Innocence Read online

  Because I knew that Father would be most proud of me if I were to respect Our Friend’s unfortunate vulnerability to depression and if I were as self-sufficient as possible, I asked for nothing more during the following six years. Every few months, I left him a note so that he would know I was alive and well.

  On the night when Gwyneth faced down Ryan Telford to save the nameless girl, I met Our Friend, who was not, after all, a stranger to me. These years later, I still think of him with great affection, and I wish that I could send him a note to let him know that I am well, but he has been dead for a long time.

  71

  AGAINST THE SIGHT OF SOLEMN CLEARS DESCENDING, I kept my eyes closed until Gwyneth pulled to a stop and switched off the engine. When I looked, I found that we were in an alleyway, parked on a garage apron, athwart its two roll-up doors.

  “Where’s this, what now?” I asked.

  “You’ll see. We won’t be here that long, but we can’t leave the girl. Anyway, she’s coming around.”

  “She is?”

  “She will.”

  We got out of the Rover, and she put up the tailgate, and I took the bundled child into my arms again.

  Following Gwyneth along the side of the garage, snow almost to the tops of my boots, I kept my head down, because the cold sharp wind stung tears from my eyes. I had been humbled, too, and filled with dread by the presence of so many Clears in the avenue, and I was afraid to look into the sky.

  We came into a snow-choked area between the garage and the back of a two-story brick house, where all the windows were as black as if they had been painted over. Walls marked the property line, and the space felt like a miniature prison yard. The back porch didn’t extend the width of the residence, and to the left of it, a pair of narrow rain doors sloped away from the house, covering a short flight of exterior stairs that led to a basement. Evidently in anticipation of us, someone had swept the snow off the doors. Gwyneth opened them.

  I followed her down, through the door at the bottom, into a warm basement that smelled of hot coffee, where bare bulbs in old ceramic sockets were recessed between exposed beams, striping the room with soft-edged bands of light and shadow. The space was used for storage, but it wasn’t packed full or cluttered. There were neatly labeled cartons, several pieces of old furniture, including a tattered armchair, and along one wall a folding table on which a coffeemaker warmed a Pyrex pot.

  Gwyneth directed me to put the nameless girl in the armchair, and after I had done so, she gently extracted the child from the blanket, which she folded and put aside on a stack of cardboard boxes.

  In slippers, flannel pants, a pale-blue cardigan, and a blue-and-white-checkered shirt, Teague Hanlon shuffled out of shadows and put two mugs of coffee on one of three metal barrels of different sizes that stood like an array of primitive kettle drums. “Gwynie takes hers black and said you would as well.”

  “I do,” I assured him.

  “How’s the child?” he asked.

  “She’s coming around,” Gwyneth said.

  Just then a series of small kittenish sounds issued from the girl, as if she were waking from ordinary sleep and regretted leaving a sweet dream not quite finished.

  “This is hard for me,” Mr. Hanlon said. “I hope you understand, Gwynie.”

  “Of course I understand.”

  Mr. Hanlon crossed the room to the door through which we had entered the basement, where he engaged two deadbolts.

  Gwyneth picked up her mug of coffee and sipped it, watching the girl intently. “You can take off your mask to drink the coffee, Addison. Neither of us will look at you.”

  To remove the ski mask, I would have to untie my hood and slide it back, thereupon being entirely exposed, which I never was outside of my rooms deep beneath the city. The thought of such vulnerability distressed me so much that I almost declined the coffee.

  But I was cold, not from the short time that I had spent in the open, but from thoughts of plague and death. I needed the fragrant brew. If she said there was no risk, I could only believe her.

  As soon as I stripped off the mask, I pulled the hood over my head again and tied it loosely under my chin.

  The coffee tasted strong and good, and even through my gloves, the mug warmed my hands.

  With his head bowed severely like a penitent monk sans habit, Mr. Hanlon returned to the coffeemaker to fill a mug for himself.

  The child raised one hand to her face and traced her features with her fingertips, as if she were not merely confused but also blind and trying to identify herself by touch. She shifted in the armchair, lowered her hand from her face, opened her mouth, and let out a long sigh. Nearly three years of coma seemed to fall away from her as easily as a single night of sleep. Her eyes opened, huge and gray and limpid, and focused at once on Gwyneth. Her voice was hoarse when she said, “Mama?”

  Gwyneth put down her mug, went to the girl, and knelt before her. “No, honey. Your mother’s gone. She’s never coming back. You’re safe now. No one will hurt you anymore. You’re safe with me.”

  Head still lowered, Mr. Hanlon returned with another mug. “Her mouth will be dry. I made sweet tea for her. It’s cooled enough.” As soon as Gwyneth took the tea from him, he returned to the coffeemaker and stood with his back to us.

  I sensed that his discretion might be no less for his benefit than for ours, and I wondered why he was so different now from the way he had been in the Egyptian Theater.

  As I sipped coffee and, from the shadow of my hood, watched Gwyneth and the girl, I realized that whatever might be happening in this basement was as beyond ordinary human experience as were the Fogs and Clears. The child returned to full consciousness not as any doctor might have expected, not as any other victim of coma would have returned, not gradually and with weakness, but rapidly and with her physical strength intact. She had sufficient coordination to hold the mug of tea and drink from it. Gwyneth spoke so softly that often I couldn’t hear what she said, and though the girl did not respond, she listened intently and focused her luminous gray eyes on Gwyneth, who smoothed her hair and touched her face, her arms, so tenderly, reassuringly.

  Sooner than seemed possible, the girl put aside her tea and got to her feet. She leaned against Gwyneth, though perhaps she did not need that support.

  To Mr. Hanlon, Gwyneth said, “Did you get the clothes for her that I requested?”

  He turned toward us but didn’t approach. “They’re on a chair at the kitchen table. I left it dark upstairs in case something … someone comes around looking for you. The only light in the kitchen is the range hood, but it’s enough. There aren’t any windows in the half bath, so you can turn the lights on in there.”

  Holding Gwyneth’s hand, the child walked on coltish legs that she had not used in nearly three years and that shouldn’t have easily supported her. I watched the pair until they moved out of sight on the stairs, and then I watched their shadows accordion after them across treads and risers.

  In a world rich with wonders and mysteries, there are also miracles.

  To keep his distance from me, Mr. Hanlon began to travel the room, stopping at each piece of furniture or stack of cardboard boxes, pondering it as if he were browsing in a shop where he had never been before, evaluating the merchandise.

  “Addison, I assume you know what has come into the world.”

  “A plague, you mean.”

  “The plague, I think, after which the long war between mankind and microbes will have ended.”

  Remembering Telford, I said, “It’s going to be bad.”

  “It’ll be worse than bad. Latest word is that they engineered the weapon, the bug, for a 98-percent mortality rate. It exceeded their expectations. Then they lost control of it.”

  “I’m scared for Gwyneth. Telford was dying and he spit on her.”

  Mr. Hanlon looked up, surprised, but then turned away at once. “Where did Telford find her?”

  “He got to the child before we did. She’s contaminated,
too.”

  He was silent, not because he had nothing to say but because he had too much. Then: “Though I always hoped for better circumstances, I’m honored to have you in my home at last. Addison Goodheart is a more appropriate name for you than Son of It.”

  72

  TEAGUE HANLON, BOTH GUARDIAN TO GWYNETH and the benefactor who had given Father a key to the food bank and the associated thrift shop, was not the high-priced attorney that I might initially have imagined. Once a fighting marine who’d gone to war, he was now a priest and the rector of St. Sebastian’s, the man to whom Gwyneth’s father and mine had turned when in need, the man who worked through Judge Gallagher’s mother, his parishioner, to ensure the transfer of the nameless girl into Gwyneth’s custody. He was the nexus of our intersecting lives.

  We were in the basement of the rectory behind St. Sebastian’s on this terrible night, and Father Hanlon didn’t wear the Roman collar here that identified his office when he was in public.

  Prior to his revelation, the chalice of my heart had been filled to the brim with emotion, and now it overflowed. I sat on the edge of the armchair, searching for an adequate response and at first finding none. The intense tide of feelings did not wash me away. I had taken a master’s degree in stoicism before I learned to walk. I needed only to sit quietly for a moment, seining those deep waters for the right words.

  I said, “You fed us all these years.”

  “The food wasn’t mine. It was all donated.”

  “You clothed us.”

  “With secondhand garments also donated.”

  “You kept our secret.”

  “The least expected of a priest who hears confessions.”

  “You never raised a hand against Father.”

  “I saw his face only a few times.”

  “But never harmed him.”

  “I was able to meet his eyes only once.”

  “And didn’t harm him.”

  “I should have made myself meet them again and again.”

  “But after each encounter with him, you fell into despair.”

  “I suffered periodic depression before I ever knew about you and the man you called Father.”

  “Yes, but the very thought of us made those depressions blacker. You said so yourself in your note to me, and we gave you nightmares, yet still you sustained us.”

  Standing with his face in his hands, he spoke in Latin, not to me, but perhaps in prayer. I listened, and though I didn’t understand the words, his great distress was evident.

  I rose from the armchair, took a couple of steps toward Father Hanlon, but halted, for it was not given to me, in my difference, to be able to comfort people. In fact, quite the opposite. As on the night when Father had been brutally murdered while I lay watching from under an SUV, I felt inadequate, useless, and I was ashamed of my helplessness.

  The Latin words crumbled in his mouth, falling from his lips in broken syllables, and he faltered in the prayer, taking deep shuddery breaths and expelling them with tortured sounds that might have been half sobs of grief and half expressions of disgust.

  Given my twenty-six years of experience, I could only imagine that my presence was the cause of such powerful, unchecked emotions. I said, “I’ll go. I never should have come here. Foolish. I’ve been foolish. And reckless.”

  “No. Wait. Let me pull myself together. Give me a chance.”

  He had given us so much that I owed him anything he asked.

  When he regained control of himself, he went to the door through which we had arrived and seemed to check the locks to be certain that he had secured them. He stood listening to the storm, his back to me, and at last he said, “It’s an east wind, like the one that parted the sea.” That thought led him to another, and he quoted: “ ‘They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’ ”

  Although there was much I wanted to say, I knew that I should not. His mind and heart were out of alignment, and only he could bring them into harmony.

  He said, “The North Koreans, what’s left of them, announced a short while ago that birds don’t contract the disease, but they do carry it. There’s no quarantine that can prevent birds from flying.”

  They made movies and wrote books about planet-killing asteroids, stories that evoked a frisson of horror in audiences and readers. But in the end, no million-ton mass from outer space was necessary to put an end to civilization. The murder of one man could be committed with something as small as a few drops of nectar from the oleander plant instilled in honey, and all of humankind could be murdered most efficiently by something even smaller, a mere microbe of malevolent invention.

  Still turned to the door, the priest said, “Your father didn’t know what he was, but there was no reason that he should. Do you know what you are, Addison?”

  “A monstrosity,” I said. “A miscreation, freak, abomination.”

  73

  THE WIND RATTLED THE BASEMENT DOOR THAT Father Hanlon faced, and as if he knew my thoughts, he said, “It may seem to be the wind that tests the door, but on this night of all nights, it’s more likely to be something far worse than wind. These aren’t the times of which Saint John the Evangelist wrote in Revelations. Armageddon would be an hour of horror and of glory, but there is no glory in what’s coming, no final judgment, no new Earth, only bitter tragedy on an unthinkable scale. This is the work of men and women in all their perversity and transgression, the love of power in the service of mass death. On such a night, the darkest spirits are likely to be drawn from their usual pursuits, taking to the streets in gleeful celebration.”

  The delicious aroma of coffee gave way to the stench of burning marionettes. Remembering Gwyneth’s words to me as we left the yellow-brick house with the girl, I said, “That’s how the marionettes smelled in the archbishop’s fireplace. But the stink is deception. Nothing’s out there.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” he cautioned, and pointed to the doorknob, which worked violently back and forth, not as the wind could ever have moved it. “Whatever wants in, it will bring with it doubt. Did you know that the artist Paladine’s last will and testament required that a marionette be included in his casket?”

  “There were only six, and Gwyneth found them all.”

  “This one wasn’t like the six. Paladine carved and painted this one in his own image, and they say it looked uncannily like him. His mother was his sole living relative and heir. A woman with unhealthy interests and strange beliefs that perhaps she had inculcated in her son. She had him buried precisely as his will directed, in a little-known cemetery that attracts people who wish to be laid to rest in ground that isn’t hallowed, that has never been blessed by anyone of any faith.”

  The foul odor had grown stronger, and although the door stopped rattling and the knob stopped turning, I said, “Deception.”

  “You must learn what you are, Addison, so that you won’t doubt anymore and won’t any longer be vulnerable.” He turned his back to the door but still didn’t look at me. He stared down at his hands, which he turned palms up. “Doubt is poison. It leads to a loss of faith in yourself, and in all that’s good and true.”

  The storm wind struck great blows at the house, and although the rectory was a sturdy structure of long-standing brick, it creaked overhead.

  Father Hanlon lowered his hands and took two steps toward me, but he didn’t attempt to make eye contact. “You’re not a monster, miscreation, freak, or abomination. You’ve seen yourself in mirrors, I assume.”

  “Yes.”

  “Often?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing. I’m blind to it, I guess.”

  He pressed me: “What is the deformity that makes you an object of such instant hatred and rage?”

  “Father and I spent many hours in speculation and conjecture, but in the end there’s no way for us to know. It’s something in our faces, especially in our eyes, even in our hands, that others see in the firs
t instant they look at us, but it’s something we can’t ever see. Lots of people recoil from spiders, don’t they? But if spiders had the capacity for complex thought, they wouldn’t have a clue why they were so often loathed, because to one another, spiders look appealing.”

  “You’ve come close to the truth,” the priest said. “But you are not to be compared to spiders.” He came to me, stood before me, but didn’t look up. He took one of my gloved hands in both of his hands. “The man you called Father told me about your arrival in the world. Your biological father was shiftless, irresponsible, perhaps even a criminal, and he was never known to you. Your mother was a damaged woman but not entirely lost. You were born of man and woman, as are we all, but with one crucial difference. You were born with that difference perhaps because the world was moving toward a time when such as you would be needed.”

  “What difference?” I asked, breathless in expectation of the answer. I knew that a difference shaped my life and made of me an outcast, though I didn’t know the nature of it. In this mysterious world, I was the central mystery of my life.

  “Though born of man and woman, you aren’t an heir to Adam or to Eve, and neither was your second and better father. By some grace beyond my understanding, beyond anyone’s, you don’t carry the stain of original sin. You have a purity, an innocence that the rest of us can sense in an instant, as surely as a wolf can smell the spoor of a rabbit.”

  I began to deny that I possessed such innocence, but he silenced me with a squeeze of my hand and a shake of his head.

  “Addison, I dread looking at you worse than I have dreaded anything else in life, because I see not only you, but also what you are and what I am not. When I look at you, I see into myself as I never do otherwise, every sin of my life in a vivid kaleidoscopic collection of past toxic moments, more than I could recall in a lifetime of examining my conscience. When I look at you, I see what should be, and I know that I am not as I should be, and I recognize in totality every time in my life that I have gone wrong, every small unkindness, every meanness, every lie and unworthy thought relived simultaneously and in an instant.”