Read The Gospel of Winter Online

Authors: Brendan Kiely

The Gospel of Winter (19 page)

BOOK: The Gospel of Winter
7.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Although I couldn't stand Old Donovan, his sensibility
inspired me. I could not go to Most Precious Blood. Imagining myself walking through the rectory door carried me into thoughts I kept trying to purge from my mind. I was not Father Greg. I was not. I wasn't James. I wasn't just another boy in the basement. I wasn't anybody. Father Greg didn't happen, and neither had my time at Most Precious Blood. Nothing happened. The story was being erased. I could erase it further. It could disappear, and what made it easier was that I knew Father Dooley wanted it to disappear too.

“Okay,” I said. I gestured to the back hallway, ushering him toward Old Donovan's study. “Let's go sit down.”

Father Dooley hesitated, but I insisted. I led him into the study, and I walked straight to the swivel-point leather chair behind his desk. I sat down and gestured to Father Dooley to take a seat in one of the straight-back chairs on the other side.

“I'd rather stand.”

“Fine,” I said, leaning back in the chair. He was quiet for a moment, and I waited.

When I said nothing, he spoke up quietly. “Look, I wanted to talk to you, Aidan,” he said, finally sitting down. I toyed with the small silver-framed calendar on Old Donovan's desk. Father Dooley cleared his throat. “The church, our parish even, has contributed greatly to our society.” He stopped again. “Aidan, look at me, please. I need you to understand this. Father Greg is a complicated man. I saw him yesterday evening. He was sick. He is sick.
He'll get better, but maybe somewhere else. You'll never see him in town again.”

It didn't seem real. I couldn't picture our town before Father Greg was in it. He was connected to everybody. There was something sad in thinking about the void he would leave behind, but I was angry, too. Angry about all the space he'd taken up. I grabbed a heavy ballpoint pen from its stand and looked up at Father Dooley, tapping the base of the pen on the thick, maroon desk pad.

“He has done a lot for this community,” Father Dooley continued. “You know what kind of money he helped raise for the schools, as well. We can't let some of his personal problems overshadow the rest of his career. Just think about what a terrible story can do to a good person. If we do that, we might also ruin what else he worked on. Imagine all the schools, the families there, the kids. We don't want to ruin them, too, do we?” Father Dooley stopped himself and tapped his cane on the ground. “There's a history to our church, a standing in this community. There's the Holy Church itself. It rose out of persecution and became what it is today. Are you listening to me? I'm saying we should forgive and move on.”

“Move on,” I repeated.

“This isn't about reparations, Aidan. It can't be about that. Sometimes we must sacrifice our personal needs for the greater good. It's religion, Aidan, and it is bigger than you or me or Father Greg. It will survive, and the Church
will be here long after you or I or anybody else is gone. It will continue to grow.”

“Without me,” I said. “I'm not going back there. I'm done, and I'm not going back.”

Father Dooley swallowed. “I think it would be important for us to think about forgiveness, too. We must. You'll be better in the long run.”

“I'll be better?” I squeezed the pen in my fist and spoke slowly. “Father Dooley, I don't know what you're talking about. We were talking about work, remember? The files are marked. The computer files are easily recognizable.” My voice cracked. “I'm only talking about work. There's nothing else to talk about. I'm leaving. That's it. That's the end of it.”

“I am trying to speak clearly with you.” He looked fragile, too thin for the clothes that hung on him. “We are talking about important things here.”

“No, we aren't.” I realized I was digging the pen down into the desk pad, and the pad was beginning to shred. I tried to calm myself with a set of Mother's slow, steady breaths. “I'm telling you there's nothing else for us to talk about. I'm done there. Okay?”

Father Dooley leaned closer. He was about to speak, but I cut him off.

“And I never, ever want to see Father Greg again.”

Father Dooley eyed me coldly and shook his head. He sighed through his nose. “I suppose I should be going,” he said. He looked very uneasy, gripping and regripping
the silver handle of his cane. “It's hard for me to trust you completely, Aidan,” he said. “I'm still concerned about you, you know.”

“You don't have to say that,” I said. “I don't need your concern.”

Father Dooley stood, bracing himself on the chair. He fiddled with the buttons on his coat, but his hands shook and he couldn't get the first one through the corresponding hole. “I'd also like to say I'm sorry. I wish you could see it from where I am standing. I have to think of everybody—the larger community.”

“I wish you would think about leaving too,” I said. “Do everyone the favor.”

Father Dooley moved closer to the door. He smoothed out his coat and lifted up his voice. “I can show myself out,” he said.

I remained in the chair behind the desk as I watched him leave. A long plane of afternoon light stretched across the Persian rug to the giant globe-bar between the armchairs. The angle of light lit up the South Pacific and the Antarctic Circle. I stared at it for a long time, trying to summon some of the Old Donovan I knew. This was who I wanted to be. What had happened between Father Greg and me? Nothing. If nobody knew about it, then it never happened. It didn't exist. It couldn't.

CHAPTER 10

I
was on autopilot. Each laugh I crafted, each nod of affirmation as someone else spoke, helped mold and make the
me
I wanted everyone to see. And they saw that Aidan, the one with the growing confidence. I rolled my shoulders as I sat in class or stood in the hall; I straightened my back. I noticed people looking up to meet my eyes for once, as if I had a purpose. On Friday, a teacher even slapped me on the back, just to say “Happy New Year.” I flashed back a fierce smile—the indefatigable Donovan party mask. It seemed so much easier to wear now. Everything was just
wonderful
. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “You too, man.”

At the end of the day, Josie and I snuck a few notes back and forth during end-of-the-day announcements. I told her I noticed she was wearing the same skirt, blouse, and sweater she wore to the Christmas party, and she explained that she and Sophie were going to a Broadway show that
evening with their mothers, for their annual January Girls' Night Out. It was her
young lady
outfit. I told her she made all clothes look like the dream the designer first imagined—it didn't matter what she wore, she made it look its best. She was still blushing when we walked down the front steps of CDA together and she and Sophie got into the car waiting for them along the curb. I had meant what I said, but it felt better to know how to say it too.

Everybody was going out that night. Mother was attending a party over in Rye, and as one of their Christmas gifts to each other, Mark's parents had bought themselves tickets to the opera. They were staying in a hotel in the city for the night and not coming home until the next day, so although Mark was grounded and not supposed to leave the house, he insisted we hang out anyway. He said he needed it, and when I gave him one of Mother's lines, “We can't let the world have fun without us,” he laughed and agreed. I was grateful not to spend the night alone. I felt like I was gaining momentum, and I didn't want anything to slow me down.

Although I could have started our party midafternoon, Mark had to go home first and then wait for his mother to leave. He couldn't use a car, either, because he was afraid his father would check the mileage when he got back. We decided to meet halfway between our houses at the playground of Coolidge Elementary, and because I had nothing else to do, I went ahead of him and tucked myself into one of the concrete climbing blocks. It was already dark by the time
I got there, and I looked up through the square hole in the roof of the block to the sky. The streetlamps in the nearby parking lot cast a faint gray-orange haze over the playground, but I could still see a few dim stars burning in the picture frame above me. Their light was weak, and I almost thought I could see them flicker, as if they shifted ever so slightly through faded shades of blue or violet. As I continued to stare, a few more stars blinked to life between the other stars. It was depressing to think about the distance between them and me, because I knew it was likely that at least one of the stars I saw that night was already dead and that all that was left of it was its light in my eye. I lit one of Mother's cigarettes and, between drags, held it toward the sky, trying to fix my own orange dot into the vast emptiness above me.

I was taking my last drag when Mark poked his head through the hole. I couldn't see his face at first, but I knew it was him. “Hey,” he said. “What are you doing? Trying to send smoke signals or something?”

“Ha, yeah,” I said. “Is anybody watching for them?”

“Nope,” he said. “Only me.”

He crawled through the hole and dropped down beside me. He laughed loudly, and the echo in the concrete cube doubled the volume. I told him to keep it down, in case anybody did walk by, and I passed him a plastic soda bottle I'd filled with Old Donovan's rum. He took it and shook his head. “What the hell. I'm stoned already, man.” He took a gulp and wiped his mouth. “Holy shit,” he said. I took a
swig from my own bottle. It tasted like I'd sucked on the wrong end of a lit cigarette.

“This is supposed to be the good stuff,” I said. “I guess it's an acquired taste.”

“Like everything in this dumbass world,” Mark said. He looked away and laughed to himself. We were both quiet for a minute. “Why not?” he eventually said, as if we'd been carrying on the conversation.

His eyes were bloodshot, but he packed his bowl anyway. We smoked it together, and I lit another cigarette to camouflage the smell. We were cramped too close together, and I stood up through the hole to finish my cigarette. “Hey. You're blocking my view, man,” he said, tugging on my pant leg.

“You're on edge, tonight,” I said. “Let's relax.” I sank back into the block and let one leg dangle out the open back side of the cube.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I've just been thinking a lot lately.” What I'd come to recognize in hanging out with Mark was that when a person was stoned, he didn't finish his thoughts. He verbalized about half of them, maybe, and it was up to me to fill in the missing links in his logic. “It doesn't matter what perspective I look at things from, though. I still end up at the same damn place.”

“What are you talking about?”

Mark looked back at me and just shook his head.

“Come on, it can't be that bad. You survived after I left your house on New Year's. I did too. We're here now.”

“Yeah,” Mark said.

“Sorry they found us like that. I barely remember falling asleep.”

“No, man. It's all fucked. It's not your fault.” We were quiet again, and I listened to a car pass by along the street beside the school. I knew whoever drove it couldn't see through the line of trees to the playground, but it made me a little nervous anyway. Mark didn't seem to notice. He was in his own head now. “I'm supposed to be someone, remember?” he said when he came out of it.

“Yeah.”

“Somebody perfect.”

“Oh, I know. Aren't we all?”

“Well, my folks think you're pretty far from perfect.”

“They're not the first.”

“But a
bad influence
. Like, I'm not supposed to hang out with you because you're going to fuck up my future.”

“That is fucked.”

“Nothing makes sense to me anymore,” he said. “Plus, they don't even know the half of it.” He drifted back into silence for a moment. We drank more from the bottles, and then he continued. “People say they believe in certain things, but then they do all kinds of other things—things that contradict what they say.” He pulled out his one-hitter, filled it, sparked it, and kept the lit bat in his hand. “If they catch me doing anything like I did on New Year's—like driving around drunk—they are seriously going to kill me. Fuck it—if I get
caught doing anything, really, they are going to kill me.” He sucked in a hit. He offered it to me, and I turned it down. He sucked in another and continued. “We were talking about that shoe bomber in class today,” he said. “And I was thinking. Know why the jihadists are going to win in the end? They believe in something. Seriously. They seriously believe in something. We don't, and we're fucked because of that.”

“I don't believe that.” I tucked my knees up to my chest.

“Yeah, right,” Mark said, mocking me. He drank more from his bottle. “My dad wrote a check to the capital campaign at Most Precious Blood. A ten-thousand-dollar check. He said he had to match your dad, even if he thinks you're a crazy person. You know my dad thinks your dad shits gold bricks. Anyway, he sent them all that money, and I don't even remember the last time he stepped into a church. What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Come on, man, just forget it.”

He shook his head. He took another hit, and I waved away his offer for another. He finished it and put it away. He rubbed his eyes and pulled out a bottle of Visine. It had some effect, but not enough.

“I mean, I haven't been to church in a long time, and I'm not going back. My dad doesn't go either, but he wants to believe we're a part of the community. Like it's a necessary badge or something. Part of
this
club: check! Part of
that
club: check! Part of a religious organization: check!” Mark stood up through the hole in the cube and looked around
into the darkness of the playground and the baseball diamond beyond. “I feel like I've spent my whole life trying to please other people, trying to become who they want me to be, but it's not like I have any other ideas. It's not like they're stopping me from being the someone I want to be. There is no someone I want to be—isn't that weird?”

BOOK: The Gospel of Winter
7.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Broken Dreams by Nick Quantrill
The Web by Jonathan Kellerman
The Martian by Weir, Andy
Falling for Her Captor by Elisabeth Hobbes
Values of the Game by Bill Bradley
See Jayne Play by Jami Denise, Marti Lynch
A Brush With Death by Joan Smith
Broken Soup by Jenny Valentine
Imaginary Men by Anjali Banerjee