Months passed. And gradually, but sooner than you might think possible given all that had happened, we adapted and we managed to carve out a precarious new normalcy. Sophie moved back home. She gained weight, her belly again slightly mounded in the way I loved, and I teased her that this was evidence of my good cooking. We smiled about that later. Eventually, not long after the trial, she got back to work on finishing her book, her way to honor our daughter, and I returned to the boat barn and worked on the panels of the saints, their faces holding both agony and ecstasy, sorrow and joy. Some days she would come with me and sit in the rocking chair I had carted there for her, and she would watch quietly as the saints grew to their sixty-foot fullness. And so both of us, in our own way, and in our own time, experienced the remarkable resiliency of the human body and mind and our capacity to not only endure but to heal.
Some nights, when my determination to block them was weakest, thoughts would creep in of all Lucy had endured those moments in the woods with Payton Hayes, and I would recall, too, the long-ago nights when I would wander around Port Fortune searching faces for a sign of evil, a mark to show me who had killed our daughter, and it sickened me to think he had been there all along. Right next door, nodding to me when we crossed paths, waving while watering his lawn, posing as a saint, evil concealed. For evil exists. It is not a theological question. It exists.
But so does goodness, so does goodness. I would remind myself of this on those dark nights of the soul. And in the darkness, as if they were talismans, I would draw close to me thoughts of Sophie and Lucy and Father Gervase, and the faces of the ancient saints.
EPILOGUE
“This is a most extraordinary day,” Cardinal Kneeland intones.
On this extraordinary day, the archbishop gazes down on those gathered in the cathedral, looks out at the ordinary people who occupy the pews. Two years have passed since he set all in motion by sending a parish priest on a mission to ask Will Light to paint saints for this cathedral, although there are those who would say all that followed really started months before that with the murder of Lucy Light. Now, along with the invited dignitaries and the media, the governor and the members of the Arts and Furnishings Committee, they have gathered here, the curious and the faithful. And the people Will has painted.
There in the first pew, which has been set aside for the models, sits Mary Silveria, the young widow with three children whom Will has always thought of as his first saint. Her youngest, the infant he had saved from falling that distant day in the grocery store, is now a chubby toddler and sits next to his older sister, who has outgrown her love of red licorice. Lick wish. Next to them sits Constantos Anastas, who posed as Martin de Porres and to whom, within the year, Mary will be wed. The beekeeper and the baker and the clerk from the coffee shop are there. And Elaine Neal, the bookstore owner whose arthritis is now so advanced she is confined to a wheelchair, and Joseph Souza, who runs the bait shop near the harbor. Alonzo Americo has closed the bakery for this day and, with his wife and seven sons, sits with head tilted up, scanning the panels as if looking through a family album. It is his youngest son who first locates his father’s face among the saints. Yes, there he is, the third figure in the first panel to the left of the altar. Saint Crispin. The widower Jules Cavanaugh sits alone. When he locates Saint Ambrose, he thinks of how proud his wife would have been at this moment, and his eyes grow moist. Next to him, Harold Weaver is moved to whisper a prayer. And him, not even a Catholic.
Lena MacDougall believes they should have been given better seating and leans over to whisper this to Miriam Endelheim, with whom, improbably, she has found more in common that she would have once believed possible. Miriam—Saint Elizabeth—smiles gently and pats Lena’s hand in consolation.
Teachers and students from the school are there. And Coach Davis. And Jared Phillips, for whom Lucy had broken a promise to her parents and gone for a ride with him so they could talk about holding a fund-raiser for SADD. Tracy Ramos, Will Light’s Rose of Lima, is here with her child. And here is the LaBrea family. Rain, now a high school senior, sits between her mother and Dr. Mallory, the family she was born into and the family she created, the mother who gave her life and the little woman who helped her return to life during a dark time of despair. She is clad, without a word of argument, in a dress. And heels. In one hand she holds the Lucky Strike stone Lucy had given her when they became sworn sisters. Her brother is here too, home from college for this celebration, and is accompanied by his partner, a boy who no longer remains Duane’s secret, the secret he once confided only to Lucy Light. There is something in his hand, too. Yoda, returned to him by Lucy’s parents.
The archbishop takes his seat, and the cathedral choir begins to sing. Will sits in his chair next to Cardinal Kneeland and lets the anthem wash over him, recognizes it as one Sophie used to teach the high school chorus for one of the holiday concerts. He scans the crowds, looking for each of his models, and then lifts his eyes to the six panels. Forty-two saints. A saint for everything and everyone, Sophie had once told him. Saints who, when tested, discovered what they were capable of and what they were not, as Will and Sophie have these past two years. He closes his eyes against the memory of that afternoon in his neighbor’s bedroom, the gun in his raised hand, the barrel pointing straight at Payton Hayes. He had thought himself capable of it, welcomed it even, this act of killing the man who had murdered his daughter and left her body to lie in the woods. And only Father Gervase had stopped him, falling to the floor, crying out in pain.
Sophie is there. Will smiles as he looks down at her. And at their son, the child conceived that long ago weekend at the cottage in Maine.
There are those missing in this gathering, among them Leon Newell, who only last month died of stomach cancer, although Jossie has come. “Wouldn’t for the world miss a chance to see old Leon as a saint,” she told her friends. Cancer has also claimed Lorna Vogler who posed as Catherine. Payton Hayes is not there, of course. Nor the saint he was to represent.
Among the absent but ever present is, of course, Lucy. Father Gervase—the little priest who, shortly after rescuing Rain LaBrea, had died of a massive coronary and in doing so saved Will—is not here. But his presence, like Lucy’s, is here. Will raises his eyes to look at the final figure in the end panel, the unnamed saint representing the potential in everyone, and gazes into the face of Father Gervase. From high above them the little priest stands, the only one among them with hands not clasped but with arms held wide, seeming to offer a benediction to them all.
Doughnuts in air.
Do not despair.
“Do you believe in coincidence?” the priest had asked Will one day. And another time, if he believed in miracles.
“Not the kind you mean, Father,” he’d replied.
“Tell me, then, what kind?”
“The fact that there exists in the desert a certain insect, the cochineal, that lives on cacti and the bodies of the female produce a dye the most stunning shade of red,” he’d said. “That’s miracle enough for me.”
“Ah yes,” the priest had responded. “Ordinary miracles.”
The words seem to float down over the crowd, bathing each one. Sinners and saints.
Ordinary. Miracles.
THE END