The waitress approached the table but, sensing Will’s distress, turned away. He closed his fingers tightly around the figure and shut his eyes, clearly trying to gain composure. “Think,” he urged. “Try to remember.”
Try to remember? As if it were that easy. He could recall so much from the past. The hazel of his sister’s eyes. The bibbed red-gingham apron his mother wore when she kneaded bread. The smell of rising yeast in their kitchen. The soft surrender of Cynthia Gibbons’s lips, though more than four decades had passed since that swift kiss. The sound of his brother’s laughter. His father’s handshake when he’d left home for the seminary. The warm halls of the seminary, steam heat fueled by the boiler in the stone-lined basement. All those were so easily retrieved that they might have happened yesterday. But more recent memories, things that in fact had happened yesterday—or last week—he found tucked in a vault beyond his reach. He stared at the tiny figure the artist held and tried to remember how it might have come into his possession, but this attempt was futile.
“Here,” he said. “If it belonged to Lucy, you should have it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was futile to remain any longer in Lucy’s bedroom.
I’d been sitting there on her bed for at least an hour, and it was growing dark but I didn’t switch on a light. I stared at the tiny Yoda as if somehow I could be able to decipher the puzzle of how it had come to be in Father Gervase’s possession. For it was her Yoda. Of that there was no doubt. For perhaps the hundredth time since the priest had handed it to me, I turned it over—as if to verify what I knew was there but couldn’t quite believe—and stared at the sole of one little reptilian foot, saw the three interwoven Ls, the personal logo Lucy had created for herself. Like a brand cowboys used to mark cattle, she had explained.
Lucy had fallen for Yoda when she was ten. I could recall as clearly as if it had been only last week the night she and seven friends had been having a sleepover with pizza and a marathon Star Wars viewing party. Once, in a lull between DVDs and as I was leaving the room after delivering the girls two more pizzas, I’d overheard bits of their conversation.
“Who would you rather have as a boyfriend,” one girl said. “Luke Skywalker or Han Solo?”
The responses seemed to be evenly divided, and I remember wondering if this foretold their future dating choices—good guy or bad boy—and I’d hung at the door, ridiculously anxious about Lucy’s response.
“Yoda,” she had said.
“Yeew,” one of the other girls said. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope,” Lucy had said. “He’s the smartest and most interesting of all.”
I relayed the conversation to Sophie, who chided me for eavesdropping on the girls, but a few days later she had surprised Lucy with a miniature Yoda. Feel the force, Lucy would say in her raspy Yoda imitation, holding the little Jedi in her hand.
Was it possible that she had given it to the priest? I didn’t believe that. It had been a gift from her mother, one she treasured, a talisman that, she once explained, when she needed clarity would help her find courage and truth. At the time, her words had stung slightly, as if my job had been appropriated by a child’s plaything. And now it had appeared—all those months after her death. I couldn’t imagine what that might mean or what, if anything, I should do about it. I cupped it in dry palms and ran a thumb over the small rough spot where once a section of a pale green ear had been affixed. When I returned home after my dinner with Father Gervase, I had been tempted to call Sophie and relate this latest development but on reflection had repressed the urge. What would be the point? To have her again fall into magical thinking and see this as some kind of mystical sign when in reality it was just one more mystery that, like our daughter’s death, was unlikely to be solved?
Do you believe the dead have an ability to communicate with us?
Several months after Lucy’s death, we had been lying in bed—this was before she had moved to the guest room—and I was just dropping off when Sophie spoke.
“What?” I’d said.
“The dead,” she said, her voice fully awake. “Do you believe they have the ability to communicate with us?”
I’d pulled myself back from sleep and turned to hold her. “Don’t do this, Soph.”
“I’m serious, Will. Haven’t you wondered too?”
“No. No, I haven’t.”
“But what if it’s possible, Will?”
“It isn’t.”
“You’re so absolutely convinced? So sure? I mean, people have experienced it.”
“Documented, I’m sure,” I’d said, not even trying to keep the cynicism from my voice. Although I understood Sophie’s need to find some source of consolation, I wanted to shake her out of this delusional thinking. I saw only more pain and disappointment ahead for her if she continued to grasp onto this path of wishful thinking, more pain I was powerless to prevent.
“How can you be so sure? I’ve been praying, you know. I’ve been praying for Lucy to send us a sign.”
“Jesus, Sophie,” I’d said before I could stop myself.
Her voice had grown soft. “You know how she loved gray seals. When I walk by the harbor, I always look for a seal. I look for one to swim close to shore. Something to let us know she’s all right.”
How “all right” do you expect her to be, I’d thought. She’s dead. Dead and gone from us forever. In the past months, people had told me it would get better with time, but that wasn’t true. It actually got worse because there was no magical thinking. Lucy was never coming home. There would be no signs. No communication from beyond the grave. She was gone.
“Oh, come on, Sophie. Signs?” I didn’t believe in that shite, the last resort of the gullible and desperate.
“Yes.” Her head on the pillow was turned toward mine, and her face, lit by moonlight, shone with a hope I found both heartbreaking and infuriating and made me want to simultaneously hold her and shake her. “Signs of something meaningful,” she continued. “A connection only those lost to us would know of. I remember reading of one instance about a woman whose father loved white owls, and on the morning of her birthday exactly one year after he died a white owl appeared in a tree outside her kitchen window. There are a lot of stories like that.”