Something Is Out There (28 page)

There was a guard inside the inner door. They had to empty their pockets into a basket and step through a metal detector. The guard, a heavyset brown man with a permanent frown that showed even as he smiled, looked at their driver’s licenses and then waved them into the room. Chairs were set in rows on one side. Five other people were there—a woman and two toddlers who looked to be twins, and a very young couple, teenagers. Everyone sat quietly, except the toddlers, who kept pulling against their mother, wanting out of her grasp. Another couple walked out of the central door, and the clerk there, a tall blond woman with very red lipstick, said “Mr. and Mrs. O’Keefe.”

So they were on time, and if they had waited another minute, this woman would have called someone else. Rita thought of the tremendous overweening punctiliousness of this agency of the government—a reaction to 9/11, no doubt. The thought went through her as she followed the woman down a narrow hall and into a small office. On the desk was a computer, several pictures of the woman’s children, and a tall stack of folders. Rita set her own folders on the desk.

The woman took their file from the stack and opened it. She used the eraser end of a pencil as friction to riffle through the pages. She asked for their passports and driver’s licenses. Rita also had both birth certificates, and she handed them over.

“Do you have your marriage license?”

“Yes.” She began looking through the folders on her side of the desk. “I’m sure I have it here somewhere.”

The woman waited. Michael looked around the room, and his wife’s little exasperated sigh told him that she wasn’t finding the thing. “Maybe it’s still in the car,” he said.

“I packed it,” said Rita. “I put it right in here.”

“But the folders all fell on the floor when I had to slam on the brakes. Maybe you didn’t get it when you picked it all up.”

“Here,” Rita said, pulling it out of the middle of the stack. “It got pushed in under some things. We almost had an accident coming here.”

“Oh.” The woman took the license and gazed at it. “You’ve been together… a year and two months.”

“We’ve been together longer than that,” Rita said. “We’ve been married a year and two months.”

“You got married here in Tennessee.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have children yet?”

“No,” said Rita. And suddenly a little sob rose up from the back of her throat. She was completely unready for it. She held the next breath back, feeling her throat close. Out of the corner of her eye she could see his face turned to her.

The woman had reached across to hand the license back, and she was frozen for a few awkward seconds, holding it out. Michael reached over and took it from her, and set it on the folder in front of Rita.

“Do you need some time?” the woman asked.

“Excuse me,” Rita said, reaching into her purse and bringing out a handkerchief. She held it to her mouth. “I’m sorry.” It wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t make it stop. She wiped her eyes, closed them tight, and sobbed.

The woman looked at Michael, who could only stare back. Perhaps he shrugged. And then he understood that she was expecting him to do something, to show some concern. He put his hand out and touched Rita’s shaking shoulder. “There,” he said.

“I don’t know what’s happened,” Rita got out. But then it
came over her again in a wave, and she sat crying, now at least partly because of the fact itself—that she couldn’t control it, make it stop.

Michael said, “We almost had an accident coming over here.”

“I’ll be back,” the woman said. She rose, looking taller than he had remembered from first seeing her. She went out of the office and closed the door quietly.

He leaned over and said, “I’m sorry. Don’t cry.”

“I said that awful thing about your father and mother.”

“I’ve said worse meself. Don’t do this. Don’t torture yourself.” He was worried about the woman coming back. He searched his mind for something soothing to say, and his mind was blank. Again he saw her ankles, the white shoes, the pretty slacks. He felt a rush of affection for her and briefly it was as if he were looking at a child crying about some small thing.

“It’s a wee thing,” he said. “The lady’ll understand. Don’t worry.”

“I’m fine,” she said, resisting the thought that he really didn’t know anything at all about her. “I love you.” But she couldn’t feel it just now, with him sitting there staring, his face white with embarrassment. Oh, how did people do it? How did they go from one place to another, and find some way to be happy? And she had been happy, so happy. And there would be children, that would come. They were together. A married couple in America. She thought of her mother and father, who had seemed so content all those years, and whose divorce had made her wish for something overwhelming to come, to make them see what they were to each other, to make them hold on to it better than they had. And she was not going to have a life like theirs, not going to lie about anything to anyone, not
going to deceive herself. She took Michael’s hand, reached for it, and looked into his green eyes, sniffling, gaining some control again. “I love you,” she said, meaning it without quite feeling it.

“There,” he repeated. “It’s all right. It’s going to be fine, you’ll see. Nothing to worry about. I love you, too.”

“I know,” she told him. It was just that the truck had startled her so, and the morning itself had been upsetting. Things would be all right, would return to normal. She had packed the marriage license. All the other papers were in order. They were not terrorists, after all. He was going to get his permanent residency card. He would be able to stay as long as he wanted to.

Because this was such a small parish, Father Hennessey knew many of the people who came to confess, and he was afraid that when he saw them on his daily rounds it might show in his face that their troubles and failures had lately, in spite of all his efforts to resist, been relegated to some zone of apathy in his heart. It was as if some part of him had come loose, and was in revolt.

His hours in the booth were an almost unbearable ordeal now.

The voices, one by one, murmured, droned, went on flatly in the confidence that what was being confessed was of interest—and through the long minutes he tried unsuccessfully to concentrate on the catalog of little cruelties, omissions, vanities, impure thoughts, petty indulgences, hatreds and angers, curses and unchecked passions of his completely ordinary parishioners.

He felt nothing. It was all the dread sameness of the self, all the old, recurring failures of control, the same rapacious desires, the same renegade appetites. Over and over and over.

But even beyond the worry about appearances, Father Hennessey was profoundly worried about the sensation itself. This spiritual lethargy, this torpor, this desolation—what other word could you use to describe it?—followed him into the
restless nights. There were prayers and exercises to combat spiritual dryness, but nothing worked.

He spent the hours after confession on his knees, in his room, saying his office, and enduring the discomfort of the hard wooden floor. He took to denying himself his lunch, and often in the evenings he retired without drinking any water or juice, though the medicines he was taking for his arthritic hip gave him dry mouth. And he forfeited the little pleasurable habits that had formed over the years—the sip of cognac before bed; the occasional ice cream cone after dinner, Saturday- and Sunday-afternoon golf on television.

One evening, toward the end of his purgatory in the booth, after more than an hour of morbid anticipation that he might fall asleep, he closed one panel and opened the other to discover a young male voice that seemed already to have been talking: “Father, the dinosaurs lived here for millions of years. We’ve only been here for a little fraction of a second in terms of evolution. What was God thinking?”

Father Hennessey straightened and looked at the shape on the other side of the screen. “Yes?” he said. Then: “Begin again, please, son.”

“Well, I don’t get it.”

“Tell me what you don’t get.”

“I don’t get the millions of years.
Millions
of years, Father. What was he thinking?”

“How old are you?” Father Hennessey asked. “Almost fifteen.”

He began to talk about God’s time being different from human time.

The boy interrupted him. “Yes, Father, but more than sixty
million
years.” There was an urgency in the voice; perhaps it was desperation.

“Son, remember the words of Saint Peter. ‘Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.’”

“I know that one, Father. I know all that stuff. I spent a year in bed and there wasn’t anything to do but read.”

“I’m sorry,” said the priest, because he could think of nothing else to say for the moment. But then he added, “If Saint Peter could doubt, think how much easier it is for us to fall into it.”

“But he didn’t know about the dinosaurs and the sixty million plus years.”

“You don’t know that—do you? You don’t know that for sure.”

“Saint Peter didn’t know about the dinosaurs, Father.”

The insistence in the voice annoyed him. He said, “We don’t know that he didn’t. We have no exact knowledge of that. There is no mention of it—although God himself mentions Leviathan in the Book of Job.”

“I know that one, too,” said the voice. “I read that one, too. He asks Job if he can draw the whale up out of the deep. He’s bragging. It’s a piece of petty belligerence.”

“How old did you say you are?”

“I read a lot. I told you, I spent a year in bed. Juvenile RA. You know what that is?”

“Arthritis?”

“Rheumatoid. Yes. I got it two years ago. I missed a year of school. They thought I had leukemia.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s just my sister and me now.”

Father Hennessey wanted to ask the name. He searched through the faces he could call up, the boys he knew. “Have you ever come to me before?” he said.

“I live with my sister. Our mother’s in the hospital and she’s the one who—well, no, I want to know. I want to know the answers to these questions.”

“These are her questions, then.”

“They’re mine,” the boy said. “I want to know.”

“Are you from this parish?” He waited. But the shape was still; there was just the down-turning shadow of the profile. He saw a large, crooked nose, a round head—evidently the hair was cut very close to the scalp. “Well, are you?”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Silence.

The priest murmured, “Yes?”

Nothing.

“Is there anything else you wish to confess?”

“Did he say, ‘Let there be lizards?’ Did he say, ‘No voices, no music, no thoughts, no yearning for divine light. Just these big ugly scaly things roaring and grunting and eating each other or chewing up the vegetation?’ What did he make them for? Could he have found them beautiful?”

“I’ve told you that we are not given that knowledge.”

“You keep saying that, Father. But I want an answer. Job demanded an answer, and he got something, anyway. Don’t you wonder about it?”

“No,” Father Hennessey said, feeling as though the other might be less than sincere, and that this was all at his expense. “I don’t wonder about it at all.”

The boy sighed. Perhaps he was not almost fifteen years old, but thirty-five and mentally unstable.

“There is no perfect answer, son—except faith.”

“That’s what I keep say—” the boy began. But then he stopped.

“You keep—” the priest said. “Is this your mother again—”

There was a shuffling on the other side of the screen, and the shape was gone. Father Hennessey hesitated, and then got to his feet and opened the door to his booth, but there were only the three other people awaiting confession, standing in line under the Stations of the Cross. Two men and a woman he recognized, a member of the choir, who turned from him and seemed sheepish.

“Did you see that boy come out of here?” he said to her.

She stared, as if uncertain that he was speaking to her. “Excuse me?”

“The boy who just left here. Did you see him?”

“I wasn’t paying any attention,” the woman said, in a tone as if to say also that she had problems of her own.

The two men were shaking their heads.

With the second of these, who confessed to missing Mass for twenty years and committing all the mortal sins except murder, he gave a penance of Mass and Communion each morning for a month, and then couldn’t remember the words of absolution—his mind, for that instant, was sheer blankness. The man either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He said his Act of Contrition, crossed himself, and left the booth.

Father Hennessey saw that the red light over the other screen was indicating a presence there, but hesitated a little before opening it. The prayer of absolution came back to him, and he repeated it, then reached to the sliding panel and pulled it back into its socket. The old woman, with petty concerns.

Later, he closed the church and went over to the rectory, where Mrs. Loring, his housekeeper, was holding dinner for him.

She was a big, graying, severe-looking woman who had raised a large family—seven boys and one girl, all of whom were now married, with children of their own. Her stern look
was deceiving, for she was full of good humor, and she possessed the kind of practical piety that had always impressed him. He was even a trifle envious of it.

She said, “You look tired, Father.”

“Yes,” he said.

She reported to him about his phone calls and messages—several from parishioners helping with the week’s events, and one from the hospital: a choir member had suffered an attack of appendicitis.

“Thank you,” he told her.

It would be inaccurate to say that she mothered him. She would have been insulted by the suggestion. She had a life of her own, quite separate from the work she did here. Yet in his sleep he sometimes confused her with his mother, who had raised him alone, and lived now in a condominium in Orlando, Florida. Mrs. Loring answered the phone and kept the schedules and cooked the evening meal for him, and she protected his privacy when he needed it. Beyond that, she kept her own counsel. She went elsewhere for her confessions, too.