The Borrower (27 page)

Ian hadn’t spoken much since I’d sworn at him. Partly to make it up to him, and partly to get even farther away from Pastor Bob, I said, “I’ll make a deal with you. We
will
go look at Canada. We’ll see if we can see all the geese and bacon and hockey. And the socialized medicine.” He looked at me blankly, as well he should have. I really was being obnoxious. I was dehydrated and hungry and operating solely on adrenaline, but that was no excuse to talk over his head. I took the only deep breath I’d taken in several days. I said, “But first we need to get you some medicine. What pharmacy do you normally go to?”

“Walgreens. The one in Hannibal.”

“Perfect.” I had checked online the night before, in a rare moment of foresight, and found that the state of Vermont had a grand total of three Walgreens. One very far south in Rutland, one in Brattleboro, where we might run into Pastor Bob himself, and one in the middle of pretty much nowhere, about forty miles east.

I knew I was making the decision right then that we wouldn’t stay in Vermont more than one or two more days, even if we had the money to. I doubted the Walgreens computer would be rigged up to the Hannibal Police Department, but even so, a charge on the Drakes’ insurance plan would eventually tip someone off. But if we were leaving Vermont anyway, this would just throw them off the trail.

Within an hour we were standing at the pharmacist’s counter, and I was giving them Ian’s real name. They had us sit and wait, and while Ian flipped through a copy of
Bon Appétit
rating each picture (“Yummy!” “Icky!” “Yummy!”) I silently panicked that it was taking so long only because they were holding us here until the police came. How long could it take fill an inhaler prescription, anyway? It wasn’t like they had to wait for the machine to count the pills.

But they called us up after twenty minutes, and the co-pay was only thirty dollars, plus seventy-nine cents for the chocolate bar that would probably be my lunch. The woman asked if I had any questions for the pharmacist. No, I did not. Lots of questions for the ethicist, but none for the pharmacist.

As we walked out the door, Ian squirted the inhaler into the air three times, then put it to his mouth and puffed up his cheeks like a blowfish. Now that the prescription was filled, and so easily, too, I knew we should have done this days ago, and I was furious with myself for waiting. I reflected that my revolutionary temperament might be better served by an equal helping of Russian courage, or at least foolhardiness, than by my maternally genetic Jewish-American carefulness. Imagine Woody Allen leading the Charge of the Light Brigade. That was me.

My key did not fit in the door of my car. I tried again, and Ian yanked on the passenger side door handle. I tried it again, and, idiotically, again. Then Ian said, “Why is there fifty coffee cups in the backseat?” We ran like hell to my actual car, three spaces down, Ian dove into the backseat, and I sped back onto the main road and north out of town. Ian probably thought we were racing away out of embarrassment, worried the car’s owner had seen us from inside the pharmacy. I was worried he’d seen us too, but for much darker reasons. I was somewhat relieved at his ineptitude, that he’d get out of the car and shop for toiletries when he was supposed to be on our trail—unless he’d followed us in there to apprehend us, or take our picture, or grab Ian away. But no, I willfully pictured Mr. Shades filling his little green basket with cotton balls and hair gel, unaware that we’d left.

It was good, I reasoned, to have a time line for getting out of Vermont now. On the other hand, on some level it was probably bad that there was no longer any compelling medical urgency to getting Ian home, no unassailable excuse if I needed to get rid of him in a hurry. At some point, I might try asking, casually, if he was ready to head back to Hannibal. But it needed to be the right moment. If I had to ask the question more than once, he’d get stubborn and never say yes. Also, we had to be
done
. Done with what, I wasn’t sure. Done with fixing him, maybe. Saving him.

I broke off half the chocolate bar and handed it to him. I bit off a tiny corner, just like Charlie Bucket, and let it dissolve on my tongue. It was awfully good, that confection that had cursed my family. (“In Soviet Russia, chocolate eats
you
!”)

Ian ate his half in two bites. “I feel way better now,” he said. “But Miss Hull?”

“Yes?”

“One thing that’s bothering my breathing is that I don’t know why, but you kind of smell like smoke.”

A
t about eleven o’clock, just as the town names were all turning French, Ian reached forward from the backseat and put a fifty-dollar bill on my shoulder. “I think you dropped this,” he said.

“Where was it?”

“Sticking out of this pocket back here.” He meant the one on the back of my seat.

I took the bill and stared at Ulysses S. Grant as if he’d tell me exactly where he’d come from. “It must have been part of the money from Church Street,” I said.

“No. The one guy gave me a whole hundred dollar bill, but everybody else just gave me regular stuff.”

I wondered for a moment if Ian had stolen it from the country store cash register, or if he’d had it all along in his backpack, but it was the crispest, cleanest bill I’d ever seen, the corners still sharp. If a ten-year-old had held it even for five minutes, it wouldn’t have looked like that. Likewise, it didn’t seem right that it would have sat undiscovered in my car for the past two years, a pristine relic of the fast-food-eating fan of Australian soccer. It could only have been Glenn’s. I’d been locking my car in even the smallest Vermont parking lots. I set the bill on the dashboard like a lucky charm.

The road that led to Canada was just a small country highway with farms right along it, but it was fairly busy, and the traffic was slow. I could tell Ian was getting antsy back there, but he didn’t want to admit that he was bored, that a visual of the Canadian border might not be worth another twenty minutes in the car. He pointed straight east, away from the main road, to a tall white church in the distance. “A big green church!” he shouted. He was wearing the green glasses again. “Let’s go over there!”

“Sure,” I said, and found a road that cut over that way. It might well have been the last turnoff before the border, and I was relieved that we wouldn’t be going any closer, pulling off the road suspiciously or doing an illegal U-turn in front of the heavily armed and presumably well-informed border security.

“And besides,” he said, “it’s Sunday. We might get to hear the end of church.”

“It’s Monday. We’ve been gone a whole week.”

He gasped. “You let me miss church!” Not the way most children would have said it, in joyful astonishment, but in horror. As if I’d fed him poison.

“Okay, so we’re going today.”

I took a few false turns before we found it. Up close, it wasn’t nearly as tall or as white as I’d thought. It was dirty, almost gray, and still decorated for Christmas, three months past, with crumbly brown wreaths and garlands tied with bows that remained a violent red against the faded needles. There was a little graveyard off to the side, the kind with wafer-thin stones that nobody bothers tending anymore. “Parish of St. Bernice,” the sign in front said. “All are welcome!” How brilliant of me, to drive this particular child halfway across the country just to introduce him to the Catholic Church. I tried to think of a way to back out of it. But he was so happy, bouncing up and down on the seat as we pulled into the empty gravel parking lot between the church and the graveyard. I turned the car off and put on my coat, but Ian was already out there, still with the green glasses on, cutting across the heap of leftover snow to get to the side door. He rang the bell and said something into the intercom, and by the time I reached the door it was buzzing and Ian was tugging it open with both arms. We stepped inside and Ian stomped his shoes on the mat.

A pale, skinny man in jeans and a red sweater and a clerical collar came down the hall looking mildly surprised. He squinted at us as he walked, to see whom he’d just let in, and then for the last three yards held his hand out for Ian to shake. “Father Diggs,” he said, as he finally reached Ian and pumped his arm, then grabbed my hand from my side and shook it too. “Or Father Oscar, whatever you prefer. Or just Oscar!” A man named Diggs this close to a graveyard was almost too Dickensian to be true, but here he was, tall and pockmarked and gangly. “Sorry for my informality here. We don’t get many visitors during the week. We’re a small parish.” He straightened the sweater on his knobby shoulders. “But I assume you’re here to see the finger.”

Ian looked at me and then back at the priest. I reached over and plucked the green glasses off his nose. “Yes,” Ian said. “We would definitely like to see the finger.” I nodded, bewildered, but glad Ian was taking charge. I was busy panicking over the possibility that the priest would offer Ian confession, and he would go into the little booth and tell Father Diggs exactly who we were.

Father Diggs smiled at me, over Ian’s head. “I figured. I’m always happy to show people. Did you read about it in the guidebook? Someone put it in a guidebook a ways back. Why don’t you come into the sanctuary, and you can have a look around while I get the keys.” We followed him around the corner. He flicked a row of four light switches, and the narthex lit up around us.

“Are you from these parts?”

“Yes,” Ian said. “Well, we’re from Concord, which is the capital of New Hampshire. It’s just that we’re not a Catholic family. We’re a Protestant family. But we wanted to see the finger, out of curiosity.”

Father Diggs went to a long table and moved aside a stack of bulletins and flyers. He handed us two pink sheets.
The Legend of St. Bernice
, they said at the top. They were hard to read, with the speckly gray letters that come from Xeroxing a Xerox.

“Personally,” he said, more to me than to Ian, “I don’t know much about this whole relic thing. I came here in ninety-two, and it was old news by then. I came all the way from Omaha, Nebraska, if you can believe it. Still not sure how I ended up in the great state of Vermont. But Concord, right? Concord’s a great town.” He opened the big double doors to the sanctuary: dark wooden pews, a broad isosceles of stained glass at the front, Stations of the Cross along the sides. Father Diggs started down the middle aisle and we followed. “It was a gift in the early nineteen hundreds. Some wealthy parishioner did his grand tour of Europe and got the finger somewhere in France.” I managed not to laugh at his choice of words. “I mean, the fact that they even sold it to him means they can’t have valued it very much. Or perhaps they were starving. It’s a bit of a white elephant now, but the older women in the church, they’ve grown up with it. It’s important to them.” We had reached the front of the room. “If you’ll excuse me a minute,” he said, “I ought to tidy up back there first. You can poke around.”

He opened a door behind the pulpit and ducked under the low frame. I looked down at Ian, at his face turned up into the streams of colored light from the stained glass. His cheeks were yellow, blue, orange, with lines of shadow in between. I left him there and started down the side aisle.

I didn’t know where the stations of the cross were supposed to start, so I just looked at each painting as I came to it. Christ Meets His Mother. Christ Falls for the First Time. They were poorly painted, and in several Christ bore an unfortunate resemblance to John Lennon. Ian was watching me now. I worried he was waiting for me to have some kind of religious revelation.

My purse beeped loudly, twice, echoing through the whole sanctuary. Ian jumped back and took his hand off the altar, apparently thinking he’d set off an alarm. I had a message, and one bar of connectivity. When I moved a foot forward, the bar was gone. I moved back, and it was still gone. I held the phone out in front of me like some modern-day divining rod until the bar appeared again. I finally stood half crouched under the arched wall of a little stone alcove near the back of the sanctuary. Ian was busy pulling down the kneelers in the pews. I entered my voice-mail code and listened.

“Lucy, hello? It’s Monday morning, and you’re not back. I suppose this is your answering machine. You have no idea what I went through to find this number. Rocky had to dig it out for me, from under I don’t know how many files and papers, and it’s been a tremendous inconvenience. For everyone.”

I held Loraine a little farther from my ear, or rather I moved my entire head away while holding the phone perfectly still so as not to lose the connection.

“And I need a firm date on your return, Lucy, because it’s just chaos downstairs. The balloon man showed up yesterday, and no one had any idea he was coming. Now, Rocky said he told you about the whole Drake family situation, and apparently Janet Drake told the investigators they should interview Sarah-Ann, Lord knows why. I told the man that
you
were the head children’s librarian, not Sarah-Ann, but now you’re not even here, which is terribly embarrassing for us. Sarah-Ann is absolutely refusing to do Chapter Book Hour again this Friday, because the children were just
beastly
to her last week. So I’ll have to do it myself, if you aren’t back. Of course I love working with our little cherubs, but I’m
very
busy, as you know.”

That was the end of the message. No farewell, no ultimatum, unless I was meant to take Loraine reading to the children as the threat. I’d been so busy keeping all my stories straight that I’d forgotten the details of that original, simplest one: I’d return on Monday. I considered calling her back, but what would I say? Not wanting to waste that one bar, that one chance for communication with the rest of the world, I decided to call Tim.

“Lucy,” he said, “where
are
you?”

I told him the same story I’d told Rocky and Glenn: bone marrow, Chicago. I said I’d be home by the weekend.

“Your phone was ringing off the hook yesterday. I finally went in and unplugged it. It was driving us crazy.”