The Bishop's Wife (6 page)

I wondered if Kurt even knew that Anna was not sealed to Tobias. “You can always be sealed now,” I said.

Anna shook her head. She was leaning against the door, holding it open now, though before she had nearly closed it on me. “He won't do it. I always thought he would change his mind. He said that he never would. At least he warned me. He is one of the most truthful people I know. His truth may hurt, but at least he does not hide it.”

“Yes, I prefer the truth, as well. Might as well get it over with from the first.” I felt a surge of sympathy for Anna once more. Why had I never gotten to know her better? Fear of not being good enough had kept me from someone who might have been a dear friend.

I told her I would come see her again soon, then went home and read an old Agatha Christie novel, one of my favorites,
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.
I had always liked mysteries.

Samuel came home in the afternoon, and he mentioned he was trying to decide between two girls to ask to a dance at school.

“You should go with the person you want to go with,” I said, thinking it was a simple choice. I didn't remember any of my other sons having this problem.

“But how do I know who I want to go with?” he asked, looking genuinely confused.

“I thought you said there was a girl you wanted to spend more time with?”

“There is,” said Samuel. “But she isn't—I don't think she feels like that for me.”

Like that? I suppose he didn't want to go into more detail with his mother. “And another girl does feel like that for you?” I asked.

Samuel squirmed, which looked very odd at his height. A giant child-man. “But I don't feel like that for her, and I worry if I ask her out, she might think …” He trailed off.

Samuel thought I understood what he was talking about. He was supposed to suppress sexual feelings as if they were wrong. I supposed there were advantages to this indoctrination. At least the church taught clearly that it was not his right to satisfy sexual urges on any girl he thought was pretty.

“I wish we could put aside the whole dating thing and just go out as friends. Not pair up or anything, just be a big group,” said Samuel.

Again, I thought how different he was from my other sons, who had complained that they wished there weren't so many strict rules on where you could touch a girl, how you could look at her, and how long you could kiss. “Well, eventually, you'll be thinking about getting married, you know. You might as well practice spending one-on-one time now.”

Samuel made a face, but he didn't say anything more, just loped upstairs to do his homework. He was such an easy kid in so many ways. He'd always been obedient. He was kind and gentle and he understood feelings in a way that even teenage girls struggled to do. But there were these weird areas that he didn't manage, like dating. It seemed like it should have been so natural, especially for someone like Samuel, who socialized easily. But it wasn't, and that was just one of the mysteries of my life, I suppose.

Kurt came home at six, the usual time for dinner. We sat and ate, the three of us. It was good family time, with inside jokes Samuel then texted to Joseph and Adam to make them laugh.

After dinner, when Samuel had gone back upstairs, I found a moment to talk to Kurt as we worked together on the dishes. I told him about Tobias Torstensen's heart, and about the fact that he had never been sealed to Anna.

“He's been a wonderful ward member. We'll be sad to lose him,” said Kurt, handing me plates. “But there's nothing I can do about his choice not to be sealed to Anna, you know. That's a personal decision between him and God. And his first wife, of course.”

I felt a pang for Anna. Would she be alone in the eternities? The church taught that everyone who was in the celestial kingdom had to be in a marriage—marriage was the highest law of the gospel—but that didn't mean she had to be married to Tobias. In the old days, people would say worthy single women were lucky because they'd be married to Joseph Smith or Brigham Young in the afterlife. But people didn't say that anymore since anything but historical polygamy had been scripted out of the mainstream Mormon church. Who would all the worthy single women marry, then? The boys who died young and were supposed to be “perfect” because they hadn't had a chance to sin before the age of eight, the age of accountability?

“What about his first wife?” I asked Kurt. “Do you know how she died? Anna said it was her heart, but I always thought it was cancer.” I didn't even know her name, I realized. I was rinsing dishes in the sink. You were supposed to save water in Utah and let the dishwasher rinse, but it never worked that way in my experience, no matter how new the dishwasher was.

Kurt thought for a long moment. “You know, for some reason, I thought she had died in a car accident, but I can't remember who told me that. It was years before we moved in.”

How strange that Tobias would never speak about her, especially now that I knew he wanted to stay sealed to her and only her. “Does anyone know the real story?” I asked.

“Well, Tobias,” said Kurt. “You'll have to ask him, I suppose.”

If I decided ancient history was important enough to bother a dying man, I would.

I spent all Tuesday reading, but had been bored by it more than usual. It made me wonder what was wrong with me. This was the life every stay-at-home mother eventually worked her way towards. After all those twenty-four-hour days with kids scraping their knees, making messes, vomiting and needing constant baths, to have some hours of peace and quiet should have felt like a blessing. But I was itchy for more occupation. Maybe I should join the PTA, although it was a little late for that with Samuel a senior. I should be content with being bishop's wife.

The doorbell rang that evening just after I'd served dinner. “I'll get it,” said Kurt, staring at his plate then taking one last, large bite of his potatoes.

“I'll put your plate in the fridge,” I said, and stood up with him.

“Poor Dad, always on call like a doctor,” said Samuel, as he watched his father walk to the front door and open it.

I heard both a male and a female voice, but I didn't recognize either of them. I put the dinner in the fridge to wait for Kurt's return and felt only slightly guilty continuing to eat without him.

“Linda, do you mind coming into the office?” Kurt called out a few minutes later.

I was startled and stared down at my own plate.

“I'll put it in the fridge,” said Samuel, with a bit of a grin.

“Thank you,” I said and went into the office to discover an older man and woman I had never met before. “Are you new to the ward?” I asked. There were still a lot of new homes being built in the area, though I couldn't think of anyone moving out.

“No,” said the man. He had a large, Roman nose and a strong jawline. He also had an amazing head of hair for a man his age, which I guessed was about sixty. It was all black, and it looked natural, unlike Tobias Torstensen's. He had eyebrows that looked like they should have been combed—or cut back like an overgrown hedge. There was something about him that made me think I should remember him. Was he an old high school friend who had come to look me up? Or someone I'd only seen in pictures in Kurt's yearbook?

The woman was greying gracefully, her hair long and thick. She wore little makeup, and had one of those pleasantly round figures. She dressed for comfort rather than fashion: a cotton floral patterned skirt that nearly touched the floor, and under it had on a pair of flat tan shoes. When I looked into her face, she met my gaze with piercing blue eyes and I suddenly knew who she was before the words came from her husband's mouth. She was her daughter's mother.

I felt an old, familiar flicker of irrational anger at that—this woman had a daughter, had been able to raise that daughter to adulthood—and tamped it down. I wondered how often that interrupted my relationships with other women.

“We are Carrie Helm's parents, Judy and Aaron Weston,” the older man said, standing up in the now rather crowded room. Kurt's office was filled with two bookshelves of church books, and Kurt had read most of them. There were two paintings of Christ, one from the story in the Book of Mormon, of him blessing the Lamanite children during the visit to America after his death, and the other of Christ in Gethsemane with Michael the archangel behind him, giving him strength. There was also a drawing of
the First Presidency, which I always thought was an odd image. To me, it looked like the three men—the president and his two elected apostle-counselors—had one neck with three heads coming out of it.

“Down from Sandy,” added Aaron Weston.

That was about twenty minutes from Draper. I'd had no idea Carrie Helm's parents lived so close. I had never heard her talk about them. But then again, why would I?

“Oh. I see,” I said, even though I wasn't sure that I did. I glanced up at Kurt, who was behind his desk.

“They are here because they have not heard from their daughter since she left her family here, and they are concerned about her,” said Kurt.

“We are more than concerned about her. We are overcome with worry,” her father said. He spoke eloquently, and with deep emotion.

“Please, sit down,” said Kurt, nodding to the couch. He got out a folding chair for me, and we all sat. I felt as if the room became less crowded, which made no sense. It was something about Aaron Weston sitting down. He felt less—overwhelming in size and personality.

“I don't know what Jared has told you about Carrie, but there is no way she would leave Kelly like that,” said Aaron Weston. He gripped his wife's shoulder, his knuckles white, and she nodded, a look of desperation on her face. I noticed, though, that her hands were folded neatly in front of her.

“I'm sure that she will get in contact with you soon. Maybe she'll decide she's made a mistake and want to come—” Kurt began.

Aaron Weston cut him off abruptly with, “The only mistake my daughter made was in marrying Jared Helm. He is a tyrant and a bully and quite possibly insane. Have you heard him talk about his political views? Or his religious beliefs? He is rigid and self-righteous and he actually thinks that the lost tribes of Israel are frozen under the ice at the North Pole.”

If we kicked people out of the Mormon church for believing crazy things like that, we would lose half the people on the rolls. I'd heard the lost tribes under the North Pole thing at least a half dozen times before, though it was usually a couple of generations removed from Jared Helm's age group.

Aaron continued, “I have talked to my daughter on numerous occasions about leaving her husband. I wouldn't care if she did that. But she always made the plans with Kelly included. How could she leave her daughter with such a man?”

There was a long silence. I couldn't help but think of the way that Carrie had hugged Kelly when she left her in Primary. Aaron Weston was right. Carrie leaving her daughter behind struck me as wrong. How could any mother do that? My throat tightened.

“I've never heard anything against Jared Helm, not from your daughter or anyone else,” said Kurt. “Not about him being dangerous, in any case.” Just a bit right-wing; we'd both heard him in church meetings call homosexuality and universal health care “signs of the end times.”

“Did you ever talk to Carrie about him in private?” Aaron Weston said. “She is afraid of him. She would never say anything close to the truth when he was around.” He pounded a fist into his hand when he said the word “never.” I was somewhat taken aback by his size and the strength of his body language. “But if you have not noticed the look of unhappiness in her eyes, the way that she edges away from him if she can, the way she stands between him and Kelly whenever she can, you have seen nothing at all. How can you be a bishop without looking past the most obvious of pretenses?”

Kurt looked at me. I did not know what to say. He was a man who tended to assume that the obvious was true. It was one of the reasons I loved him. He appreciated honesty rather than subtlety. He did not enjoy the games men and women often play with each other. When I said I wanted one thing, he did not think that it must mean I wanted the opposite. But at times this habit did not serve him well.

“I've noticed that she seemed unhappy,” I said. “And lonely. She didn't make many friends in the ward. I wondered why.” Now that I thought about it, I only remembered her sitting next to Gwen Ferris, but Gwen was a bit of an outsider herself. It occurred to me that the scene in the bathroom with Gwen crying might at least in part have been precipitated by Carrie Helm's absence. She and Gwen had always sat together in Relief Society and must have helped keep each other sane when stupid things were said, from remarks about depression being the work of the devil to God showing His love by making the righteous wealthy.

“Jared was careful not to leave any marks on her,” Aaron Weston told me. “He threatened her. He told her that he would kill her if she ever tried to leave him, and he would make sure that Kelly never heard of her again. He whispered to her at night. Sometimes he woke her up to tell her that God would judge her if she didn't obey her husband's every word, or give details on how God would torment the wicked in the afterlife.”

I blanched at this. That was not only directly against the doctrine of the church, but it was monstrous. No wonder Carrie had kept to herself. She must have been terrified every moment of her life. How could I not have seen that in the small rebellions she tried to make in public at church on Sundays? I had let her walk around with no allies to turn to. I wasn't the bishop and I couldn't call her husband into repentance, but the bishop's wife was the unofficial mother of the ward. She—I—was supposed to comfort and help and, well, see things!

“If you knew all this, then why didn't you do something?” asked Kurt. “Why didn't you call the police?”