Chapter Six
Yesterday No More
I stand at Katie’s grave and stare off over the trees, the new day’s blue twilight creeping toward orange, trickling through their naked limbs. Spindly gray fingers still in the calm before dawn, the loitering air painfully crisp. Stinging my face. Reaching effortlessly through my windbreaker to numb my flesh. My bone. I feel these things, these physical signs of discomfort, and they do register in my thoughts, but only as the most fleeting nuisance. Like white noise. There, but not of import.
Katherine Jerome
Beloved Daughter and Sister
Gone To A Better Place
Born October 31, 1979 Died May 9, 2005
The epitaph cut into the stone that marks her grave says so little about her, I find myself thinking.
Five years and almost six months she’s been gone, to a better place as it says on the slab of granite. Soul in the hereafter. Body beneath a yard of cold earth in a suburban boneyard north of Chicago. A mile from where she grew up with a brother and parents and a succession of Labradors all named Jasper. Two miles from where she graduated high school, homecoming queen and valedictorian.
Eight miles from where she was killed.
In my own way I have echoed the shallowness of the stone in my own thoughts, quantifying my baby sister’s life so coldly. As if her twenty-five years were reducible to an equation of origin and distance and time. All factored with one another. Yielding a result. A life. Its passing.
The norm of my visits treads nowhere near the dread reality I have brought with me this morning. Twice monthly, at least, I come, bearing flowers and words. Morsels of life as it spins on without her. It always seems that I leave too soon, without having shared enough. Yet she does not want for other visitors, I am certain. Friends had always flocked to her, so much so that it seemed during her high school years she was the beacon of most social groups, others orbiting her as if it was her presence which held them together. I have not seen those people in many years, and on my one day here with Katie I am unlikely to, but I can imagine them coming by in ones or twos or threes. I can imagine them gathered around, standing where I am, giving voice to recollections. Good times shared. Bad times endured. There would be laughter, and tears, and there would be goodbyes with promises to come again.
Then there is my father. Our father. I know he visits, and I imagine he speaks to Katie as I do, but I do not profess to know what he says. In the few oblique conversations we’ve had verging on the subject, he offers little, and as sadness seems ready to envelope him he shifts the conversation entirely, to the horror that the Bears have become, or how good the fishing must be up at the lake. To anything that is not about her. Her death devastated me, but it was harder on him. There is a regret in him that I cannot describe. One that only a parent suffers when a child is ripped from the world before their promise can be realized. And he goes through it alone. Without being alone.
He will not take my mother to the cemetery. He could. It would be no more trouble than walking her to the car, helping her in, making the short drive, then guiding her between the tombstones to where her only daughter is buried. But I understand why he does not. The last and only time she was here, on the day we buried Katie, she broke into giddy laughter as mourners laid white roses upon the casket.
By then, though, it could not be blamed on her. Two years earlier she’d been diagnosed. Finally the misplaced keys and forgotten names and pots of burned stew on the stove had become worrisome enough that she gave in to my father’s insistence and went to the doctor. Who sent her to another doctor. Who sent her for tests. And then we knew. That was when a fear became a more frightening reality, though I believe that my mother knew before any of us. Before any doctor told her. I say this not from any special knowledge, but from a single observation six months before her absentmindedness had a clinical name appended to it, made one day when I looked out from the altar while celebrating mass and saw her and my father six rows back, having sneaked in to see their son, an associate pastor then at St. Gregory The Great in Milwaukee. On my father’s face I could see that pleased smile that I had come to cherish since I was a boy standing petrified before a crowd at the school spelling bee. It was his most simple offering of approval, and to me it was the treasure of his presence. It was the look of my hero.
And then I glanced to my mother, and her gaze was fixed upon me, lost and wondering, as if she was trying to place a stranger.
An hour?
I wonder absently to myself, trying to gauge how long I have stood where my sister rests. When I finally rose from the blacktop in the hospital’s parking lot and slid behind the wheel of my car, this is where I came. Without plan or design, or even purpose. I was drawn here, and have stood without word to Katie since arriving. If there is something to say to her I do not know what it is. What can I share with her that, in the place of peace and knowing where she now dwells, she does not already know? Mystery does not vex the dead. Only the living.
My being here, I suddenly realize, is not about her. It is about me.
“I’m sorry.” The voice comes from behind me, feminine and abrupt. I turn toward it and see a form wrapped in gray, long coat bundling the stranger against the cold, knit hat pulled low to warm her ears. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.”
It is a moment so unexpected, at this hour, after the events just passed, that I find no words to offer in reply. And in the silence that follows, as my gaze plays over the stranger, I begin to think that this woman is not a stranger at all. This realization rises not because the shape of her face or the timbre of her voice is somehow familiar, but because of the covering upon her head, brownish locks spilling from beneath its multicolored weave. I do not know why this simple article of clothing stands out to me, but it does.
“You don’t remember me,” she says, her voice edging toward something at that realization. Not sadness. Disappointment, maybe.
I shake my head, confirming her suspicion.
She approaches and slips a gloved hand from her coat, eases it toward me. “Christine.”
That one word, that name, drags me back in time. In that glimpse of the past held in memory I see Katie, and I see this woman with her. Girls then. Teenagers. Friends.
“Chris Wheeler?”
She nods, and I put my bare hand in hers and hold it for a moment.
“No one’s called me Chris in years,” she says in an almost wistful way.
“I’m sorry,” I say, the exchange, as nascent as it is, seeming to have existed between us for more than the few seconds which it has. It might be the flood of recollection, the familiarity with a relationship from my sister’s past rising once more. Or it might be that the appearance here of one who was close to Katie has put an exclamation point on the impossible happenings spun out over the previous hours.
“No, there’s no reason to…” She hesitates, her gaze shifting to Katie’s headstone. Lingering on the etched slab of granite for a moment before returning to me. “I’m the one who should apologize. I didn’t think you…” She does a quick verbal backtrack. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.”
“It’s all right,” I tell her, my words bland. Even cold.
She absorbs my tepid assurance. I feel her hand withdraw from mine. It disappears back into her coat pocket as her gaze narrows down on me. A near grimace of awkward uncertainty. “How are you, Michael?”
My reply does not come freely or instantly. I can imagine her watching as the words do come, twisting as they rise from somewhere within me. Not lie, not truth. An obliging dismissal of the query. Transparent and fumbling. “Busy. Keeping busy. I just stopped by on my way…”
There my reply trails off, whatever manufactured meaning I had attempted lost, nothing left to sustain it. My mouth hangs open for a moment, whitish breath jetting silently in the freezing air. I stare at Chris, her own gaze reflected back, puzzled. Concerned.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
“I’m okay,” I tell her, discarding outright my attempt at finding some half-truth. “I just came by for some time with my sister.”
Chris nods. The gesture almost apologetic. A realization that she has intruded on something. It is a reaction I did not intend. But feigning small-talk is beyond me at this moment. At this new place in my being.
“I’ll let you be,” she says, and steps past me to Katie’s grave. The hand which had held mine comes out of her pocket once more and rests atop the headstone. She holds it upon the cold granite for only a moment. Her gaze meets mine briefly, the look in her eyes one of punctuation. The end of something. Goodbye. Without a word she looks away and moves past, weaving through the headstones. In any movie worthy of celluloid I would call out to Chris, and she would turn, and some understanding would come just in the look between us. But life does not spill flickering from a projector in a darkened space for communal experience. It is mostly solitary, often unknown but for those in the midst of its plodding suddenness. Sometimes life shatters the ordinary, as words from a dying man have for me. Sometimes it is a mostly forgotten acquaintance walking away, and not calling out to them as they make the distance too great to bridge with voice.
When Chris is gone I turn back to my sister’s grave, and again I am confronted with my reasoning for coming here. I can ask forgiveness from God for my failings in the dark hours just passed. For withholding comfort from a dying man as he begged for such with his last breaths. This I can seek through private exchange with the Almighty, or in hushed confession to one of my colleagues. Here, though, I stand wondering what it is I should expect from this communion with my absent sister. Are there words I should speak over her resting place? Should I expect some cathartic release from doing so?
Or am I here because what happened is more prelude than postscript.
We got away with it…
The terrible past given texture with his words. The vague descriptor ‘two assailants’ less so now. One bloodied face has been painted on a blank wondering. A name has been affixed to the same. Eric.
We…
Still, there is another. An unknown. A partner in the taking of my sister’s life.
A flock of spritely birds streaks over the cemetery. I look up and track them across the brightening sky, their number moving in symmetry, as if guided by some singularity. Toward some place. Or purpose.
Where, from here, do I go? I ask this of myself as the flock disappears over the slumbering neighborhood surrounding the cemetery. What is it that I will do with what I now know?
Were another life mine, one where I was not bound by the strictures of my calling, I would certainly share what was told me with those charged with solving my sister’s murder. Were I another person entirely in this alternate personal universe, one who embraced vengeance above justice, I might seek out the remaining party in this new reality and visit upon them all the pain which I and my family and all who loved Katie have experienced since her killing.
After my actions so few hours ago, where I let
who
I am come before
what
I am, I wonder if I am worthy of calling myself a priest. I fear that I have toed one foot over a line that, once crossed, cannot be erased and drawn further along a path at my convenience. That line is there for a reason. A sacred reason. And if I do not understand that, and accept that, even embrace it, then what have I been in the years since taking my vows? A pretender? I have no illusion of being perfect, either as a man or a man of God. Adornment with a stiff white collar is no guarantee of purity or propriety. Those of my calling have demonstrated the ability to sully their name and their church with maddening frequency, and though their numbers are small in comparison to the greater body who give with hearts willing and motives pure, actions do thunder, while vows crumble with barely a whimper.
We deceive ourselves in solitary certainty. Am I that kind of person? That kind of man?
I look to Katie’s grave again. I know that a single sunrise ago I was not in doubt as to the makeup of my character. But I am now.
Still, I did not reach this place of want or planning on my part. The most horrible knowing invaded my being, clouded my mind, corrupted my actions. It is no excuse, but it is reasoning.
We…
That other. Is he out there? Has he succumbed already, as Eric just did, to the harsh reality of the life they chose? The path they set upon? Do I step fully over the line and seek the answer to a question I could not even imagine a scant few hours ago?
A blinding sliver of hot yellow morning sizzles suddenly on the horizon, peaking through the barren trees, too new to bring warmth just yet. Shedding light only for now.
“Katie, I…” I stop because I do not know what I want to say to her. I know what I should say, what I must say, that I will turn my back on what I have learned and let life spin on, just as I would were I ignorant of the revelations given me the night before. I can do nothing. Can take no action. I have failed myself, and my faith. No more weakness on my part can be allowed.
I must answer for too much already.
“I’m so sorry,” I finally say, my words offered in her direction, but not explicitly for my sister. I have not wronged her. At most I have disappointed her. Perhaps that is enough reason to seek amends as I am, but truly I am speaking so that my words might drift beyond this place to the one who deserves my penitence.
* * *
I leave the cemetery as the sliver of day becomes a half orb of scintillating orange creeping glacially into the sky. For a moment after driving through the gates I do not realize what I am doing, nor where I am driving. No conscious thought has gone into the route I choose, but as the distance spins out behind me, a quarter mile, a half, a left turn onto a certain street, a right on another, I am confronted with a hazy familiarity. I see places not for what they are, but what they were.