The Judas Child (55 page)

Winter was late again this year. Perhaps
order had not been completely restored to Makers Village; the dust had not yet settled in all the chimneys. He had paced through the month of December, waiting on some event he could not name.

This Christmas morning was another anniversary of Susan Kendall’s death. Her oldest friend laid a bouquet of snow-white flowers on her grave. Next, Paul Marie stopped by Father Domina’s simple stone marker. The old priest had lingered only long enough to hand over the stewardship of his parish, never doubting that Father Marie would accept.

The church had been filled on his first Sunday behind the pulpit—a record attendance. One year later, they still came in great numbers, and this mystified him. Surely by now they had found him out as a fraud, one who went through the motions with no feeling or faith. He looked down at the tattoos on the backs of his hands. Perhaps it was only novelty that so intrigued his parishioners. He toyed with the idea of emblazoning his vestment with an elaborate
C
for convict.

He said a ritual prayer over Father Domina’s grave. It was only a small spate of words that meant very little to him, and so his mind wandered even as he spoke. What would the old man think if he knew his acolyte had ambitiously evolved into a hypocrite, an agnostic
and
a heretic. In closing the prayer, Father Marie addressed the Lord, Who
might
exist, in the too familiar form of “You Bastard.” He alternately referred to God as the Great Baby Killer in the sky.

As he walked away from the old priest’s grave, he still held one bright cluster of flowers. Their colors reminded him of a child’s paint box. He held them up for Sadie’s mother to see from the distance of the gravel path.

“Aw, they’re beautiful,” said Becca Green as he came closer. She sat on a stone bench, holding her own bizarre bouquet, a loose arrangement of dead blooms, their large heads impaled on wire stems. She clutched them tightly, not yet ready to commit them to the ground.

“An odd color for sunflowers.” He smiled as he knelt by the brass vase at the base of Sadie’s stone.

“Gwen gave them to me last Mother’s Day—filling in for Sadie. She couldn’t find anything purple at the florist shop, so she got these. She thought Sadie would’ve bought me sunflowers—so bright and cheerful. Of course, that was before Gwen painted them.” Becca looked down on the dead flowers encased in thick globs of dark purple. “I thought that was so great. I laughed—Harry cried.” And now one stalk dropped to the ground and went unnoticed. “Ah, Gwen, what a practical kid. I thought Sadie might appreciate the joke more than Harry did.”

Though Gwen Hubble never came near the cemetery, he had seen the child in church every Sunday. She walked without a cane these days, and the bruised look in her eyes was passing off. He had taken this for a sign of healing.

He remained at Becca’s feet beside the monument, a low piece of slanted marble with a violet cast, engraved with letters of a simple elegant script. He finished arranging his flowers in the brass container and looked up at her. “David Shore doesn’t come anymore?”

Becca shook her head. “He has a new girlfriend. Sadie had a big heart—when she was alive. I don’t think she would have minded.”

Over the past year, the priest and Becca Green had wandered into a strange friendship over the graves of children. He had heard all the best Sadie stories. But this was the first time the mother had alluded to death. All their previous talks had centered on the exploits of a very lively child. And Becca had never brought flowers before; that was a service one performed for the dead, and it would have interfered with her deep denial.

In the months following Sadie’s funeral, there had been so many flowers heaped on this plot of earth, the engraved marble had been hidden from sight. One family had driven a hundred miles to lay a wreath on the grave. And now and then, the priest would encounter policemen walking through the cemetery, their large meaty hands awkwardly clutching small sprays of delicate violets.

Today the stone was exposed. Becca could read the dates of life and death—if she chose to. But she only stared at her hands, plump and white, folded around the painted flowers. “Gwen came by the house yesterday.”

“Is she done with the therapist?”

“Not yet. She still has a lot of strange ideas.”

“Does it upset you when she visits?”

“No, I love having her around the house. Oh, I almost forgot.” She rooted deep in her coat pocket and pulled out an envelope. “Harry’s latest batch of baby pictures. Gwen says the kid looks just like Sadie.”

He sat down on the cold stone bench beside Becca and looked at each photo with great care. Yes, the likeness was there in the large brown eyes and the wide generous mouth of the infant. The mother also bore a resemblance to her many wallet photographs of Sadie.

When he turned to Becca, she wore a puzzled expression and held the purple sunflowers closer to her breast. “I wish I knew what happened in that cellar.”

So Gwen had been at her again, attempting to heal her best friend’s mother, driving Becca insane to make her well.

“The kid does have a good argument.” Becca said this tentatively, as though testing the words in her mouth. “Yesterday, Gwen said—”And now the rest of the dark flowers fell to the ground at her feet. “She said—only Sadie could have known what commands the dog would respond to. I keep thinking about that dummy they found in the cellar, the one Gwen used to train the dog. It all happened just the way she said it did. The holes in the ground, the dead dog—everything. And that bastard was attacked by the dog, wasn’t he? And his knife wound—that was real. Gwen could never—”

“Becca, let it go.” This woman was in deep trouble, and he was ill equipped to help her. In the church-approved role of
advocatus diaboli
, he might point out that the mushroom lady’s journals were a more likely source for the dog’s commands, though no such mention was made in any of the newspaper excerpts.

“Listen!” She grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard. “There’s more. Only Sadie could have told her I was pregnant. I didn’t know for sure myself until that afternoon. Just before Sadie left the house, my doctor called to confirm the test. I didn’t tell Harry until after the funeral. But Gwen knew about the baby before my own husband did—and Marsha Hubble backs that up.”

Or perhaps at some earlier date, Becca had given away her secret by keeping Sadie waiting on a sidewalk, lingering awhile in front of a store window decorated with cribs and baby clothes. And there was another possibility. “Gwen might have talked to Sadie before she died.”

Becca shook her head. “Gwen says Sadie wasn’t conscious in the boathouse. That medical examiner, Chainy, he told me she was dead by then. He showed me the report. The blow that knocked her out was the one that killed her. Sadie died the day that freak stole her from me—over a week before they found Gwen.”

“
If
Dr. Chainy was right.” He had no great faith in either realm, supernatural or scientific.

She squeezed his hand again. “So what happened in that cellar?” The wind whipped up around them, collecting the painted flowers and driving them toward the grave. “Where do I put my faith? In a little girl’s crazy story—or a pathologist’s report?”

“Both things could be true,” he said, raising his voice with this lie, so the wind wouldn’t take it. “Gwen didn’t believe she could survive all alone. So her best friend came back for her. Does it matter
where
Sadie came from—Gwen’s own mind or that shallow grave?” He lifted Becca’s face to his and winced at the mad hope in the woman’s eyes.

No—call it faith.
Becca needed to believe that Sadie was an ongoing little force of nature before she could let go of her child. Gwen had understood that. Why hadn’t he?

“It doesn’t matter, Becca. They were so bound to one another, one child couldn’t leave the other behind—”He began to revise his deception, hunting for better words. He had spun so many tales for the parish, this should have been so easy. It was not.

And Becca Green was not comforted. Bright woman, she knew the sound of lies. Her eyes were decomposing now, giving him a view of the grave and its attendants, things that writhed and slithered, worms of the mind. He had failed her by planting doubt in a child’s ghost story.

Her face was a work of agony: her mouth opened and closed, as though gasping for air, making strangled sounds. His arms enfolded her, and he held her for a very long time. It had begun to snow, and a hard wind was driving the flakes into his skin, stinging him as he rocked Becca, gently stroking her hair until the ground at his feet was shrouded in swirling white and he had read the words on Sadie’s monument for the hundredth time: “Beloved child.” Snowflakes filled in the graven letters, and he closed his eyes.

“Sadie can’t be dead.” Her voice was muffled against his coat. She shivered. He held her closer, believing she was only cold. The snow had ceased, but the wind was rising and roaring all around them. The woman in his arms began to shake and thrash in a full-blown seizure. She screamed, and he came undone in his panic. This was his fault; he had brought this upon her. Her pain was cruel, and it was coming all at once—too fast. She could not stand it, and he could think of nothing to ease it or slow it. Her body was quaking so violently he feared that she would fly apart.

Then the wind ceased abruptly, and she lay exhausted against his chest, a spent storm of a woman. The world was utterly quiet and still as she lifted her wet face from the folds of his coat.

“How could Sadie be dead?” Louder now, she said, “Tell me how!” One hand formed into a claw and raked through her hair as she moved away from him. “I wake up every
single
morning, hoping it was all a lying dream.
Praying
that it never happened—that this damned piece of granite didn’t even
exist
!”

She thrust out one angry fist toward the carved stone and then fell silent. Stunned, she slowly turned her head to stare at the surrounding grounds. Her eyes came back to Sadie’s grave.

The sheltering windbreak of their own bodies had allowed a light cover of snow to accumulate over this one plot of earth, while all the rest had been swept clean—as if the snow had fallen on Sadie’s grave and no other. The priest knew it for a hoax, only an illusion of the elements. The rational explanation was there for anyone to see. Yet Becca’s eyes were shining, entranced and enchanted.

Paul Marie bowed his head, but not to pray. The woman beside him was smiling now, and he was the one in deep pain. So there they were, two people of radically different faiths, for hers was great and his was small.

He knew she was finding more ghosts in the weather, as though this fragile white covering of snowflakes might be a grand gesture of sorts—to erase the grave from her sight, hiding solid proof of Sadie’s death, allowing a mother to keep her child alive for one more day—a present for Becca.

Paul Marie stared at her radiant face, and there he found peace. He would not be the one to say that she was deluded. Maybe there was a God. And perhaps the Almighty had learned a bit of humility, for the priest now saw this unnatural act of deceit by snow as almost human in the frailty of a lie.

 

 

The old man kept pace with him, then
ran ahead in a sudden burst of energy and fear—as if he loved Louisa more. Man and boy raced toward the scream, a long high note, shriek without pause for breath, inhuman in its constancy.

Malakhai’s entire body awoke in violent spasms of flailing arms and churning legs, running naked into the real and solid world of his bed and its tangle of damp sheets. Rising quickly in the dark, he knocked over a small table, sending a clock to the floor, shattering its glass face and killing the alarm.

Cold air rushed across his bare feet to push open the bedroom door. By the light of a wall sconce in the outer hallway, he cast a shadow on the bedroom floor and revolved in a slow turn, not recognizing any of the furnishings. A long black robe lay across the arms of a chair. Shivering, he picked up the unfamiliar garment and pulled it across his shoulders like a cape.

A window sash had been raised a crack. White curtains ghosted inward, and drops from a rain gutter made small wet explosions on the sill. His head jerked up. A black fly was screaming in circles around a chandelier of dark electric candles.

Malakhai bolted through the doorway and down a corridor of closed rooms, the long robe flying out behind him. This narrow passage opened onto a parlor of gracious proportions and bright light. There were too many textures and colors. He could only absorb them as bits of a mosaic: the pattern of the tin ceiling, forest-green walls, book spines, veins of marble, carved scrolls of mahogany, and swatches of brocade.

He caught the slight movement of a head turning in the mirror over the mantelpiece. His right arm was slowly rising to shield his eyes from the impossible. And now he was staring at the wrinkled flesh across the back of his raised hand, the enlarged veins, and brown liver spots.

He drew the robe close about him as a thin silk protection against more confusion. Awakenings were always cruel.

How much of his life had been stripped away, killed in the tissues of his brain? And how much disorientation was only the temporary companion of a recent stroke? Malakhai pulled aside a velvet drape to look through the window. He had not yet fixed the day or even the year, but only gleaned that it was night and very late in life.

The alarm clock by his bed had been set for some event. Without assistance from anyone, he must recall what it was. Asking for help was akin to soiling himself in public.