply turn off his light and ease one errant foot onto the bed and spread a blanket over him. I step back and reach to turn off his small bedside lamp but pause, my fingers on the switch beneath the shade. I let the light be for a moment, its weak glow washing over a small photo atop the nightstand. Framed simply, it is the image of a younger woman, two children clasped to her legs, beaming on a deck somewhere, field below stretching out toward bucolic woods. The look about the woman is dated, style and dress hinting at a time twenty years past. Father Taylor has spoken of a niece on occasion, living well with a husband, their twin daughters off at college someplace, and I suspect this is his memento of a familial connection long withered. Glimpse of a time when photos and letters were still dispatched to keep him apprised of events, monumental and mundane. They have abandoned him, even as he holds them dear.
O God, come to his aid. O Lord, make haste to help him.
The words are a soft plea in my thoughts. The beginnings of a prayer I will say for myself in a few minutes when I am alone in my room, making peace with myself and my God at the end of this day He has granted me. Standing here over Father Taylor, by proxy I offer it silently for him. Wondering if he has done so in his own name. For his own sake.
I turn the light off believing that he has not.
I step into the hall and ease his door shut. As I move toward my room I suddenly stop, dead still in the hall, the image of Father Taylor’s treasured photo striking me. Chilling me, even. For a moment it is as though some mental checklist ticks through my consciousness, trying to convince myself that what I am realizing is not so. And even when I am certain it is I move quickly to my room, wanting to find that I am wrong. That it is
not so
.
My door opens quickly, revealing the simple room in which I rest and pray. The dresser is topped with accoutrements of my calling and items more personal. Stiff white clerical collar resting next to a framed snapshot of my mother and father, one of the few she allowed me to take with her prized camera, the pair of them seated on the bench tucked under the alders in the backyard of my boyhood home.
I spin away from it and look to the wall opposite the door, window prominent at its center, more photos hung to either side. Me at the seminary. Tim and me in Las Vegas. A shot of the sisters from my previous parish. Two photos of me with Tim’s family at the beach in South Carolina, captured during a joyous summer weekend to which I was invited this last summer.
My heart begins to thud. My throat goes dry. Soft, quiet sobs begin to percolate from deep within.
I pull the drawer from my nightstand and dump its contents on the bed. Rosary beads and notepads and keys rain down among a happenstance collection of keepsakes. But not what I am looking for. Not what I am hoping for.
She is not here. Katie. No trace of her exists in this most personal space of mine. No picture, no saved card bearing birthday wishes. No item of import to her that I have retained for its sentimental value. There is not a stitch of her being within miles of me. No hint of her but for the odd memory I allow to bubble up from the depths where they have settled since her depths, like a stranger lost in quicksand.
“My God…” I utter the words too loud, and rush to my door, closing and locking it before turning back to my room. Without conscious design I have scrubbed Katie from my life. Wiped her like a stain upon my existence.
My mother holds more of her in memory than I.
“Katie, I’m so sorry.” Tears threaten, but do not fully form at the realization that I have abandoned my sister. In death, when all that she was should be cherished and held so very dear, I have let her go.
I have forsaken her.
Chapter Thirteen
The Slippery Slope
“Is there anything else?”
Chris puzzles at my question. Puzzles at my presence, as well, standing in the open door of her condo for the second time in twenty four hours. She’s wrapped in a comforter, pajama bottoms dragging past her bare feet. “I’m sorry…what?”
I move past and into her condo, heading for her small desk in the living room. She watches me, stumbling up from sleep by the open front door. I turn the desk lamp on and find the folder of clippings, taking it in hand and turning back toward her. “Anything else not fit? Not make sense?”
She seems to struggle with what I ask, distressed as she wakes fully and closes the door. “Michael, I didn’t bring this up to open old wounds. Like I said, I’ve dealt with Katie’s death on my own since it happened.” She pauses, as if catching herself in some terrible misstep. “Which in no way compares to what you’ve been through.”
She stops fully now and turns half away, shaking her head, as one does when admonishing the self.
“Chris,” I say, and she looks back to me. I close the folder and set it down. “I’ve tried to pretend that I was over Katie’s death. You can’t reopen a wound that’s never healed. All that anyone has ever said to me, or my parents, about Katie’s death is how terrible and senseless it was. You’re the first person to ever express anything resembling an attempt to
make
sense of it.”
She faces me now. An air of relief about her.
“If there is more,” I go on, “I want to know. In fact, I think I deserve to know.” I pause, letting what I feel, what I have come to realize, find its own words now. “She deserves more than being an afterthought.”
It is not a smile that comes to her face. Just an expression affirming of my words. “Yes, she does.” Her gaze ticks off for a second in thought, working on the initial questions I’d posed her. “The business now, people come and go like trains. There aren’t many reporters left who’d remember Katie.” She pauses again, running through some mental rolodex. “There’s someone at the
Trib
I can check with. Eddie Kleisner. He’s worked city crime for thirty years. Tight with the police. If they were holding anything else back, he’d be the one to know.”
“I’d appreciate that, Chris.” I reach my hand out to her and she puts hers in it. It is not the forced exchange of pleasantries we shared at Katie’s grave a few days before. Not cold leather against colder flesh. Her hand settles against my palm, fingers curling softly under, holding me for a moment before easing away. Skin gliding over mine.
It is a touch, a connection, I have never known.
Chris looks away from me, too quickly it seems, and takes the folder from my hand. She moves past, back to her desk, and slips the clippings into a drawer. The place she’d buried Katie until our chance meeting.
“Where can I reach you?” She asks this without looking, then turns toward me to qualify her question. “If there’s anything else to find.”
I nod and approach, standing next to her at the desk. A disastrously gaudy mug rests there, filled with pens and pencils and a collection of change at the bottom, a pad of post-its nearby. I snag a stubby pencil and begin to jot the rectory’s number down. But I never finish. Despite what I know to be right, and what I know to be wrong, I have taken the first steps on an unknown path which I had, until now, decided to leave untraveled.
Didn’t deserve it…
No, she didn’t. By Eric’s own words her death was without reason. Which, in concert with what Chris has shared, makes learning the ‘why’ of her murder more than a desire. It is an imperative.
Yet I must seek this knowing quietly. In whatever shadows exist along the way to this final truth.
I cross out what I began to write on the post-it and put my cell number instead. “Call me anytime.” I peel the slip of sticky paper off and hand it to Chris. She takes it, nods, reservation in her acceptance.