Francis Jonah was buried on Friday, the first day of spring. The former priest’s last will and testament called for a private funeral service—absolutely no reporters. That job was left to Father Jack Connelly. The well-respected and much-loved priest had a lot of pull in the community; he managed to convince the police, a good majority of them Catholics themselves, to leave judgment in the hands of God and honor a man’s final wishes.
What Father Jack couldn’t contain were the leaks. Someone had tipped off the media, and they had set up camp in front of the church.
The front doors of St. Stephen’s opened and the pallbearers, four young men on loan from McGill-Flattery Funeral Home, stepped out with the casket, not expecting to see the small group of reporters crowding the front steps. Flashbulbs popped and cameras clicked. The police detail moved into action, starting to clear a path to the hearse.
Mike sat in the passenger seat of Slow Ed’s cruiser parked across the street, his eyes covered by sunglasses and scanning the faces of the hundred-plus crowd of people.
“Cemetery’s going to be just as bad,” Slow Ed said. “Probably even worse.”
Mike didn’t respond, just sat there, staring, a thin, slowly dissolving membrane of separateness dividing him from the rest of the world.
Slow Ed started the cruiser and pulled away from the curb.
“We can keep the media out of the cemetery, but we can’t keep them from holding their cameras up over the cemetery wall. They set up shop on Evergreen. They’re standing on the roofs of their vans to get a better view of the gravesite. You told me you wanted to keep your face off the tube. You go in there, your face will be playing on all the news cycles.”
Downtown traffic was light. They pulled onto Parker Street and climbed the steep hill, and when they passed Evergreen, a long street of tract housing for the terminally jobless and lost, Mike saw some of the residents gathered out on their front steps, their faces drowsy with sleep and pinched with hangovers, their hands trembling as they lit cigarettes and drank coffee and watched reporters fix their hair and makeup.Vans were parked up on the sidewalk, satellite feeds extended into the air.
“If the reason you’re going there is because you want to see Father Jack,” Slow Ed said, “I can turn around and drive back to his office. You want, I’ll wait with you until he comes back.”
Slow Ed giving him an out. There really was no reason to go ahead with this—no logical reason Mike could put into words. He had tried. Slow Ed had asked, and so had Bill, and Mike couldn’t explain the reason for wanting to be at the cemetery to either of them or himself and yet this need was still there, this throbbing, unexplainable compulsion that told him he needed to be at the cemetery when Jonah was buried. Maybe this sudden need had to do with the dreams of Sarah and the new ones where Jonah lay on the cool steel table, his last words still on his tongue—Mike could see them, Jesus, they were right there, let’s pick them up and sort them out. But nobody wanted to do it. They started to sew Jonah’s mouth shut and he’d scream at them to stop and they would ignore him.
The dreams, Mike felt, were a signal to keep digging. Or maybe he just wanted to punish himself. He had, after all, set all of this into motion.
Slow Ed hooked a left onto Hancock. Two cruisers were set up by the entrance. He rolled down his window and waved, and a patrolman opened the gate. They drove into the cemetery and when Slow Ed pulled over to the side,Mike saw, up on the hill and in clear view, the section of dirt where Jonah was about to be buried and felt a well of fear rise up in him that tore through that protective membrane like a bullet.
“I know you are—were—close to Father Jack,” Slow Ed. “That’s why I don’t think he’ll have a problem with you being here. But if he asks you to leave, we have to respect that.”
Mike nodded, got out of the car. The sun was warm on his face as he walked up the slope of damp grass, heading toward what looked like a utility shed and to the right of it, a small patch of trees that hadn’t been cleared.
When he reached the top, Mike moved behind a tree and saw the contraption that would lower Jonah’s coffin into his final resting place. No trees out there; no shade. The gravesite was exposed and it worried him for a reason he couldn’t explain.
Several minutes later, the hearse and limousine pulled onto Evergreen. A half dozen or so blue uniforms directing traffic cleared the area to let the vehicles through. A moment later, the hearse and limo had pulled up against the curb, and the young pallbearers got out and carried Jonah’s coffin up the slope, Father Jack dressed in his priestly robes in line behind them.
The pallbearers placed Jonah’s coffin on the lowering device and stepped back. Mike wiped the sleeve of his sweatshirt across his forehead.
Father Jack opened his Bible. “Let us pray.”
“Michael.”
Wide awake with that middle of the night terror that tells him something’s wrong with the baby. Jess is coming up on week twenty-two of her pregnancy with the girl they’re going to name Sarah and now something’s wrong.
The keys and wallet are on the nightstand so he doesn’t have to hunt for them in the middle of the night. He scoops them up, sits up in bed.
“It’s okay, Michael. Give me your hand.”
He does, and she places it on her belly.
Kicking. The baby was kicking.
“Can you feel it?”
He did. Sarah was kicking up a storm. Jess lies back down, and he relaxes, eases himself against her back, his hand never leaving her belly, that feeling of life forming beneath her skin. Just give me this, God. Just give me this and it will be enough.
A rumble of gears and Mike saw the coffin being lowered into the ground.
Jonah on the morgue table, fighting to free the words from his lips.
Only God knows what is true.
The gears stopped working.
The coffin lay in the ground now, waiting to be buried.
“Amen,” Father Jack said, and closed his Bible.
Mike dug his fingers into the bark of the tree. It kept him from screaming.
Mike paced the lawn around the cruiser, trying to work the knocking sensation out of his knees. His cell phone vibrated against his hip for the third time in the past two minutes. Mike checked the caller ID again: OUT OF AREA. Probably a reporter. Mike clipped the phone back on his belt and saw Father Jack walking this way.
The priest stepped up to him. “I’m sorry, Michael.”
“Did he, you know …”
Father Jack bowed his head and studied his shoes.
Mike’s cell phone vibrated again. He pulled it out from his back pocket, checked the caller ID. It was Bill. Mike answered it.
“Jess just called me,” Bill said. “She’s trying to call you on your cell and just called and said she hasn’t been able to reach you.”
OUT OF AREA—those calls were from Jess.
“Thanks,” Mike said and hung up, Father Jack’s eyes locked on him now.
“Francis was a bitter man. Bitter and very angry. He was in denial.” Father Jack shook his head, sighed. “I tried.”
Mike felt a thick, bulging wetness in his throat that he couldn’t swallow back.
“I’m sorry,” Father Jack said.
Okay. Okay, so Father Jack didn’t know anything. There was still Merrick to talk to, and the nurse, Terry Russell. One of them had to know something. There was still hope.
Mike’s phone rang again.
“Michael?” It was Jess, her panicked voice having an odd echo to it.
“I can barely hear you.”
“I’m calling you from France.” Her words came out hurried to the point where she sounded breathless. “I just found out. I’ve been staying out on a farm, there’s no TV or—it doesn’t matter. I just booked a flight and will be home tomorrow afternoon. Are you okay? Where are you?”
Mike’s attention ran up the hill, stopped at Jonah’s headstone.
I can’t take it anymore, Bill. I’m tired of living with a shell. I’m tired of living with a woman who is terrified of life and has made me a prisoner in my own home. I’m tired of having to fight for the simple things like taking my six-and-a-half-year-old daughter sledding. I’m tired and I want out.
His words, spoken in an almost silent prayer that night on the Hill.
“Michael? You there?”
“I’m at Jonah’s gravesite,” he said.
“What? Why? Why would you do that to yourself?”
The need to cry and scream was building inside his chest. He wanted to reel it in, wanted to look away from the gravesite and couldn’t.
“You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself. How many times have I told you—remember that time in the grocery store? Sarah was with me and I turned my head just for a second and she was gone. They tore the place up and five minutes later I found her outside talking to that woman. Sarah thought it was the mother of a friend and she had followed her out—”
“You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?” Jess sounded on the verge of tears. “Please, let me in. I want to help you.”
That night on the Hill I let Sarah walk up that hill by herself because I was pissed at you. That night I prayed for a way out and for once God was listening.
“Talk to me, Michael. Don’t shut me out again. Not now.”
Mike opened his mouth to speak and a moan escaped his lips. The guilt, the anger, the love he still carried for his daughter and the life they had once shared, everything he had carried for the past five years was ripped out of him in sobs.