Neil looked around. Beth must have gone to lunch and Professor Piot had already left for a meeting with the archeology students. There was no one for Neil to tell.
He looked back at the parchment. Now that he had the idea in his head he couldn’t see it any other way: The monk had been writing under some impediment. He’d been carrying an actual physical burden, even as he sat with his pen at the abbey of Saint-Jean-d’Angély. The date of the parchment was 1259, which, if Neil was remembering right, was around the time of the Inquisition of Languedoc. Local bishops would have been busy rooting out seditious thoughts among their clergy, especially in France, where the Cathars and other heretical groups had been challenging the church for some time. Neil had read about priests made to walk barefoot across Europe because of minute differences in the interpretation of the liturgy, the placement of the and in the naming of the Holy Trinity, things that seemed so laughably trivial now that it was hard to imagine heaven and hell had once hung in the balance.
Magdalena’s letter was lying open next to the monk’s parchment. Do not worry so much for why, only please tell to father to call my mother . . . Neil thought of Dijana and Nan’s red shoes. He thought of his father, so weighted down by a made-up memory that he couldn’t do much more than inch through life, and he knew what Professor Piot would say: A historian must not hide the facts for the sake of protecting the people or nations or ideas that are close to his heart. Neil checked his watch. It was still early morning in the States, but his father always got up early.
Neil left the monk’s documents where they were and went back downstairs to get his phone, thinking about how he would describe to his father the effort it must have taken the monk to form each letter, as every adjustment of the pen made the rough metal bands dig more deeply into the raw places on his wrists. He would tell his father about the trials of the early Inquisitions, and his father would picture the monk sitting silent, holding fast to some unsanctioned detail of faith while the church authorities measured out the weight of his heresy in iron—both of them remembering the thing with the school board and how Neil’s father had refused the lawyer the teacher’s union offered him and wouldn’t talk to the people from the newspaper when they asked if he denied the allegations. How he’d asked Neil to please just believe him, and how that hadn’t been enough.
There would be a silence, and then, if his father didn’t start talking first, and if the moment seemed right, Neil would tell him about Magdalena’s letter and Dijana and the shoes.
Neil got his phone out of the locker, but he hesitated a moment before he dialed the number, imagining his father, a little stunned, probably sitting alone at Nan and Pop’s old kitchen table, in the place he’d always thought she must have sat, finally knowing for sure that his mother really had abandoned him.
But then Neil thought about Dijana, who obviously really liked his father, and how she’d gotten all dressed up when she thought he was coming to dinner. He dialed the number. He thought about Inga Beart, who’d been too busy being famous to visit her son even once, who’d given his dad so little of herself that he’d had to invent a memory of her just to get by, and he thought about Nan, who must have bought herself a pair of fancy shoes in a moment of extravagance and then kicked them deep into the back of her closet when she found out they gave her blisters, never imagining that in the time she’d had them on, the little kid Neil’s dad had been had made an imaginary mother for himself.
The old answering machine chimed. Neil hoped his father wouldn’t take it too hard.
“You have reached Walter and Catherine Hurley. We probably couldn’t make it to the phone in time, or else we’re out in the yard . . .”
“Hey dad,” Neil said. “I’m really sorry it’s been such a long time, but, ah, that Lithuanian lady, you know, Dijana? I think she’d really like to hear from you. Actually, kind of a crazy thing—she found some shoes in Nan’s closet, some red ones, like you always said you—well, she’ll tell you all about it. I have her number here . . .” and so on, imagining the sound of his voice slowly turning those tired tapes on the old machine next to Pop’s chair, on top of the box where Nan used to keep coupons. He imagined his father coming in to find the little light blinking, rewinding the tape a couple of times to be sure he’d heard right, then picking up the old rotary phone and dialing the string of numbers that would ring to Dijana’s apartment with its lace and cooking smells, where, surely, somebody would answer.
Then, though he knew he ought to get back to his documents, Neil left the archives and hurried back to the oyster bar whose dumpster he had chosen to throw his father’s Christmas gifts into earlier that morning, when he’d been thinking that no matter how bad he felt about Dijana’s homemade socks, that dumpster was the one place where he wouldn’t be tempted to retrieve them.
The garbage hadn’t been collected yet, and Neil rolled up his sleeves and ignored the looks from people on the sidewalk as he plunged his arm in up to the elbow. He almost passed out when he accidentally grabbed something with legs and long limp antennae, but he kept at it, digging past shells and old lemons until he felt the edge of the shopping bag. Except for the smell and an orange stain on the toe of one of the socks, the Christmas gifts were fine.
Neil couldn’t put off sending the presents again, so he went straight to the post office on rue de Moussy, where the clerk wrinkled her nose but gave Neil an airmail envelope and a wet paper towel for his hands.
“Priority or Express?” she asked.
“Express,” Neil said. “It’s a Christmas present.”
The clerk looked at him oddly.
“Last Christmas,” Neil said.
“Seventy-four euros.”
“Oh,” Neil said.