The Death of Wendell Mackey (36 page)

“Pretty ordinary in the light.”

“But different. Sounds and smells. Different.” He closed his door. “I didn’t hurt him?”

“Santos?” Agatha put the key in the ignition and turned the engine on. “No, you didn’t.”

She guided the car backwards out of the parking spot and then out of the rest stop and back onto the highway. They drove in silence for a few minutes.

“Cops’ll want to talk to you,” Wendell said to her. “You’ll get a world of trouble.”

“Nothing I didn’t ask for. And I’m good with cops. No nuns are going to jail.”

It never occurred to Wendell to ask Agatha where they were going, to get the name of a town or a hospital. She got him
out
; that was enough. What happened after that would happen miles away from that dark center of the universe. And when he had struggled to trust no one, she still proved herself to be trustworthy. Persistent, like a burrowed tick. She wouldn’t let go.

The car hitting the seams in the highway and the low thrum of the engine became hypnotic to Wendell, as he watched the blacktop snake out before them like a black ribbon. Agatha began to talk quietly, about Santos, about the police and calling the local news and asking for the Virgin Mary’s prayers, but Wendell kept his eyes on the road, feeling it stretch out from the hood of the car.

If I close my eyes…if I close them, just for a second…

He smiled, a drunken, foolish smile.

Can’t get me now
, he thought.
They can’t. She can’t
.

Agatha kept her rosary roped around her hand and dangled over the steering wheel. Periodically she would shift in what she was saying and pepper her words with prayers, scripture verses. Wendell drifted in and out, catching the highlights: “And so that’s why I left Pennsylvania…for from him and through him and for him are all things to him be glory forever amen…but my daddy thought engineering would be a better fit for me…and it was just something, just something about that apartment that fit me, like a comfy shoe.”

“Agatha,” Wendell whispered.

“They will soar,” she continued, “as with eagles’ wings; they will run and not grow weary, walk and not grow faint.”

“Hey Sister.”

“Yes?”

Wendell paused, looking out his window. Flatlands were becoming hills.

“It’s strange,” he said, “how things end up.” He sighed and kept staring out his window.

“Things?”

“I was this little kid, and not everything was perfect; it never is. But at least I had it: a home, a family. Then the world intrudes, it all gets kicked around, and we’re there.
There
. The city. That apartment. And you think your folks will figure it out, or your lotto numbers will get called, or your little comic book mind will think up something heroic to save you all. And mixed into all of this, this wading through this daily sewage and just trying to take a clean breath, is this certainty—and it’s not just an assumption anymore, but a certainty—that the one who’s supposed to love you most has let her sickness turn you, this little kid, into the villain.”

He looked out the window to the horizon of black hills under a navy sky. Dawn was coming.

“So I’m playing with my Legos on the carpet,” Wendell continued, “and she’s staring at me from the doorway, disgusted and angry, but also a little afraid. Because I’m the source of all evil, this little boy playing on the floor. We’d go back and forth to churches and acupuncturists and herbal healers to get her healed of all of her fake sicknesses, and all along she knows—and she even tells me this—that the source of her sicknesses isn’t asbestos in the ceiling or nicotine or microwaves or pollution. It’s me.”

“She was disturbed, Wendell. You did nothing wrong. You were the victim.”

“My dad died, and she became something different, something new. And she had one goal: to survive the ravages of her son.” Wendell laughed, finally seeing it all come together in his head. “She signed off on that power of attorney, forged my name and had me institutionalized. And then I was changed, I became something different, something new. Seems my one goal was different, though.”

“You’re not that way.”

“It’s funny. Her sickness hollowed her out. Then she turned me over to them, and they reengineered me and hollowed me out too. Her soul died, then mine died too. Funny,” he repeated, “funny, how I end up just like her.”

“No you’re not. You have a soul. You can’t let yourself believe—”

“No, it’s okay. It’s fine, really. Somehow, even knowing what I am, I know I won’t hurt you.”

“It’s not what you think it is, Wendell.”

“Everything’s changing, like you said.”

“Wendell, you’ve been through hell. And we can help you.”

“I’d love for that to be true.”

Agatha kept talking, but Wendell only heard her voice thin out and drift into the background. He closed his eyes.

And he saw
her
, one last time. Though not her face. He couldn’t look into her face. He just watched the pipe drop, right onto him.

The car thumped. Or perhaps it was his heartbeat. He felt a smile on his lips.

“Wendell, wake up.”

Must be time for school
, he thought.

“Wendell…”

No, not school. Maybe we’re moving back to the house
.

“Wendell, wake up.” Agatha’s voice.

He opened his eyes, and turned to his window to see the rising sun, red, placental and shimmering. Tendrils of orange were spreading across the sky. The hills, now gold-tipped, rolled green with patchwork farmland, dotted with trees and silos. The road was elevated, so Wendell looked down into a valley with a dammed lake shining like mica, surrounded by fir trees. A town was sprawled out over the valley’s green carpet—houses, a school, a steeple, black specks of cows and a farm combine making neat chessboard rows—like something unreal, at least to Wendell, who had never seen anything like it before. The sun’s rays touched the lake and reflected up, painting the road, the car, Wendell’s face, a soft orange.

The car slowed as it turned left and began to wind its way up a tree-lined road, which quickly thickened into forest.

“Thought you were dead,” Agatha said.

“Probably woulda been better.”

“Well, don’t worry. It’s just up a ways.” She nodded her head up the road. “Roll down your window.”

Wendell rolled it down a crack, then halfway.

“Smell that?” Agatha asked.

He leaned towards the window, breathing deeply through his nose. Earth, pine sap, honey.

“All of those cedars,” she said, “apple and cherry trees, the honeysuckle. All of it, beautiful year round. Like it was meant for a different world.”

She slowed the car to allow Wendell a few moments to take it in. He knew it was there, this beauty, this unnamable quality, but his nose couldn’t quite catch it all. He could try to cup the air in his claws and shovel it towards his nostrils, but still he would miss something. He looked out, trying to see it, watching the trees lining the road go by, ordered and massive like a line of soldiers, behind which was the chaotic bloom of the forest with its trees and shrubs growing over and around each other. But he knew that it was
there
, whether he could fully grasp it or not.
There
, this beauty, new and powerful and seeming endless.

“Isn’t it amazing?” she asked. “It’s going to be fine, you know.”

“Maybe.”

“No, not maybe.”

“Okay then.”

Up ahead the trees along the road angled out, allowing for more grass. Farther ahead the forest opened up and out of it appeared the convent, a sleeping stone giant of a building, with an austerity that looked familiar to Wendell. But the tree-lined campus, or the carpet of lawn, or the sea of flowers before the building—
something
—gave it all a pacific mood. Pigeons took off from the tiled roof and landed among the daisies and purple gladiolas. A square line of shrubs ran in a short green wall around the red-blue flower sea.

It isn’t real
, he thought. He clenched his claws together, expecting it to disappear, leaving the two of them still on the highway, directionless. But nothing changed. He relaxed.

“The hospital’s just a mile over the hill,” Agatha said. “We’ll start here. They’ll take care of us, then they’ll take us there. It’s going to be fine,” she repeated.

“I know.”

Sister Agatha pulled the car up to the front door.

“End of the road Wendell.”

He stepped out of the car cautiously, wincing at the sun. Above the front door was a giant stone cross; Wendell looked through the open front door and saw a statue of Jesus standing, hands open.

“Got himself off that cross,” he whispered, marveling at the detail of the statue, which almost looked alive.

There’s nothing more to do
, he told himself.
No running, no fighting back, no need to hold on to whatever’s been long dead
.

He looked up at the building’s windows, painted pink from interior light. Walking the perimeter of the campus was a line of nuns in white habits. He turned to the car which, with their new backdrop, now looked like a remnant from another age, rusted and tired and incapable of traveling another mile. Agatha, perhaps knowing what he was thinking, exited the car and walked around its front, patting it lovingly on the hood before stopping next to him.

Wendell turned back to the building, took a deep breath, held it in, wondering how to proceed.

“…gonna be fine,” he whispered.

“Yes,” Agatha said. She smiled, took hold of Wendell’s hand, and led him through the door.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

T
HE
D
EATH OF
W
ENDELL
M
ACKEY
is C.T. Westing’s first novel. He holds Master’s degrees in Theological Studies and Library Science, and along with writing, he teaches part-time as a college instructor. He lives with his wife and children in Western New York.