And the Dark Sacred Night (38 page)

“Yes,” she said. She left the barn before he did. She made sure that they were never alone together after that. Not once. Now she suspects she will never see him again, not unless Zeke dies first.

She hears the cats moving overhead in the hayloft. The tiniest rustlings echo loudly in the barn’s cavernous void. Even the loft is empty; these days, the hay is trucked away as soon as it’s baled. She has disturbed the cats’ nocturnal routine, probably scaring whatever mice they could have caught back into the knotholes of the desiccated boards that hold up the roof—the boards for which some salvage hunter would pay a good sum these days.

In that first conversation with Kit—which had lasted nearly an hour, until the battery in Kit’s phone gave out—they exchanged details about their lives as if they were prospective roommates. Lucinda told him that she couldn’t wait to meet his family—her
great-grandchildren
—but that night she wanted to hear about him. Just him. Between his telling her about his passion for northern art and his confessing to her that he had lost his teaching job, there was an awkward pause. It was during this pause that she realized something shocking, though it was logical: Lucinda
knew
the voice on the other end of the line. She hadn’t heard it in twenty years, because it was Mal’s voice. Gentler, less edgy, with none of her son’s urban irony, but Mal’s voice all the same.

Lucinda cried as quietly as she could for the next several minutes, making sure that Kit kept talking. When she regained control of herself, she told him about the farm: what it had been like before Mal was born, then during his childhood, and since Zeke’s decision to enter politics.

“Jasper told me about his stroke,” said Kit.

“He’s doing very well.”

“I just wish …”

“I know what you wish. That you’d looked for us—for Mal—sooner.”

Kit sighed. “Yeah.”

“But here we are,” she said. “Let’s just take it from here.”

“The phone is a terrible meeting place,” he said. That’s when his phone began to beep, as if it were personally offended. “Oh God, I cannot believe this.”

“You know what?” said Lucinda. “Let’s say good-bye, just for now, and let’s send each other pictures.” Quickly, she took down his mailing address. Lucinda had no photographs of Mal on her computer; really, the only photos she had in this form were those her children sent to her, as attachments to their e-mails. She went straight to her sewing room and chose three pictures of Mal that normally she would have been heartbroken to surrender. She folded them into a piece of stationery and sealed it in an envelope. She wrote
DO NOT BEND
on both sides of the envelope and inscribed it with the name and address of her grandson.

Jonathan and Cyril are still awake upstairs. They are talking, and their conversation, though she can’t hear the words, sounds tense.

She returns Zeke’s coat to its allotted hook and goes through the living room, turning off lamps. She opens the door to the den as quietly as she can.

But Zeke is fully awake, sitting up on the mattress against the back of the sofa. He is still dressed, and he is holding a large envelope in his lap.

“Something tell you,” he says.

“Oh, Zeke, it’s been such a long day. You need sleep, and so do I.”

“Tell you now.”

“Please,” she says, “no more bombshells.”

His expression, yet again, confounds her. Does he mean to look so serious, as if he is about to break terrible news to her?

“Zeke, you’re scaring me.”

He hands her the envelope. “Open it.”

Lucinda holds the envelope in her lap and closes her eyes briefly. She feels the warmth of Zeke’s thigh against hers. Her hands are cold from her time in the barn; there were no gloves in the pockets of the coat.

“All right then.” It’s one of those interoffice messenger envelopes, printed with columns of lines on which to write the names of the serial recipients, closed with a red string that winds around a small cardboard disk. She hasn’t laid eyes on one of these objects in ages. Does anyone use them anymore?

She pulls out a sheaf of photographs, some in color, some black and white. A young boy on a sports field, wearing a baseball glove. The same boy, a bit older—thirteen? fourteen?—eating ice cream with another boy, in a playground. And then, again, wearing a black robe and mortarboard, mingling with other young graduates under a tree.

The boy is never quite facing the photographer, never quite close enough to the camera to see all that clearly, but by the fifth and final photo, Lucinda knows who he is, because she’s recently seen pictures of him, on her computer, as an older but still-youthful man.

“When did these come?” she asks Zeke. “I don’t understand. Did David pick these up with the mail when he came by yesterday? I asked him to leave the mail on the front table.”

“Not David. Not mail.”

“I don’t understand.”

Zeke seems to be inspecting his hands, which he holds in his lap. She can tell that he is trying hard to keep them still. He says, very slowly, to get each word right, “I paid a detective. I paid to know. Back when.”

Lucinda continues to look at the photograph of Kit the high-school graduate. “Zeke.”

“For Mal.”

“What do you mean, ‘for Mal’? What are you talking about, Zeke?”

“Mal wanted to know.”

“He never told me that!”

Zeke’s expression is unmistakably sad. “When he got sick. Was when.”

Lucinda picks up the envelope and the photographs and tosses them back in her husband’s lap. She gets off the mattress and stands. “What are you telling me? That you and Mal, behind my back,
tracked down this boy, photographed him, kept some sort of … dossier? A secret file?”

“Yes.” Zeke watches her, one of his eyes nearly closed, the muscles too tired to hold the lid open. Lucinda thinks that if he hadn’t had a stroke, if she’d found this out and he were well, she might have hit him. She has never hit him.

“For Mal,” he says. “Not for you.”

Lucinda begins to cry. “This is the worst Thanksgiving of my life.” She turns away from Zeke. But she doesn’t want to go upstairs; she is afraid of running into Jonathan when she feels so undone, so betrayed.

“Not, it is not,” Zeke says forcefully. “Bullshit.” That word comes out clearly.

Lucinda faces him again.

“You are being shelfish.
Sel
-fish,” he corrects himself, spitting as he nails down the consonant. “
Saint
Lucinda. Don’t like you thish way.”

“Don’t hurt me more than you have,” she says.

“Lishen to me,” says Zeke. “Mal wanted to know. Know the child was well. Alive. Cared for. You undershtand me? Under
stand
?”

“Of course I understand. Does that mean I’m supposed to feel just fine about this?”

She cannot look at him. She looks instead at the rows of trophies in the case that was moved from the living room decades ago. Some of the trophies are old enough to have been won by Aaron. Why do they still display them? They should have been put in the attic a long time ago; sold as novelties; melted down.

“You think,” says Zeke, “you failed as a mother. Wrong about that. Wrong. And wrong that you should have … know … everyshing.
Thing
.”

She realizes that the anger she hears in Zeke is directed mostly at himself, not at her: at the frustration of not being able to speak freely and clearly. It occurs to her that he is the one most unsettled by having to live with these long silences. How do you peacefully contain a self with opinions that cannot simply tumble forth? Words for Zeke have never required exertion. She sits down beside him again and rests a hand on his nearest leg. “Stop talking for a minute,” she says. “Just relax for a minute.”

“Keep talking if I want.”

“I know what you’re going to tell me, and please spare yourself the energy. Mal is gone, and Jonathan is here. Christina, too, of course.” She sighs.

Something else occurs to her then. Christina is the child who has kept the fewest secrets from her—who has told her more than Lucinda thought she wanted to know. She wishes above all that she did not know about Christina’s abortion—yet if a mother thinks she somehow deserves to know everything, then she will have to know things that keep her up at night, won’t she? Jonathan, her youngest child, moved the farthest away and, for the longest time, kept his life a cipher. Now here he is, making sure she knows about the things that matter most to him. The people who matter most.

“Allowed, you
allowed
to be angry at Mal,” says Zeke. “Don’t at me.”

“But you’re my husband,” she says. And what does she mean by this? That he is the one who deserves her anger? That it’s his job to tell her everything he knows about their children? Is it?

She thinks of the last months of Mal’s life, when he was weak, so thin it was an agony just to look at him. She remembers how manic she became with forced optimism, determined faith, exuberant wit. Each night, she fell into bed exhausted from maintaining the bright, energetic façade necessary to endure every minute of every day. By then, Mal had no job, fewer and fewer of his friends came to visit, and he rarely left his apartment—oh, that beautiful apartment, the home of someone who had seen the world and knew exactly what he liked, what memories he wanted to behold every day in the objects and patterns and books around him. That winter, Lucinda moved to New York and found a separate place to live. She saw herself as her son’s handmaiden, his final confidant. This was a delusion, and his last act toward her was a ruse.

To give himself the time to take his life, without fear of her barging in, he arranged for a good friend—Fenno McLeod, the man who really did take care of Mal at the end, who
was
his final confidant—to escort Lucinda to an elegant party, a fund-raiser of some kind, dinner and dancing. Her son, who claimed he was sending them in his place, knew how much she loved dancing.

If Mal had thought her capable of forgiveness, of letting him go,
he might have told her the truth, given her a chance to say good-bye. But he was right: she would never have given in. She would have guarded him against himself, fiercely. She would have thrown away all his pills, planted herself at the door of his bedroom, stayed awake for days on end, anything to keep him alive: to keep him. She would have claimed it was about honoring God’s will; that, too, would have been a ruse. It would have been about honoring her will, her earthly possessiveness.

“I am a terrible mother,” she says to Zeke.

“Moments we all fail,” he says. “All us. Fall short.”

She remembers her first formal date with Zeke, when he drove to Middlebury to pick her up at her dorm and take her out for dinner. It was during the spring of her freshman year. Over bowls of Indian pudding, he asked her what she thought about his never having gone to war; if she thought he was, to any degree, a coward. He asked her to be completely honest.

The question came out of nowhere, with a blunt, awkward urgency. They had been discussing something suitably bland for a first date—her classes, the gossip from their town, his father’s success at business—so she was shocked. Later, she realized it was a frighteningly intimate question. But what she said that night was “You did your duty by staying on the farm. Someone had to do that, and you were the one. I hope nobody tries to make you feel ashamed of it, because that’s the person who’d be a coward.” She was relieved to have kept her composure, but did she really believe this?

He told her she hadn’t answered his question. Did she wish he’d been tested by war? Wouldn’t it have made him seem braver? Didn’t women feel safer with a man who’d had to fight for his life?

“Maybe that’s true. A little,” she said. “But I’m glad you’ve never killed anyone. That would scare me some, to think about that.” This was true.

When he drove away, after seeing her back to her dorm, she didn’t know if she would hear from him again.

She says now, “I’m cold. Let’s get under the blankets here. No, stay where you are.” She fusses with the quilt pinned under Zeke’s weakened legs, pulling it out from beneath his feet, up and over them both.

“Jamas?” he asks her.

“You want to change? I’m too tired. Way, way too tired.”

“Shleep like this,” he says.

She reaches over and turns off the lamp on the desk. (Is that where Zeke kept the photographs? Were they there all along? Did he sometimes take them out and look at them; wish, in his secular fashion, for the same things she prayed for when she knelt between the pews at Saint Joseph’s?)

“Cyril leaves tomorrow night, but Jonathan will stay for a couple of days.” She thought of the outburst upstairs. “I hope.”

“Thinks I like playing chess. Makes me.”

“You don’t?”

“Don’t.”

“Zoe thinks it’s good for your mind.”

“Mind’s fine. God shake.”

True, thinks Lucinda. His mind is fine. She says, “So maybe the three of us can have an adventure. If Jonathan drives, we could go to Montreal for lunch. Have some really good French food. Is that too ambitious?”

“Wanted to take you to Italy again. Idea I had … for shish.”

“Yes, before this,” she says on his behalf. “But you know what? I wouldn’t want to go back. I’d rather we go somewhere we haven’t been before. And we will. You know where we’ve actually never been and should definitely go? Niagara Falls. Everybody has to go to Niagara Falls. Once at least.”

When Zeke doesn’t answer, she turns to look at him. Just like that, he’s already asleep.