The Rainy Season (31 page)

She stood staring at him, working to control herself.

“You’ve gotten very anxious,” he said. “What you want will come to you in the fullness of time. We all have to make our own way. I’m not in the least interested in any other crystal, no matter whose memory it contains. My trinket customers aren’t either. They would have no notion of how to access the memory even if they possessed the crystal. Evidently you believe that I’m trying to cheat you, Elizabeth, which is painful to me. But I’ll tell you that it’s even more painful to think that you’ve become rapacious about money. Are you in debt? In particular need?”

“No. I only thought that—”

“
Please
let me do the thinking, then.”

There was the sudden sound of someone at the door, rattling the door in its frame, trying to get in. It was apparently a customer, a short, heavyset woman and a little girl. The woman stepped back and focused on the store hours, which were printed on the door. Elizabeth abruptly recognized the little girl. “Hell,” she said.

“You know them?” Appleton asked.

“It’s the girl,” she said. “Phil’s niece.”

“Why on earth … !” Appleton looked at her in astonishment.

The woman banged on the door again, and now she shouted something through the mail slot.

“Leave this to me,” he said. “Entirely to me. Out the back with you!”

She did as she was told, leaving the satchel of bones and going out the back door of the office, into the hallway that ran out to the rear courtyard. She stopped to listen before opening the back door. Faintly she heard voices. He had let them into the shop.

She opened the door, and then, remaining inside, banged it shut again. Quietly she tiptoed back down the dark hallway.

MISSION SAN JUAN
Capistrano lay a mile off the freeway, ten minutes out of their way, what with afternoon traffic and finding a place to park near the train station. Jen was fascinated with nearly everything, but especially with how so much of things had really stayed the same. The train still ran on steel rails, the ties were wooden, and the roadbed was laid with crushed rock. Phil asked her if the sleek silver Metrolink cars hadn’t lost something of the charm of old passenger cars, but the whole idea of “charm” was something she had never considered in regard to trains. “I think they’re thrilling,” she said.

The tracks behind the mission were lined with sycamores, large enough to have been growing there for a 150 years, and although most of the adjacent neighborhood had been built early in the century, the wood-sided houses that made it up were familiar enough to her, with their tilting front porches and casement windows and flower gardens. There were no sidewalks in the neighborhood, and there was a haphazard, unplanned look to the place that was uncharacteristic of the rest of the county, but entirely characteristic of what the place had been a century or so earlier.

She had seen the mission itself only once, and the adobe buildings were resolutely the same now as they had been—sleepy and quiet, with the sound of gurgling water from the fountains and the smell of age. Perhaps because of the pending storm, there were few people on the mission grounds, and the very quiet of the place gave it a solemn and holy quality.

“I want to tell you something before we go inside,” she said.

Phil prepared himself for whatever it was: that she loved this Colin O’Brian. That she was grateful to him, but that she was moving on now that she had found someone more … more her type.

“Betsy found this,” Jen said. She held out a bluish crystal object, and Phil knew at once what it was—Elizabeth’s so-called sapphire.

“Where?”

“In the tower. May hid it there, I suppose. I brought it because I hoped I could give it to … to Colin.”

“All right,” Phil said. “I’ll take your word for it. I was told that it was very valuable.”

“I have no idea. I wonder what you mean by valuable. It’s caused a lot of grief.”

“Then give it away,” Phil said.

The doors to the chapel stood open, but the chapel itself at first glance appeared to be empty, and when they walked in, their footfalls echoed on the worn wooden floor. But then Phil saw that the chapel wasn’t empty after all, that an old priest stood near the altar. He had apparently been putting cut tulips in a vase, and he stood still now, looking back at them, but with his hands still outstretched toward the flowers, unmoving.

The priest looked steadily at Jen, who returned his gaze, and it was the priest this time who began to weep. It occurred to Phil that Jen had already known—not of Colin O’Brian’s existence, but of the likelihood that he would not be the man she remembered. Time had passed for him. Phil’s own mother had lived a second life, had borne children, had passed on, all in the years that Jen was away; there was no reason to believe it would have been different for this man. Jen hadn’t been looking for the man she loved so much as the man she
had
loved. His very existence was for her like water in a country of dry hills. He looked to Phil to be about eighty, his lined face betraying both sorrow and hope.

Phil turned around and walked out into the sunlight again, leaving the two of them alone. He sat down on a garden bench and waited by himself. The priest’s face had been instantly familiar to him, and he took out of his pocket the old photo that had been among his mother’s effects, and studied again all four of the faces in the picture, no longer just gray ghosts on old paper.

THE PRIEST HIMSELF
stood in the chapel doorway watching him, and Phil wondered how long he had been there. When the two of them reentered the chapel, Jen was nowhere to be seen.

“She’s stepped out for a moment,” the priest said, “to give us time to talk.”

“All right,” Phil said. “I’m Phil Ainsworth. I’m happy to meet you finally. My niece had nice things to say about you.” They shook hands.

“Colin O’Brian,” the priest said. “But you knew that already.”

“I guess it was you who sent Mr. Dudley out with the divining rod.”

“It was. And you were successful?”

“We found an old barrel with a human skeleton inside along with some other things, coins and beads. There was an elongated piece of polished green glass—a mossy green, maybe some kind of gemstone. I don’t know how many coins and beads. We put the whole bundle into the water tower and locked it up. I would have brought them out here to you myself, except …” He paused, gesturing futilely. “… except that someone stole them, probably within a couple of hours after I locked them into the tower. I’m sorry about that, too.”

The priest shrugged. “Perhaps we can recover them.

Do you have any idea who might have stolen them?”

“A woman you already know: Elizabeth Kelly.”

The priest nodded. “Of course. Possibly I’ll hear from her.”

There was a silence now, and it seemed to Phil that Colin was uneasy, as if he were trying to find the words to say something. The silence lengthened, and finally Phil said, “You know, I was a little jealous when I found out who you were. Jen’s … easy to be around. She’s like … therapy or something.”

The priest smiled vaguely. “I guess I’m a little jealous of you, too. Jen and I knew each other a long time ago, another lifetime.”

Phil nodded. “She couldn’t stand waiting around the house. You said she might take weeks to acclimate, but I don’t think so. We went out into the country today, and I realized that she had to go her own way, that she couldn’t go on waiting on account of my hesitation. That’s why we’re here. She wanted to find you, and we’ve found you. It was easy to do.”

“She couldn’t stand waiting,” Colin said. “I understand that. I’ve been waiting a long time myself, but I guess I’m through with it now. Don’t you ever make the mistake of waiting.”

“It’s a mistake I’m familiar with, too.” Phil looked out through the chapel door and saw that Jen was sitting on the same bench he’d been sitting on, as if they were taking turns. “I don’t have any real excuse for it, though, not like the two of you.”

The priest paused again before going on. “What I’ve been waiting for …” He started over. “Well, as you can see, she’s sitting outside there. She’s safe, which is miracle enough for me. I’ve been at loose ends for years. There is one thing, though, that I still have to tie up.”

Phil waited for him to go on, but Colin had stopped talking again and was staring at the altar. Clearly he was struggling to say something. This reunion with Jen was apparently taking its toll on the old man’s emotions, which was a sad thing, given the long years that separated the two of them now. “You two were in love?” Phil said, trying to give him a hand.

The priest looked at him for a moment before responding. “Yes,” he said, “I guess we were. It’s more to the point to say that we were falling in love, I suppose, which isn’t the same thing as
being
in love. We were deprived of that.”

“I’m sorry,” Phil said.

“You shouldn’t be. Maybe our loss was your gain, as they say. And anyway, the sun set on our lives a long time ago. I’ve forgotten so much of it. … It’s our fate, I suppose, that we’re doomed to forget what we felt in our best moments. The past, especially the distant past, fades away like a dream. You seem to think that Jen wanted to find me out of love, but I think she was looking for a fragment of her past that hadn’t faded yet. Just something to hold onto, to steady herself while she catches her breath.”

“More than that, I think. You’re selling yourself short.”

He glanced meaningfully at Phil. “In fact I’m not. I wasn’t entirely true to Jen, you know. There was another woman, to put it bluntly. Jen’s aware of that, by the way.”

“I suppose that’s your business,” said Phil uncomfortably.

“It’s your business, too. The other woman was your mother.”

The priest held him with his eyes now.

“Even when I was in love with Jen, I wasn’t true to her in my heart. I wish I could say that I haunted that well all these years in hopes of regaining my one true love, but part of my obsession was simple guilt. I’m ashamed to say that, but it’s true.”

“There’s a lot I don’t know about my mother,” Phil said.

“She told you nothing about your father. You and Marianne?”

Phil was surprised to hear him speak his sister’s name. “No,” Phil said, “not much. I got the impression there were hard feelings. All I knew is that he’d gone away, really. I never knew him at all.”

The priest nodded. “And you didn’t … despise him. You didn’t hate him?”

“If I didn’t know him, how could I?”

“For leaving?”

“Who knows why people leave.”

“I don’t think I’ve made myself clear,” Colin said, and he sat for a time, looking away, until Phil began to wonder if the old man had lost the thread of the conversation. He glanced at his face and saw a puzzled sadness in it.

The priest sighed, put his hand on Phil’s knee, and said without looking at him, “You’re my son, Phil. Your mother and I … you’re my son.”

“AND THAT’S ME
on the left,” Colin said, pointing to the daguerreotype. “And this man is Alejandro Solas—Alex to his friends, of which he didn’t have many. I don’t suppose he had
any
when he died. This was the front porch of May’s house, your ancestral home, I guess you could say. It was torn down in 1942, during the war.”

It was hard for Phil to keep his mind from wandering. With a suddenness that shocked him, he knew that he had never really been indifferent to his father’s absence at all. What he had said a moment ago hadn’t been true. He had simply boxed up his anger and confusion and put it away. On one occasion in his life he had considered the idea of trying to find his father, although he had never even known his name, and when his mother had died, that information had died with her. He had no aunts or uncles to call, no mutual friends or relatives. His own last name was his mother’s property, not his father’s. And so the idea of knowing his father had merely been an interesting mental game, and his interest in it had dwindled in the years since his mother had gone.

He glanced out through the open door again, and saw that Jen was no longer sitting on the bench. He could see her in the distance, walking in the gardens. The last few minutes had changed his life utterly. A week ago he had been alone, his life routine, the past neatly organized and stowed away in a tower somewhere and padlocked. It was easy enough to live like a monk when the world lived somewhere else. But apparently the world would find you sooner or later, no matter how tightly the doors and windows are locked. And now the world—past, present, and future—had risen roundabout him once again, with its regrets and its dreams and, surprisingly, its hope. And not only his own past, but the entangled pasts of his mother and his father and now of the woman who walked in the sunlit gardens of this tranquil old mission.

“I don’t know how to … justify anything,” Colin told him, handing him back the photograph. “But I can tell you what happened if you’ll let me.”

“Yes,” Phil said. “I want to know. But I’m curious about something. Did you ever, you know, look in at us, at Marianne and me, even from a distance?”

“Often.”

Phil nodded. His throat constricted, and he found that there was far more sorrow in him than anger. “Go ahead and talk,” he said.

“Your mother and I weren’t married—I guess I should start there. Of course I hadn’t really thought of becoming a priest. Not seriously. When I found her again, after we parted, we were both alone in a strange world, her particularly. You and Marianne were … were the result of our comforting each other, I guess I would say. As I said, Jeanette knows this, because I just told her. My only defense for my behavior is to say that I loved your mother in my way. I was lonely, and I had despaired of finding Jeanette. On the night that you were conceived, an act of violence occurred for reasons almost too complicated to explain now. A man was shot and killed, another traveler. It was Alejandro Solas, and I can tell you that if he
hadn’t
been shot, it’s possible that he himself would have killed me—your mother, too, for that matter.

“May, your mother, was appalled by the violence. She was appalled by our having betrayed Jen, or Jen’s memory, by making love. And it turned out, of course, that she was unwed and pregnant in a world which was unsympathetic and foreign to her. She couldn’t live with me, nor did she want that. I stayed … hidden, watching the old well, waiting to finish what I’d begun so badly, so ineptly, so many years ago. If Jeanette hadn’t come to us this season, I wouldn’t have seen it through to the end, and that would have been hard. I don’t know what I would have done. Meeting my granddaughter changed everything, though. I didn’t expect that. I’ve been anticipating this meeting between you and me, though, wondering what would come of it, of us.”