“No,” I say. “Tell me about her.”
“Oh, she’s a beautiful girl,” my mother begins, the chair starting to move. Rocking in a slow, calming rhythm. “She has blonde hair, a bit taller than me, and her eyes, oh, they are the greenest green you have ever seen. Her name is Katherine.”
She goes on from there, regaling me with a condensed telling of my sister’s life. Her accomplishments. My mother’s expectation of a grandchild any day now, as soon as Katie finds a man smart enough to know what a fine wife and mother she will make.
It is cruel irony that the person my mother recalls with such vivid detail is the one no longer here. But it is a comfort, I am certain, that she has no concept of Katie’s absence. To her, all the promise that lay before my sister is still possible. All things are still good.
I sit and listen to her share of Katie’s life, every word, every phrase unchanged from our last walk down this path in her narrowing grasp of what was. And no different from the time before that. The ritual spins on, a warmth to its familiarity on any other day. But this day is new, this reality for me is new, and as the story of what is no more slips sweetly past my mother’s lips my heart begins to ache.
And then, she stops. Mid sentence. It comes at a different point each time. Sometimes she makes it to the tale of my sister’s coming graduate studies at Northwestern. Others it is how gorgeous she looked all dressed for her high school prom. This time she is in the midst of recounting the speech Katie gave as valedictorian at her high school graduation, recalling how studious and bright Katie looked in her cap and gown. And then the flow of those words ends, as if caught in some eddy against a mental dam, and for a brief moment a look of pale confusion flashes on my mothers face as the rocker stills beneath her. I wonder, as I do each time this happens, if some fiber of reasoning deep within her failing brain has glimpsed what is real through the fog of what she thinks is real, and in so doing forces her retreat.
She sets the picture of Katie back on the table beside the rocker and grips the camera. Her eyes seem to search the room, an almost angry vacancy in them. As if a terrible anger knows no party to be unleashed against. Her fingers bear down on the camera and I stand, just before she does, the rocker screeching backward from her quick rise. She looks past me, out of the living room and into the entry hall. Directly at the door.
The years have slowed her, but she moves spryly by me and to the door, one hand reaching to the knob. Twisting it back and forth, frustration rising. She shifts from it to one of the three keyed deadbolts above, fingers curling into a fist which she pounds lightly against the door.
“He’ll be home soon,” she says, on the edge of frantic.
“Why don’t we sit again,” I say, moving closer. I do not touch her. I do not try to bring her physically away from the door she cannot breach. The one time I did she spun fiercely toward me with her camera held high. Ready to strike. In her eyes that day I saw something primal, something beyond animus or anger, and I resolved then to never elicit such a reaction from her again, so it is with words now that I try to soothe whatever frenzy is building within. “You can tell me more.”
She ignores me. If she hears me at all. I do not know what her mind segments. How selective it might be. Just as it stops her telling of Katie’s life before it nears that point where no more memories can have existed, perhaps it lets her hear only what it chooses. Perhaps it filters randomly. No rhyme, no reason, just what she is. Because.
If there are moments in my life where I question the random motives of my Maker, it is as I witness my mother’s flailing disconnect from all that surrounds her.
“He’ll be home and I always have the door open for him,” she explains, still thumping the wood around the locks. “Gus always expects me to be waiting for him.”
“I’m here, honey.” The voice comes from behind. My mother and I turn in unison and see my father, just inside the dining room, his smile thin but true. She calms instantly at the sight of him and moves away from the door, going to my father with a brightness building about her.
“You snuck in again,” she scolds him mildly, and lets the camera dangle from one hand as she embraces him, her cheek pressed to his.
My father holds her, looking past to me. A tired stoicism fills his gaze. He is ready for this all to be over, but at the same time unable to fathom such a thing.
“Let’s get you upstairs for a rest,” he says.
“You’re so good to me,” my mother tells him. He closes his eyes and holds her more tightly than the moment before.
* * *
My father walks me out to my car, keying one of the deadbolts as we leave the house, my mother ‘resting’ in her their room upstairs. Settled into a soft wingback facing the window overlooking the backyard. The camera might be on her lap, or not. Upstairs is a place she appears to feel more settled. More safe. The old Nikon, which can certainly be branded a security blanket of sorts, likely serves little purpose there. She will sit quietly until my father joins her to make of the day what he can.
“I put the back seat down,” my father explains as we approach the car. “Wedged it through the pass through from the trunk.”
The storm door fills the back seat at an angle, half of it lost in the depths of the trunk. I take the keys from my pocket and look to my father.
“A few screws and it’s on,” he tells me. He would prefer to do the deed himself, I know. But he has not been to the house on Arrow Lake in five years, and will, I imagine, never venture there again. It is a three hour drive up, and three back, and added to any time he might spend there the sum is far more than he is willing to be away from my mother. And so the modest house has become little more than the occasional spot where I retreat from the ever-present responsibilities of my parish. My job. My calling.
“Not a problem,” I assure him.
“If the weather gets in…” he says, stopping there, leaving the consequences unspoken as a slackened expression of despair rises. “Your mother couldn’t recognize me this morning.” If there is a reality which would be more painful for him to voice, I cannot imagine it. He turns to me, makes a slight gesture that seems a nod of acceptance. An understanding that this milestone was never a possibility—it was a certainty. “She seemed better later.”
There is nothing I can say. Nothing I can do. My mother is the victim of this affliction, but my father is the primary recipient of its pain. She has forgotten me. Forgotten that I am her son. I am just the priest who visits from time to time. My father has been her one bond, however tenuous, to a life that once was. And now that is slipping.
“Thanks for loading the door, pop.” I reach to open the driver’s door but am stopped by his words. “Are you okay?”
The fabric of his life torn in places I cannot even imagine, his concern is for me. His query the same as Chris’s a few hours before. I do not feel the same person I was at the same hour yesterday, this inner change which has befallen me clearly manifesting itself in some outward show of distress more obvious that I want. If a vague acquaintance from my sister’s past could sense it, it should not surprise me that my father does.
I look to him, the concern on his face almost too much to bear. In that look I see my own selfishness reflected, having come here with no intent to tell my father the truth of what transpired in the hospital, but with the simmering possibility that I might not be able to contain the revelations of Katie’s killer.
We…
One of her killers.
My father is burdened enough with the realities of my mother’s existence. If I am not to tell him, then I cannot cause him worry by my inability to do so. It is my secret, bound so by my calling. He deserves no anguish by proxy.
“Just a rough night,” I assure him. “Do give Dave a call.”
“I will,” he tells me, and I open the car door. I start the engine and focus on the mirror as I back down the driveway, glancing back to the house as I reach the street and drop it into drive. My father is still standing there. Watching me. His gaze tracking me as I drive away.
Chapter Eight
The Scales Of Self
The sanctuary is quiet and cold as I enter. Moonglow trickles weakly through the windows of stained glass high on the walls, muting the vivid depiction in each. They are darkened glimpses of my faith’s lore. Hovering over me.
Rows of pews that are so often filled with the faithful are empty, each wooden bench facing the larger than life cross high upon the wall beyond the altar, the dying figure of Christ pinned to it. I pause while passing before this symbol of my religion’s ultimate faith and lower to one knee, crossing myself in the process—father, son, holy spirit. Just one example of the Catholic calisthenics those unfamiliar with my religion find odd, even silly. And if those same individuals were to witness a Sunday mass, with its choreographed repetition of kneeling and sitting and standing while singing and praying and filing in procession to the altar to accept a small wafer of bread on one’s tongue in homage to the last supper of Jesus, well, I might not fault them for conferring cultish commentary on what they have seen.
But to the faithful such as myself, just as to the believer of any religion which nourishes them, the act of worship is secondary to what one receives from it. A sense of community. A feeling of joy. A confirmation that something good and wondrous awaits us beyond this life.
But I am no fool. When looking look out at the congregation during one of the half dozen masses I conduct each week, I know there are those in attendance out of a sense of obligation, or habit. Some for reasons of guilt. Faith has little, if anything, to do with it for these people.
But they come. Not to me, but to this place. God’s house. Maybe five hours out of every twenty four it echoes with sermon and song, and the remaining time it is as it is now. A shell.
Masons laid the stone, and carpenters raised the roof. Artisans crafted the hued panes of glass set high into the long side walls. But hearts within those few hours of each day make it a house of God.
I take a seat four rows from the front, my gaze cast up at Christ on the cross. Reverence should fill my heart at the sight, but it does not. It is not the opposite, either, that I feel looking upon the image of my Savior. No disdain or disgust. The events of the previous twenty four hours are no doing of my God, or my church. The feeling about me, or lack thereof, is borne entirely of doubt.
In myself.
I led one mass today. In the language of my vocation, I was the celebrant. The one who guides others through the celebration of our faith. Leading all through the prayer and ritual which brings us closer to God.
And throughout the hour which encompassed this very usual act on my part, there was not a moment in which I did not think myself a complete fraud.
So I sit here, feeling nothing, understanding less, knowing that what I have done, my refusal to heed my calling and offer absolution to a dying man, has left me spiritually suspect. To myself. And certainly to my Maker.
“Father Jerome.” The voice startles me, though I instantly recognize it. I have thought myself alone, but when I look to my right I see Father Augustine Taylor at the end of the pew, his painfully thin frame bent lightly forward, slight weight supported by a simple wooden cane gripped in a bony hand. After eighty-three years on this earth, the majority of it spent in service of God, he finds himself in residence with three priests, none of whom are even half his age. Living at St. Mary’s as a retiree.
“Father Taylor,” I greet him. He smiles and gestures to the space next to me on the pew. “Please, sit.”
He sidesteps between the wooden benches and lowers himself toward a sit, the last few inches too much for him, and his body settles down hard. He grimaces briefly, then the smile returns and he looks to where my attention has been. Our Savior.
“Did I ever share why I became a priest?” he asks, his eyes still fixed above the altar.
“I don’t believe you have,” I say. “Not with me.”
“The dental plan,” he says, and in spite of myself and all that has transpired, a barely suppressed laugh slips out. Father Taylor looks to me now, seeming to savor the burst of lightness he has elicited from me. “God wants us to laugh. He wants there to be joy in here.” His smile ebbs just a bit now. “You are a joyful person, Michael, but today you brought no joy to your flock.”
The instant of quiet merriment fades fully from me. I am surprised. It is uncommon that a fellow priest just ‘attends’ mass. They would almost certainly participate in some capacity as concelebrant upon the altar. This afternoon’s five o’clock mass I officiated alone.
“You should have joined me on the altar,” I say, sidestepping his observation of my lacking demeanor.
He nods. “I should have. But it tires me, more and more now. And sometimes it feels more right to be among the believers than before them.” He hesitates for a moment of self appraisal. “Rather unpriestly, I suppose.”
“Rather honest,” I correct him.
He accepts the counter view I offer and turns his attention again to me. “What is your trouble, Michael?”
I think on what to say, if anything at all. I could confess all to my elder colleague, leaving out details that might lead to the identity of the one I have wronged—Eric. This is permitted by Canon law.
But what would motivate such an act on my part? The desire for my own measure of absolution, or the want of putting my actions in the past tense? A deed already done. An aberration. A moment of weakness acted upon. How can I confess my failing when I do not truly know, in my own heart, why I would be seeking forgiveness? I know what I did was wrong, if not abhorrent, but a part of me struggles at this very moment as to why that is. He was party to the killing of my sister, and I was supposed to ease his way to the afterlife?
“Have you ever been faced with a person seeking forgiveness who…” I struggle with how to finish my question.
“Does not deserve it?” Father Taylor completes it for me. But I am not sure he has captured my true wondering.