The Gospel of Winter (17 page)

I don't know how long I stood in the street, staring at Most Precious Blood, but eventually, I became aware that the afternoon light was fading, and I could only think of how I'd watched it disappear in the basement the afternoon James had been there. It seemed unreal that I had been that boy too. I started to feel my mind spin through a zoetrope of other memories, and I couldn't stop thinking about my time with Father Greg. I pulled an Adderall from my inside jacket pocket, tried to crush the pill in my palm, and snorted the uneven chunks up off my fingertips. They burned like I'd
stuck a Zippo up my nose. I tasted something like baking soda dripping down my throat, and I let the tears come down, telling myself it was only the Adderall and nothing else.

My head rocked, and as I tried to gather myself, I realized the taillights of the parish Lincoln Town Car had lit up and the car was backing out of its parking space. I took off down the street, hoping whoever was in the car hadn't yet noticed me. I walked quickly downhill, toward the center of town, and as I rounded the corner onto North Street, I caught a glimpse of the Town Car behind me. It changed lanes, slowed beside me for a moment, then passed on ahead. I couldn't see who was in the car, but now that I was on this side of town, I had no choice but to round CDA, swing past Stonebrook, and cut back along the roads closer to the cove to head back home. I could no longer see the car, but I broke into a dead run.

I got all the way to Stonebrook before I saw it again. I was on the bridge, down by Mark's neighborhood, when I saw the car appear at the top of the hill in the direction I was heading. It had its headlights on now, and as soon as the beam swept down the street and found me, the car accelerated. I took a few more steps but then realized the Town Car was gunning right in my direction. I turned and ran back across the bridge and heard the car approaching. There were no houses along this stretch of the road. One side of the street was a thin band of trees on a slope that led
down to the harbor, and the other side of the street was the grounds of the country club. The car beeped. I leapt off the shoulder of the road, into the line of trees bordering the golf course.

“Aidan!” I heard behind me.

His voice still stung.

“Aidan,” I heard again, and I knew he was out of the car. He repeated my name as I broke through the tree line and jumped into the first sand pit. I thought if I took it directly I'd get farther up the hill faster, but it slowed me. As I climbed out of it, I heard him again. He was on the golf course too. He took the long way around the pit, which cut me off from making a break across the fairway. He was dressed in his usual black pants and shirt, buttoned to the throat, with the Roman collar crisply fitted at the top. He lumbered after me. His gait was awkward, but his speed was surprising. By the time I was out of the sand pit, he was close. Flushed and breathing heavily, he called me again.

“Please!” he yelled. “I need to talk to you. Stop. Please.”

I cut right, toward another stand of trees, and pushed as hard as I could uphill. Once I was back in the grass, I put more space between us, but he kept up. Just before the top of the hill, I ducked into the cluster of trees. They lined the quickly flowing river that ran downhill and slipped under the bridge and poured out into the harbor. The river narrowed along the golf course, then widened as it flowed toward the street and the bridge. I jumped down the slope,
springing wildly, using spindly trees and limbs to break and guide my near fall to the riverbank. I looked back up when I'd gotten to the bottom. Father Greg appeared at the top, where I had been standing moments before. He paused, leaned on his knees, and briefly tried to catch his breath. “Aidan,” he growled. He couldn't say much else, and he began his descent.

I scrambled along the river toward a large tree that had fallen across it, roots twisted haphazardly into the air. The churned soil near the base was darker than the ground around it. I grabbed hold of a root and swung onto the trunk. Father Greg crashed through the thicket above, and as I began to slowly make my way out over the river, I heard him fall. He moaned as he hit the ground and tumbled. His back finally slammed into a tree, which kept him from rolling into the river. I paused on the trunk, and a rich stink of dank earth and crisp, rushing water overwhelmed the silence as I waited for him to move. He sat up and wiped the debris from his face and clothes. His face was lacerated, and as he tried to stand he clutched his side and cried out. He didn't get up. He leaned against the tree and stared at me. He coughed and groaned, and I waited.

“Please, Aidan,” he said. “Please listen.”

He could barely move, but as each moment passed he seemed to gain more control of himself. His focus came back and he looked at me without bobbing his head. It had only been this past summer when I'd found bruises on my
shoulders where he'd squeezed me while I'd obeyed him and held him as he'd directed. I pictured myself grabbing a thick stick and whipping him; I pictured stoning him. Somewhere else, deep within me, I could see our hands reaching out for each other, slipping behind each other's back and pulling close—the image still warmed me. The thoughts rose and died in my mind, and all I'd wanted was to feel less afraid, to not feel as lonely as I had, as non-existent. Even if he had breathed a kind of life into me, what did I owe him now?

“I need to talk to you,” Father Greg said. He rubbed his head.

“No,” I said.

“Listen to what you're saying. It doesn't have to be this way.”

“You made it this way!”

“I expect more from you, Aidan.” He shook his head.

“Please. Stay away from me,” I said.

Father Greg leaned heavily on an elbow and adjusted himself. I began again, but he held his hand up. “No. Listen. You misunderstand me.”

“I can't. I won't. Don't touch me. Don't get near me. Stay away.”

He coughed. “Nothing will ever happen between you and me again. I don't want it to. It's over, Aidan. It's over.”

“I don't want anything to do with you.”

“No, no. It was nothing.”

“What?”

“It was nothing, wasn't it? Inconsequential. A passing thing. It's over. It's behind us. It's as if it didn't happen, Aidan. It was nothing.” He cleared his throat and used both hands to push himself into a more comfortable sitting position.

I struggled to speak. “It happened. It happened.”

“No, it didn't. It didn't mean anything.”

“Yes, it did,” I said. My throat tightened—it was out of my control. “Yes, it did. It happened.”

“It's over. You have to understand that, Aidan. It's over, and you need to move on. Be a man about it, Aidan. Forget it. It was nothing.”

I crouched lower on the tree trunk as my arms began to shake. “Why are you talking to me? Stop talking!”

“I'm trying to protect you, Aidan. Remember all our conversations, how I helped you think about your family? Think about all the work we've done together too—think about all those kids, the schools they'll have now. We've accomplished so much.”

“Stop,” I begged. “Please stop.” All of that was true. It was all that I had been proud of, all that I had been dreaming might be the springboard from which I'd leap forward into the rest of my life.

“No. I'm concerned,” Father Greg continued. “If you tell people things about me, they'll find out about you, too. What will they think of you, Aidan? It's just like I always
told you: They won't understand.” He smiled. “See? I didn't lie to you. We have to be careful. I'm getting older. But what will happen to you, Aidan, if you tell anybody? What will happen to your mother? What will they all say about you if they find out? Have you said anything to anybody?”

“No.”

He smiled and shifted his weight but did not get up. “What about your friends, your friends from your party? You haven't shared what was between us with them, right? You haven't said anything to Elena or to any of your friends, right? Protect yourself. Don't speak to anybody.” He leaned forward off the tree. “You haven't, right? Not to Mark, or any of the girls?”

“No. No one.”

“Not about anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Good. Then you're safe,” Father Greg said, leaning back against the tree. He took a deep breath. “As long as it stays that way. I care about your safety, don't you see that? I've always cared about your safety, Aidan. And think of what we accomplished together. That's what is important. All that we've done for others, I mean.” His voice sounded automatic, as if it was an old recording and not the man I once knew.

“I can't,” I said. “That's meaningless too. It's all meaningless now.”

“You can't mean that,” Father Greg said. “You don't.”

He looked up at the darkening sky. He sniffed after air, growled, cleared his throat, and spat into the dirt. He wiped at the blood from a slash across his neck and then wiped at the blood on his fingers with his thumb. So many times I had sought out his voice, listened to it with an eagerness, hope, and desire that I had called love, and still now, that thing that tugged me toward him must have been something like love, or what love leaves in its wake when it is gone.

I remained on the trunk, listening to the rush of the river beneath me. Eventually, Father Greg used the tree to pull himself off the ground. He staggered toward me, losing his footing but grabbing hold of another branch to steady himself. His hair was a mess, and his shirt was ripped and soiled from his fall. One of his legs bothered him enough to make him limp. It struck me that Father Greg was a man who would someday die—and if things worked out the way they should, he would die long before me. The haggard old man stumbled to the base of the trunk and took hold of one of the bigger roots. He looked at me and tried the root to see if it moved the tree at all. Nothing happened; the root only bent slightly with his pressure. “I wanted . . . ,” he said quietly, and then he stopped. He searched for words and nothing came to him. “This will all just go away, won't it?” He tried the root again, and I knew with a strange assurance that he wouldn't climb up onto the tree, and that even if he did, I could move more quickly now, get across the river,
and make it back down to the road in no time. He turned around and picked his way uneasily back through the thicket to the edge of the golf course. His shoulders shook and trembled. Father Greg was broken, and yet, I thought, more right than he had ever been.

M
y busted face wouldn't heal in a day, of course—a crescent of jaundiced skin cupped the blue and purple bursts around my eye—but Mother let me skip school on Wednesday anyway. I knew I couldn't stay home forever, however. The longer I was alone, the worse I felt. No matter how many painkillers I popped, they only numbed the sting in my face. I couldn't hide. On Thursday when I woke up, I knew it was time to go back to CDA. I sat on the edge of my bed listening to the news for a while. Another mosque was vandalized and ransacked, this time in Columbus, Ohio. Jury selection began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the trial of the father who beat another father to death at a hockey practice. How do we all go on with our lives?

I called the car service before I changed my mind, and threw the phone across the room when I was done. I needed
to move forward, and enforcing an absolute silence was the only way I could hope to feel safe. What if there was only one story to tell—that nothing had happened?

I didn't make it to school on time, though. My driver took his sweet time crawling along at the actual speed limit on every road. But as we turned onto Mulberry, a powder blue Lincoln Town Car pulled away from the curb across the street from the driveway up to CDA. I couldn't see who drove the car, but I couldn't help but think it was the car for the priests at Most Precious Blood. It shot up Mulberry, ahead of us, and as we turned into the driveway, I lost sight of it.

I fidgeted with my backpack in the backseat until my driver cleared his throat and asked me in broken, Slavic-clipped English if I would kindly step out so he could get to his next passenger. He stood on the curb and held the door open, but I couldn't get out of the car. All I could see in my mind was Father Greg standing beyond the double doors to the lobby, leaning on Mrs. Perrich's desk, entertaining a crowd that had gathered around him, waiting for me with his broad smile, and him reaching out between their shoulders to grab me and pull me into his story.

I was about to tell the driver to take me home immediately, but Mrs. Perrich came out onto the stoop to see what was going on and why the driver was waiting around so long. She held down the points of her pashmina so it wouldn't blow away in the breeze, but then lifted one
hand and waved to me. She waved again, like we were old friends, but when I finally climbed out of the car, she pulled back as if my bruises were viral. She recovered quickly and wrapped an arm around me and walked me up the rest of the stairs, offering her sympathies.

“I fell out of bed,” I told her as we entered the lobby. No one was there. She didn't buy my excuse, but she didn't press me any further, either.

“I hope it didn't ruin your break?” Mrs. Perrich asked me.

“This? Oh, no. This was nothing. No big deal,” I said. It was my mask, a way to present myself without having to talk about anything else.

She made me sign the late sheet and ushered me off to English class, saying, “When you have a minute, come back down and tell me about your break. Wasn't it wonderful? Did you travel?” I looked back at her before I left, wondering about her chipper world. Like Mother, Mrs. Perrich seemed to be able to smile her way into the world she wanted to believe in. I flashed one at Mrs. Perrich, just to try it. She smiled back.

When I opened the door to Mr. Weinstein's classroom, everyone stared at me. I came in and took my seat on the other side of the room. The questions would come later, questions I could handle. Questions Josie, Sophie, and Mark could answer too. Mr. Weinstein perched on the front of his desk and waited for me to take my seat behind Josie before continuing with his lecture.