Any Bitter Thing (41 page)

Good guy. Drinker. Fisherman. Layabout. Wife-beater. Churchgoer.

All the usual flapping jaws. How did she manage it? A woman that size? A hole that deep? A truck that heavy? But then, a witness. The statute of limitations expired long ago on accessory, obstruction. He’s coming back anyway.

Confessor. Friend. Accomplice. Lover. A dead man bent on living again.

Wait, wait, isn’t that the same guy, the priest who—?

The facts don’t square.

Nothing rings entirely true. Because nothing is.

The night after Charlie made the call that would set into motion the mud-stuck wheels of justice, he returned to our house to tell Drew and me what he had done. “Mariette can’t stop crying,” he said wearily. “In a couple of days it’ll hit the papers.” He rested his blunt brown eyes on me. “I’m sorry about all this, Lizzy.”

It took me a second to realize he was referring to my own impending discomfort in town, my old story about to rise from the mire. He propped his meaty hands on our table and pushed himself to standing. All at once he seemed to require extra shoring for the simplest movements, his bulk no longer able to take itself for granted.

“So. That’s it,” he said. “Come on, Paulie-boy.”

Paulie, who was in the living room making spit-drawings on the window, caught sight of his coat dangling from his father’s hand and hotfooted up the stairs to the nether reaches of the house. Charlie sighed. “I haven’t got the juice to go after him.”

“Leave him here,” Drew said. “We’ll take him home when he winds down.”

Too worn out to entertain other options, Charlie consented. Drew went after Paulie to keep him from our dresser drawers, and I walked Charlie to the door. “She still loves me, right?” he asked. The door made a wintry cracking as he opened it.

“She’d be a fool not to, Charlie.”

He took this in without comment. After a moment, he said, “I’ll have to sell the business. I don’t see how we can stay here now.”

For Charlie, moving would mean leaving his parents and brothers, his customers and employees, the streets and river and hills he had been born into. He’d planned to run for selectman when he reached thirty-five and turn himself into the guardian of the law, custodian of the town hall, friend to the people. Now he was going to be part of a story these same people told at parties.

The yard sheened with fresh snowfall, the kind that stayed. “It’s hard to imagine this place could even exist without all of us here,” I said.

But we would find, soon enough, that it could. The shape of the hills and the course of the river would not vary. We could scatter like fall leaves—Drew and I to Boston;
Mariette and Charlie to northern Maine, where they would make room for Mrs. Blanchard after her three months served—and our town would abide unchanged. But at this moment, in the silence of a lasting snow, I preferred to believe things otherwise.

Charlie made a move toward the driveway. I called after him, “Kiss your wife for me.”

“Lizzy,” he said, turning around, “they’ll be taking statements right away. Mariette wanted you to know.”

I hugged myself against the encroaching cold. “Why would they want to talk to me?”

“Not you. Your uncle. He’ll be contacted before week’s end.” We locked eyes a moment, but there wasn’t a thing to say. Charlie lurched back toward me, gave me a squeeze, then hiked up his collar and went home.

The square of lime-green paper lay on my kitchen windowsill, after two days already soft from overhandling, lifting a little whenever we opened or closed the nearby door. I had been waiting, returning to that fluttering scrap as if it were a page in a prayer book, and it struck me now that my waiting felt the way religion once had—the promise of a perfect reunion that lay perpetually in the future. Even as a child saying my nightly prayers, I dreaded Heaven, afraid my own parents might not recognize me after so long.

After supper Drew shuttled Paulie back home. The paper rustled as the door swung shut. Father Mike’s name, joined with a woman’s, looked like a piece of code. An odd humming began in the back of my throat, and I caught myself at something I hadn’t done in twenty-one years. A single line from the Prayer to St. Bartholomew came winging back, unaltered: “Keep us ever guileless, and innocent as doves.”

It rang twice. A child answered.

MATINS

THIRTY

I saw a one-hundred-fifteen-year-old woman on television once, one of those balding, toothless Russians who surface every so often to recommend yogurt or vodka as the secret to long life. Instead, she reminisced about her baby brother, who fell through the ice and drowned when she was eight years old and he was five.
He had the prettiest hair
, she said to the translator,
it was the color of yellow and smelled like the hay in the barn.
This creaky, spotted woman with a face so old it had all but melted off her skull remembered a smell from one hundred and seven years past. I thought, I know what you mean. One hundred and seven years is nothing.

He arrived in the afternoon, under a bleached winter sunlight. His wife came with him, and her son, a serious child named David who stared at me in undisguised wonder the whole time he spent in my house. I served cranberry muffins that I made myself, some milk for the child, and coffee that I’d made with crushed eggshells, though I did not tell. Also, I pretended not to remember that he took his coffee black. I did not wish to wound him with echoes of intimacy.

On the phone he had said, Can you forgive me?

And I said, I’m afraid not.

Then I opened my door and saw what a penance such as his could do to the mortal flesh. Most of the color had bled from his eyes and his once-ruddy cheeks. His copper-threaded hair had gone a lifeless gray. He was gaunt, and shorter than I remembered. His glasses tilted weakly. His sole remaining beauty was an essential kindness that still showed in the particular way the bones met in his face. Otherwise, he seemed crumbled before his time, intentionally so, as if fixed on decomposing along with the man he had buried.

He was hard to look at if you’d had something else in mind all this time. I didn’t know what to call him.

He beheld me with a sorrowful calm that made me calm in turn. I was aware of my own changed, adult face, which he kissed just above the scar. His parched lips burned me.

“Lizzy,” he said, his voice cracking.

He put out his hands and I took them, forgiving him already. His hands felt dry and ridged, not at all how I remembered them, except for the tattered nails. Once, I had known his step before it landed. I had drifted into sleep on the tide of his voice. I had not wholly understood where he left off and I began.

“This is my husband,” I said, as Drew put out his hand. These moments seemed glimpsed and tottering; I was trying to recall them even as I lived them.

They shook hands: the man who left, and the man who stayed.

His wife, Frannie—middle-aged, short-haired, puppy-faced—said, “Hello, hello.” I liked her button earrings, her homely purse. Everyone stepped inside.

“What are we?” the boy asked, as we milled in the entryway. He was twelve but looked younger. Pale and dartlike in his narrow blue jacket.

“What do you mean?” I said. Father Mike put a hand on his stepson’s shoulder, a gesture that had often marshaled my own courage, as it did now for the boy’s.

The boy said, “Are we relatives?”

“Sure,” I told him, looking into his elfin face. “I guess we’d be cousins.”

This seemed to satisfy him. He believed me. Then he glanced up at his new father, just to make sure.

Frannie seemed glad to be in my house, to meet my husband and see my things. She, too, had been living with a ghost; perhaps my presence gave him form. I served the muffins and poured the coffee. Daylight carpeted through the windows as if in search of us.

We talked about the recent snow. The drive from Ohio. The changes in town. When Mr. Peachy sidled into the room and hopped onto Father Mike’s empty lap, my uncle chuckled in a way that startled me.

I thought,
That sounds just like my uncle.
I began to see him then, his latter-day self bleeding through the veneer of his present-day self, like a painting beneath a painting.