Any Bitter Thing (38 page)

She comes to him in the privacy of the confessional.

Bless me, Father
, she says.
For I have sinned.

Through the trees, he has been watching her moving around in her dooryard. She avoids the woods but otherwise appears to move freely, a winglike lift to her step.

It has been one week since my last confession.

She has told the children to keep out of the woods. No playing there. I sprayed something on the weeds.

These are my sins: I committed murder. I love you.

Once a week, here in this vessel of oiled wood, he grants absolution again, as he must.

A cold noontime, mid-November, he taps on the farmhouse door to fetch Lizzy for lunch. Pauline says:
Chummy Foster saw Ray’s truck.

The air dampens with panic. Can the children feel it? He packs the children off, sends them down the lane to Mrs. Hanson.

Tell me.
His face goes hot and clammy. Across the white Formica are strewn the remains of Lizzy and Mariette’s game of Sorry, a tin of color pencils, a box of paper dolls. This evidence of innocence quells his terror.

It’s not you he saw
, Vivienne says, her color rising.
Who would ever think it was you?

Never in a million years
, agrees Pauline.
No one.

He stands up, his cassock grazing his polished shoes, his collar chafing.

Even if they find the truck
, Pauline says.

They won’t
, Vivienne reminds her.
The quarry is filled with old trucks. Old stoves, old everything.

But even if they did, they’ll think it was Ray anyway. Who would suspect the priest?

He doesn’t like the way Pauline says
the priest
, as if her sister’s woes can be laid entirely at his feet. As if her sister killed at his behest.

His stomach pitches. Where is the woman who came to him with the brushed hair, the lovely dress? She is all tapping fingers now, and bitten lips, nothing but nervous darting.

Still, he believes Pauline. Who would think of Father Murphy driving Ray Blanchard’s truck in the middle of the night?

They breathe easier, one by one by one.

His cassock feels papered on, paper clothes on a paper man.

I’m sorry
, Vivienne says.

He turns, once, before pushing open the door.

Tell God
, he says.
Tell Ray.

A day later, he asks for a transfer. Which is denied.

Tuesday night, another week gone, the children abed, he knocks again at Vivienne’s door. A glint of alarm flares in her eyes, but also the old longing that, despite everything, fills him.

Something’s happened, Vivienne.
He looks at her now, straight at her; he needs her.

Of course she thinks it’s about Ray, now past two months in the ground. He reads her fear.

Have the police—? Have you told—?

Not that
, he says.
Something worse.

Her hand goes to her throat. What could be worse?

I’ve been accused
—He can’t bring himself to say it.

Again, she’s thinking: Ray.

Not Ray
, he says.
Lizzy.

He scratches the slanderous words on Vivienne’s grocery list. A word, and another, beneath the words
milk, potatoes, Pop Tarts.
By the time she puts it together, he is weeping.

Don’t cry
, she says.
Oh, don’t.

He clings to her bony shoulders, fingers dug in.

Ida Hanson must be crazy
, she says.
Who would believe such a thing?

It’s so difficult to meet her eyes. Something different has been born in her face, a savage clarity around the mouth, a vulpine cast to her once temperate features. Is this his own reflection? It’s so difficult to look.

She saw you in my bed, Vivienne
, he says, eyes averted.
She thought you were Lizzy.

What?
she cries.
That’s impossible.

In your beautiful white dress with the red snowflakes. She mistook you for a child.

Her face flushes briefly. What comes to him is the buckled skull of Ray Blanchard, the collapsed and glutinous mess of it.

My dress—?

It looks like a nightgown, he tells her. Lizzy has one with red dots.

Now she gets up, pacing, hugging herself.
Don’t tell, please don’t tell. The two of us together that way, and then Ray disappears. They will guess.

We’ll have to chance it
, he says.

She turns around, and he receives her face in its newly brutal beauty, its capacity to surprise.
No chances, Michael. I won ‘t.

We have to
, he whispers.

They will put the two and two together!

You’re not listening, Vivienne. I stand accused with no witness but you.

He lies there, Michael
, she whispers bitterly, thrusting an incriminating finger toward the window as if Ray buried himself in the ground.
He lies right there under our feet! The police will know. They will ask the children, and the children will tell where we forbid them to play.

We
is the word she uses.
We.
Tears now, dear God, copious, rivering tears.
They will know.

Self-defense
, he pleads.
You tell them it was self-defense.

He could not see me coming. They can tell.
Her face horrifies him, the way its lovely contours shift slightly, then lock.
He thought I would always be afraid.

Listen to me.

No, Michael
, she says.
You listen.
Her face—merciful God, who is she?—lifts to him.
You dug a hole and put him in it. If you tell, we will both lose our children. Spare me, Father. Please, Father.
She is very close to him now, closer than she has been in weeks, her breath warm and clean, her lips warm and clean, but she is leaving him, this very minute she is leaving, and it feels like strips of skin being torn away.

He pleads but she won’t listen.
Nothing will happen
, she insists.
Nobody will believe that stupid woman. Nobody will believe you could desire to hurt Lizzy.

But what if they do?

They won’t. Trust God.

I can’t trust God! God can’t be trusted!

Her body holds fast to the place it takes.
Then trust me
, she whispers, taking him into her arms. The physical fact of her feels like destination.

Nothing will happen
, she croons, guiding him to the blue chair. She fits herself there with him.
Nothing will happen.

He closes his eyes, listening to her.

Michael.

He still loves his name when she speaks it.

Spare me, Michael. Let one of us keep what is ours.

In his head runs their history in an endless loop, all those days with the children in their sun-brightened yards, all those cook-outs and sled rides and the small conversations at her table or his, all his missteps turned graceful through the eye of his neighbor and friend.
She has all her life for people who put their foot down. You go ahead.

Her arms tense around him.
Promise me you’ll never tell.

I do. I Promise.

Be merciful. Promise.

Ido
, he says, resting now, choosing her anew. How many feverish nights she has cut short his prayers. How many more to come.

COMPLINE

TWENTY-EIGHT

Although Mrs. Blanchard had not lived in the farmhouse since Buddy, her youngest, left for college, her apartment retained the faintest scent of leather. Perhaps the years of piecework had settled onto her clothes and dishes, or perhaps my accident—which had altered my physiology in unknowable ways—had added to my memory the sense of smell. In either case, her apartment made me think of unstitched shoes.

She lived in one of the new complexes in Stanton with her basset hound, Pierre, the reincarnation of Major right down to a fear of cats and a knack for opening doors. Except for the dog, the new place betrayed no outward sign of our shared past. It was small and tidy, like her. No jam jars left open on the sideboard, no recipes stashed behind the blender, certainly no skeins of rawhide laid out, no pouches full of needles. After the shoe shop closed she’d taken a job at ShopRite as a cashier, where she still worked five nights a week, leaving daytime for babysitting Paulie. Nearing sixty, Mrs. Blanchard was still lovely; her eyelashes retained their inky darkness and her lips were still full. But the radiance she had once possessed was gone, in its
place a statuelike sheath, a structural beauty that gave the viewer nothing but surface.

Charlie met us at the door with Paulie hoisted against his chest. “I was summoned,” he said. He looked flushed and harried in his McDonald’s-owner costume, a Ronald McDonald tie floating out the front of his half-zipped jacket.

“Hi, Fluffy,” I said to Paulie, which normally made him laugh, but he’d been torn from a nap and squashed his face into his father’s collar.

Mariette exchanged a look with Charlie as he passed us. “Something’s up,” he said. “She asked me to clear the deck, so that’s what I’m doing.”

Nothing looked right. She kept the place eerily clean, the counters clear, the chairs pushed in, like a stage set tended by prop masters. The Mrs. Blanchard of my childhood had always seemed nestled, at one with her surroundings; now she lived in rooms designed to make normal human activity seem like acting. We found her waiting for us in the living room, which despite the daily presence of Paulie and a fifty-pound dog looked freshly swept.

“Sit, girls,” she said. “I require you to sit.”

We sat.

“Maman,”
Mariette said, “what is it?”