The Fifth Gospel (32 page)

“Father Alex,” he says. “You're back.”

“What are you doing here, Brother?”

“I tried calling.”

“What's wrong?”

He's tense. His voice has a queer note of rehearsal. Of delivering a message that isn't his own.

“Someone came looking for you.”

“When?”

“This morning. There was a sound in the hall. I came out to see what it was.”

“What happened?”

He fidgets mightily. “Father Alex, I don't want to be in the middle of this. The arrangement was that if I saw you again, I would make a phone call.”

“What are you talking about, Samuel?”

“I made the phone call, Alex.”

I'm about to respond, when Leo murmurs something unintelligible. He's staring down the outer hallway at something I can't see. His face is paralyzed. Finally the sounds from his mouth resolve into words.

“My God.”

Samuel backs away. He slips into his apartment. I hear the door click shut.

I step out.

A human form stands at the end of the hall. It hovers near the stairs, dressed entirely in black. When I recognize it, my skin tightens.

“
Alex
.”

That single word comes echoing down the hallway. And the sound of her voice splits my heart like an ax.

She takes a small, hesitant step forward. “Alex, I'm so sorry.”

I can't even blink. I'm too afraid she will be gone when I reopen my eyes.

“I heard,” she says, “about Simon.”

I say the only word my mouth will form. The only one that is etched on every particle of me like gospels on grains of rice.

“Mona.”

It is the first word I have spoken to my wife since her baby learned to walk.

C
HAPTER
17

L
EO MAKES HIMSELF
invisible. They glance at each other in passing, my friend seeing himself out, my wife seeing herself in. Memories detonate in my thoughts. I'm standing at this door with her, holding groceries, holding furniture, holding our newborn son. Neighbors have come out to coo and pay compliments. Brother Samuel has hung so many balloons on our door that we can't even climb inside.

At the threshold, she waits. She needs to be invited into her own home.

“Come in,” I say.

Just the smell of her, passing in front of me, restores electricity to the oldest districts of my heart. I know this scent. The soap she always bought at the pharmacy. A fragrance I've tracked down in every nook of her body.

I make sure we don't touch as she enters. Yet the air vibrates. My body's reaction is violent. But my mind is already registering the differences. Her hair is shorter. She doesn't keep it drawn back anymore; it hangs down just past her chin. There are the first hints of wrinkles beneath her eyes, but her neck and arms are leaner than I remember, her lines tighter. Covering her body is the same sleeveless black dress, plain but flattering, that used to be her favorite: the rare garment that was both traditional and modern, respectful and liberating. Around her shoulders is the thin black sweater she used to wear when women
were required to cover their arms. I wonder what message this outfit is supposed to send.

“May I sit?” she says.

I gesture to a chair and offer her something to drink.

“Water would be nice.”

As she glances around the room, there is a twinge in her expression. Nothing has changed, not even the photos in the picture frames. I kept it this way in the spirit of honoring her memory, of awaiting her return. Like all good Romans, Peter and I have built our roads around our ruins.

“Thank you,” she says when I return with the glasses. Again I make sure our hands don't touch.

She waits for me to take the seat across from her, then she composes herself and forces her eyes to meet mine. When she begins to speak, the words come out rigidly, as if no amount of practicing has prepared her, as if she sees now that her husband is not just an audience of one. All the lost hours and days, the lonely weeks and months and years, crowd around me and stare across at her, waiting at my back to hear what answer there will be. What possibly can be said. The unrequited moments stretch so far into the distance that she realizes some of them can never be reached by words.

“Alex,” she begins, “I know you must have so many questions about what happened. About where I've been. And I will try to answer anything you want to ask. But first there's something I need to say.”

She swallows. Her eyes seem desperate to look away.

“When I left,” she continues, “I truly thought I was doing the right thing for you and Peter. I was scared of what would happen if I stayed. My mind was so full of awful thoughts. But for a while, I've been feeling like myself again. I'm better now. And I've wanted to call, or come see you both, except that I was afraid. My doctor says the risk of a relapse is low, but even if it were one chance in a thousand, I couldn't put you and Peter through that again.”

I begin to interrupt, but she raises a hand from the tabletop, asking me to let her finish while she still can. Her mouth is pinched. For a second she seems gaunt, every muscle in her neck tense, the hollows in her cheeks darkening as she clenches her jaw. In that second, it looks as if the years away have wasted her, as if the regrets have devoured her from the inside. In the sludge of my emotions, the portion that is anger
weakens. I cannot forget how Peter and I suffered without her. But I see now we weren't the only ones to suffer.

“I begged my family,” she continues, “to find out how you and Peter were doing. They asked around and heard you were doing okay. Doing
well
. So it didn't seem fair to turn your lives upside down just because the time was right for me.”

For the first time, she lets her eyes fall.

“But then I heard about Simon.” She hesitates. “And I know how much you love him. How hard this must be for you. So I told myself that since things had already been turned upside down, maybe now you might need some help.”

These last words end feebly, almost as a question. As if this is a hope she isn't sure she has the right to harbor. Mona swallows. She places both hands back on the table and looks at me again, bracing herself. She is done.

Faintly I ask, “You heard about Simon? How?”

Relief crosses her face. It is far less painful to answer this than so many other questions that remain.

“Elena's new boyfriend works in the vicar's office,” she says. “He saw the paperwork.”

Elena. Mona's cousin. I wonder how far from that one office the news about Simon has already spread.

“And who,” I ask, “told you about Peter and me?”

Relief fades. When she forces herself to look me in the eye again, I prepare myself for difficult news.

“My parents,” she says. “I got back in touch with them last year.”

This is a blow. For a year those miserable people have hidden her from me.

“I made them swear they wouldn't tell you,” she says, putting her hands in a praying posture, asking me not to blame them.

My anger subsides. But only because I see, on her upturned finger, the ring I gave her. She still wears it. Or at least, she wears it tonight.

“And where have you been living?” I ask.

“An apartment in Viterbo. I work at a hospital there.”

Viterbo. Two hours from here. The last stop on the train line heading north. She went as far away as she could without leaving entirely, to be sure we would never run into each other.

And yet she didn't escape to the beach or the mountains. Viterbo is an austere medieval town. Its biggest landmark is a palace where the popes used to come to escape Rome, and it towers over the land like Saint Peter's. She did this for a reason, I tell myself. To torture herself into remembering.

Her eyes have found the pictures of Peter. As she stares, the corners of her mouth sag. She fights to raise a wall in front of her emotions, but suddenly she blinks. Tears hop from her eyelashes to her cheeks like water dancing in a hot pan. She refuses to give herself up to it, though. Merciless control is all that keeps her balanced on this wire.

My hands want to stretch forward and hold hers. But I'm on the wire, too. So I open my wallet and pull out a picture of Peter. I slide it to the middle of the table.

She picks it up. And seeing the boy our baby became, she says in a choked voice, “He looks just like you.”

The first lie of our reencounter. He doesn't look just like me. The softness in his features is hers. The dark lashes. The expressive mouth. But maybe she isn't referring to the picture in front of her. Her voice is haunted, her stare distant. She's venting some preconception of what Peter really is. He looks like me because I'm the one who clothes him, who cuts his hair each month and brushes it every morning. Even in the signed watercolor paintings taped to the walls, there's a faint resemblance between his poor autograph and mine. Peter is the duet that Mona and I wrote together. The music sounds like me, though, because I have performed it alone.

“Mona.”

She is looking at me, but her eyes are vacant. She is retreating. Her body language now is a plea for going slow. She is strong, but this is harder than she imagined.

I've waited years to ask this one question, and it rages inside me. She owes me this answer. And yet I can't ask. Not when I see her this way.

Her eyes close. “I know,” she says, “how you must feel.” She sweeps a hand through the air, gesturing at the pictures of herself in frames. “I don't understand any of this.” Her body is racked by a sudden, heaving breath. “I had hoped—I know this doesn't make sense, but I'd hoped you'd moved on.”

Such darkness swims at the bottom of those words. As if she can
see no happiness in this refusal to forget. As if she can even imagine an alternative.

“Mona,” I say quietly, “did you find someone else?”

She shakes her head in agony, as if I am making this so hard.

“Then why did you never—”

She waves her hands in front of her head. No more. Not right now.

We are strangers. We share nothing but wreckage. Maybe this is as far as we can come in one night.

“So,” she says in a choked voice, “is Simon okay?”

I glance away. For years she and her family have kept secrets from me. Now she asks this about mine.

“He didn't kill anyone,” I say.

She nods forcefully, to convey that this is self-evident. The brother-­in-law she once considered so inscrutable, so unpredictable, now a clockwork saint.

“I don't know why they're attacking him,” I say.

For a second her expression is so tender. As if my loyalty to Simon is a beautiful thing to be reacquainted with, full of new meaning after these years of separation.

“How can I help?” she says.

I try to keep all emotion from my voice. “I don't know. I have to think about what's best for Peter.”

She collects herself. “Alex, I would give anything to see him.”

It comes out quickly, before I can let myself second-guess: “Then I want you to meet him.”

“Okay,” she says, suddenly sitting taller. “I would love that.”

She keeps glancing at Peter's radio-controlled car on the floor. A red Maserati with a broken axle from a joyride into a medieval wall. Peter has written his name on the door. Mona can't take her eyes off those scrawled letters.

“I would,” she repeats more faintly, “
really
love it.”

The discovery of how much those words mean to me is a warning that I need to step back. If hope comes this easily, so will disappointment.

“I can't let that happen until Peter's ready,” I say. “And I need time to get him ready. So you can't just come knocking at our door again.”

She looks decimated. Trapped in her silence.

Finally I stand and say, “Peter's at my uncle's place right now. I need to get back to him.”

“Of course.”

She rises. On her feet again, she seems stronger. She tightens the sweater around her, then tucks in the chair. At the door, she makes a point of not moving, of letting me shepherd the parting. But the thought of her departure fills me with a premonition of vast loneliness. If in the morning she has gone back to Viterbo, I will have to hide my emotions from Peter. I will have to never let him know tonight happened.

As my hesitation deepens, she lifts a hand in the air and, as if touching a wall of glass, lets it linger.

“Here's my number,” she says. It's already written on a piece of paper in her hand. “Call me when you and Peter are ready.”

WHEN SHE'S GONE, LEO
slowly drifts back. He doesn't speak. We've returned to the oldest terrain of our friendship. In silence he walks me back to Lucio's.

At the palace door he gives me a tap on the arm and a meaningful look. Making the sign of a telephone with his hand, he says, “If you want to talk about it.”

But I don't want to talk about it.

Peter is asleep. His body is misaligned on the bed, feet nearly touching the pillow. I move him, and his eyes open. “Babbo,” he says lucidly, then tumbles back into the abyss. I kiss him on the forehead and stroke his arm.

Mothers in the neighborhood ask how a single father does it. They see me at playdates, at the meet-ups where rising students are supposed to become friendly before primary school starts, and they say how lucky Peter is to have me. Never do they suspect that I am a ghost. A sunken ship dragged back to the surface by the little boy hanging from the monkey bars. God took Mona but left me Peter. Now she is only one phone call away. And yet I wonder if I can bear to dial those numbers.

I say a prayer for Simon, then decide to sleep on the floor. My little boy deserves a bed of his own. But before I crawl out, I whisper in his ear.

“
Peter, she came home
.
”