He hesitated, his smile slipping for only a moment, and then nodded. “Sure. It’s down that hall. Last door on the left. Right past the bedroom.”
Once in the powder room, she locked the door, leaned against it. Alone, her fears seemed foolish. She waited a few minutes and then flushed the toilet in case he was listening. She was being a baby. Completely paranoid. She was just not used to being alone with a man. I used to see you playing badminton. So he’d watched them. The thought made her feel funny but in a good kind of way, like when one of the men who sat on the benches by the harbor whistled when she walked by. She turned on the faucet and washed her hands, studied her features in the mirror, her ragged hair, her too-high forehead, trying to see what he might find attractive. Okay, so it was totally wrong to snoop, but she opened the mirrored cabinet, checked the contents, all so ordinary they mocked her fears. A box of Band-Aids, mouthwash and toothpaste—a brand that whitened, she saw and made note to buy some—a container of shaving cream, razor, aftershave. English Leather. She opened the cap, sniffed it. Although she wanted to, she resisted the urge to dab some on her wrists and replaced it on the shelf. She pulled open a drawer on the small vanity and saw a box of tampons, something the wife must have left behind when they got divorced. Or a girlfriend. A man so good-looking must have a girlfriend. She was taking too long, she knew, and he would wonder what she was doing. She closed the drawer and unlocked the door. On her return to the kitchen, she passed the bedroom, paused to take a look. The bed—a king-size bed that practically took up the entire room—was neatly made. She liked that. That he was not messy. Some men, if their wives left them, would let the house go downhill, dust everywhere, dirty dishes in the sink, yellowed sheets on the bed. Her father, for instance, didn’t even know where her mother kept the vacuum. The closet door was partially open, and she saw a row of shirts hanging neatly. She pictured him in the morning cleaning the house and at night making dinner for himself, and she wondered what he liked to eat. And if he drank. Probably something like wine. Imported. She thought of him sitting at a table, imagined herself sitting opposite him, raising her wine glass. There would be candles on the table. Again she wondered if he had a girlfriend. The unease she had felt earlier disappeared. She had been being silly.
“Hey, Rain? You okay?”
“Coming,” she called back. Shit. He’d think she’d died or something. She turned to go and caught sight of something on the surface of the bureau. She drew a sharp breath. Of course she was mistaken. It was a trick of light. From across the room it was easy to be mistaken. But as if pulled by a magnetic force, she entered the room, crossed to the bureau, picked up the stone.
“Looking for something?” He stood in the doorway.
“Where did you get this?” She held out her hand.
His mouth twisted in a smile that was not a smile. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you it isn’t polite to snoop around other people’s rooms?”
“Where did you get this?” she asked again. She held her arm toward him, her palm upheld holding Lucy’s Lucky Strike stone, the stone that contained the tears of the Apache women hiding in a cave. It was a mistake; she saw this at once. She should have pretended nothing was wrong. Rain glanced around the room, but there was no other way out except through the door that he was blocking.
“Where did I get it?” His voice was high, mimicking. “You’re just like her. Meddling in where it is no concern of yours. You girls should learn to mind your own business.”
He had changed right in front of her eyes. Turned into someone else. Something ugly. How could she have ever thought he was good-looking? She needed to make him stop talking. If he didn’t tell her any more, she would be able to leave. She forced herself to be calm. Casually, as if it were no more than a beach pebble taken from the shore, she turned and put the stone back on the dresser. “It’s pretty. I was just wondering what kind it was. My grandfather used to know all about the different kinds of stones.”
It was too late. She understood that at once. He came toward her. Came for her. She stepped back until the bureau pressed against her spine. Her throat closed against a swift and fierce desire. She wanted her mother. Her mother who once could make things right, who had held her when she had nightmares or scraped her knee. But she was alone with no one to protect her. She remembered then a story she had heard on the news about a man, a convicted murderer, who had escaped from prison and had broken into a house looking for drugs. Somewhere in the South it had been. And a woman had been home alone and he had taken her hostage. He was going to kill her, and she had prevented him from doing so by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
“Our Father,” Rain began.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
As Father Gervase left Rose Manor, he reflected, as he often did after these visits, about how very much the patients wanted to talk about their pasts, histories that in the telling assumed a surprising vitality and importance, more alive than the present.
Just this afternoon, after she had taken Communion, Mrs. Carlotto, now blind and confined to bed with the latest in a series of shattered bones, the pelvis this time, had kept him at her bedside talking, stories he had heard before of her days as a nursery school teacher. Staring with cloudy eyes into a place only she could see, she spoke animatedly about her students as if only yesterday she had stood in the classroom writing on the chalkboard. “Memories are all I have left,” she had told him one day. “The thing is, I only remember the good ones.” Father Gervase wondered if that were true, that unpleasant recollections faded. He hoped it was so, although it was his experience that the sins of his past, the disappointments and losses, remained as vivid as ever. The sins of commission and those of omission. It was the sins of omission that troubled him now. He thought of all the parishioners he had failed mightily over the years. And of course he thought of his one profound failure beside which all others faded. To understand forgiveness, his mentor had said, it was first necessary to forgive ourselves. Had he? Was it possible to forgive himself for failing Cecelia? His one big secret sorrow. The secret sorrow the world knows not. Who said that? Longfellow? Yes, he was pretty sure it was Longfellow.