On the top landing I inhaled the scent of oil paints and turpentine sinking down from the studio, and I was taken briefly by the familiarity of it and was comforted. For a moment I understood why Sophie had fallen for the science—the pseudoscience—of aromatherapy, why she had selected hand soap scented with eucalyptus, furniture polish imbued with the oil of lemons or oranges, and why, at night, she’d sprayed our pillows with a mist of lavender—ordered online and shipped from France—that was supposed to induce deep sleep. Used to spray, I thought and wondered if, when she’d moved to the rented condo three weeks before, she’d packed the blue aerosol bottle along with her bath salts and body lotions. It was all I could do not to go down to the room we’d once shared and check, afraid that if the spray was gone it would hold a significance I was not ready to face.
I switched the fan back on and returned to the worktable where I took up my brush, unwrapped it from the foil, and approached the easel. In the past, I had received a certain level of renown for my portraits—features in the arts sections of the New York Times and Washington Post, a four-page spread in Arts in America; exhibits in Germany and China; commissions from corporations, politicians, actors—and I gathered it was this attention that had led to Cardinal Kneeland’s offering the commission. No doubt I would have refused anyway—even before September I would have avoided getting involved with the church—but since Lucy was murdered I had no interest in portraits and the necessary intimacy they involved. When I’d finally begun to paint again, I had turned to still life, finding in it a distance that allowed me to breathe, as if it were a door opening to another world. There remained a narrative in the work, but no people. I had never been very social, but after Lucy was killed I had given up on people. And who, knowing my story, could have blamed me? In still life I found something remotely identifiable as, if not truth, at least escape. I have never understood people who mistook still life for static. There is so much there in the line and light and composition that contains the power to stir me and draw me in and allows me—momentarily—to almost forget. And even if it was only an hour or two of reprieve, I would take it. As I stood there, I wondered again if Sophie knew about the commission. Had Father Gervase told her he was coming? I remembered another of our recent arguments. “Maybe you’re content to spend every waking hour just going through the motions, mad at the world,” she’d said. She turned to me then, and I’d seen the gleam of tears in her eyes. “I’m really sorry, Will. Really, I am. The thing is, maybe you can live that way, but I don’t think I can.”
Of course she couldn’t. Not Sophie. I knew she was frightened by my anger, fury that at times shook even me, a force field that repulsed others and isolated me. Nights I would wake from the nightmares I’d had ever since the fall, when the police had given us the news, when I had gone to formally identify our daughter’s ruined body, I had lain in the dark and—fueled by this rage—held on to the grim hope, the weak consolation, that someday I’d be able to find and kill the unknown person who murdered our daughter. Almost from the first I began to devise elaborate plots of torture, graphic plans involving things I wouldn’t have believed my mind was capable of inventing. I hadn’t yet learned the deeds we are capable of. That knowledge would come later, in the summer. Those fantasies and my newborn capacity for violence, my need for retribution, I kept to myself. Once—in the early-morning dimness and tired of being alone with these thoughts—I’d woken Sophie. Soph, I’d said, if you found out who murdered Lucy and you absolutely knew you wouldn’t get caught, do you think you could kill that person? She had turned to me, not even trying to conceal her horror. No, of course not, she said, and then added with a conviction I did not share, Nor could you, Will. Violence is never the answer to violence. Well, the truth is we have no earthly idea how we will act when faced with the unimaginable. So I continued to exist in a deep and private grief from which I was cut off from everyone—even Sophie, especially her—and left to my own sorrow. I had lost my daughter, and I had lost my way, and it wasn’t getting better.
The painting I was working on that morning depicted an Anjou pear, a wedge of cheese, and an ornate silver fruit knife, all on a blue-rimmed plate I’d selected from the collection of goblets and platters and teapots we’d picked up over the years. I put brush to paint, and as I looked at the order and simplicity of the arrangement on the canvas in front of me, I experienced a mix of relief and guilt to know that while I labored to capture the sharpness of a fold in the cloth that draped the table, the precise shade and texture of the fruit’s flesh, I would be able to escape not only the past but the reality of life outside this room, as if I had entered a great tunnel leading to a parallel world.
I looked at the fruit on the blue dish and then thought: Pears. Not pairs. Pears. Perhaps that was what the priest had said. Doughnuts and pears.
CHAPTER THREE
“Do not despair.”
As he pulled out of the driveway, Father Gervase heard the echo of his parting words to Will Light and recalled Will as he’d stood in the foyer, his face molded by the strange beauty of sorrow, a grief so personal and manifest he wore it like second skin. He remembered, too, the man’s posture, his closed-up body that spoke loudly of his rage, and he knew how facile, how empty, those words must have seemed and felt the insufficiency of them, knew full well his own inadequacy. Surely there was something he might have said that would have comforted or consoled, or even indicated by holding silent that he had seen Will’s pain, a witnessing that in itself could comfort. He hesitated for an instant, considered going back, but didn’t. Will—his anger and grief—had unsettled him. Still, this did not acquit him. He was aware of his cowardice and was ashamed.
He wrenched the steering wheel, took the corner too widely, veered into the oncoming lane, saw, at the last minute, the motorcycle, and swerved. The bike skidded sideways and then straightened, avoiding a collision by a matter of feet. Maybe inches. As the biker roared off, and even knowing he couldn’t possibly be heard, Father Gervase murmured, “Sorry. Sorry.” He felt slightly light-headed. The noise and color outside the car seemed to intensify and press against him, flustering him, and for a moment everything was unfamiliar, as if he had taken a wrong turn. He lowered the window for some air and sighed. A dry and shaky exhalation. Like someone’s grandmother. Like his own Nana Gervase.