The Unspeakable (25 page)

“I didn't see her!” cried the brakeman.

“Nobody saw her.”

“But the whistle—?”

“To hell with the whistle!”

Another one said, “I'll radio a doctor.”

But the first guy just grabbed his arm.

He said, “Radio an undertaker. She's dead.”

“What should I say?”

“Tell them it's an accident.”

Double take on the man from the caboose.

“—tell them we're not sure.”

My house after Sandra's death wasn't like a real place. Or maybe it was too real. Nobody talked about it even though we all walked around like zombies. At night I could hear my mother downstairs at the kitchen table, praying, her words low and mumbled as though she was too embarrassed to voice them aloud. But I knew what she was doing anyway. At least she knew that Sandra was dead. More than my father, who just blocked her out of his mind. He never prayed again. And he never stepped back into a church again after the funeral. He was done with God, I knew that.

Gradually, and this is the incredible thing, gradually life began to come back. Baths were taken again, food eaten, cars driven. We went on. But our luck was never the same. Sandra's name was never mentioned again in our house. Her photographs were stripped from the walls, along with the needlework and paintings that she gave to my parents. And the contents of her room were packed up. Sold off. Clothes were donated to the Goodwill. Gone were her dolls, her bike, her bed, and all her furniture. Gone too were her memories, for it was like she had never existed, or just walked away one day and vanished. Even in our minds.

I tried to join the family in their denial but I wasn't always as successful. Sandra would just pop into my mind for no apparent explanation. I certainly wasn't thinking about her. I avoided that like everyone else, but there she would be. Not that I could talk about it. Nobody wanted to hear anything that I had to say. Even
after the accident I never had the opportunity to explain myself, to tell people what I really saw. My mother didn't ask me what happened, having learned it from my father, and he didn't try to clarify anything. He just went along with my story.

I remember once, months after the incident, that I tried to tell my teacher. It was after school and I waited for everyone to leave, thinking that I would get a sympathetic ear. But instead I got someone who didn't know what to say, and not knowing, she just tried to say everything. I could barely spit a word out edgewise. My teacher talked about God and how everything had a purpose, even things so horrible that we can't imagine them, and then she started quoting things, people that I've never heard of, until she lost steam and I lost the desire to say anything else.

I haven't opened my mouth about the incident since.

Marbury looked at me and said that he was sorry. But I just shrugged him off. Sorry counted three decades ago, not now.

“You have to worry about yourself, Marbury.”

“What's the worst on my plate?”

“A tribunal,” I said.

“Oh, it won't come to that. Trust me.”

“Then you agree to my conditions? First, a declaration that you can't heal, could never heal, and a disavowal of everyone who claims to have been healed by you.”

“Don't forget about my desk job.”

“That's already waiting for you.”

Marbury smiled and twirled the ball on his index finger like a pro. It fell off only when it quit spinning.

He said, “I have a better idea. Let's shoot for it, Peter. First one to miss caves in. What do you say?”

I said that I couldn't.

“Too bad. Then I guess I'll have to wait for the cavalry.”

Chapter 10

I
left Marbury after that. I was sweaty and tired and every vein in my head throbbed and ached. At home I ran a bath and sat in it, nursing a few bottles of beer and thinking, but the dirt just wouldn't soak off me.

The sun must have woke me up, for my eyes opened. A streamer of light ran from my outside window down to the tub, where I had fallen asleep, and it hit me in the face. Warmth.

It was Easter Sunday.

I got to Marbury's office a few hours before Mass. He was sitting there, his feet propped up on his desk reading a newspaper. Not a care in the world. He took one look at me and smiled.

“Your skin. Are those wrinkles on your hands?”

I looked down. White prunes attached to my wrists.

“You're not suddenly aging on me, are you?”

“Just a long shower.”

“You still take long showers?” He smiled.

I brushed him off by pushing a pile of books from the couch, which mysteriously had gotten there overnight like a growing fungus, and onto the floor. A loud crash. But Marbury didn't flinch from his article. He was used to chaos.

The sun was beaming through his window as well. It was cold outside, maybe forty degrees, but the sky was the color of the sea,
a washing of blue. And it felt like Easter. I thought about all the Easters in my life, a kind of rapid montage of places and events and people too. Then it came to me.

“What are you laughing about?” asked Marbury.

“I was thinking about seminary. The guy with the cross.”

“Sure, you mean Lou Waters.”

“God, you actually know his name?”

“Why not?”

The man that I was referring to was seen only once a year. On Easter. Whether he was a local or a vagrant who just drifted in for the occasion, I don't know. But I was shocked that Marbury actually knew him, for everyone saw him as a nut. He always showed up on the chapel stairs around sunrise, thinking that he was the resurrected Christ, I suppose, wearing only a cloak and sandals. He wore a crown of thorns as well but nobody noticed that. They only noticed the cross.

It was huge. Maybe eight feet long made from real lumber that was hammered together. He dragged that damn cross around every year on Easter morning, signifying exactly what I had no idea, for it wasn't Good Friday. And he never said anything. Not a sermon. Not even a quote from Revelation, which was usually standard fare.

“You spoke to him?” I asked.

“I took him to lunch. Of course, he had to park the cross.”

I almost burst out laughing. The thought of Marbury feeding the Jesus man, as he was later to be known, was the craziest thing that I've ever heard. I could imagine them together at a diner, everyone in town glancing up from their soup and cheeseburgers only to wonder who brought in the circus.

“He was interesting. But I love fanatics anyway.”

Marbury said that for one day of the year, Easter, the Jesus man actually lived the way Christ had. He ate similar food, or what he hoped was similar, dressed like him, and generally spent the day
walking around with a cross draped over his shoulders. And everything began at sunrise.

“Why?”

“I guess that's how he celebrated.”

I couldn't believe that Marbury was defending a man who was clearly just this short of being institutionalized. But he was.

“Surely you don't buy this, Marbury?”

“Maybe he got people to thinking. You still remember him.”

“I remember him because he was so bizarre.”

“I'm sure the real Jesus struck some folks as bizarre.”

I looked at him but he was smiling.

“Is that what you are, Marbury? A man holding a cross on a street corner?”

“No.”

“How do I know that?”

“Well, I could have stayed in Pennsylvania, for one.”

Pennsylvania.

That scraping noise was the sound of freedom, said Marbury. Two snowplows fresh off the interstate were already working away on the roads, slowly pushing huge heaps of snow to the rear of the parking lot. Marbury watched them from the window. The sky was clearing by now, a thin ribbon of blue starting to break from the clouds. And sun. Already Marbury could see the dripping of water, melting snow, but there was plenty left. The town had received over three feet of snow, all said, though blowing and other accumulations made that number rise.

It was a ton at any rate.

But the snowplows brought another thing. They brought hope. For the first time since the snow began, things were coming back to normal. Laughter could be heard in the hospital and people whistling.
Doctors had a spring to their step. Janitors stole extra-long breaks while the nurses gossiped about everyone else's life.

“What are you going to do once they spring us?”

“Foot massage, if I can find one.”

“Not me. A nice, hot shower.”

“You can keep your shower, girl. I'm in bed before I shut these eyes.”

“I can think of a few other things to do in bed.”

Giggle, giggle.

“You girls are crazy. I'm going to treat myself to a good breakfast.”

“With real eggs.”

“And Belgian waffles with strawberries.”

“Strawberries? Where are you going to find fresh strawberries?”

“They'll have to be frozen, I guess.”

“I'm eating nothing frozen.”

More laughter. Finally one of the nurses asked, “Hey, Father, what are your plans?”

Marbury said that he didn't know. He could continue on to the conference, which was now half over, or he could turn right around and head back to Minneapolis.

“We'll miss you.”

And then the nurses went back to their various stations, leaving him alone. He just stood there and watched the snow being moved around. Huge blocks. It was almost over.

The sound of shoes in the hallway. One of the doctors returning. He was wearing a grim expression.

He said, “I'm sorry, Father. The child didn't make it.”

Marbury clutched a chair for support. A four-year-old girl. God took a four-year-old girl. That was the only thing he could think of.

“She never regained consciousness. We did all we could but—”

His voice trailed off.

They stood there together and just watched the snowplows. A mound of snow was building in the parking lot the size of a small house. But a house with no windows.

Marbury finally broke the silence. “Have you told the parents yet?”

“No.”

“Then let me. I mean I should.”

The doctor agreed and shook Marbury's hand good-bye. Marbury said that he walked down to Helen's room preparing in his mind what he would say. But before he could even voice it, say anything, Helen took one look at him and started crying. She already knew that Lucy was dead.

“How did you know?” asked Marbury.

“I had a dream last night. She walked up to me and kissed me and told me that she loved me. I just knew that she was gone.”

More tears. Barris held her hand.

“I'm very sorry. Your daughter—”

“You don't have to say it,” said Barris.

“She was a special girl.”

“I know,” said Helen. “She was touched by God himself.”

Marbury nodded.

“She lived a good life, Father.”

“Four years isn't a very long life.”

“We were blessed anyway.”

“But she should have lived longer. She might have if not for me.”

Marbury felt his head spin, a vertigo of words and sensations.

“I saw the bracelet. She was wearing it and I just assumed that—”

But he couldn't say it. His body started to shake.

Barris touched Marbury on the shoulder, compassionately.

He said, “Don't whip yourself, padre. You couldn't have known.”

“Who do I blame then? The nurse, the insulin? What?”

Barris shrugged.

“I should have done something. I was there, Jacob.”

“So was God but you ain't hearing nothing from him. My Helen's back and that's the main thing. As for the child, she was always threatening to cure Helen of her diabetes anyway, and I guess she finally got around to doing it.”

“You mean—?”

Helen smiled. “Lucy always said that anything was possible with God. Now we know that it's true.”

Marbury said that he left as soon as he could after that. Everything else became a blur. He remembered going outside, starting his car, and then driving away but he couldn't say where. And then the police found him walking outside of Altoona.

“You said my car was found in New York?”

“Yes.”

“I must have abandoned it. Left the keys inside.”

I gave him a look, somewhat incredulous.

“Well, I didn't drive it to New York and walk.”

“Maybe you hitchhiked. Anyway, it doesn't matter.”

I thought about Marbury's story but I still couldn't figure it out. When I asked him for an explanation he just shrugged.

“I'm just telling you what happened.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I told you. What wasn't I responsible for?”

Marbury tortured himself about the bracelet but he had no way of knowing. It probably fell off in the crash and Lucy grabbed it, hoping to return it to her mother. Or maybe that was her intention all along, he said. Make the bracelet vanish and the diabetes along with it.

I said, “You weren't responsible for the snow.”

“I drove into it. You said that yourself, Peter.”

The snow. Then I thought about the roof. Marbury was up there shoveling but he couldn't finish, which set everything in motion. Or maybe it was already set in motion when he arrived on the scene, I couldn't tell. Water fell onto the generator from the roof, which touched the lives of Helen and Lucy and then back again in a great big circle, all the dots connected, with Marbury in the center.

“Do you believe that Lucy could heal?”

“I do now, yes.”

For Marbury said that a strange thing happened to him. He was in the Altoona jail being interviewed for a robbery that he didn't commit but was being accused of when the detective in charge asked whether Marbury wanted coffee. He said that he did. But when the detective reached for the pot it spilled, and piping hot coffee ran down his leg, blistering flesh even through his trousers. The detective was screaming and yelling. Marbury went over and just touched him, nothing odd, for reassurance maybe or just to calm him down, when it happened.