18

I left campus in a daze and drove around town, unwilling to go home where I’d have to tell Stefan about this new outrage. He’d been through more than enough trauma already. Reporting the cops and Valley in my office would be like letting go of someone’s arm when you’d been dragging him out of quicksand. How could he not sink?

So I drove. But where could I go? Where could I ever go to escape what had just happened, what had retriggered the shock of the SWAT team night? Away from the scene, down from whatever ledge I’d climbed onto when I’d shouted at Juno Dromgoole, I thought it impossible that the scars of this week would ever heal. There was no closure possible, only deeper immersion in shame. It didn’t matter that we lived in a small city with only one major newspaper and that the paper hadn’t reported what had happened at our house. It didn’t matter that my name wasn’t being bitten into like a breakfast donut by tens of thousands of people, mocked by some, defended by others. The exposure and humiliation I’d already suffered was enough. It was inside now, searing me like a brand.

I ended up heading home with a weird sense of defeat, and was glad that only Marco was home, needing attention, dinner, and a walk. Stefan still wasn’t back when I returned from the walk, and I didn’t bother calling him. I was glad to be alone with my own thoughts, and I fell asleep in bed watching one of my favorite classic noirs, Laura, Marco by my side.

When I woke up Thursday morning, Stefan was snoring, which meant he must have taken one of his sleeping pills since that was the only time he snored. I was grateful, because that meant more time before I had to tell him about Valley and the campus cops descending on my office. So I showered, got breakfast for me and Marco, walked him, and when I returned, Stefan still hadn’t woken up.

I didn’t have a therapist, hadn’t had one in half a dozen years because my life seemed so placid, but now I thought I needed to talk to someone I could trust. Father Ryan popped into my head for some reason, so I drove to St. Jude’s, hoping to find him. I knew he was often there in the mornings before Mass.

Michiganapolis had two downtowns in a way, one centering on the state capitol west of campus, the other around the university, and St. Jude’s was on a cul-de-sac near campus, well inside the smaller, less built-up downtown. The short, dead-end street was the typical mélange of moderately priced ethnic restaurants and clothing stores, but St. Jude’s was near the end where the commercial buildings gave way to fine old houses and older trees and then a public park. Given the bosky setting, the unadorned vaguely Gothic brick façade and bell tower brought to mind a rural church. I parked across the street, put as many quarters in the meter as I had on me, but before I made it over to the steps, I saw Father Ryan emerging in his “clericals.” He looked surprised, then waved, and I dashed across to ask if he had some time for coffee. There was a Starbucks a block and a half away.

“That’s where I was going, Nick.” He studied my face as we walked over. “Are you okay?”

“Not really. The campus police raided my office yesterday. I haven’t even told Stefan yet.”

He looked stunned as we walked into Starbucks, which was almost empty. Coffee shops of all kinds had proliferated in town and you never knew when they’d be filled with students on their laptops, or nearly vacant.

I bought us both frozen mocha Frappuccinos and we settled into a corner where nobody could hear us, far from the counter and the baristas, far from the door, and far from the floor-to-ceiling windows. The interior was a small maze of worn leather armchairs and tiny tables, and not my favorite place in town for coffee, but it was close by, and I wanted to sit down with Father Ryan as soon as possible, not wander.

I’d never been alone with Stefan’s spiritual guide before, and it struck me as a little odd. In just a few short years, he’d had a profound impact on my partner, though he discounted his influence and said he was just journeying along with Stefan.

Today, his fashion model good looks didn’t register on me with the discordance they usually did. His face was like a beacon: clear, open, safe. I could understand why Stefan had been drawn to the door Father Ryan had opened for him, and then stepped through into another faith. He radiated a sense of calm, even though he had clearly been disturbed by what little I’d already told him.

“Tell me what else happened, Nick.”

I did, trying not to rush, and after the initial shock, his face settled into grave concern. At one point, he said, “Careful—your hand is shaking.”

I put my coffee down and took a few deep breaths.

“At first I thought you wanted to talk to me about Stefan,” he said, “ask me something, and I was going to tell you I couldn’t share anything he’s told me in confession, but you probably know that?”

I nodded.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go home? Wouldn’t you feel better there? I can drive you if you’re feeling unsteady. We’ll figure out your car later.”

“I’ll be okay.” Then I contradicted myself: “I feel lost, Father.”

“How do you mean?”

“Lost in what’s going on with me and Stefan. I mean, what’s happening to us. I don’t feel like the same person anymore.”

He nodded. “You’re not. Disaster changes us. It’s inevitable.”

“But what if it’s made me crazy?” I lowered my voice and leaned forward. “I’ve been to a gun range. I applied for a permit to buy a gun.”

He grinned. “I’m from northern Michigan. I grew up with guns, I have half a dozen, so that doesn’t sound crazy to me at all. If you want to go shooting together sometime, let me know.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I went on to explain the most recent blows Stefan and I had experienced leading up to the raid on my office. His face grew even more pained as I went on. And then something unexpected popped out: “You told Stefan they weren’t coming back.” It sounded like an accusation, and I felt myself blushing.

He sighed. “It wasn’t a promise, it was something to hope for, to hold on to. It seemed reasonable at the time.”

“You’re not going to tell me to turn the other cheek, are you?”

He flashed a neon smile. “No, that would be glib. And probably dangerous.”

My thoughts were jumbled and I wondered now why I had even sought him out. Could anyone help me?

He said, “Tell me who you think is tormenting you.”

I ran through the short list of suspects with him. He dismissed them all.

“That professor—Lucky?—sounds miserable, but not like he has the energy to launch a campaign like this. And your chair or the dean? That’s not how these people operate. I’ve known enough academic types. If the administration wanted to get rid of you, they’d be more subtle. Bureaucracies may be cumbersome, but they’re devious when they need to be. They dread scandal more than disease.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Wait a minute! That scandal line, it’s from Edith Wharton.”

Ryan nodded. “The Age of Innocence. My mother was an English teacher. She adored Wharton. It rubbed off.”

“Are you kidding? How come I didn’t know that?” I wondered if Stefan hadn’t told me more about Ryan because he thought I would suspect him of making it up to curry favor with me, given that I was a Wharton scholar.

“Really, scratch those people off your list,” he insisted quietly.

“But bureaucracies are so twisted and power hungry, they eventually become evil, and whoever is after us has to be evil,” I said. “Stalking us, or me anyway, setting a SWAT team on us, breaking into our house, putting roadkill in our bed, provoking a drug raid …”

“Well, Nick, I’m careful about using the word evil. Even Christ forgave on the cross. ‘Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.’ His killers did something evil, but that doesn’t mean they were evil. I will say this, though: whoever’s orchestrating the campaign against you must be suffering inside, suffering profoundly, and is trying to make you suffer just as much. Who do you know who’d feel like that? Anyone?”

If that was the explanation, then I couldn’t think of a single person, and my frustration burst out in a totally unexpected way. “Stefan’s hiding something from me. He knows something about that guy’s suicide and he won’t tell me what it is.”

“What guy?”

“His student, you know, the one who Stefan caught plagiarizing? His name was Casey. The poor kid freaked out and hung himself in Parker Hall, remember?”

Father Ryan frowned, and I found myself wondering if he knew more about the suicide than he could tell me, whether through Stefan, or some other way. Or was that being overly suspicious? He took a long sip of his coffee drink, then said, “People claim secrets are bad things in a marriage. Sometimes they help keep it going. Sometimes not. You’ll have to find out which kind this is.”

“How?”

“Ask him, if it’s important to you.”

“I have, and he pulled away.”

“Give him time, then.” He added, “Love is patient, love is kind,” and I recognized the famous words.

“Corinthians,” I said.

He grinned. “Looks like we know each other’s favorite writers.”

I finished my coffee, and I asked him, “How are you so relaxed about me and Stefan—as a couple, I mean?”

“Well … my sister is a lesbian. But even if she wasn’t, the Church has got some of its current theology dead wrong. My feeling is, if it ain’t love, it ain’t God.”

“Wow. Do you say that in church?”

“Of course I do. And yes, some people complain to the bishop, but he hasn’t slapped my hand yet, so I’m okay.”

Before I could ask anything more, I happened to look up. There was nobody blocking my view of the front window, and on this bright spring day I could see a black car double parked across the street. That wasn’t common in Michiganapolis, and I stood up to go to the window. I couldn’t see the face of the driver, but it was clearly a man at the wheel, and when I opened the door and stepped outside, he sped away at easily twice the speed limit. Much as I hated the police, I hoped he’d get stopped for speeding, hoped he’d crash into something.

But even if nothing stopped him, at least I got the license plate number of the car: DXM 838. When I walked back inside and felt the soft cocoon of cold air, even the bored-looking baristas with hipster black-framed eyeglasses and beards had woken up and were staring at me. So was Father Ryan.

“That was the car!” I said, sitting back down and getting my phone out to text Vanessa Liberati. “It has to be the one that’s been following me. And it wasn’t a Chrysler, it was definitely a Caddy.”

“For a minute, I thought you were going to chase him down the street,” Father Ryan said softly, and I realized how hard I was breathing, almost as if I had been running. I flashed on the image of that shape-shifting Terminator chasing Linda Hamilton in one of the movies, grim, determined, inescapable. If only I had that kind of power.

“I need to go home. Thanks for your advice.”

Ryan calmly thanked me for the coffee and I hoped he didn’t think I was crazy.

As soon as he saw me walk in, Stefan asked, “What happened?”

While I sat cross-legged on the floor in the living room with Marco nuzzling and mouthing my hands in greeting, I told Stefan the whole horrible story of yesterday’s drug raid. I didn’t exaggerate, but I didn’t leave anything out, and I didn’t look up at him once because I was sure meeting his eyes would send me over the edge. With all my recitals of bad news, I was beginning to feel like the Ancient Mariner.

“Omigod,” he said when I was done. “Omigod—omigod—omigod.” He was sitting on the edge of one of the armchairs opposite the fireplace, head in his hands, rocking back and forth like a mourner at a funeral. “This is never going to stop.”

Strangely, instead of being unnerved by his despair, I suddenly felt the opposite. I felt confident, I felt brave.

“It has to stop,” I said. “We’ll find out who’s behind everything and we’ll make it stop.”

He mumbled through his hand, “How?”

“Hell if I know,” I said, and he looked up, apparently startled by my flippant tone. But what I said amused him and he laughed a little, tentatively, and that grew and grew until he was taken over by laughter like an infant having its belly tickled. Pretty soon he had tears in his eyes and Marco started leaping up at him to participate in the fun.

“I need a drink,” I said, even though we hadn’t had lunch, and Stefan followed me to the kitchen where I poured us each several fingers of Lagavulin and let Marco out into the backyard. We didn’t usually drink smoky single malts in the spring, we preferred lighter scotches, but nothing was normal anymore. I set the kitchen radio to play something soothing by Thomas Tallis and I dug out some smoked salmon spread from the fridge. I toasted salty bagels in the four-slice Breville toaster my cousin Sharon had sent us for Christmas and Hanukah. She had initially taken Stefan’s conversion better than I had, coming at it from her perspective as a cancer survivor: “Be thankful he wasn’t diagnosed with something life-threatening and that’s why he chose a new path. He wasn’t desperate or afraid of dying. He felt called. You’re lucky.”

Stefan and I sat at the granite-topped island, drinking and munching companionably. It’s not just strangers who can be knit together by sharing a meal; even spouses can deepen their connection, heal a rift, arm themselves against adversity, can do almost anything through the quiet magic of food and drink. Sitting there, I remembered the times the electricity had gone out in our neighborhood because of a thunderstorm and how we’d huddled around LED emergency lanterns, feasted on bottled water, peanut butter and crackers as if they were the offerings of a fine chef, relieved that we were together, that our house was unscathed, that we hadn’t lost any trees, that life would go on, order would soon be restored.

I couldn’t tell you why, but that’s how I felt right then, grateful and even mildly hopeful.

Then the mood changed when I said, “Father Ryan told me we should look for somebody who’s suffering the way we are—”

“You talked to Ryan? Why? When?” Stefan looked almost angry.

“We had coffee just now.”

“Why?” He set his scotch glass down as if he wanted to smash it but was forcing himself not to.

“Why not? I didn’t know who else to talk to and I thought he could help. He did. I can see why you like him. I mean, we didn’t talk about religion or anything like that, but he’s pretty calm and centered.” None of that seemed to be getting through to Stefan, whose face was still beclouded. “Are you pissed I didn’t tell you first?”

He flushed. “Yes. Sort of.”

I took his arm. “Stefan, I was a wreck yesterday and I was relieved you weren’t home. And this morning, you were sound asleep. Did you really think I’d wake you up for something like that? I needed to calm down first, and talking to him really helped.” Stefan didn’t pull away, which I considered a good sign. “I know you tell Ryan things you don’t tell me, and that’s okay. He’s your priest, you go to confession, I get all that.”

“It’s called reconciliation now, not confession.” Stefan knocked back his scotch and poured another two fingers of it.

“Oh, sorry. I guess he called it confession so I’d know what he meant.”

Stefan wasn’t really listening. He said, “There’s something I haven’t even told Ryan, not all of it, anyway. I haven’t told anyone.”

“It’s about that student’s suicide, isn’t it?”

He nodded, his face as twisted with guilt and shame as if he were a gargoyle carved by a medieval stonemason to represent those cruel and terrible feelings.