CHAPTER 31
As soon as Gwen Ferris left, I walked over to the Helms’ and rang the doorbell. Alex Helm met me at the door. He looked me up and down. “Can I help you, Sister Wallheim?”
It felt as if I was literally swallowing my pride, which was a hot and heavy stone. It kept rising back up, and I would have to swallow it down again. “I wanted to ask if you needed any babysitting help,” I got out at last.
He sneered. “Help from you?”
“I know that we did not part on the best of terms and you must think that I—that I am not on your side. But I came to apologize for that. I realize now that I was wrong.”
“Wrong about what, Sister Wallheim?” he asked.
“About Carrie,” I said softly. “And her parents.” I would have to deal with them soon, but somehow I felt like I needed to make this right first.
“Someone has told you something,” he said, leaning in enough to stare me in the eye.
I had to work hard not to lean away from him. I wasn’t going to give him any names. I might have been wrong about him, but that didn’t give me the right to expose Gwen Ferris’s secrets.
“So,” he said when I didn’t reply. “You’ve realized that my son married a troubled young woman and spent a good deal of time trying to figure out the truth.”
“I know that she loved him,” I said. At least, she must have for a few years, until she left. I was trying to make it easy for him to open the door wider and invite me in.
“Do you know that she called him, before she left Las Vegas?” he asked. “Told him that she loved him and that she missed him? At three in the morning, when Kelly was asleep? The morning of the day she died?”
My mouth was dry, and I wished I had a drink of water. I was struggling not to lick my lips in front of this man. “I didn’t know that,” I said. Could I believe him? So far, I could not think of anything that Alex Helm had directly lied about. He might be an odious man, but he was a truthful odious man. “Did she say she was coming home?”
“Not directly, but that was the gist of it,” said Alex Helm. “She said she was sorry for the havoc she’d caused and that she knew she’d been searching for something that only Jared could give her.”
I felt a chill run through me at that. Did she mean love? Had only Jared been able to give it to her? Surely people who are sick can hope for better healing than that even in this broken, mortal world. “Has he told the police about this phone call?”
“The police no longer consider Jared to be a suspect, and they have not asked him about the details of the day Carrie died.”
“And he hasn’t volunteered it? It might be useful for them, in trying to get a timeline of her movements.” But what did I know about detective work? I had stuck my nose into two murder cases in the last five months. I had thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I knew more about the underside of my ward than anyone else, and especially about the women’s world.
“Why should he volunteer anything to the police after the way they’ve treated him?”
“So they will be able to catch her killer,” I said. “Surely Jared wants that as much as anyone.” I couldn’t see Kelly anywhere behind him. Was she sleeping? Or was she too afraid to come near the door? Had her grandfather forbidden that, like so much else?
He glanced behind him, then closed the door and stepped out onto the porch with me. He sat on one of the steps and nodded for me to follow suit. I suppose this was a kind of reconciliation between us. I wasn’t worth the couch, but I could be seated here.
“I think Jared believes that it will only make Carrie look worse for the press,” he said. “After all this, he still cares about her name. After all that she did to him, and the way she left him, he wants to protect her. I don’t understand it, but I think my son loves her still.” He didn’t seem admiring, but neither was he disgusted.
I felt a strange peace at this moment. Love didn’t conquer all, but it endured through many things you’d think would kill it. Real love, which I had to admit I saw in Jared and Carrie’s marriage, despite all their problems.
I tried to remember the expression on Jared’s face when he had first appeared on our doorstep with Kelly in his arms that January morning. He’d been distraught. Whatever his relationship with Carrie had been, however odd and unlike any healthy marriage I had seen, he had loved her. And I couldn’t help but think, now, that she had loved him.
“And then there is Kelly and how it will affect her, all of this,” he added, nodding behind him.
“How is Kelly?” I asked. I wanted to see her so much. Just a glimpse of her messy hair, a hint of her fresh washed little girl smell, a shared smile over a brownie.
“We don’t need you to keep checking on us like some kind of Mormon child services. Jared and I are perfectly capable of taking care of her,” said Alex Helm. “She’s been sick the last couple of weeks. Last cold of the season, I guess, and I’ve kept her indoors for her own safety.” He glared at me, waiting for me to contradict his style of caregiving.
I didn’t. “I know you care about her. But it’s not the same as—well, as a mother.”
“I agree. She does need a mother. A better mother than the confused creature who gave birth to her. That is something Jared agrees on, and he is working on it. He has a new woman in mind to be Kelly’s mother, and his wife.”
I knew he had told Kelly he would find her a new mother, but it seemed crazy to think that Jared would marry so soon after Carrie’s funeral. Hadn’t we just been talking about how much he’d loved her? “So he’s dating again?” I asked, trying to find a way to make it sound more normal.
He let out a brief laugh. “Not dating. He’s courting. She’s met Kelly already and she has fallen in love with her. Now all Jared has to do is convince her that he will be a decent husband and he’s won. Women marry for children. Men marry for—” He didn’t finish, but made a crude hand gesture that it took me a moment to recognize meant the sex act. But I refused to blush. I was too old for that. “Well, who is she?” I asked.
Alex Helm shook his head. “So you can call her and tell her all the sordid details you think you know about Carrie and Jared? She’s heard enough on the news. But she met Jared herself and realized how wrong it all was. She is a lovely person and I won’t have you ruin what could be a perfect ending to this tragedy.”
There was no perfect ending to this tragedy. “Well, I hope Jared is happy. I think he deserves some happiness,” I said, the words grating, but not untrue. I was still trying to salvage things. I still needed Alex Helm to let Kelly come back to Primary at church.
He began to pick at the bits of debris on the steps, which were already nearly clean enough to eat off of. A bit of an aspen leaf. A pebble. A wrapper probably carried from the street to here, or possibly tossed by a child on the way home from school.
“Do you know, I told Jared not to marry Carrie?” he said as he collected the bits into his hand. “I knew about her past problems. I thought he could do better. But he insisted. He wanted so much to save her. And then she turned back to it. Whoring again.” He looked me in the eye, and I knew that he knew what Aaron Weston was, and what he had done. I wouldn’t have called it whoring, but I knew what he meant.
Alex Helm did a strange thing then, and put the pebble into his mouth, chewing at it like it was a bit of gum. There was a long, uncomfortable moment of sympathy between us. I hated that he seemed to be the one person who saw this picture the same way that I did. I did not like to think that I had so much in common with someone like him.
“I appreciate what you and Jared did for Carrie, giving her a safe haven,” I said, even if it hadn’t lasted long. I could see him moving the pebble around inside his mouth, which was distracting. “Jared was a good husband,” I admitted.
Alex Helm nodded. “He was a good husband. If he ever hurt her, it was for her own good. She knew that, too. It was why she loved him so much.”
For her own good? No, I thought. I could go a certain distance to see another person’s point of view, but not that far. I stood up and brushed off my pants. “Well, thank you for your time,” I said, though I hadn’t even begun to ask him about Kelly and Primary. Perhaps the Presidency would have to do that on their own. I couldn’t do everything.
“Do you know,” Alex Helm said suddenly, “when she called him, she begged him for forgiveness. She said that she had always been looking for a place where she belonged. As if a whore like that could ever belong anywhere.”
I tamped down my emotional response to his word choice. “And what did Jared tell her?”
“He told her the truth, that he couldn’t take her back into the house with Kelly. He couldn’t let her contaminate their daughter anymore.” He spat out the pebble into his hand and examined it.
I had tried. I really had.
My heart felt as if it were beating outside of my chest, I could hear it so clearly. I couldn’t fix this.
There was a sound behind Alex Helm, and I caught a quick glimpse of messy blonde curls before the door flew open.
“Sister Wallheim!” Kelly shouted, and ran barefoot toward me.
Alex Helm caught her and moved swiftly back to the door without a word to me. As if I didn’t deserve even a farewell. He closed the door in my face, and the last I saw of Kelly were her feet kicking over her grandfather’s shoulder.
I FINISHED THE laundry at home, then started on dinner. I had to do something about what I’d found out about Carrie Helm and her father, but what? Drive down to his house and smash into it? Take a chainsaw with me and see if I could get close enough to take off some body parts? I felt wrung out after my conversation with Alex Helm, as if nothing I did was ever going to matter, and what was the point? Why was I pretending that I could change the world?
I had originally planned to make some chicken stew for dinner, which required two stalks of celery, an onion and a carrot. I had taken out a whole five-pound bag of carrots, a triple bag of celery stalks, and a whole ten-pound Costco bag of onions. And then I had peeled and chopped my way through all of them, telling myself that I would freeze them, that it wasn’t a waste. It was a useful therapeutic exercise.
But then I got out the potatoes. The fifty-pound bag we’d gotten in November when, in a parking lot on the way home from work, Kurt had seen a truck advertising fresh potatoes, straight from the ground in neighboring Idaho. We had barely made a dent in it, in part because the potatoes were so dirty it took more effort to peel them.
I rinsed, scrubbed, and peeled every potato. I diced them, cubed them, and shredded them. I packed them into the gallon-size Ziploc bags (also from Costco) and then put them in the freezer. And when I was done with that, I got out chicken. I boiled it, froze the stock, and then shredded the chicken. My hands had tiny cuts all over them by then, and there were probably flecks of blood all over the food. My wrists ached and my feet were on fire from standing for so long. But it all felt good. Anything felt good. It reminded me I was alive.
“Um, Mom?” asked Samuel when he got home from school. “Is there something wrong?”
“I’m just doing some prep work,” I said, as if it was no big deal.
“For the next millennium?” he asked.
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said.
“Mom—do you know something I don’t know? Did Dad tell you about a letter he got?” asked Samuel.
I took a moment to look at him. My beautiful son, scared because I was too caught up in my attempts to mother people I couldn’t mother. Why couldn’t it be enough for me to mother him?
Because he didn’t need me anymore. Not really.
“You think the apocalypse will be announced by the First Presidency in a letter?” I said.
“I was thinking more along the lines of the Second Coming,” said Samuel, smiling faintly.
Yes, let’s make this into a joke. A very, very funny joke. “There has to be all that other stuff first. Gog and Magog. The prophets lying in the streets. Blood on the moon.”
“The blood on the moon thing already happened. Didn’t you hear? Neil Armstrong got into a fight with some Russian astronauts.”
I raised my eyebrows. “And we never heard about it?”
“The Russians didn’t want to admit they’d lost the fight, so there’s been a cover-up for years.”
“But you found out about it—?” I asked.
“On the Internet,” said Samuel. “Of course.”
“Yeah. Of course,” I said. He had gotten me out of myself enough that I could see what the kitchen looked like. The sink was filled to the top with potato peelings. The kitchen garbage was overflowing onto the floor. There was pink from blood mingled with vegetable juice all over the countertops, and the handle of one the knives had come off. I’d stuck the knife into the wooden cutting board before ignoring it and moving on.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” I said.
“It looks like someone got you really mad,” said Samuel.
“Then it is what it looks like,” I said. I started to clean up then. Samuel helped me. And then I got some actual stew cooking, though it was a bit after Kurt got home that it was ready to eat.
I was a mess. My kitchen was a mess. My house was a mess. My family was a mess. My whole world was a mess.
I had tried to help Kelly Helm, and I had failed and I was never going to make up for the daughter I had let die. She was always going to be dead and there would never be anyone to fill the hole in my heart.
We ate in near silence, though I could see Kurt and Samuel sharing meaningful glances over the table. As soon as Samuel had cleared his place, he skedaddled, leaving Kurt and me at the dinner table. I stood up, swayed with exhaustion, and broke into tears.
He eased me back down, moving his chair close enough to mine that I was half sitting on him. I wished I didn’t feel so squished against him. But the reality was that when you got to be our age, it seemed like things didn’t fit the way they used to.
“You’re allowed to cry, you know,” he said.
Which only made me cry louder. “Thanks.”
“Bad day?” he asked.
“You could say that,” I said, though I didn’t elaborate.
“You know, it makes me feel like there is something wrong with me, that you almost never let me see you cry. About anything.”
I realized we were actually talking about what was wrong, the deep wrong that had been put away. “You know, you haven’t cried about it in ages, either,” I pointed out.
“I cried about it at the time. For weeks, if you recall. And I kept waiting to see you break down. Other women would have spent days at home alone. But you didn’t. You just got right back up and moved on with your life, as if nothing had happened. As if there was nothing wrong.” He had pulled away from me and was examining me. It reminded me of nothing so much as when Alex Helm had looked down at the pebble in his hand after he’d cleaned it in his mouth.
That was the problem between us. It had always been the problem. I was worried that Kurt was judging me and finding me wanting. It had become even worse since he was called to the bishopric. He was the one who was superior. He had better access to God. He had the priesthood and could use it to give blessings, to call down God’s voice with his own words. What did I have? I was a mother, and I had lost my way and wasn’t sure I was ever going to find it again.
“Say something,” Kurt begged. “I always know you’re all right if you’re talking.”
I sighed. He wanted words. Fine. I would let them out. “It was just that I couldn’t see how it would ever be right again. And saying that out loud—it felt like I was being unfaithful. Like you would tell me I wasn’t allowed to be so broken.” I looked up to search his face, but he turned away.
“I don’t know what I would have said then, Linda. I can’t say I would have known the right thing. But I wish we hadn’t gotten into the habit of silence.”
“People always try to talk about the compensations. That you get blessings from trials. That you have little angels watching over you if you have lost children. But I don’t feel like she is here with us. I never feel it. It makes me wonder why. If there is something wrong with her. Or with me. With us.”
“I don’t know. I don’t feel her, either. But maybe we’re keeping her away somehow. Maybe it still hurts too much to feel her.”
“So it’s my fault?” I said softly. “Because I’m still sad?”
“No. I didn’t mean that.” Kurt tried to move the chairs closer, gave up, and let me slide away from him onto my own chair. But he grabbed my hand and held it tightly. As if he and I were crossing the busiest street in the world together. “If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. And I’m sorry. I wasn’t there for you, when you needed me. How you needed me. I’ve always wondered how it is that I could be called to be bishop, to be there for other people, when I wasn’t there for you.”
“And now?” I asked.
He let out a short, barking laugh. “Now I know that being bishop is just God’s way of letting you see all your flaws. It’s not just you I haven’t been there for. I try to do what I can, but afterward, it always seems like it wasn’t enough, or it was at the wrong moment, or that I said the wrong words to the wrong people.”
“So you discovered that you’re not enough for anyone?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Kurt let out a low breath.
“Join the club,” I said. I told him about what had happened with Alex Helm. Kurt was my bishop, as well as my husband, and at times that felt awkward. But at the moment it felt good, like we could connect on even more points than before.
“And Gwen Ferris came to visit,” I added after a moment’s hesitation. Was it my secret to share? She hadn’t sworn me to silence. I wasn’t her bishop. There was no expectation of confidence. But she had trusted me, and I couldn’t share lightly.
“Did she tell you what she would never tell me?”
“You knew?” I said.
Kurt shook his head. “I don’t know what it is. But I know she’s held something back. Some heavy burden. I wasn’t even sure that Brad knew about it.”
“He knew,” I said, and then I explained it. All about Gwen Ferris’s father, and about Carrie Helm’s, as well. Aaron Weston, the man I had felt for a moment as he spoke at the funeral would be an apostle or possibly a prophet. How was it that we could ever believe that we had real inspiration after an experience like that? But I couldn’t give up the hope that next time, I would have learned better to tell the difference between a good liar and God’s truth.
“Something has to be done to stop him,” I said, sometime long past midnight, still sitting in the kitchen amidst the dishes of dinner that I had yet to put into the dishwasher.
“Yes, but what?” said Kurt.
“Can’t you call a church trial or something? He should be excommunicated at the very least. A man like that in the same church with us—it makes me want to run away like Carrie Helm did.”
“Hmm,” said Kurt. And he guided me upstairs, tucked me in bed with a kiss on the forehead, and then went back down the stairs. He was on the phone most of the night in his bishop’s office.