“I suppose I need a penance?” Leon asked, rubbing his forehead.
“Yes. You are to pray for Brother Jim, that he gets to heaven before you do,” the older friar directed.
Catching himself, Father Bernard looked quickly back at the novice. “And not because of any direct action on your part!” he added.
“Or yours!” Leon quipped with a smile.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Bear stood outside the door of the bedroom that had once been his mother’s. He found himself lingering, his hand on the knob, looking up at the ceiling.
Come on, don’t wait, he thought to himself. Crashing for a few hours’ sleep on the couch had restored some of his physical energy, but he had so little emotional energy left…Still, he had to go in.
“He’s not doing so well,” Jean had warned him. The digoxin that Elaine had been giving him had weakened his system. And the brain tumor that might take his life any day was still waiting in the wings for its final entrance.
The sick man was lying in the bed that had belonged to his first wife. The silver gray canopy curtains were drawn back to the wall. He was looking out the windows over the cityscape, as though deep in thought, or fighting off pain. But he slowly looked over at Bear when he came in.
“Arthur?”
“Yes,” he said. Then he added, “Dad.”
“Did you find her?”
“No.”
There was a long pause, while the man looked out the window, and Bear wondered for a moment if he had understood. Then he suddenly realized there were tears running down the man’s cheeks.
He came closer. “Dad—are you all right?” he asked.
The man spoke without looking at him. “Do you think she’s dead?”
Bear shook his head slowly. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t know if it’s because it’s still so unreal, but she doesn’t feel dead to me.”
“I hope you’re right,” the man said softly. He looked at Bear. “I loved her as though she were my own daughter. I didn’t know she was yours. But I loved her.”
Bear pulled over a footstool and sat down beside the bed. “Dad, to be honest, I really don’t know if she’s ‘mine.’ I don’t really know where our relationship is going. I don’t know if she—” Bear found he was struggling himself, surprised at how easy and natural it was to converse with his dad. “Let me leave that aside for a minute. Dad, I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I’ve been a real jerk to you.”
“Can’t say I blame you much,” his dad said, after a pause. His breath seemed to have a hard time coming. “I have a lot to ask forgiveness for, don’t I?”
“I forgive you, Dad. I’ve—well, I’ve been trying to forgive you for a long time.” He had to smile, remembering. “Blanche told me I needed to.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. I didn’t see why it would make any difference to us, but now I see it has. She’s had a lot to do with this.”
“It seems she’s been helping both of us.” His father looked at him with one eye, but couldn’t keep his gaze. He’s still afraid, Bear thought. “I haven’t exactly been much of a role model. More an example of what not to do. I didn’t stick to the woman I promised to be faithful to for life, left her to die alone—I would have done more for her, but Elaine made it an issue—said if I went to see Catherine, it was all over between us, and I was too weak to say no. I should have gone anyway—gone back to you and Ben and Catherine. If I had, things might have turned out better for all of us—” his voice died away into despair.
Bear put a hand on his father’s shoulder, and the man managed to look him in the eyes once more. “I want you to know that God brought good out of that, Dad, even if you don’t see it. I’m just starting to see a lot of it myself. What I’m trying to say is, as big as your shortcomings were, God made up for them. He always will, if we let Him fill in the holes. That’s the only way any one of us can say we’re men, in the end.”
His dad’s good eyelid drooped. “I always resented that you boys found more inspiration in a celibate priest than in me. I guess it made me feel inadequate, so I made you suffer for it. I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you, Dad.”
“Thank you, son,” the man whispered. And then put his hand on Bear’s arm, “Listen, I know you’re worried about me slipping into this coma, but I want you to find Blanche. Just go out and keep looking for her. Don’t worry about me. You have to keep after her until you find her.” The man pushed Bear’s arm away, and then confusingly, grabbed it again, and pulled Bear back towards him.
Bear’s father hugged him for a long moment, and Bear felt the strength in his father again, but it was waning. His dad’s voice was faint. “Now go.”
Bear left.
Despite his words to his father, Bear was afraid that by now, Blanche was dead. At the recommendation of the police department, he forced himself to go to the morgue at the medical examiner’s office.
He went alone, not because he wanted to, but because he didn’t want to ask Rose or Jean to face the ordeal unnecessarily. If she was dead, he wanted to be the one to find out first, and the one to break the news.
After filling out the paperwork, he waited for a police detective to come and help him go through the files of the recently deceased who might match Blanche’s description. He prayed that he would be like steel, and not cave in on himself. Fortunately, the staff member who came to help him was a mild, sensitive man who seemed to understand what he must be going through.
There were only a handful of cases that could have been Blanche, but even going through those four files was numbing. Bear simply prayed the same prayer over and over again: Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.
Viewing the photo of the first questionably identified body was the worst, but Bear managed to keep himself steady.
“No,” he said. “That’s not her.”
There was one badly-wounded accident victim who was the same age and hair color as Blanche, so Bear agreed to view the body. He had obtained from Jean a short list of Blanche’s identifying marks—a scar on her right wrist from a childhood accident, a small mole on her left leg—that could help him to verify her.
He waited in a small blue and gray room for the body to be brought up on a lift from the morgue in the basement. When the gurney was wheeled up to the viewing window, he knew even before the man removed the sheet from her right arm that it wasn’t Blanche. Still, being in the presence of Death was frightening, and silencing.
“No,” he said softly, “that’s not her.”
When he had finished going through the morbid process, Bear realized that there was no real relief. Maybe her body hadn’t been found yet, but if and when it was found, he would have to go through the same deadening process again.
“Keep checking the hospitals,” the man said to him gently. “You never know. She may turn up alive. Stranger things have happened.”
Bear blinked rapidly. He knew the man was trying to show sympathy, but, subdued by the presence of death, he had little hope.
“Thank you,” he said.
For hours he drove from hospital to hospital, asking questions and looking at patients that might be Blanche. But the feeling of death was creeping forward in his mind, and he fought against it. Giving up driving, he parked his car and walked around the parkway, searching down alleys and in odd places, any spot where a sick girl might have fainted and lain unnoticed. His search yielded nothing.
He called home to check with Jean, who had been phoning hospitals and drop-in centers. Then he called the police. Still nothing. He was warned that it could take days to find her, even if she were in a hospital.
Heavy with sleep and weak with inner pain, Bear started to drive to the Briers’ house. The mental image of death was closing in on him. And weariness lapped dangerously at his limbs.
He couldn’t drive any longer. Pulling over to the side of the road, he parked the car, got out, and started walking, forcing his muscles to work and to escap
e the stalking of death.
By the time he came to a bridge leading to the Bronx, he felt as though he had pulled ahead of his enemy, for a moment. Stumbling off the road down to the bank, he found a dark spot under the bridge pilings uninhabited by muggers. He slept there. He had done it before. There were mosquitoes, and, he was sure, rats, but he was too exhausted to care.
The sun was starting to rise when he woke up with a jerk, aching all over. Blearily he ran his hands through his hair and tried to pat it down. He crawled out from under the bridge, feeling like something that had escaped from a slimy rock, and climbed back up to the road and crossed the bridge. Somehow he formulated a prayer of thanks for at least being alive. And he was hungry. All the same, he ignored his querulous and indignant stomach, and kept walking.
His footsteps took him a long way. Cities are entirely different when you walk through them. Not so long ago, he had walked almost everywhere, because he couldn’t afford the subway. Now he started to remember once-familiar things. Memories led to others in an inexorable train.
It seemed like a very short time ago that he and Blanche had driven these streets in a taxi, her in a ripped but lovely green prom dress, him in a ruined tuxedo. That night, which had included a fistfight and an escape from the police, had been their bonding night. He remembered, in the taxi, sensing the closeness between them rising to a crescendo. He could see her fighting it, but didn’t want to say anything until she was ready, until she could admit to herself what he had known was going on. On her front steps, she had finally stumbled out some words about loving him, and he had walked on air for days.
He winced now at the recollection and stopped in front of a small diner, open for breakfast. But the memory had stolen his taste for food, and he walked away, his incensed stomach protesting loudly.
If he kept on walking this way, he would come to the Briers’ street, the brownstone with the roses in the window boxes. But he wasn’t ready to go there yet. At the other end of this path, if he went the right direction, was St. Catherine’s, Blanche’s old high school, the site of the prom. And St. Lawrence’s, the church where Father Raymond had served long ago, in Bear’s other life, as he now thought of it. He still had the keys to the church, too—well, at least one key. Blanche had the other one.
No, he couldn’t bear any more memories. It was time to retrace his steps, find his car, drive home. He turned around and started wearily back the way he had come.
Rapid steps were padding across the street behind him. He glanced around, and saw a dog. A large, rather ugly Rottweiler.
He halted. The dog, sensing his attention, looked over at him, and barked. Then it leapt back the way it had come.
His memory jarring, Bear ran after the dog. Blanche, at the airport, grabbing the dog by the collar—and this dog had the same thick red collar—it might be coincidence, but maybe—
The dog was sprinting towards St. Lawrence’s. As Bear closed in on it, the dog sat down on the steps of the church, wagging its tail and looking at Bear expectantly. Apparently this was its home.
Bear didn’t know what to do. He patted the dog gingerly on the head, and looked up at his former palace. He remembered being told by the archdiocese that some new order of monks had taken over the church, and had probably changed the locks. But the worn Yale openings looked the same, so out of an abstracted curiosity, he walked up the steps, pulled the key off his neck chain, and tried it in the door. It turned, and the door opened. The dog ran inside and vanished.
He stepped inside the cool darkness, and with a start of indignation, discovered racks of old clothes and piles of garbage bags heaped around the vaults of his old haunt. Someone was making his favorite church into a warehouse.
Feeling bemused by the changes, he let the doors close with a click behind him.
Hesitantly, he opened the door to the sanctuary. The church was vast and empty. But the high altar had been restored to some of its former glory, with gold paint touching up the old worn edges, and a new statue of St. Francis replacing the one of St. Rocco. And the red sanctuary lamp glowed with candlelight again.
Feeling a bit reassured, he crossed himself, genuflected, and slid into a back pew, finally able to rest his aching muscles. Blinking from the relief of sitting still, out of the air, he looked around. There were splattered paint buckets and an orgy of canvas and ladders over part of the sanctuary. But someone was painting an unusually good mural, with lilies, over the Mary altar.
Suddenly reawakening to his cross, he closed his eyes in pain. Everything he was carrying now broke him open, and he slumped his shoulders in defeat. God, please. Just let me find her. Even if she’s dead. Please just let me find her. There was nothing he could do, except trust.
There were footsteps approaching, and Bear looked up over his hands to see a short young Hispanic man in full Franciscan habit, complete with a rope belt, walking quickly into the church, with an ambling, side-to-side walk that was almost a swagger, pausing only to genuflect before the tabernacle with surprising seriousness. He saw Bear in the corner, nodded, and walked out of the chapel.
Bear took to staring at the dome above the altar, where some ambitious artist had sketched out the outstretched arms and solemn face of a massive Christ in chalk, and wondered what the young monk was saying to the others: Hey, who’s that homeless guy in the chapel? Bear allowed himself a thin grin, wondering if he should slink away and leave the monks to wonder if he had merely been an apparition of St. Joseph or something.
He tried to guess how high the scaffold would have to be to reach that dome. Or did they use a suspended catwalk of some kind?
Footsteps again. Bear wondered if he should leave, but inertia kept him there. A sigh escaped him. Another eviction was impending. He wondered if he should freak the monk out by telling him that he was the person who had donated thousands of dollars to fix up this church so that it could be used again. It would make a good story. Maybe they would pray extra hard for him.
The young monk returned, casually striding in Bear’s direction. Here comes the interrogation, Bear thought.
But the monk had some panache, apparently. “How’re you doing?” he said familiarly, lounging against the last pew.
I bet he’d say the same thing to an apparition of St. Joseph, Bear guessed. “I’ve been better,” he said, not pretending. The scrub on his cheeks, the worn rumpled clothes, the wild hair and red eyes couldn’t have said DISTRESS any more loudly.
“Can I help you with anything?”
“No—” Bear started to get up to go, not anxious to spill his guts. “Sorry. I just thought I’d take a look inside.”
“Oh. That’s fine. You’re not bothering anyone. We sort of encourage people to sit in front of the Eucharist around here.” The brother paused, and Bear waited. “So the door was open?” the monk asked.
“I had a key,” Bear tried to keep down the sigh unsuccessfully, and handed it to the brother. “There’s only one other copy that I know of. Don’t worry, they’re not selling them on the street these days or anything. I had the key from back when I used to be an altar boy here, and I just figured I’d see if it still worked.”
“Oh,” the brother said in a strange tone. Bear glanced at him. But the only thing the brother said was, “You were an altar boy and they gave you the keys to the church?” a bit disbelievingly. He was obviously a former altar boy.
“It was a special case. I was really good friends with the priest. I sort of filled in as a sacristan for him a lot of times.”
“Boy, you must have been pretty devout.”
Bear nodded. “Guess you could say that.” He made a half-hearted gesture towards the paintings. “Nice monastery you’re putting together here.”
“Friary. We’re friars, not monks.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
There was a long pause. The young friar scratched his chin, scratched the back of his head, scratched the back of his neck, and then scratched his chin again. Bear looked at him again oddly, and m
oved further away.
“You know, this is reeeeally weird,” the friar said at last, saying the last two words very slowly. “But you wouldn’t happen to know who has the other key?”
Wondering if these brothers were paranoid about burglary, Bear said, reassuringly. “A friend of mine. Don’t worry. I doubt she’ll ever use it.”
“She?” the young brother said in that same strange voice.
“Yes,” Bear said. Then, “Why do you ask?”
“Her name wouldn’t happen to be Nora?”
Something twinged inside Bear, and he focused in on the situation. “No. It’s Blanche. Do you know her? Have you seen her?” He automatically pulled the photograph of Blanche that he had been carrying for verification out of his pocket.
The brother looked at the picture and then back at Bear. “That’s her.”
“What?” Bear leapt to his feet.
“Except for the hair. It’s short. But that’s her.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Yes, but hold on—sit back down a moment,” the brother said, soberly. “I need to tell you something. You’re a friend of hers, right?”
“Yes. My name’s Arthur. Arthur Denniston. I know her mom and her sister. Jean and Rose Brier. We’ve been looking for her for the past week. Is she OK?”
The friar took a deep breath. “She’s in a coma.”
“I know. But she’s alive?”
“You do? Yes. She was attacked—about three days ago. We’ve been trying to figure out who she is and where she came from.” The young monk was animated now, talking at the same time as Bear.
“It was my stepmother who poisoned her—I’ve been looking for her—So has her family—Where is she?” Bear was saying simultaneously.
“So that’s what happened! We’ve been taking care of her—In Our Lady of Mercy Hospital—Here, I’ll take you there.”
With one motion, each of them put a hand on the back of the pew and vaulted over, racing through the friary and out the door to the street.