From his St. Paul hospital, Billy sends Duncan a postcard and a letter in an envelope. The post card shows an ice breaker on the Mississippi River and the St. Paul towers dusted with snow in the background. A Christmas setting with snow on the streets and rooftops and blue and green lights frozen and alight in every storefront window. The card says Seasons Greetings and on the back Billy has written in his poor penmanship:
Happy Holidays from the most livable city in America.
Just makes you want to come live here, don’t it?
They haven’t broken me yet, Duncan!
Yours,
Billy
In the letter Billy has drawn a small map of his ward, and he writes about what he eats and where he sleeps and the room that contains the dyna-chamber where he receives monthly isotope bombardments. The final spot on his map seems to be in one of the southern hallways on the sixteenth floor, at a window looking out upon the wide Minnesota plains beyond stretching into an indeterminable distance. Duncan assumes that this must point toward the Home, and he imagines Billy late at night—while the other children sleep and nurses quietly pad the tiled hallways and distant monitors beep and muted, garbled voices tremor from the ward’s intercoms—sitting alone before his snow-frosted window, the city lights cast upon the glass and his wide-eyed old face reflected back to him, searching the darkness for the distant flicker of lightning spidering across the vast Iron Range beyond the Home, and perhaps he hears the soft brass peal of church bells from the minaret resounding outward into the far towns across Thule’s frozen valleys, and as Duncan stares at the card, he wishes he was sitting in the dark with him and watching over him so that he might sleep.
Later that evening during Mass at St. Mary of the Wharves, Mother takes his hand.
I know you miss your friends, she says. Would it help if we called the Home and spoke to them, to see how they are?
She seems surprised when he shakes his head and says no.
Why not, sweetie?
I don’t want to know that they’re still there and that their parents haven’t come back for them like me. And I don’t want to remind them of that. I already said goodbye once. If their parents come for them, they’ll call me.
Are you waiting for that?
I don’t know. Sometimes.
Honey, I’m sure they’re very happy for you and that they’d love to hear from you.
Duncan shakes his head again. The priest raises the Eucharist in his hands, Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem, and the altar boy rings the bell.
No, they’re not happy for me, he says and blesses himself. But that’s all right. If I was them, I wouldn’t be happy for me either.
In the rectory, as Mother waits outside, he requests a pair of Mass cards for the dead, and when the old priest who is no longer capable of performing Mass asks him who the cards are for, he tells him that they’re for Billy and Julie and under The Departed he writes their full names:
Billy Bowen, Julie Connors
He does this every Friday after the Stations of the Cross, and on Sunday he sits in a rear pew of the church and listens to the priest calling out Billy’s and Julie’s names and the congregation bowing their heads and offering up their prayers, and the sound of their names spoken in a low, sorrowful timbre by a hundred voices trembling in his belly and then rising higher with all the names of the other faithful departed and reverberating off the polished stone balusters and columns in the nave like a great clanging of bells that reminds him of Brother Canice swinging from the ropes of the bell tower in the late hours of the night, and he wonders who Brother Canice tells his story to now that he is no longer there or if perhaps he speaks it to himself before the pulsating embers of the woodstove in the dark kitchen and if his story is any less real without anyone to hear it.