He seems to puzzle over the question I have posed him, or maybe he is surprised that I have asked it at all. I take this as a sign my foolish wondering is wrong. The deed is too far in his past to clearly recall. This I believe.
This I want to believe.
“How long ago, Eric?”
“Five years,” he says, and a sickly lightness begins to fill me. Like I am falling upward. “Five years ago.”
“Where did this happen?” I press him gently, leaning closer, the confusion, surprise, whatever it is in his gaze doubling on itself. To the point it is indistinguishable from fear.
“Here,” he answers.
“In the city?”
His head bobs slightly. Weakly. I lean closer still.
“Where in the city?”
For an instant his eye drifts off of me. Not looking at anything in the here and now, but to another time, another place. Dredging that place from memory. Recalling it with unwanted clarity. Reliving what happened there.
What he did there.
His eye tracks back to me. A tear spills from it. Drags a wet streak down his blood-stained cheek.
“Tyler Street,” he tells me, and in the instant after he utters those two words, as they connect undeniably with other specifics of what he has confessed, the world as I have known it, all the terrible and the wondrous, changes.
And I with it.
Chapter Four
That Night
I had to tell my parents their daughter was dead.
I have tried to bury that time. To lay a veneer over memory that, on occasion, has yielded and allowed snippets to invade my consciousness. Now that thin skin of manufactured self deceit has been shredded, and what
was
,
is
again.
Six minutes past midnight, May 10
th
, 2005. My second year at St. Mary’s. I was associate pastor then, a year away from ascending to full responsibility for the parish upon the death of Father Oliver Simon. It was with him that night I was engaged in the kind of random discussion common among those who are not friends in the truest sense. The simple back and forth where acquaintances edge toward friendship. He was inquiring as to my recent appointment to the chaplaincy program of the Chicago Police Department as we stood in the kitchen, he filling the coffee maker for its morning duty and I assembling a late night turkey on wheat. I was telling him that my six months working on the periphery of the CPD had given me more insight into the job of a police officer than my thirty years as the son of one had. That was entirely unfathomable to Father Simon, and he probed as to whether there was a distance between my father and me which I had not revealed. I was on the cusp of explaining my father’s way, the Great Wall Of Dad which protected family from job, and job from family, when there was a knock at the door.
Three knocks. Solid. Official.
There are no good reasons for the sound at the hour I heard it. I laid my half constructed sandwich on the counter and went to the front door. I opened it to find two faces. One familiar, Reverend Harrold Garner, the department’s senior chaplain, and one not. An officer in uniform. A captain. They wore grave expressions with an open resignation. As if there were no other manner possible about them right then. Something terrible had painted that look upon them, and it could not be wiped away or willingly made to be something less foreboding. I puzzled for a moment at them, wondering in that instant before knowing what could have brought them at that hour with dread in their eyes.
Then they told me.
It is odd to recall it now, all things up to that moment crystal clear in my mind, but the hours and days after learning that my sister had been killed a warren of places and conversations and plans all lost in a foggy state of consciousness. I wonder if it was so for those who experienced the events I mentioned earlier. Did people wander in a daze following Pearl Harbor? Did the basics of life continue—eating, sleeping, breathing—without the texture and feelings which defined one day as different from the last, or one moment?
A few minutes after being given the news of Katie’s death I was in the back of an unmarked CPD car, Reverend Garner next to me and the captain at the wheel. I did not know his name, and to this day I still have no idea who the man was who drove me from St. Mary’s to my parents’ house in the dark.
Officers arriving at the market where she was shot found her identification, a driver’s license clutched in her dead hand with a fifty dollar bill, and one had recognized her last name. Had wondered if this could be any relation to Gus Jerome. A cursory exploration of that possibility had confirmed that she was. Some harried discussion had followed as to how to notify their brother officer of his daughter’s death when someone interjected my newish involvement with the department.
I was to be told first.
It was assumed, I imagine, that I would simply accompany Reverend Garner and the captain to my parents’ house to be present as they were notified. As they were officially told of Katie’s murder during an attempted robbery of a market none of us had ever heard of. That was what I was told on the doorstep of the rectory. That was the plan as we drove the few miles to share the awful news. That was the intention as the captain pulled to the curb in front of the house where Katie and I had grown up.
But as we walked up the path to the front door that sequence of events yet to play out seemed impossibly detached. I could not stand by as witness to what was about to transpire. I could not simply observe. She was not a stranger whose untimely passing I was only connected to by my position and my calling. She was my sister. My flesh and blood. I could not be the face my parents looked to after learning of their daughter’s death—I had to be the face they were looking at
as
they learned it.
And so I told them. The reverend and the captain did not challenge me in that decision as I stopped them on the way to the door and announced my intention. They did not intervene when the door opened and my father and mother appeared together. They stood by in support only as we entered the house and gathered in the cramped foyer. They listened as my mother gave a soft, detached whimper upon hearing the news, retreating almost immediately to the living room a few feet distant where she settled into her rocker by the fireplace, letting the motion of the chair lull her to a place more distant than was now usual for her.
My father made no sound, standing rigid, nothing seeming to move about him. Nothing seeming to change. But I saw it in his eyes. An avalanche of boundless grief. As if a piece of his soul had just washed away, no different than footprints gone from a sandy beach as the tide rolled in. There one instant, but not the next. You glance away and they are no more.
And from there the mental fog rolls in with force. All that happened that night, and the next day, and the next week did occur, and if pressed for details I might be able to dredge the particulars from the muddled mix which is my memory of that time. But beyond any singular attempt to go back and relive a moment from the days following Katie’s death, there are only vagaries to be drawn upon. A mix of what is too hazy to remember, and what is made only of questions. What? Who? Why? All gnawing wonderings without satisfaction. Without answer.
Until now.
Chapter Five
Sinners
“Absolution,” Eric says once more, the word barely escaping the rattle and rasp of his thick, shallow breaths. He stares up at me with that lone, pleading eye, anticipation raging in it. Expectation even. A knowing that before he leaves this life and drifts off to the mystery that awaits he will be granted that which he wishes. That which he needs.
Were he not on the blinding edge between life and death a fuller ritual would be what he seeks. Communion. Anointing with oils. A gathering of the faithful offering prayers for his passage from light to dark, and on to eternal light. But here I suspect he waits for mere words from me. A simple prayer, maybe. The promise of a slate made clean before he passes from this mortal existence.
This is all he wants. What I am here to offer.
But I do not. I ease my face back from his, a flash of surprise in his eye as it tracks my slow withdrawal.
“Father,” he says, his hand squeezing weakly down on mine. “I need absolution.”
I slip my hand from his tepid grip, breaking the physical connection with little difficulty. With unconscionable intent.
“Father…” He utters the word almost as a question now, puzzled by my actions. Maybe doubting my convictions. Most certainly afraid that I am not what I should be.
I fear the same thing.
“Please…” This soft plea comes with great effort. With fading, terrified breaths. “Father.”
I stand fully now next to the gurney, my gaze cast down at the man who killed my sister. He is alone before me. Alone in his dying. That sudden realization swimming in his gaze, his perceived hope for salvation drifting away like a life raft caught in some rogue current. He cannot flail like a drowning man might at the sight of his rescue being inexorably pulled away, but behind his stare his mind grasps at possibility. At chance.
“Our father, who art in heaven…” He begins the prayer, hoping to jumpstart my participation in this very last rite of his being. I stand mute in response, recalling the very same prayer, as I recited it among others as we watched Katie’s casket descend slowly into the hole cut in the green earth. I said it there with true and complete understanding of its meaning, its power. I said it for her.
I cannot say it for him.
He seems to try to start the Lord’s Prayer once more, but his will to do so no longer trumps the coming of what is inevitable. His mouth gapes slightly as his eye fixes on me. The fingers of the hand I held in mine stretch out and up toward me. He gasps one more breath, his mouth twisting to make sound, that one word coming once more. In whisper. Almost nothing.
“Absolution…”
So soft it comes I could claim to not have heard it, but I do. In that final utterance he is begging for what I am here to give him, and terrible thoughts of symmetry fill my mind and rage in my heart. Did Katie beg? For her life? As this man and the unknown other he spoke of raised a gun and squeezed the trigger and took all that she was, and all she would ever be? If she did, this man did not heed her plea. Gave her no consideration.
Yet he wants that now.
I watch him closely, wanting him to know my silent presence in these final moments of his life. Wanting him to feel what it is to be watched as one dies. I am holding a mirror through time for him to gaze at, though I am under no illusion that he has made any connection between Katie and me. He has no sense of my motive in doing what I am. He is confused, and frightened. An abyss looms behind him, and he will enter it without what he craves, and will find within its darkness whatever waits for him, be it salvation of the highest order, or damnation without end.
His lips tremble and curl and make a soundless word. No longer the plea for his soul to be cleansed. Just a very human wondering now in this cold place he cannot understand.
Why?
He seems to expect an answer. When none comes a sadness washes over the part of his face not wrapped with gauze, and his eye tracks lazily off me and rolls toward the ceiling. It fixes there as his chest settles a final time and stills.
It seems that I stare at him for an eternity as that moment lingers. Watching his death as if it were frozen in time. A freeze frame in some movie whose ending is neither sad nor joyous. And maybe not an ending at all. I might stand there contemplating this, and him, but the shrill squeal of an alarm jolts me to a semblance of awareness as the doctor and nurse rush back in, the curtain flung open behind them. The officers are right behind, standing just outside, watching as the doctor and nurse work to get Eric’s heart started again. I am pushed clear of the gurney and find myself wedged against the wall as the flatlined heart monitor screams. I watch the urgent flurry of activity as more doctors and nurses join the battle to keep their patient alive. Doing their duty without hesitation. Loyal to their calling.
I shuffle slowly away along the wall, past these would-be saviors, and through the line of protectors just beyond, until I am alone in the hall. The way out just before me. A short walk and two left turns, through officers and staff, all here this night for reasons that are right and true. All who would assume the same of me as I pass.
But I would know. I would know what I have done. How deeply I have broken the covenant of my calling. I cannot face them, and so I turn away and move toward a door at the far end of the trauma ward. A passage to the interior of the hospital. A way out.
* * *
A side door lets me into the parking lot. The chill that chased me inside has doubled on itself, the breeze a stiff river of icy air as I weave through the haphazardly parked police cruisers. I reach into my pocket and have my key ready as I reach my car. My hand trembles as I try to slip it in the lock. It slips from my grip and drops to the asphalt at my feet.
I let it lay there, my body tipping toward the driver’s door until I am leaning against it. My knees slowly buckle, body above folding toward the ground as I slide down the car, the leaden collapse leaving me sitting awkwardly between my car and a cruiser. I force my eyes shut. As if to keep within the tears that do come, because I do not know for whom I am crying. If it is for me I cannot allow that. I am undeserving of so much at this very moment. Pity, particularly, especially if it is of the variety manufactured by the self.
Still, the tears do come, and after a moment I open my eyes and let them flow. Sobs do not rack my body. I weep silently and bring my hands together and press them against my mouth. It could be mistaken for the act of prayer, but it is not that. Not in the usual sense. Words do rise lightly behind my clenched hands, my own plea, offered in the dark of night, huddled in guilty sorrow on the chilly ground. Selfish words.
God, help me…