After Sophie left for Maine, I closed the door to my studio and walked away. If I’d had a deadbolt on the door, I would have shot it home. I no longer climbed the flight of stairs to the top floor each morning. Instead, I poured my energy into chores that had been neglected for months. A faucet that dripped in the first-floor bathroom off the kitchen. The peeling paint on the sill over the kitchen sink. Tasks that required nothing of me but mindless labor. I finally got around to properly repairing a broken window in the dining room. Earlier in the spring someone had thrown a baseball through it, leaving a perfect hole in the center with a web of cracks radiating from it. The ball had landed on the table, chipping the ceramic bowl we had brought home from a trip to Italy. I had been infuriated that we were targets of such an act of vandalism and wanted to call the police, but Sophie had convinced me to let it go. “What on earth do you think they can do about it?” she’d said, her voice tinged with a bitterness she rarely betrayed. “If they can’t find who killed Lucy, I doubt they will find who did this.” There was no arguing with that, so I’d patched the worst of it with duct tape and waited for the new pane I ordered to come in, but I never got around to replacing it. So last week I had retrieved it from the basement and carried it outside, where I set it on the grass while I went to get the stepladder from the garden shed. As I’d worked cutting out the old putty, setting in the new pane, inserting glazier’s points to hold it in place until the new putty set, I’d felt the ever-present anger stir that someone would target us for such vandalism. A boy, I’d imagined, one with an arm strong enough to hurl the ball across the yard, although it was far too late to do anything about it at that point.
Another day last week, looking for yet another chore to fill the time and searching for hedge clippers to tackle the shrubs along the back of the property, I found a pile of stakes in the shed and impulsively took them to mark off the lines for a patio in the backyard that I had once considered constructing. I had gotten as far as plotting the design for the bricks, a basket-weave pattern. I’d imagined it as a place where we could gather in the late afternoons or where Lucy could spend time with her friends. Before. I ordered four pallets of bricks, and while waiting for them to be delivered, I prepped the space, cutting up sod and leveling the ground (my father had drilled the importance of careful preparation necessary for every job, telling me that was where a project failed or succeeded), and was aware occasionally of eyes on me, in that inexplicable way one had when being watched. Once I saw Payton Hayes watching from his kitchen window. He’d waved and moments later appeared to ask if I wanted a beer or cold drink. We had spoken only once since I had seen him in his office. He had phoned to see how I had made out with Gillian Donaldson. I’d given him a brief report, and we had each gone back to our own lives.
The only other witnesses to my work were the finches that nested in the elm and the two ropes of Lucy’s swing, which, with the seat now gone, swayed freely from a limb like severed arteries. Sometimes I would catch their movement out of the edge of my vision and imagined Lucy sitting in her swing watching me in silent companionship, a thought that brought sharp pain, but also an odd and completely unexpected comfort.
Once started, I worked on the patio obsessively, plying trowel and level and spreading stone dust, bending to the precise task of laying bricks in the pattern I had devised. It occurred to me it was a futile task as I no longer had a family to gather there, but still as the work progressed I felt the stirrings of something, not quite excitement or pleasure and certainly not joy, but a stirring nonetheless. At first I put it down to the satisfaction of doing the work, physical labor that helped me sleep better at night, but when I tracked it back to the first faint stirrings, I thought of the woman in the market, her laughter, the quick drawing I’d done of her.
You do paint saints.
Do it for Lucy.
I resisted. You have no idea how I resisted. I wanted none of it. Even the thought of agreeing to accept the commission caused a hot flush of irritation, as if it would indicate an acceptance of a religion I didn’t believe in and a church I didn’t belong to, surrendering to something I couldn’t name.
What are you afraid of?
The more I struggled and resisted, the stronger the ghost echoes grew and the more a possibility took shape in my mind just as the patio took shape beneath my hands.
The saints were ordinary people.
You do paint saints.
Wherever I went these words of Father Gervase’s stayed with me, a ghost staking out territory in my head as certainly as I had staked out the space for the bricks I now laid. If I were a more fanciful man—or a more superstitious one—I would say it was as if the little priest had put a curse on me.
I began to see saints.
I saw them in the streets and shops of Port Fortune. It wasn’t that I was visualizing dead people in halos and robes, but instead flashes of something in the features of my fellow townspeople, glimpses that briefly transformed a face, revealing an essence of goodness or virtue or a wisdom born of pain. They fit no single profile. They were men and women and even youth with expressions that were worn or serene, gaunt or well-nourished, na?ve or experienced, happy or worried or bitter. They were white, and black, and varying shades of brown. Ordinary people going about their daily business and spanning all of life’s stages. A hefty boy on a trail bike. A fisherman with a face seamed with a web of deep lines. A balding man with stooped shoulders sitting at the bar in the coffee shop. One night I again saw, sitting on the wooden fence at the playground, the slight-framed teen with an expression at once desperate and proud and lonely, and I’d been reminded of the martyred youth who’d been pierced with arrows in the book of saints Father Gervase had brought to my house. Saint Sebastian.
The saints are us.
The irony was bitter. In the past months, ever since Lucy’s murder, I had looked into the faces of the townspeople and seen only the possibility of cruelty and alienation, mean-spiritedness and the real potential for evil. Now, as if I possessed the vision of some other person—some stranger, a madman or monk—I began to see in them a fleeting aura of the possibility of goodness. A sort of halo effect. Regardless of what life had taught me, of what I had learned of humanity and its potential for pettiness, for betrayal and greed and envy and the most grievous of human sins, it seemed anyone might appear a saint. I remembered what the priest had told me. Saints come from every page in history and from every part of the globe.
The saints are ordinary people.
Gradually, despite my deep reluctance and resistance, a vision took shape. A gathering of the saints. Not on individual canvases but in two triptychs. Six panels. All ages and colors. Receiving Communion.
For Lucy.
And then, one day when the last brick was laid and the patio finished, without forethought or conscious intention, I climbed the stairs to the third-floor studio and unlocked the door.
PART TWO
SAINTS
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
—Oscar Wilde
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
As always, with the arrival of summer, Port Fortune geared up for the influx of tourists and seasonal residents.