The Bishop's Wife (37 page)

Alex Helm did a strange thing then, and put the pebble into his mouth, chewing at it like it was a bit of gum. There was a long, uncomfortable moment of sympathy between us. I hated that he seemed to be the one person who saw this picture the same way that I did. I did not like to think that I had so much in common with someone like him.

“I appreciate what you and Jared did for Carrie, giving her a safe haven,” I said, even if it hadn't lasted long. I could see him moving the pebble around inside his mouth, which was distracting. “Jared was a good husband,” I admitted.

Alex Helm nodded. “He was a good husband. If he ever hurt her, it was for her own good. She knew that, too. It was why she loved him so much.”

For her own good? No, I thought. I could go a certain distance to see another person's point of view, but not that far. I stood up and brushed off my pants. “Well, thank you for your time,” I said, though I hadn't even begun to ask him about Kelly and Primary. Perhaps the Presidency would have to do that on their own. I couldn't do everything.

“Do you know,” Alex Helm said suddenly, “when she called him, she begged him for forgiveness. She said that she had always been looking for a place where she belonged. As if a whore like that could ever belong anywhere.”

I tamped down my emotional response to his word choice. “And what did Jared tell her?”

“He told her the truth, that he couldn't take her back into the house with Kelly. He couldn't let her contaminate their daughter anymore.” He spat out the pebble into his hand and examined it.

I had tried. I really had.

My heart felt as if it were beating outside of my chest, I could hear it so clearly. I couldn't fix this.

There was a sound behind Alex Helm, and I caught a quick glimpse of messy blonde curls before the door flew open.

“Sister Wallheim!” Kelly shouted, and ran barefoot toward me.

Alex Helm caught her and moved swiftly back to the door without a word to me. As if I didn't deserve even a farewell. He closed the door in my face, and the last I saw of Kelly were her feet kicking over her grandfather's shoulder.

I
FINISHED THE
laundry at home, then started on dinner. I had to do something about what I'd found out about Carrie Helm and her father, but what? Drive down to his house and smash into it? Take a chainsaw with me and see if I could get close enough to take off some body parts? I felt wrung out after my conversation with Alex Helm, as if nothing I did was ever going to matter, and what was the point? Why was I pretending that I could change the world?

I had originally planned to make some chicken stew for dinner, which required two stalks of celery, an onion and a carrot. I had taken out a whole five-pound bag of carrots, a triple bag of celery stalks, and a whole ten-pound Costco bag of onions. And then I had peeled and chopped my way through all of them, telling myself that I would freeze them, that it wasn't a waste. It was a useful therapeutic exercise.

But then I got out the potatoes. The fifty-pound bag we'd gotten in November when, in a parking lot on the way home from work, Kurt had seen a truck advertising fresh potatoes, straight from the ground in neighboring Idaho. We had barely made a dent in it, in part because the potatoes were so dirty it took more effort to peel them.

I rinsed, scrubbed, and peeled every potato. I diced them, cubed them, and shredded them. I packed them into the gallon-size Ziploc
bags (also from Costco) and then put them in the freezer. And when I was done with that, I got out chicken. I boiled it, froze the stock, and then shredded the chicken. My hands had tiny cuts all over them by then, and there were probably flecks of blood all over the food. My wrists ached and my feet were on fire from standing for so long. But it all felt good. Anything felt good. It reminded me I was alive.

“Um, Mom?” asked Samuel when he got home from school. “Is there something wrong?”

“I'm just doing some prep work,” I said, as if it was no big deal.

“For the next millennium?” he asked.

“Nothing wrong with that,” I said.

“Mom—do you know something I don't know? Did Dad tell you about a letter he got?” asked Samuel.

I took a moment to look at him. My beautiful son, scared because I was too caught up in my attempts to mother people I couldn't mother. Why couldn't it be enough for me to mother him?

Because he didn't need me anymore. Not really.

“You think the apocalypse will be announced by the First Presidency in a letter?” I said.

“I was thinking more along the lines of the Second Coming,” said Samuel, smiling faintly.

Yes, let's make this into a joke. A very, very funny joke. “There has to be all that other stuff first. Gog and Magog. The prophets lying in the streets. Blood on the moon.”

“The blood on the moon thing already happened. Didn't you hear? Neil Armstrong got into a fight with some Russian astronauts.”

I raised my eyebrows. “And we never heard about it?”

“The Russians didn't want to admit they'd lost the fight, so there's been a cover-up for years.”

“But you found out about it—?” I asked.

“On the Internet,” said Samuel. “Of course.”

“Yeah. Of course,” I said. He had gotten me out of myself enough that I could see what the kitchen looked like. The sink was filled to the top with potato peelings. The kitchen garbage was overflowing onto the floor. There was pink from blood mingled with vegetable juice all over the countertops, and the handle of one the knives had come off. I'd stuck the knife into the wooden cutting board before ignoring it and moving on.

“This isn't what it looks like,” I said.

“It looks like someone got you really mad,” said Samuel.

“Then it is what it looks like,” I said. I started to clean up then. Samuel helped me. And then I got some actual stew cooking, though it was a bit after Kurt got home that it was ready to eat.

I was a mess. My kitchen was a mess. My house was a mess. My family was a mess. My whole world was a mess.

I had tried to help Kelly Helm, and I had failed and I was never going to make up for the daughter I had let die. She was always going to be dead and there would never be anyone to fill the hole in my heart.

We ate in near silence, though I could see Kurt and Samuel sharing meaningful glances over the table. As soon as Samuel had cleared his place, he skedaddled, leaving Kurt and me at the dinner table. I stood up, swayed with exhaustion, and broke into tears.

He eased me back down, moving his chair close enough to mine that I was half sitting on him. I wished I didn't feel so squished against him. But the reality was that when you got to be our age, it seemed like things didn't fit the way they used to.

“You're allowed to cry, you know,” he said.

Which only made me cry louder. “Thanks.”

“Bad day?” he asked.

“You could say that,” I said, though I didn't elaborate.

“You know, it makes me feel like there is something wrong with me, that you almost never let me see you cry. About anything.”

I realized we were actually talking about what was wrong, the
deep wrong that had been put away. “You know, you haven't cried about it in ages, either,” I pointed out.

“I cried about it at the time. For weeks, if you recall. And I kept waiting to see you break down. Other women would have spent days at home alone. But you didn't. You just got right back up and moved on with your life, as if nothing had happened. As if there was nothing wrong.” He had pulled away from me and was examining me. It reminded me of nothing so much as when Alex Helm had looked down at the pebble in his hand after he'd cleaned it in his mouth.

That was the problem between us. It had always been the problem. I was worried that Kurt was judging me and finding me wanting. It had become even worse since he was called to the bishopric. He was the one who was superior. He had better access to God. He had the priesthood and could use it to give blessings, to call down God's voice with his own words. What did I have? I was a mother, and I had lost my way and wasn't sure I was ever going to find it again.

“Say something,” Kurt begged. “I always know you're all right if you're talking.”

I sighed. He wanted words. Fine. I would let them out. “It was just that I couldn't see how it would ever be right again. And saying that out loud—it felt like I was being unfaithful. Like you would tell me I wasn't allowed to be so broken.” I looked up to search his face, but he turned away.

“I don't know what I would have said then, Linda. I can't say I would have known the right thing. But I wish we hadn't gotten into the habit of silence.”

“People always try to talk about the compensations. That you get blessings from trials. That you have little angels watching over you if you have lost children. But I don't feel like she is here with us. I never feel it. It makes me wonder why. If there is something wrong with her. Or with me. With us.”

“I don't know. I don't feel her, either. But maybe we're keeping her away somehow. Maybe it still hurts too much to feel her.”

“So it's my fault?” I said softly. “Because I'm still sad?”

“No. I didn't mean that.” Kurt tried to move the chairs closer, gave up, and let me slide away from him onto my own chair. But he grabbed my hand and held it tightly. As if he and I were crossing the busiest street in the world together. “If it's anyone's fault, it's mine. And I'm sorry. I wasn't there for you, when you needed me. How you needed me. I've always wondered how it is that I could be called to be bishop, to be there for other people, when I wasn't there for you.”

“And now?” I asked.

He let out a short, barking laugh. “Now I know that being bishop is just God's way of letting you see all your flaws. It's not just you I haven't been there for. I try to do what I can, but afterward, it always seems like it wasn't enough, or it was at the wrong moment, or that I said the wrong words to the wrong people.”

“So you discovered that you're not enough for anyone?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Kurt let out a low breath.

“Join the club,” I said. I told him about what had happened with Alex Helm. Kurt was my bishop, as well as my husband, and at times that felt awkward. But at the moment it felt good, like we could connect on even more points than before.

“And Gwen Ferris came to visit,” I added after a moment's hesitation. Was it my secret to share? She hadn't sworn me to silence. I wasn't her bishop. There was no expectation of confidence. But she had trusted me, and I couldn't share lightly.

“Did she tell you what she would never tell me?”

“You knew?” I said.

Kurt shook his head. “I don't know what it is. But I know she's held something back. Some heavy burden. I wasn't even sure that Brad knew about it.”

“He knew,” I said, and then I explained it. All about Gwen Ferris's
father, and about Carrie Helm's, as well. Aaron Weston, the man I had felt for a moment as he spoke at the funeral would be an apostle or possibly a prophet. How was it that we could ever believe that we had real inspiration after an experience like that? But I couldn't give up the hope that next time, I would have learned better to tell the difference between a good liar and God's truth.

“Something has to be done to stop him,” I said, sometime long past midnight, still sitting in the kitchen amidst the dishes of dinner that I had yet to put into the dishwasher.

“Yes, but what?” said Kurt.

“Can't you call a church trial or something? He should be excommunicated at the very least. A man like that in the same church with us—it makes me want to run away like Carrie Helm did.”

“Hmm,” said Kurt. And he guided me upstairs, tucked me in bed with a kiss on the forehead, and then went back down the stairs. He was on the phone most of the night in his bishop's office.

“It's done,” said Kurt when he came home from work that Friday evening. He looked terrible. The last time I had seen him like this was when he went on a high adventure with the Varsity Scouts for a full week in the Uintas, a backpacking trip where he claimed to have gotten no sleep at all and had to cook food over a fire for fifteen boys ages sixteen and seventeen—two of them our oldest sons, Adam and Joseph.

I touched his beard. “You forgot to shave this morning,” I said, rubbing at it. I hadn't seen him before he left for work. I'd slept in, feeling good. I trusted that Kurt would do something. It might be that I didn't agree that men should hold all the offices in the church, but I trusted Kurt that if he had power, he would use it well.

Kurt put a hand to his face. “Oh, damn,” he said, which said a lot to me. Kurt didn't curse easily, and I didn't think he was cursing about his beard.

“So, what happens now?”

He shook his head. “I can't tell you anything about it. It's too personal, and I don't really know any of the details. I've just set something in motion. I don't know how it will turn out.”

I looked him in the eye. “Don't tell me there's a possibility that he will go scot-free.” Church discipline wasn't exactly a legal system. There was no “evidence” to be offered, no experts to testify. Some
witnesses might be called, and then the “jury” of priesthood holders deliberated, allowing the accused to speak for himself if he wished. And they all prayed.

The idea was that God would tell the truth of the matter, and it was supposed to be far better than a regular court system, where you had to rely on things like reason and logic. But those men who would be deliberating were all likely to be men who knew Aaron Weston, who admired him, and served with him. If he denied everything, which I was sure he would, would they be able to see past the shiny sticker of perfection he wore so well?

“If he's innocent, then he will face no punishment,” said Kurt.