Any Bitter Thing (31 page)

“It’s true?” Mariette asked him.

“Yeah,” Drew said. “Celie made it up.”

Charlie’s eyes welled. “She told a kid with no parents that her uncle died of a heart attack? Why?”

“To shut me up,” I said. “Grief gets so annoying.”

Mariette regarded me with something close to awe. She, too, had mourned my uncle, at a time when her father had gone missing and she was mourning him, too. Now, a resurrection. All at once I felt as if I’d just entered familiar territory after a sojourn in a faraway land where nobody knew me. The cat, lulled by the drop in our voices, squinted approvingly. “He’s beautiful, Drew,” I said. “You picked a good one.” I scooped it up. The thing weighed nothing, apparently one of the boneless variety that suffered endless lugging around by children and old ladies and shaped to whatever vessel it happened to land in.

“It’s a present,” Drew said. “I figured you were in for a long day.”

Paulie was back, clutching the stuffed mouse, eyes snapping with light, face aquiver. “What’s the kitty’s name?” he asked, trying to match his voice to ours and coming up with a hammy stage whisper.

“Here’s the thing, my man,” Drew said. “We’ve got ourselves a little problem.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Exactly. Some little granny-type named him Peachy. I would’ve taken the one named Boris. This one’s ten years old with no prospects. I figured he could use a guidance counselor.”

“Did she die?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The granny-type.”

“Oh. Jeez, I guess she must’ve.”

Mariette petted the cat’s narrow face. “He looks something like Mittens,” she said.

Celie couldn’t take the bachelors. Instead they’d been separated into parish homes by Mrs. Blanchard, who also couldn’t take them, on account of Major’s terror of felines. Before my enrollment at Sacred Heart, I spent weeks languishing in Celie’s boy-smelling house, speaking to no one, praying that whoever took the cats had thought to ask what they liked to eat, each of them spleeny and spoiled rotten in separate ways. I spent the rest of my ninth year and most of my tenth worrying myself sick over the cats, unable to bear the thought of them sitting in separate windows, befuddled by new names.

“So,” Charlie said slowly, like one of Mariette’s worst students trying to memorize an impenetrable formula, “he could—be out there? Now? Alive someplace?”

“Could be,” Drew said. “Probably is.”

“They didn’t direct you to the gravesite?” Charlie asked. The question didn’t surprise me. Working with teenagers had taught me to expect people to accommodate shocking news in something other than chronological order.

“There’s no gravesite,” I said. “There was no death.” Four words. We fell silent at the sound of them.

There was no death.

“Is she all right?” asked Charlie, whose version of the world, though expansive in its way—he expected his line workers to look back on their McDonald’s experience as the birth of ambition—did not easily take in a sudden reversal of the received truth.

I had foundered into the double chair and curled up with the cat, vowing to make this animal glad his old mistress
had died. Paulie came over to inspect me, and attached a humid kiss to my forearm.

“Thanks, my little man.”

“She’s all right,” Drew said. “You’re all right, aren’t you, Lizzy?”

“Auntie? Auntie?” Paulie crooned. “All right now?”

“Yeah,” I assured him. “Happy tears.” The cat smelled of medicine and animal shelter but would soon smell like us. It relaxed into the destination of my arms, its purring as fulsome as an acceptance speech. I guessed its age to be closer to twenty than ten. Maybe Drew misheard them. Maybe they lied. It loved me already.

Paulie grinned his rubber-man grin. “He’s
loud.”

“We’ll have to do something about the name,” Drew said. “I mean, he’s a
guy.
”

I tipped the cat’s face to see it better. It stared at me benignly. “We could call him Mr. Peachy, maybe.”

Paulie hurled himself to the floor and cycled his legs into the air, this is how hilarious he thought we were.

“I’m switching him to decaf,” Mariette said.

“Hahahahahahaha!”

I looked up. “Thank you, Drew.”

Drew smiled, appearing suddenly older, radiating crinkles showing around his eyes. When had that happened? Charlie, too, already possessed the earnest frown lines of a franchise owner. Paulie, on the other hand, had the complexion of a snowfall, nothing in his face but unblemished jollity and applause.

Mariette kissed the top of my head. “We’ve got to get him home before he implodes. I don’t know what to say, Lizzy. Can I tell my mother? She’ll want to know.”

“Go ahead. It’s not a secret.”

“My God,” Mariette marveled, “she’ll die when she hears this.”

Charlie scooped up Paulie—upside down, so that by the time Paulie was done laughing he’d be strapped into his car seat, thoroughly outwitted. Their sounds left me in stages, and then there I was, left alone with my husband and this restful purring.

“Alive,” I whispered. “Drew, imagine.”

His jaw was working fervently, as it did when he was trying to solve a problem. “Celie said he was barred from contact. Why would he agree to something like that?”

“To shield me, I think. A child-protective investigation is no pretty thing.” A decision worthy of Solomon, I realized; Solomon would have restored me on the spot to the parent who refused to chop me in half. “You can read the transcripts for yourself,” I said. “I stole them on my way out of the chancellor’s office.”

He got up, put his hands in his pockets, and stared down at me. When had he lost weight? Had I done this to him? “You stole them,” he said evenly. “Okay. Where are they?”

I got up, laying the cat gently on the chair, and retrieved the file. Drew leafed through it, frowning. He led me into the kitchen, where we turned on lights and cleared the table and I made us something to eat as Drew set to reading. The cat hopped onto one of the kitchen chairs, apparently pleased with his new digs. Every once in a while Drew would read a sentence or two aloud—
I never called her a liar; I said she was mistaken
—to signal how far he had read and what struck him as especially significant. I felt curiously content, considering the circumstances, for this is exactly how we used to be in our beginning, hanging around his apartment on a Sunday morning with the
Globe
spread out in sections, reading snippets to each other and building unlikely intersections out of our thoughts. Back then, this seemed like the apex of romance.

At last he closed the folder and looked at me. “What the hell was going on here?”

“I thought the woman was some poor stupid thing who had
forgotten
to dress her dolls,” I said. “I had no idea what she was getting at. of course he touched me. I was a baby when I first got there. How do you not touch a baby? He had to tend me when I was sick, or filthy, or hurt. I had bad dreams—where else would I go? What was he supposed to do, throw me out the window?”

“This isn’t your fault,” Drew said, and my eyes welled up, because of course I’d been thinking exactly the opposite.

“If you’d screamed up and down that he never touched you at all, ever, they would have said you were protecting him, or repressing it. Something.”

“That’s exactly how I read it, Drew. I had no power over their good intentions.”

“Something’s off, though,” he said. He tapped the folder. “On his end of things.”

“Something,” I conceded.

“He makes himself sound so guilty.” Drew’s gray eyes—trimmed with the wet-looking eyelashes I had always loved—narrowed with calculation. “It’s like he’s measuring the words, you know? Why not just deny it to the hilt?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “All I know for sure are two things. He loved me. And he loved being a priest.”

“He’s hiding something, though. That’s why they don’t believe him.”

“It’s not what they think he’s hiding. That’s the third thing I know for sure.”

“Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than people thinking he’s a child molester.”

“Then what is it? I turned twenty-one nine years ago. Where has he been?” I felt the hot-splashing tears of a child. “Did he just—forget?”

At this point, Drew could have said,
I guess we’ll never know.
He could have said,
You have to take this file back.
He could
have said,
Are you sure your memory isn’t playing tricks, Lizzy? Is it possible you’ve forgotten something?

Instead, he said, “He didn’t forget. He was in your hospital room.”

This, as it turned out, was the actual apex of romance. To be absolutely believed.

“Maybe Celie really does know where he is,” Drew suggested. “She might have called after the accident, out of pity. Or else he’s been watching you somehow, this whole time. Nearer than you think.” With his long, tender fingers he wiped my wet cheeks. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

I fell weak with love and was stunned to feel it, awash with the sudden animation in my own body. It struck me then—
struck
is the right word, too—that a certain richness might be returning with the knowledge, however mystifying, that Father Mike lived in the world somewhere. Everything around me took on a solidity that I associated with childhood, those nine and a half years in which every object seemed permanently earthbound, three-dimensional, as fixed and lasting and unassailable as museum objects displayed under glass. Thirty spice jars reposing fat and aromatic on the kitchen shelves. The fire of Father Mike’s tiger’seye ring as he nails a page with his finger, marking our place in a book that smells of must from my mother’s breakfront. All these moments and objects, and days and years, dense with substance.

Everything after that felt almost airy in its inconsequence. Twenty-one years—that long pause—had accumulated so little weight.

“Lizzy,” Drew whispered. “Come upstairs.”

A good healer, my doctors called me. Amazing. Resilient. Plucky as hell.

I held my husband, who was no expert at healing. Tamping his body with the pads of my fingers, I craved imperfection, yearning to feel every snag and fissure straight through
the feeble sheath of his skin. By contrast, I felt anointed—because, of course, I had been. Father Mike had found me in my needful hour and anointed me.

The cat trailed us and hopped onto the bed, treading the coverlet in a tight circle, claiming a space at the foot. Drew and I took up the rest.

We moved languidly beneath the covers. At one point he rested his hand on my forehead as if I were a child with fever, and it struck me that any one form of love borrowed from all the others. Love comprised thirst and quench, pain and repose, mystery and recognition, lust and purity, the ingredients shifting, more slightly than we might think, depending on the object of our affection. In this bed, with this man, at this moment, the formula found its ideal: equal amounts of everything, generously flowing.

“Is this all right?” Drew murmured, petting me gently.

I felt the way I had back in Boston in our early days, a slow fire burning up through my limbs into my center, where nothing existed but sensation and release and a shameless, idiotic joy.

I expected to enter a bloomy stupor that would last beyond the morning’s first alarm, but instead thudded awake around five-thirty, coiled and scared. It was Friday, and in two hours I was due at school. Mr. Peachy arrived at my elbow and began to knead on my arm. His former mistress had had him declawed, I was dismayed to discover. “Poor thing,” I whispered. He tucked into the crook of my arm and collapsed asleep; Drew stirred but did not wake.

I wanted that long pause back. Twenty-one weightless years. Two hundred and fifty-two months, went my furious calculations. More than seven thousand days. Almost two hundred thousand hours. More than ten million minutes. Two-thirds of my life, hovering in the blue distance like a let-go balloon. I lay back in the dark, and when I woke again the covers had been tucked under my chin and Drew was gone. I found him downstairs
in the kitchen. He shot me a tentative look, a half smile, the morning-after glance of a man who’d been taken home by a stranger and wasn’t sure now where he stood.

My first feelings for him had arrived much as they did now, as a kind of homesickness. Isn’t that what the first blush of love is, a thirst for your true home, the ancestral place you’ve been dithering toward, unbeknownst?
I can’t believe I found you!
Desire and enchantment, naive tallies of shared passions
(Me, too, I like Saul Bellow, too!Yes, and folk music! Oh my God, gambrel roofs! Helicopters! Dobermans!)
, that perpetual aha.

“I feel as if I’ve been someplace else for a really long time,” I said from the kitchen doorway. “It’s like a waiting room. You kind of float there, waiting for your name to be called.”

Drew was seated, unmoving, his face still morning-squinched and blinky. “I called your name, Lizzy,” he said.

Our kitchen that morning radiated a comforting heat. “Can I tell you a secret?” I asked him. I, too, felt shy.

“I hope so.”

“When we got married I thought of myself as your helpmate. Something old-fashioned and worthy like that. I had this ridiculous idea that you needed me to freshen up your worldview.”

His look was warm. “I did need you to freshen up my worldview.”

There was a tingling moment of recognition that we were each referring to the same thing—the photos from his Boston days, print after print of smashed storefronts and car wrecks, anguished widows and bawling orphans. He’d shown them to me after our first date. These were his “work.” The brides and babies and ninety-year-old birthday girls—these he called his “Kodaks.”
I give it eight months
, he was fond of saying, unloading his gear after a hoop-skirt wedding. He scorned his Kodak subjects because, I believe, he envied these beaming families, he
who called his mother but once a year. Despite the evidence of human misery tacked all over his walls, he’d been a bringer of flowers, a candy-and-wine guy.

“How’d I do?” I asked. “Freshening up your worldview, I mean.”