Suffer the Children (11 page)

That didn’t mean they would depart their home without dignity. She intended to say good-bye with love and respect. Tomorrow, she and Doug would host a wake.

The preparations kept her busy. There was a lot to do and not a lot of time. That was good. If she stopped, if she had nothing to do, she might have to deal with her grief directly. Grief that could eat her alive. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to handle that yet.

All morning, she’d rolled up her sleeves and given the house a thorough cleaning. She didn’t touch the kids’ rooms. She just closed the doors and left them alone. In every other living space, though, she’d erased all evidence of their existence. She couldn’t cope with what she was feeling if she had to wash her face every night before bed while staring at Megan’s little pink Dora the Explorer toothbrush.

By midafternoon, she finished getting the house into shape. She’d called her guests, found appropriate music from her CD collection to play during the service, and dug up some candles. Now she needed to buy some refreshments to serve everybody. She hoped she could get Pastor Gary to visit and say a few words.

First stop was Major’s kennel to fill his bowls. Joan knelt next to the dog while he ate and stroked the fur on his back. Major glanced at the back door of the house.

“Are you looking for Nate?”

The dog looked up at her with hope.

“Nate’s not coming today.” She rested her cheek against his warm back and listened to his steady heartbeat. “When I get home, would
you like to come inside for a bit and see how you like it? Do you want to be an inside dog? Would you like that, Major?”

The dog nudged the bowl along the wood floor with his sloppy eating. Joan closed her eyes and smiled for the first time in days. It didn’t last.

She walked out in front of the house, where she found her Dodge Durango. She’d parked it on the street to avoid disturbing the children in the garage. She scraped the ice off the windshield, got in, and started her errands. The streets were eerily deserted. The playgrounds empty. Everywhere she went, nobody had their Christmas lights on. It struck her that in most of the world, there wasn’t a single human being who believed in Santa Claus.

Her local supermarket was open. Joan bought as many items on her list as she could find. Many shelves had been emptied. The pharmacy had run out of sleeping pills. Even the allergy and cold medicines had been cleaned out. Teenagers and old men ran the cash registers. The cheerful Muzak made her want to scream.

She packed her groceries into her car and drove off.

The next stop was the church. Her heart fluttered as St. Andrew’s came into view and she heard its bell calling the faithful. She felt both drawn and repulsed by the prospect of going inside to find Pastor Gary. She was a churchgoing woman, and the familiar comforts of her religion sounded good right about now. But she couldn’t reconcile the idea of a loving God with what had happened. It was one thing to strike down a family member before his or her time and leave it to the survivors to find meaning in it. It was another to completely cull the world’s children.

The Lord worked in mysterious ways, but this time it looked like plain old genocide.

Maybe she would find some meaning to all this inside.
Why did this happen?
she wondered.
Who should we blame? Ourselves? Terrorists? Global warming, pollution?

God?

And if it was God, why? What are we supposed to learn? If God is teaching a lesson, what could it possibly be?

Saint Andrew’s appeared to be packed. The church parking lot had filled to capacity and then some, and Joan was forced to park several blocks away. She left the car and followed other people streaming toward the church. Most wore black; the entire world was in mourning. The bell tolled again.

Joan hesitated at the entrance. She’d never seen it so crowded. The pews had filled. A long procession of mourners waited their turn in the aisle to place candles, flowers, toys, and photos at the altar. The organist played a neutral tune, something to fill the air so you couldn’t hear the sobbing. Otherwise, there was no structure to the ceremony, no clergy providing comfort to the afflicted. The atmosphere was thick with tension, grief, and anger. Hysteria and madness channeled into the rituals of coping with death. She pictured somebody pushing somebody else, and that would be the only thing necessary to turn the room into a violent bloodbath.

She recognized members of the congregation, some neighbors, a few friends. The simple act of breathing seemed to demand every bit of energy they had. She saw Coral and resisted an impulse to offer some comfort, maybe even get some herself. She didn’t have the energy. Moments later, her friend blurred into the background with the rest.

We’re all alone now
.
Look at us. Packed in here like sardines, but we might as well be miles away from each other.

One of the mourners sent up a keening wail. Then others joined in, the urge to scream washing over the congregation like a wave, filling the enormous space with the heartrending sound of their grief—

Get out of here NOW.

Joan rushed out the doors and stopped on the church steps, taking deep breaths. She’d left just in time. She’d been about to join in. It would feel so good to lose control, but once she started, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.

In any case, she’d learned something valuable. There were no answers to be found in there. Just unyielding horror. Emptiness.

A bearded man in a long black coat stood smoking near the chain-link fence at the edge of the congested parking lot. She passed him on the way back to her car.

“Pastor Gary?”

The man stared at her. “Hello, Joan.”

“I didn’t know you were a smoker.”

“I quit when Jane was born,” he said. He took another drag.

“I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“We lost them all. All three.”

“Nate and Megan are gone as well.”

“I’m sorry too.”

“I was at a movie when it happened,” Joan confessed.

“And you feel guilty about that?”

She bit her lip and nodded.

“Let me tell you something. It might give you some perspective.”

“Please do.” She listened closely.

“My youngest died on the stairs. He was always getting himself hurt, and I found him lying there in this little”—his voice cracked—“this little tangle of arms and legs. The first thing I felt was irritation. The first thing I actually thought was,
What did you do to yourself now?
” He glared at Joan, his eyes wet and fierce. “What kind of father am I to think that? To feel that?”

She recoiled. “That’s awful.”

“
That’s
guilt. What you feel is something else.”

“I am so sorry.”

“We’re all sorry, I guess. Did you come for a service? We’re not doing anything formal today, as you probably saw. People are free to use the church for whatever they need.”

“No, I came to see you.” Joan thought her request seemed petty now. The man had the loss of his own children to cope with. “We’re taking Nate and Megan to the burial ground tomorrow night, and Doug and I will be hosting a wake at our home. I was wondering if you might come over and say a few words. I hope you don’t mind me asking.”

Pastor Gary dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. “I don’t think I can do that.”

“It’s all right. I figured you’d be too busy.”

“I’m not busy at all. I just don’t want to do it. I really don’t want to do anything, to be honest.”

“Oh,” said Joan, surprised.

He lit another cigarette and coughed. “Please don’t take it the wrong way. I always liked you. I mean, you came to church every Sunday to listen to my sermons. What a different world it was only a few days ago, right? There was so much to believe in. We had no idea. No idea at all.”

Joan nodded. The truth was she didn’t know which was more like a dream, the past or present.

“When you get home, you should look up the Kübler-Ross stages of grief,” he told her. “That’s what I was trained to use as a pastor to provide comfort. I could tell you a little about it if you want.”

“Please. I’d like to hear it.”

“When you’re ready to process what actually happened, you will likely try to deny your own suffering. Understand? You might decide to get mad about it and blame yourself or others. You may try to bargain with God, offer blood sacrifices and burnt offerings or whatever. But God created death as well as life and will deny your request. You may become depressed, which is of course the active process of grieving, and that’s good, but grieving isn’t the goal. Accepting your loss is. That’s the final stage. All the other responses are normal as long as they lead you to acceptance.” He shrugged. “That’s what I used to say to people in the congregation when they lost a loved one, Joan. I hope it will help you and Doug.”

It was like getting a swimming lesson from a drowning man. The loss of a child was bad enough for any single person to bear, Joan knew. But to know it had happened to everybody was even worse. There was nobody who could comfort you. Everywhere you looked, you saw your own pain reflected in somebody else’s face.

“I think what I really want to know is
why
this happened.”

“You mean why God allowed this to happen. And you think I might know. Honestly, I was hoping maybe you could tell me. It’s all I’m thinking about. Any ideas?”

“No, not really,” said Joan.

“We all just want to understand. As human beings, we need to come to terms with it. The thing we have to acknowledge is not all miracles are good. Some miracles are evil. God allowed His own son to die, but it was for a reason. It was a sacrifice. Why did He allow our children to die? Maybe we were wicked and God wanted to punish us. But what did we do that was so bad? Seriously, why did God feel He had to come down and do just about the worst thing He could do?”

Joan felt compelled to answer, as the man was now glaring at her. “I don’t know, Pastor.”

“Remember how the Egyptians wouldn’t give up the Jews?”

“You mean, in the Book of Exodus?”

“Exactly. God inflicted nine plagues on the Egyptians. He turned their water into blood, and still they wouldn’t release the Hebrews. He threw hail and darkness and wild animals at them, and still they said no. Then God did a simple thing. He killed their firstborn children. The next day, they let the Jews go.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

“So if we did something wrong—if this is some form of punishment—how do we get right with God again?”

Pastor Gary burst out laughing so hard that Joan took a step back. “I don’t know. I really don’t. Maybe next time, God will come down here and tell us what He wants instead of expecting us to guess, and murdering our kids when we’ve guessed wrong.”

Joan touched her face as if he’d slapped her.

“An even bigger question has been bugging me, Joan. The question is: Why did I bother? I thought, because we worshipped Him, that He liked us. But now, after witnessing all this? Call it blasphemy, but I’m
starting to think He never really liked us. So I wonder why we wasted our time. I wonder why I bothered. My whole life is a waste.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she told him, close to tears.

“Of course you don’t know. Neither do I. We’ll just have to keep on guessing.” He dropped his cigarette into the slush at his feet and lit another. “Or stop trying altogether.”

50 hours after Herod Event

Doug drove the big U-Haul truck off the highway and onto the dirt road that led to the children’s burial ground.

The soldiers at the checkpoint waved him through. The truck rumbled over the rough ground. Inside, sixteen bodies lay cocooned in black bags.

Nine stops today. Nine homes with screaming mothers and angry fathers looking for somebody to blame. They’d decided to give up for the day after somebody took a potshot at them with a rifle from a bedroom window.

Doug nipped at his flask and shook it. Almost time for a refill. “We’re just about done here. You coming back tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” said Tom. “Jesus, I really don’t.”

Doug nodded. Nothing more needed to be said.

He continued driving at high speed, careless of the risk. The truck topped a rise and the fields beyond spilled into view. Big yellow construction machines performed an awkward ballet across the scarred landscape, followed by drifting clouds of dust.

“It’s huge,” said Tom, moved at the sight.

“They’ve been at it since last night.”

“Oh, Christ. Look, Doug.”

The government had run out of body bags. Hundreds of bodies lay in neat rows on the frozen ground, covered with a dusting of quicklime.

Tom wiped his eyes. “It’s horrible. It’s like the end of the world.”

The end of the world. Doug remembered how he used to worry about that. Electromagnetic pulse, peak oil, asteroids, superflu, you name it. He kept emergency stocks of food and water in his basement just in case his family had to live off the grid for a while.

They drove into the works. Construction signs flashed in the distance. Bulldozers fitted with single-shank rippers tore into the frozen, compacted soil. Excavators lurched in their wake and dug trenches five feet deep and three hundred feet long. Army five-tons, U-Hauls, refrigerated trucks, and pickups rolled along with little puffs of exhaust, stopping to allow men in hazmat suits to jump off and unload body bags into the trenches. At each finished trench, bulldozers pushed hills of earth to cover the dead.

He drove toward a bustling village of trailers and vehicles. Doug pulled up next to several men in orange vests and hard hats warming their hands over a fire burning in a metal drum and rolled down his window.

“Who’s in charge here?” he called.

The men looked at each other and shrugged.

“I’ve got a full load,” he said. “Where do you want them?”

“Over there’s fine,” one of the men said, pointing vaguely. “You’ve got to register the load first.”

Doug turned to Tom. “Back in a minute.”

He used to worry about taxes and making ends meet.