The Gospel of Winter Read online

  I fixed my posture immediately. Every idiot with a beating heart knew Josie Fenton and Sophie Harrington. So many of us at CDA thought of them as celebrities, as if life would be glamorous if you carried yourself the right way. For a brief stint that fall, Josie had dated a senior, but she had called it off after only a month. I was used to looking at Josie and talking to her with my eyes. She sat in front of me in Honors English 10. I imagined combing my hand through her long brown hair. She cocked her head while she wrote at her desk, making her hair fall to one side. It would expose the smooth, cool slope of her neck, the spot where there was no better place to kiss a girl, I thought. Sophie had a different reputation, which too many guys were too eager to brag about—and since guys were always looking at her, she had developed the confidence to stare back with her dark eyes and thin-lipped smirk that made her look older than the rest of us, or at least more cynical.

  Mother was obviously delusional enough to think the girls talked to me at school because they were her friends’ daughters, and she wore one of those smiles I wasn’t supposed to let fall as she dragged them through the room toward me. “Be a good host now,” she said as she withdrew herself. “You have guests tonight too.”

  Josie and Sophie stood beside me, peering through the crowd as if they were looking for someone. In their high heels and close-fitting skirts, they looked like the adults in the room. I got up and wiped my palms on my legs. “I didn’t know you were coming tonight,” I said, and knew I’d lost the only moment I had to offer up some wit or charm.

  “Last-minute kind of thing, I guess,” Sophie said. The lone freckle on her pale cheek rose up her face as she smiled.

  “Hope it didn’t ruin any other plans?”

  “No. Whatever,” Sophie said. Josie flashed a quick smile. She wore silver earrings with blue beads that matched her eyes.

  “I hope they didn’t bribe you to come here.”

  “Come on,” Josie said, rolling her eyes. She sounded tired. “Everyone knows your mother throws great parties. No one turns down an invitation, right?” She glanced toward the bar. “Look at all that alcohol.”

  Even if she didn’t mean it, I appreciated it. “Can I offer you a drink?” I asked her.

  She was still gazing at something back in the foyer and remained quiet. Sophie looked at her. “Maybe a couple of Diet Cokes?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean a real drink.”

  “What?” Josie asked quickly. “Really?”

  “It’s a party, right?”

  “That’d be cool,” Sophie said. “My mother will be smashed, anyway.”

  “Mine would probably encourage it,” I said. “Especially if she saw me hanging out with the two of you all night.” They shot tight-lipped glances at each other, and so I quickly, added, “And Mark’s here.”

  “Mark Kowolski?” Josie asked.

  “See if you can drag him away from his father. He’s got Mark leashed to a pack of guys in the living room, last I saw.”

  “Oooh, a rescue,” Sophie said. “We can handle that. Where do we meet you with the drinks?”

  I gave them directions across the foyer to Old Donovan’s study. They threaded their arms and moved away as one unit, squeezing through the crowd in the library. It looked like a dance and, probably because they were in my house, I thought maybe I could join them.

  I convinced the bartender to give me a couple of unopened bottles of soda water and some wineglasses, and I marched through the party as quickly as I could. When I got to Old Donovan’s study, they were all there. Josie and Sophie walked alongside one wall of books. They weren’t scowling. They didn’t hush up as I approached. In fact, I was surprised: They looked like they were having a good time. Mark stood by the giant sepia-toned globe that stood between two leather chairs.

  “Your dad likes to read, huh?” Josie asked. “He has this office and the library out there?”

  “What’s a dad?” I said as I put the bottles on the desk. Sophie turned and gave me a sympathetic look. Josie nodded.

  “The boss,” Mark said. “Results! That’s my dad. Results, results, results.”

  “Maybe he’ll have a breakdown,” Josie said. “That’s what happened to my dad. Now he’s, like, Ayurveda-vinyasa Dad.”

  “Maybe,” Mark said.

  “Well, if Old Donovan were here, we couldn’t use his room,” I continued. “Check this out.” I unlatched the lock on the globe in front of Mark, lifted its top half, and revealed the bar within it. “Vodka sodas?” I asked, lifting the bottle from its slot. “We can toast to our fathers, whether they’re already gone or we wish they were.”

  “Seriously,” Josie said.

  “Dudes,” Mark said. “Think about this clearly. We’ll get caught drinking. They’ll smell it on us. Last time I got caught, my dad nearly strangled me. I was, like, chained up at the house for a month. Don’t we have anything else?” Mark asked. He jabbed at me. “You got to have something else, man. Got any herb? We all poke smot. I never get caught when I’m poking.”

  I smiled at him; I was happy to dish out the pills, too. “Let’s start with a drink, though. We won’t get caught. I never do.” They took seats beside the globe, and I set to work fixing the drinks. It was good to have a task, something to keep me in motion, because my heart raced as if I’d done another bump. I had no idea what to say to Josie, Sophie, or Mark. Conversation required spontaneity, and spontaneity made me nervous. I didn’t want to say anything stupid, or anything I’d regret.

  “Take a sip,” I said as I handed them their glasses.

  “Belvedere, right?” Josie asked after she tasted it. “Smooth.”

  “I thought you only liked Ketel One.” Sophie laughed and then took a sip. “Remember that at Dustin’s? Oh my God, we got so wasted.”

  I raised my glass the way I’d seen some of the adults do out in the party, holding it by the base and not the stem. “Cheers, I guess.”

  We clinked glasses and laughed about the rest of the party getting drunker. I tried not to smile too much, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t like my smile. I liked what my face looked like when I listened, or when I smoked a cigarette—I’d looked in the mirror as I’d done both, and I could live with it—but when I smiled, I was someone severely deranged.

  I was surprised every time I made them laugh, and I hoped I wouldn’t run out of things to say. I was more than halfway through my drink when I realized they still had nearly full glasses. Especially Mark. He had put his down on Old Donovan’s desk. There was a pause in the conversation. Sophie stared at her feet. Josie got up and walked to the window that looked across the yard to the hedgerow along the Fieldings’ property.

  “What are we doing at this old-person party?” Mark asked. Sophie rolled her eyes in agreement. “I mean, no offense, Donovan, but this would be cooler if we weren’t ten feet away from our parents.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “Here’s how I get through it.” I pulled the bottle of Adderall out of my inside pocket and shook it. “I’m already zooming.”

  Sophie squinted. “You just pop these like vitamins or whatever?”

  “No,” Josie said. “You snort them, right?” She walked back toward me and smiled deviously. “Is that what you’re doing every day?”

  “Not every day.” I grinned. She laughed. It wasn’t exactly a lie. I’d done it at school before, when I hadn’t slept all night and I was nodding off.

  “Should we go for it?” I asked.

  “That’s not my thing, dudes,” Mark said. “Not tonight. Man. I sound like a downer tonight. You know I’m not.”

  “Fine,” Sophie said. “I’m game. I’m always game.” She raised her glass. “Let’s finish these first.”

  I raised my glass with her and took a big swallow, but I gulped too many ice cubes at once. One lodged in my throat, and the passage clamped shut. My mouth was full and airless. The soda burned into my nose. I seized up.

  “Oh my God, are you okay?” Sophie asked, leaning forward
.

  I inhaled deeply through my nose but couldn’t take anything in, or if I did, I couldn’t feel it. I snorted violently after air. Soda fizzed in my mouth and nose, and my eyes burned. There was a belt going around my neck and chest, cinching one notch tighter at a time. Fear floated up from within me, because I could feel my head going light like it had when I’d tried that game where you make yourself black out for the hell of it and just before the darkness you wonder, Shit, what if I’ve gone too far? What if I can’t come back?

  “Jesus, you sound like you’re hyperventilating,” Josie said.

  “He’s choking,” Sophie said. “Is he choking?”

  I tried to shake my head and leaned forward to spit something back into my glass, but the whole frothing mouthful came rushing out, and I sprayed Sophie on her blouse and skirt.

  “Holy shit!” she yelled.

  My eyes were so full of tears, I could barely see. “I’m sorry,” I managed. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Shut up!” Josie said. “Pull yourselves together. Don’t make a scene or we will get caught.”

  “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “Did he ruin my skirt?” Sophie demanded. “Look at my blouse? What the hell?”

  “Shut up! Seriously.”

  Mark moved to the door and listened closely to the noises in the hall. I wiped my eyes. The burn still crackled in my throat, so instinctively I took another sip, then without good reason slurped down the rest of the drink, using my teeth as a dam against the ice. It chilled me to my toes, but it felt good, the fat syrup of vodka sliding beneath the soda. I put the glass down and grabbed tissues from a box on the desk. I handed them to Sophie, but they were useless. The music was loud in the other rooms, and people shouted over it and over one another. Nobody could hear us.

  Josie pulled Sophie out of the chair, and they surveyed the dark spots scattered across the green skirt. “What am I going to tell my mother?” Sophie asked. “What’s wrong with you?” she snapped in a hushed voice.

  Josie grabbed my arm. “Do something! Get us to a bathroom a-sap.”

  With my face burning, I led the girls out into the hallway. Mark followed behind them. A group of Mother’s willowy friends huddling in the foyer saw us. “Barbara. Barbara. Here he is,” one of the women sang. I was a step ahead of Josie and Sophie, but I could picture them scowling behind me as they heard the woman. I tried to ignore what she said, but that sinking feeling opened up within me again. I waved the girls on, and we went down the hall, away from the party and toward one of the spare bedrooms, the one Old Donovan had slept in for a few months, before he was finally gone.

  I held open the door to the en suite bathroom. “This’ll be private,” I told them. Josie brushed past me, and I stepped out of the way so Sophie could follow her.

  “Why don’t we just meet you out in the party later?” Josie suggested. “I’ll clean her up.” She had carried the drinks with her, and she set them on the counter next to the sink.

  “I’ll make sure they’re okay,” Mark said. They shut the door, and I could hear them whispering before the faucet ran. Eventually, they turned the water off but didn’t open the door. They giggled. Glasses clinked. I wanted to break something. Take your faces off, assholes. I should have just said it, even if it was through a goddamn door. Aidan’s a fuckhead was scratched into the back of a stall door in a boys’ restroom at CDA, and I was sure they were saying something similar right then.

  There was more giggling, but it came from the hallway. One of the women who’d seen us come out of Old Donovan’s office stood in the doorway and blocked the light coming into the dark bedroom. She beckoned those behind her. “Yup,” she said, “they’re in here.” She leaned against the door frame. I couldn’t see her face. She was only a silhouette of a woman speaking to me through the shadows. “Why are you hiding in the dark, Aidan?”

  There was something cold and straightforward in her voice that instantly held me. Even though she could barely see me, I felt as if she’d caught me naked, and the emptiness within me was spilling everywhere, running out into the room and staining the carpet and the bedsheets and the wicker furniture. Another woman joined her, and then another, and again, one of them asked me, “What are you doing?”

  One of the women pushed through the others and snapped on the overhead light. Barbara Kowolski, Mark’s mother, marched forward. She glared at me over her round and flushed cheeks. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

  I remained silent, still fixed in the fear from the moment before. The other women laughed and began speaking with each other in the hallway, but Barbara put her hands on her hips. “Where’s Mark? Where are the girls?” She glanced at the bathroom door and pointed. The bangles on her arms clanked as she gestured. “Are they in there? Is Mark in the bathroom with the girls?” I tried to say no, but she pushed past me and tried the door. It was locked. She glanced toward the doorway to the hall. The other women were gone. “Mark?” she said softly.

  The faucet ran briefly, and then the toilet flushed. Josie opened the door and stepped out first. “Hi, Mrs. Kowolski.” Her cheeks were red. Sophie followed, holding an empty glass in her hands, and Mark followed her with his hands in his pockets. Hunched over like that, he looked much younger, like a dog cowering before a raised hand.

  “Young man,” Barbara said to him.

  None of them would look at me. “Mrs. Kowolski,” Josie said, “we’re just hanging out. What’s up? How’s it going?”

  Barbara frowned. Her skin was so permatanned and taut that her lips folded her face like an accordion. “Don’t play nice with me right now.” She turned back to Mark. “Your father was looking for you. There’s someone he wants you to meet. But like this?” Barbara glanced at the doorway again and then turned back to us. “This is what is going to happen,” she said. “We’re not going to speak about any of this. We’re not going to say anything to any of your parents. We’re not going to mention any of this to Mike. Not any of it. Do you all understand me?”

  “It’s not their fault,” I finally said. “It’s my booze.”

  Barbara turned and pointed her bloodred fingernail at my face. “I know exactly whose fault it is, Aidan.”

  “Don’t take it out on him,” Mark said. Although he’d had the least to drink of all of us, his eyes still had a glassy look. I thought tears might have pooled in his lids. “It’s not Aidan’s fault.”

  “It certainly is,” Barbara shot back. “Enough’s enough. I’m taking you home.” She swung her finger around to the whole group of us. “I’m taking you all home.”

  “Ma,” Mark said. “Come on.”

  “Enough,” Barbara said. “This is what’s best for you. I’m taking care of this.” She pulled Mark in for a quick, lifeless hug. “You know your father, honey. Don’t be stupid.” She pushed Mark and the girls into the hall as he was trying to say good-bye to me. “Just because your father’s not here doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want,” she said to me. “Somebody should explain that to you.”

  She left, and I flipped the light off in the bathroom and then the overhead in the bedroom and sat on the bed in the darkness for a while as the party stormed through the rest of the house. Eventually, I got up, wandered to the window, and looked out to the backyard. The moonlight made the crust of snow look moonlike—a gray, noiseless landscape, something like what I imagined death to be—a landscape where you would inevitably arrive, permanently alone.

  I wished I could disappear, maybe even out there, but people were in the hall and on the stairs up to the second floor; they were everywhere. The party filled the whole house, pushing into room after room. All those bodies and no one to really talk to, I thought, until I heard a familiar laugh come rolling down the hall from the foyer. I’d known his laugh since he’d first arrived at Most Precious Blood, taking over the Mass from Father Dooley and turning the homily into a stand-up story hour. His voice, thick and low and constant, like a foghorn chanting through the night, had
begun to sound like home to me. With relief, then, I steered toward his voice in the party.

  Nobody had a laugh like Father Greg, one that bubbled up and gained volume as it stretched out. He stood near the foot of the grand staircase, his ruddy face and silvery goatee shining in the glow from the foyer’s chandelier. He palmed a thick rocks glass and swirled the scotch in it as he spoke to the crowd around him. Most of them had to look up at Father Greg as they listened, because it wasn’t only Father Greg’s voice that commanded attention. I think if you put him in the ring with Coach Randolf over at CDA, Coach would actually have a hard time finding the courage to lace up the gloves. Father Greg looked like a man who had played football in a time before helmets and shoulder pads and had come through it all without a scratch.

  He laughed at his own story, and when he noticed me he beckoned me with a nod. I followed immediately. He was a regular on the party circuit, and everyone loved Father Greg. He didn’t bother with any of that dancing-is-the-devil’s-work kind of ministry. He understood very well that our Catholic town liked Mardi Gras and Easter brunch and preferred to skip the Lent in between. He never missed a party, either.

  “But it isn’t only about the money,” Father Greg was saying as I walked up to him. “Do you know what’s hard work? Love. Love is hard work, maybe the hardest, but it’s what counts in the end. That’s what our work is about with these kids. Teach a man to fish? Ha.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Teach a man to love, Richard. Teach a kid to love, to love learning, to love others. Then watch what happens.” Father Greg dropped a hand onto my shoulder. “Right, Aidan?” He was the real solicitor at the party—at every party. I was his assistant, and only had been for the six months I’d been working for him.

  “Yeah, I know. The kids,” Richard said with a hard smile. “That’s who I’m thinking of when I write my check every year.” Then he aimed that nose at me. “I haven’t gotten the call yet this year. Aidan, you going to start making those calls soon? Father, going to put Aidan in charge now?”