The Son, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book Two (19 page)

“The guard who accompanied Don Miguel and waited outside until he had finished his prayers had a different story to tell. Minutes passed and Don Miguel had still not emerged from the Camara Santa. So the guard went in and found his body on the floor. Fortunately the cloth had been unharmed. Or so we thought. So it was locked way. I was a young priest here at the time. But when we checked on the cloth later, we found this small corner missing. The cardinals came and the decision was made not to make the information public. For many years, we did not display the cloth, fearing that the missing piece would we noticed. But people desperately wanted to see it. So the decision was reversed and we started exhibiting the cloth again. When older photographs were compared with newer ones, the difference was apparent. The official explanation was that we had allowed a small sample of the cloth to be taken for scientific analysis. And that was that. No one ever challenged the explanation.”

Mano was riveted to the archbishop’s words. “But how could anyone get in?”

“Yes, we wondered that ourselves. The guard was a trustworthy man and we believed him when he told us that Don Miguel had been alone in the Camara Santa. Then just before his death - in confession - he admitted to me that he had abandoned his post for a few minutes that night. After locking up the church earlier, he realized that he had left someone inside – a woman. American, I recall. He ushered her out. But for those few minutes, the Camara Santa was left unguarded. We have long since speculated that this woman was a diversion, but we will never know for sure. If the guard knew more, he took it to his death soon after.”

“May I ask if you believe this is the blood of Christ?”

The priest sighed. His impatience with the young man was growing short. He had already devoted too much time to him. “What I believe is my private business,” he answered crisply. “Belief and fact don’t always coincide. All that matters is faith. In God and His church. Understand me when I say that it is my job, above all, to protect the church.”

Mano examined the missing piece of cloth again. “My mother was a virgin when she gave birth to me?”

“What?”

“She was a surrogate mother. The egg was implanted in her. She was 19 years old.”

“Sweet Jesus!” the priest exclaimed vehemently. “This story just gets better and better.”

“It isn’t a story,” said Mano, raising his voice in anger for the first time. “It’s the truth. My truth.
It’s the reality of me
!”

“Think of the billions who would be led astray by such a heresy,” the archbishop riposted. He was getting flush in the face and his right eye had begun to twitch. If his displeasure had not been so apparent, Mano would have thought he was winking. There was no levity in his voice, however. “Because that’s what you are, a walking, breathing heresy,” he shouted. “Every element of this story may be true, but there is one thing I can tell you with utmost certainly. It is not the work of God.” He paused, trying to gather his composure, but his pulse was racing too fast by now and his eye twitched with what under any other circumstances would have been comic regularity. Then without further hesitation, he grabbed Mano’s head in his thin hands, stared him straight in the face and thundered, “You are the work of the devil. The devil at his most creative!”

Mano fell back, as if he had been punched in the stomach. The breath went out of him and it took him several moments to regain his equilibrium. But when he did, he extended his hand toward the cloth. The archbishop stepped forward to stop him, but before he could, Mano placed his palm directly on the cloth. The archbishop was paralyzed with fright at the harm that might come to the precious relic. But Mano merely held his hand on the cloth, as if he might somehow absorb the blood on it and his mysterious parentage might become clear. He had felt at one with the atoms of the earth. Why could he not co-mingle with the blood of the cloth, if it was indeed his, as well?

But he felt nothing. And the one emotion he had not yet experienced in his strange odyssey finally overwhelmed him: despair. He wailed. He wailed like a wounded animal. Then he began to weep. The archbishop watched helplessly, as the young man’s body became racked with sobs. Tears flooded his eyes, then ran down his cheeks, his chin. Then to the archbishop’s horror, several tears fell on the cloth itself, where they mixed with spots of the dried blood, changing their color from dull brown to bright red.

Mano pulled his hand from the cloth, as he would from a scalding stove, and without looking back at the priest, ran blindly from the sacristy.

2:40

They were prisoners in their own home again. What had begun as a handful of curiosity seekers with the YouTube airing had grown steadily so that at any given time of day or night, at least fifty people waited outside the house on Venustiano Carranza for a glance of the new savior. Failing that, one of his family members would do - proximity to sanctity being almost as noteworthy as sanctity itself. Every time Jimmy opened the door or Hannah cracked a window, a flurry of excitement surged through the crowd. The vigil continued after dark with the lighting of candles. Sometimes there was singing, broken by wails of faith.

The press was back in force. After all, what better story for Holy Week, the Second Coming! It not only dwarfed all the earlier accounts of Mano’s survival in the mudslide in the Sierra Gorda, but it lent them an authenticity in retrospect. Old footage of Mano limping down the hillside was aired alongside the YouTube video. Together they were taken as irrefutable proof of Mano’s divinity.

Jimmy closed the store until further notice, screened all the phone calls and finally disconnected the doorbell when the continuous ringing became impossible to ignore. The police came by once and dispersed the crowd, but two hours later, it had reformed and the police didn’t bother a second time.

Hannah found the safest way to observe the crowd was from their azotea, the roof garden that overlooked Venustiano Carranza. If she stood far enough back from the edge, she could still see and not be seen. A block away, the procession of silence was already underway and groups of hooded penitents were making their way down Cinco de Mayo. The sharp retort of the drums sounded like gunfire to her. She had always viewed the procession as ugly and barbaric. It was made up of ordinary people, some of them probably her neighbors. But barefoot, dragging chains from their ankles, lugging heavy wooden crosses on their shoulders, they seemed to belong to a different species, a species whose zeal scared her. Some of those very people, were now clustered in front of her house, she was sure, waiting for the chance to see her son and clutch at his body. All of them in their way were desperate for the same thing: redemption.

Her eye was attracted by two middle-aged men at the back of the crowd, one slender and nattily dressed in a cheap beige suit; the other, burly and thick-featured, more a worker type. They shared a certain coldness that set them apart from the others. She tried to place them. Then it came it her. The man in the beige suit had threatened Mano after the mudslide, warning him not to meddle in local politics, and his burly companion had backed up the warning with simian grunts. They had returned. What would they do to Mano now, if they got hold of him?

The drumbeats from Cinco de Mayo punctuated the dread she felt. There was no way their son could come home. He would be expected here. People were already waiting. He needed to be with someone they knew, someone trustworthy, someone faraway who would keep him safe. There was only one person:
Teri!
Even though Hannah hadn’t seen her in twenty years, certain friendships were forever, resistant to the erosions of time.

She went downstairs eager to share her thoughts with Jimmy.

“Dad just slipped out to check on the store,” Teresa said. “He’ll be right back. He said not to worry.”

But Hannah did worry. Time mattered. On an impulse, she picked up the phone and dialed the old number in Fall River, Massachusetts. After several rings, the familiar voice picked up.

“Who’s calling and what you got to say?”

“Teri?”

“Ya. Who’s this?”

“It’s Hannah. Remember me?”

Teri drew in a deep breath. “Good Gawd Almighty! Hannah Manning. Hon, you are not someone easily forgotten.”

She stood in her kitchen in Fall River, the phone in one hand, a can of oven cleaner in the other. For a second, it seemed like yesterday: her best friend calling to chat. But it wasn’t yesterday; it was twenty years later - twenty years during which children had grown up and left home and whole lives had been led. Just hearing Hannah’s voice was enough to make her realize how long there had been an empty spot in her heart.

“Imagine hearing from you after all these years!”

“I’m sorry, Teri. You did so much for us and it’s been so long. I don’t know where to begin. So much has happened and it’s so hard to explain.”

“You always said that.”

“I think of you often, believe me.”

“Well, I should hope so. Are you still in Canada?”

“No, we never went to Canada. That was something I wrote you to throw those people off our track. We’ve been in Mexico all this time. I figured it would be easier for you, if you didn’t know.” It occurred fleetingly to Hannah that she was using the same argument her son had made just before leaving: What you don’t know, you can’t tell. Events seemed to be repeating themselves.

“Well, you were right. Because those nuts showed up in the diner, not long after I got your postcard. I played ignorant. Guess I didn’t have to pretend, after all. In fact, I never told anyone what happened back then. Oh, once, I tried to clue Nick in, but he thought I was just exaggerating things, as usual. He never really considered me a serious person. Oh, good enough to put some bread on the table and keep the kids dressed. That was about as far as it went.”

“How is Nick?” Hannah asked tentatively.

“Darlin’, that party ended long ago. Not that it was ever that much of a party. Lot’s changed in twenty years, hon. I’m a grandmother now. At 49! Would you believe it? Where did the time disappear? I have to say I missed you plenty after you left. A lot of girls came and went at the diner after you left. But you were the only one I ever risked my life for. That’s not something you forget easily.”

Hannah felt the tears come to her eyes. It was true, she had thought about Teri over the years. But her old life and her new life had diverged so much they seemed to belong to different planets. Talking to Teri now, she realized how wrong she’d been. There wasn’t an old life and a new life; there was just her life.

“I’m sorry, Teri,” she mumbled. “I’ve been a lousy friend.”

“Hey don’t be feeling sorry. I knew that I’d played my little part in your life. I did a damn good thing. Whenever Nick put me down, I’d think of you and all we went through together and tell myself, ‘Teri, sweetheart, you can’t be all bad.’ It’s funny we always think the exciting days are ahead. Then one day you wake up and you realize that the exciting days have already happened, and you think, ‘Why didn’t I enjoy that more? Or get mad? Or stand up for myself?’” She paused. “Whew! I don’t know where all that came from. Sorry! May I ask, are you still with Father Jimmy? I mean Jimmy.”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. You see, it was all for something then. And the boy?”

“He’s a young man now.”

“Of course, he would be.”

“And he’s got a younger brother and sister. Little Jimmy and”—- Hannah paused before announcing – “Teresa.”

“
Teresa?
” Teri was dumbstruck that Hannah had named her only daughter after her.

“I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind? I don’t know what to say. I always wanted a daughter. Someone to pass on my make-up techniques. You sure never listened!”

“Teri, there is so much I need to tell you. Things I couldn’t explain back then. But I think now’s the time you knew why everything happened the way it did, and why we disappeared. You deserve more than anyone to know. It may come as a shock to you.”

“I don’t shock easily, hon.”

As succinctly as possible, Hannah filled in the blanks of the last 20 years for her friend, right through the mudslide in the Sierra Gorda, which was when their peaceful life in Mexico had started to change. She told her about the reappearance of Judith Kowalski and Dr. Johanson and their desire to unleash her son on the world as the new redeemer.

Teri listened in silence, trying to imagine Hannah’s face, a face she hadn’t seen in two decades. When Hannah stopped talking, Teri sucked in her breath and said, “Maybe, I should take that back about not shocking easily. So those sick fucks are back, huh? And have gotten even sicker, it seems.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Perhaps I should come down there and remind them what a gun-totting waitress is capable of.”

“I think that’s exactly what we need! When can you get here?”

“Come to Mexico? Are you serious? Tell me, you live anywhere near that Cancun place?”

“No, we live in the center of the country. It’s about ten hours from the ocean.”

“I almost went to Cancun once. Almost did a lot of things.”

“Teri, any chance you would be up for a visitor instead?”

“Are you kidding? Anything to see your face. You coming back this way?”

“No,” Hannah replied. “Not me. My son.”

“Your son?”

“Teri, our house is literally under siege here. We’ve got to find someplace safe for him to ride this out.”

Without missing a beat, Teri said, “Oh, what the hell! Send him my way. I still have one of Nick’s old guns. How hard can it be to keep two 70-year-old nuts at bay?”

“If only it were just them, but there seem to be hundreds, maybe thousands,” Hannah said, before the floodgates broke and tears poured down her face. Trying to be strong these few days had taken its toll and suddenly her emotions spilled out in a rush. “What is this poor boy’s life going to be like? I can’t imagine. I don’t even know if Jimmy and I did the right thing.” The receiver was wet with her tears. “Oh, Teri, we’re all trying to be brave here, but I don’t know if I can take much more of this worry and guilt.”

“Hannah Manning, you listen to me.” It was the old Teri speaking, the companion who’d supported her from the start, who’d kept her spirits high during the pregnancy and let her know if you weren’t your own person, you were nobody! “If there’s one thing I remember about you, it’s this: you always put that child’s interests before your own.”

“But what do I do? I don’t know how to protect him now.”

“Sweetie, none of us knows how to protect our children. Oh, I know. Your situation is a little…unusual. God knows there’s no Dr. Spock for this one. But when you come right down to it, all of us live with the fear of our kids stepping off the curb without seeing the bus, getting involved with drugs. And now with this insane world we live in, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, when the terrorist strikes. But for as long as I’ve known you, everything in your life has been, well, unconventional, and you’ve managed to hang in there.”

Teri could hear Hannah sniffling. The tears were subsiding. “Let’s face it,” she continued, “you didn’t start a family the way you did and expect everything to be apple-pie and ice cream, did you? You were never destined to be ordinary. Hell, that’s what always impressed me about you. So when you get in touch with that son of yours, you send him here. I’d be on the run, too, if people were saying that crap about me. Of course, I’d be more likely to be mistaken for the slut. What was her name? Mary Magdalene?” Teri stifled a hoarse laugh. “Sorry, honey, that’s a bad joke.”

Hannah was pleased to see that Teri’s outrageousness was still intact. “That’s okay. Jokes are in short supply around here.”

“Well, you know I’m here for you, kid. Always have been. Except we’re not exactly kids any more.”

Hannah sighed. “I’ll be forty this year.”

“What I wouldn’t give to be able to say that,” sighed Teri. “In a few months I will be leaving my 40s behind forever, and not so gracefully, I can tell you. I’ve gone up two dress sizes and - and are you ready for this? - I’m a redhead now. Well, reddish pink. More pink than red. With dark roots. I swear it’s the last time I’ll use that Revlon shit. I look like a bad sunset.”

And Hannah who had begun the conversation in panic was actually laughing. They hadn’t worked together that long, but there had been a lot of laughter in the Blue Dawn Diner back then and the events they had been through together were indelible. Teri had actually saved her life. She was as responsible as anyone that Hannah was in Mexico with a husband and three children. They had been through one battle. And now another was raging. Teri was her war buddy. How nice it would be one day to get together and swap old war stories.

“But there’s something you haven’t told me yet.”

“What’s that?” Hannah said.

“What’s his name?”

“Whose?”

“The boy’s. Well, the young man’s.”

“Manning. Manning Wilde. Jimmy and I just combined our two last names.”

“Manning Wilde, eh? There’s a good Irish name for you.”

“He doesn’t look very Irish, though,”

“No, Hon, something tells me he wouldn’t! Listen, I’ve got to get to work. Time and the Blue Dawn Diner wait for no woman. So you inform young Manning Wilde the door’s always open at his Aunt Teri’s.”

“Teri! You don’t still work at the Blue Dawn Diner?”

There was a brief pause. “I’d afraid so. We don’t all lead lives of adventure, hon.”