The Good Life (25 page)

They sure didn't. St. Thérèse House was a two-story facility downtown for terminal children, youngsters dying from cancer or brain lesions or frenzied infections Father Dom had never heard of. Children went to St. Thérèse House when they couldn't survive another faltering transplant or more scorching chemotherapy. A hospice for six- and seven-year-olds, it drew patients from three states away. Doctors in the area were proud of the institution, which appalled Father Dom. Sweet Jesus, it was not something to be proud of.

Although he had never been in it, he realized he could describe the place as if he'd lived there. For every child who died with a face filled with light, three others left this earth looking puzzled or disappointed or so crocked on morphine they couldn't feel the oils of the last rites being thumbed onto their foreheads. His stomach turned heavily.

“Their people are trained,” Father Dom said.

“They're short-handed,” Sipley said.

Joe studied his clear brown tea, and Father Dom automatically thought of Gethsemane. He wondered whether Joe was also thinking of that utter despair. In a brief burst of viciousness, Father Dom hoped he was, then was ashamed of himself. “When would it start?” Father Dom said.

“That depends on you,” Sipley said. “There's only so far the staff can bend the rules. We can come, but a faculty member has to supervise.”

Father Dom opened his mouth and shut it again. “I don't have medical training,” he said.

“The staff will be keeping an eye on the patients,” Sipley said. “They want someone to keep an eye on us. Since you've been working with Joe and me, I thought you should be the one. Of course, I could ask somebody else.”

And somebody would agree. Priests always went: the jails, the hospitals, the shuttered, stinking houses. “Beats reality TV,” Father Wells had said one day after a visit to the prison, his eyes blazing. He might very well go to St. Thérèse House and train his gaze on those withering children. His gaze would also land on Joe, helpless at the bedside.

“I'll go,” Father Dom said, lifting his chin. “I'll
go
,” he added, not that Sipley or Joe had asked a second time.

 

St. Thérèse House smelled like apples. Most of the children ate through feeding tubes, but one or two could manage soft foods, and every morning ferocious Sister Lupe, who looked thin even in sweatpants, made a fresh batch of applesauce. “At lunch you will feed them,” she told Joe and Sipley. “Until then you will visit with the children who are alone.” The two young men nodded, as did Father Dom, standing a step behind them. Sister Lupe glanced at him with flat eyes, then led them down a corridor.

Bedrooms unfolded in wings from the central hall, and in either apple-smelling direction lay children, one to a room. The children were bald and gray faced, lying in what looked less like sleep than suspension. Parents, murmuring steadily, sat close beside the beds.

“How long do they stay here?” Sipley was asking.

“Two weeks, typically,” Sister Lupe said. “The one you're going to see has been here almost three months, our longest ever. You're getting her because she already knows all of our jokes.” Father Dom tried to imagine a joke coming out of Sister Lupe's lipless mouth.

“What does she have?” Sipley asked.

“Leukemia.”

“Where are her parents?” Joe asked.

Sister Lupe's smile was vulpine. “Several agencies would like to know.” She breezed into the girl's room, then looked back and gestured impatiently for Joe and Sipley to follow. “Look, Cindy. Father Sipley and Father Halaczek are here to see you. And Father Dominic.” The girl smiled at them with half her mouth. Father Dom didn't know whether she had lost motor control on one side or she meant the expression to look ironic. “Hi.”

Bruises ran in chains up her arms and ringed her neck, and around the bruises her skin was a dry noncolor. Her skull made a hard dent in the pillow. Father Dom guessed she was twelve years old, but he could have been three years off in either direction.

“They're going to visit with you until lunch,” Sister Lupe said.

“That's a long time,” Cindy said.

“It's good for you to see new faces,” the sister said, already on her way out of the room. “Enjoy yourselves, Fathers.”

Cindy's expression was clearly long-suffering, and Father Dom revised his age estimate upward. “Are you here to talk to me about dying?” she said.

“Not if you don't want to,” Sipley said. “What's on your mind?”

“No offense, but I'm scared of priests. It's not good news when you guys come around.”

Joe reached behind his neck and unsnapped his collar. “I don't have to wear this. I haven't been ordained.”

“You're in training?”

“I'm on probation. I messed up, and I'm being given one last chance.”

“So you're here to show your stuff.”

Joe nodded, and Cindy said to Father Dom, “What does he need to do?”

“Just be with you.”

“Some test.” She closed her eyes. Father Dom had stood beside hospital beds for twenty-five years; rarely had he seen a face so dwindled, her forehead collapsed as if someone had stuck a thumb into it. He flattened his wet palms against his thighs. Sipley and Joe were talking to her. He could slip out of the room and no one would notice.

“Well, do it,” Cindy was saying to the young men, her eyes still closed. “I'm not going anywhere.”

Joe said, “What do you want to talk about?”

“You talk. I'll listen.”

Father Dom's stomach seemed to tip. Shamefully, he couldn't stop thinking that he was breathing the air that had passed through Cindy's diseased membranes. He pulled a tissue from the box on the ledge and held it before his face as if he were going to blow his nose.

Joe said, “Our Father.”

“No,” Cindy murmured. “I don't like that one. Do your own.”

Joe smiled crookedly. “Please. That's the only good prayer I know.”

Cindy didn't open her eyes. “Sister Lupe says the best prayers are one word. What's your word?”

“Please,” Joe said promptly.

“Keep going.”

The smell of apples billowed softly from the corridor. “Please. God,” Joe said, the word like a cough. “You are in heaven. And your name is—praised.” His white face was damp, and he stood at a tilt, as if every muscle in his body were locked. “I could use some help,” he said to Father Dom.

“What do you want me to do?” Father Dom hadn't meant to sound savage, and he was embarrassed when Cindy looked at him with interest.

“Aren't you supposed to be telling me about heaven?” she said.

“Ask Father Halaczek. He knows,” Father Dom said, a bit of malice to add to his lifetime sins of evasion and cowardice, sins he yearned for now as his eyes slid away from the girl's cheeks, molded to the bone. All a priest could do was plead for her release and hope that pleading would do some good. Joe knew that lesson as well as Father Dom. Joe, who pleaded so much, knew it better.

The young man grasped the corner of Cindy's sheet, his hand tightening and releasing, his voice shaking. “Please. Your will is going to happen,” he said, then broke down. Pressing his hands against his face, he stood beside the bed, his shoulders racked. “This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me,” he said. “And it's going to get worse.” He wheeled around to face Father Dom, who had backed up until his shoulders touched the wall. The smell of apples rose around him, and his nausea was roiling like a sea. “Isn't it?” Joe said.

“Yes,” said Father Dom.

“Are you going to stop my ordination?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Sipley said, “Fathers, we're here to pray for healing.” He began to move his lips unselfconsciously, a powerful man who could probably hold the seventy-pound girl in one hand. Here, Father Dom realized, was the test Sipley had set for himself: to halt death's advance, even though death was on the march. Death had already won. Father Dom wondered when Sipley was going to acknowledge that.

“Why not?” Joe repeated, louder.

“Who else would come here?” Father Dom said.

“I don't think you're supposed to say those things where I can hear them,” Cindy said.

“Father Dominic is a special priest,” Joe said. “You're lucky to even see him. Why don't you lead us in prayer, Father? We need guidance.”

Joe probably didn't hear the rage that rang through his words. And Father Dom would forgive the boy—just as, when he looked at Cindy's shrunken, darkening body, he already forgave her parents for running away. In the end he forgave everybody, which was half the reason Joe would never forgive him.

Father Dom dampened his lips to say something unobjectionable about faith and perseverance. He breathed in the apple-drenched air. The instant he opened his mouth, he vomited where he stood. Sipley managed to get a basin under Father Dom's mouth for the last of it, but the room was full of the stink, and when he finished Father Dom could not lift his swimming eyes.

“Usually I'm the one who does that,” Cindy said.

“I'm sorry,” he murmured, afraid to say anything more. Sipley was probably warming up to quote St. Paul: the Spirit expresses itself in outcries that we ourselves do not understand. If Sipley said one word, Father Dom would retch again.

“Father,” Joe said, “you should have told us you were ill.” He pulled a chair beside Cindy's bed.

She said, “Do you mind not talking?”

“I'll get you something to drink.” Joe's thin voice wavered. When Cindy shook her head, he said, “We have such a long day ahead. Let me get you something. Please.”

 

 

 

A
LESS WATCHES PATRICK
slip into the back of the high school auditorium, where he tiptoes behind the last row. He is trying to be silent even though the door booms shut behind him like a cannon shot. The length of the fifty-row hall stretches between him and Aless, but still her heart shudders as if he, her chum, her buddy, were breathing into her hair. This collapsing of distance is just one of the things she hates about being in love with Patrick.

On stage, Aless is coaching Melanie Montrose, who has been cast as Guinevere in
Camelot
. Every note she sings above D tilts and wheezes and loses its balance, but Melanie's loose gold curls tumble down her back, and Aless suspects that the girl's parents have donated handsomely to Our Lady of Mercies for the last four years, longer than Aless has been here.

Patrick lifts his hand in greeting, and Aless waves back, unable to control her happy hand. She works in the same building with the man and can't keep her heart from bucking every time she sees his red-gold hair. Dragging her gaze back to Melanie, she says, “Think about what you're singing. Your heart is torn between duty and love. Your heart is
torn
. Try it again.”

The accompanist gives the note and Melanie launches herself back into the ballad, her pretty features squeezing as she imagines herself remaining nobly silent about her ruinous desire. The song might as well be Aless's anthem, and Melanie is murdering it. Humming the right note to herself, Aless scoots off the stage to join Patrick and says, “I should make you leave. Friends don't let friends listen to Melanie Montrose.”

“Why'd you cast her?”

“An audience needs something easy on the eyes. Also, I'm interested in keeping my job. Why are you here to listen?”

“Listening to Melanie beats listening to my own thoughts.” In a flash, his amiable expression starts to droop, and Aless steels herself. Patrick's sorrow comes like a German train, exactly on schedule. “I was thinking about Eleanora,” he says. “I never knew that sorrow would be so durable.”

Aless nods, pushing the muscles of her face into a look of sympathy. Since his wife died almost a year ago, Patrick has been giving voice to his grief, talking about his emotions in the direct manner the wife encouraged. Aless doesn't care for it. His old moody detachment put a little space between them, space that she spent her time trying to violate. Now when Patrick says these things, he feels too close, intimate in every wrong way. She has to resist the impulse either to draw him to her or shove him back.

“I was going through student files, thinking about where I could recommend that Jason Sanders and his 1.3 average apply to college, when the floor opened up beneath me.” Tears shine in his leaf-green eyes. “I miss her so much.”

“I know,” Aless says. She lets Melanie move into the second verse, for which the girl has worked out arm motions. She has spotted Patrick and beams at him, as all the girls do.

“Thank you for listening,” he says to Aless. “Thank you for listening again. You should get some kind of Golden Ear award.”

“What's a friend for?”

“You're a better friend than most. Nobody else would put up with me.” As if he is getting a readout from Aless's brain, he adds, “It's been going on too long, this grieving.”

“It's not like a class. There's no final exam.”

“I need to do something. And I have an idea.”

From her second-row seat Aless can see Melanie, approaching the half-step interval, tighten her abdomen. This time she comes closer to hitting the note, and she grins through the rest of the measure, confidently enunciating “dark despair.”

“Sustain the energy,” Aless calls to the stage, then says to Patrick, “What?”

“This isn't the place. Will you come over for dinner on Saturday?”

He has invited her to his house a hundred times, but still he sounds winsome, and she tightens her own abdomen to keep her voice from swaying.

“I have rehearsal that afternoon. It may go late.” She nods toward the stage, where Melanie is hurtling through the last notes a beat ahead of the accompanist, her arms outstretched as if she's crossing a finish line. “Still a few bugs to work out.”