I say nothing. What will come from him must come by his choice, in his way.
“Your mother wasn’t as far gone as now, back before Katie was killed. She had her rough patches. Episodes.” His fingers work slowly against each other in a constant, nervous rub. “She still went out with your Aunt Sheila or me. She’d wander off, sometimes, when your aunt looked a little too long at a dress in a window, or some such thing.” He rubs, and rubs, aging skin over wiry fingers edging toward a shade of pink. “Later, after everything was…after it had happened, I was able to pick little pieces of this from talking with her. She was out with Sheila and wandered off and saw Katie and the Hammond woman together in a car parked downtown. They were next to each other in the front seat. Kissing.” Pink verging on red now, the color of Michelle’s lipstick that sealed the love notes. “That’s where this began. On a side street downtown, by chance. Your mother could have seen any two of three million people, and she saw them.” He eases his hands apart, flexes the fingers, realizing the abuse he’s been exerting upon them. “That was a…more than a sin to your mother. It was a slap in the face. A denial of what she wanted Katie to be.” He absorbs his own words for a moment, and adds to them. “What she wanted from Katie.” Until now his gaze has danced about the room, but it settles on me as he says what he does next. “I know your mother’s faults. Her rigidness. I always have. But there was so much more good. I never thought…”
I glance back over my shoulder, just for a second. My mother rocks to a perfect cadence, some meter that soothes, cradled in her own solitude.
“I think she decided right then to have the Hammond woman killed,” he explains. “Do you remember when I was still on the force, your mother would let me tell her about my shifts?” I nod, and wonder if he knew how I would listen in on these cathartic conversations between him and my mother. “Dave and I, we can’t think of any other way that she knew about Fury. That he was the guy you went to if you wanted someone killed. She had to hear it from me at some point.” He almost grins. “What did Nixon say? I gave them the sword?” What blame there is he is trying to apportion at least some to himself. It is not right that he does that, and in time I will force that issue with him. Now is not that time. “What’s so terrible to me is that, all the while that her mind was at war with itself, dying inside bit by bit, she made a plan and acted on it. Wandered off one day and withdrew money from our savings, and went to Fury.” Again he quiets, the most difficult juncture for him reached. The instance where happenstance sealed the fate of my sister and not Michelle Hammond. “He had to ask her the way he did. Had to use that phrase that triggered your mother’s love for Katie. I think about that, and if he’d just said, ‘Who’s the lady you want dead?’ then the Hammond woman would be gone now, not Katie.” He looks to me. “I’m not saying that would be right, but…”
For some reason he stands. It is as if he’s completed confession and is rising from the kneeler, ready to perform what penance he can inflict upon himself. But there is none. Nothing that can soothe what he feels, or erase what he knows, or change what has come and gone.
“You can’t hate Dave for what he did,” my father says, the utmost sincerity in his voice. It is a plea to me to look past anything that has transpired between Dave Benz and me. “I think losing Esther made it impossible for him to envision me going through investigations and trials, competency hearings, all for your mother. All in public. He made it all happen, to protect your mother. Kept Estcek and Redmond quiet, cut a deal with Fury.” The near brotherly adoration he’s expressed tempers now. “The Hammond woman was only too happy to have it go away.” Then back again, the bond that lives and breathes with his brother cop. His friend. “When you started digging around, he said a few scares would put a stop to it. I wasn’t sure. But I wanted to protect you from all this.”
He stops. Enough said it seems. All that matters.
Not for me. “Why did you keep all of this from me?”
He walks to me and gently lifts his hand, puts palm to my cheek, toughened touch tender against my skin. My eyes grow warm and wet.
“I couldn’t bring you into the lie.” His own gaze glistens. “I couldn’t let you slip away, too. I had to let you live a right life.”
I say nothing. Tears spill down my cheek and onto his hand. He eases it back after a moment and sniffs away the emotion he has let slip, then turns and heads into the living room where he sits with my mother, watching her rock. Taking her hand. Holding it in his.
The love of his life.
Chapter Thirty One
Finality
I have no way of knowing whether she will be at home, or off tending to some necessity of her husband’s career, but I drive to the house on East Division and park across from the Hammond house. It twinkles from within, as does the house I have just departed, though here life spins forward less the fear of a disappearing past and present. Here a party to my sister’s life lives and breathes without apparent distress that Katie no longer does. Here the heart has hardened, if it was ever not that way.
Regardless, I have come to apologize.
I cross the street and climb the few steps, reaching to knock upon the door just as it opens, Michelle Hammond standing there. Expecting me. Noting my car from the camera, or an upstairs window, I imagine. She is not a woman ever surprised.
A brief thought on that forces a retraction of the internal observation. ‘Ever’ is too strong a word.
“Father Jerome.” She speaks my name with strict sameness, bored with my presence now and always. It is a practiced disinterest. Falsely conjured from the real of her being.
I wonder if she knows. If she has received a call from Dave Benz, or from my father, alerting her that what secret the trio of them had kept is no longer theirs alone. My rooting around has brought me, finally, to the truth.
To
many
truths. Each wanting of a space to be hidden. The truth of my mother. The truth of my sister. The truth of this woman.
None were what I had pursued this woman, or her husband, for.
“I came to say I’m sorry.”
She puzzles at me for a moment, pulling tight the sweater than hangs upon her shoulders and stepping out into the chill. “You’re sorry?”
It is as if I’d made some alien gesture to her. “I thought you were responsible for my sister’s death.”
“Responsible?” She half laughs, like a teacher might at a dimly unaware child. “In what deluded world have you been living?”
She does not know. There has been no call. Each so far understands that whether the secret remains that depends on my willingness to keep it. There will be no more threats, no more bodies in alleys. That is not her way, and has not been, I now know. What Michelle Hammond wields is the image of power. A relation to it.
“You can stop,” I say. She regards my words in silence for a moment, but is clearly ready to fire some salvo back at me. A measured diatribe to remind me of my place in comparison to her.
I do not give her the chance. The hand which has secreted itself in my coat pocket comes out, stack of envelopes in it, cards within. Her eyes track fast to what I hold, a wash of recognition in her gaze, hardly enough for one to notice. But I know enough to look, and I see it.
“Since the apology is out of the way,” I begin, her eyes still fixed on the cards, recognition tinged with a flash of sadness as I hand them to her. She looks to me first, not understanding, then takes what I offer her, holding them in two hands, thumbs rubbing the rough paper as if feeling for memory. “I have to ask…why did you leave her? To die alone?”
She stares at the cards, and I wonder what it is she will do with them. Bury them deep in some cache of mementos, or burn them one by one in the fireplace, watching each turn to cinder, all evidence of her relationship with Katie cast to the sky in drifts of smoke?
“I didn’t know what to do,” she says, confirming my earlier correction. The horrid event had happened too fast, taking her by surprise, some survival instinct kicking in. Though not survival of self. Speeding away from the market as my sister lay dying was an act to preserve reputation. “We were having such a nice night, and we wanted some wine, so…”
What she is able to say stops there. She steels herself against the threat of emotion and pulls the cards in against her chest, hugging them and herself as she looks to me.
“Did you love her?” I ask. Simple and clean. Yes or no. I do not need to know, but I want to so that the depth of this woman’s shallowness can register for me. Is she a vacant shell of humanity, breathing and walking and using what needs to be used, or what can be used, be it thing or person? Or does that spark of goodness smolder, even a small bit, somewhere inside?
But I am left to choose myself. She turns away from me and steps back through the door, closing it behind, giving me no answer. I return to my car across the street and sit behind the wheel. I have done what I needed.
I start the car and drive away. Nowhere left to go. No answers left to find.
I have never felt so lost.
Epilogue
The First Day Of
After all the machinations and surprises which infect our lives, large and small, momentous and mundane, we have to choose what we are. And what we will be.
My mother slumbers with her eyes wide. My father tends her like a fading flower whose season of bloom and bluster grows nearer to winter with each new day.
I am their son. Born wailing in their fullest days. Now here as witness to what is bleak and beautiful all at once. I see them, and I see love.
I am a brother. To a sister gone. To a flower that never faded. That looked toward the sun even in the rain. Perfect and not in the very same glimpse, but remembered as she was seen, not as she is now known.
Beyond the blood that binds me to others, I am not sure what I am. What I have been in the months since too many truths were revealed to me, by happenstance and by my own push to know more. Possibly more than I ever should have.
One thing I am not, though, is a priest.
I have crossed too many boundaries to hold myself up as a man of God. The vows I once held as inviolable crumbled too easily under the weight of my weakness. My need to satisfy the self before serving the God I embraced, and still do, brought me to yet another a fork in the road stretching out to my future. No choice was mine but to diverge and tread upon a new path.
Tim said to me when I shared with him my decision to leave the priesthood that he feared, in contrast to me breaking the faith, the faith had broken me. I assured him it had not. The judgment I had laid upon myself was not harsh, but fair. And, in a way, liberating. Were I to continue abiding by my vows, I would constantly be questioning to what degree I was a worthy steward of the faith. In moments of doubt I might brand myself a pretender.
And I would be right.
To live with that lack of confidence in self or motives would hardly be living at all, just an existence in expectation of failure. Stumbling into a future such as that holds no promise. An honest appraisal of self has brought me to understand this. I have changed, and the life I lead must change with me.
I will not be one thing to myself, and another to those I love for convenience’ sake. Katie locked herself into that manner of living. I wish she hadn’t. I wish I had known.
The time for wishes, though, has passed. I am living now, my life, new and unplanned. I walk along the shore of Arrow Lake, patches of crisp snow crunching under foot, a skim of ice on the water thickening now as winter takes hold. The real winter, not an imposter like that which chilled the world last fall. Christmas has come and gone, as has New Years. There is no door here for me to fix, no fallen tree to clear. I am here, for now, to live.
I drive down, as necessary, to visit my parents, once or twice a week, in a Jeep that Jimmy G’s brother sold me. The hardtop and windows seem not to fit as flush as one would like in a winter climate, but I make do, and a bit of cold air whistling past safety glass is small sacrifice so that I can spend time with my family.
The occasions now where my mother cannot place my father have grown more frequent, but not enough that the bond they share is anywhere near threatened. I know the chance of that terrifies my father, even if he will never let that show, much less admit it. But among family not all clues to feeling or worry need be apparent. Call it what you will—some cosmic connection or the true blending of souls meant to exist in tandem for all eternity. Whatever it is they have it. I can only hope one day to know a fullness that compares.
I left Chris in the city. What happened between us progressed no more than the embrace by the bay. But it would have, and to know whether it was true or not was impossible in the midst of the emotion and the turmoil. Something sparked between us. Something that was real then, but with no promise of being that when a semblance of normalcy returned to our lives.
Normalcy minus the clerical collar.
So we parted, understanding that if it was real, what we were beginning to feel, we would find our way to each other. Not running though fields of flowers in full bloom with birds singing and rainbows aglow, but with a call, and a chance to talk, over a cup of coffee.
I think of her every minute, of every hour, of every day. I tell myself to pick up the phone, and dial her number, but I am new to this. Presumption of being wanted is not a trait I have nurtured, nor one with which I am comfortable. So I have not called.
Instead I walk. Around the lake, with the wind stinging my cheeks, listening to the ice crack and hearty birds call when venturing from their winter nests. On the far side I stop, tasting the scent of winter on the wind, muted pine and a wisp of chimney smoke. I look back across the lake to where the latter rises from my house, slanting into the breeze as it reaches over the lake. Passing over someone. Standing across the water from me.
Chris.
She sees me, but says nothing. Makes no attempt to call out across the lake. I am too far to note any expression on her face, but I believe she is smiling. I want to believe she is smiling.