The Gospel of Winter Page 5

  “Oh, I understand, Father,” she said. “Hear that, James? You listen to Father Greg.” She patted her son on the back and pushed him forward again. “He’ll be good. He always is!”

  Father Greg stood up and ushered Cindy and James into the room. “Please. Take a seat,” he said, gesturing to the couch. He became more animated and enthusiastic as he spoke. “Aidan was just on his way out.” He looked at me with one of his party grins. “I have a meeting with Cindy and James. What a big day!” Father Greg clapped once and then, with one hand on my back, steered me out of the office. “All right. Let’s go,” he said as he closed the door. Through it I could hear him clap again and then say, “You are going to be great, James! Let’s run through the rites to make sure you remember.”

  In the main hall, the geriatrics dozed over their phones and coffee. I knew the damn script better than any of them and yet, nobody wanted me there at Most Precious Blood. Even with all the holiday adornments, the statues, the paintings, and the people positioned around the room in chairs, or leaning over tables, the church felt cold and empty, and the pageantry could not hide the lifelessness behind it. It reminded me of my own house, a giant dollhouse perfectly appointed to pretend something real existed where nothing did. I didn’t want to wait around for the afternoon service to watch James wave the incense or hold up the book while Father Greg raised his hands in prayer and smiled down at him. Prayer was a sacred trust, Father Greg had told me, and there was nothing that could break it, if I had faith.

  For the words you will speak will not be yours; they will come from the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. . . .

  Everyone will hate you because of me. But whoever holds out to the end will be saved.

  I repeated the passage to myself as I got outside and took off, on my own, down the long slope of the front lawn to the street. I couldn’t understand: Was it really love if it was so often being tested? Hadn’t I endured? I had, and I would hold out to the end, I told myself. I must. What else did I have?

  CHAPTER 3

  The car service had been scheduled to pick me up later, but I left without calling to cancel. I walked home, letting the cold air sting my face and eyes. When cars passed me, I tried to keep my head down. I felt like a stain on their gorgeous country view, and I wanted to be a mark that could be dissolved with the blink of an eye. I could only imagine what I looked like, leaning into the wind with my overcoat billowing behind me, my face windburned and splotchy. I could just hear those people asking as they passed me, Who is that? Does he belong here?

  Well, go take your faces off, because I am just one of you.

  When I got home, I threw off my coat, made a snack in the kitchen, and prepared to barricade myself in my room for the rest of the afternoon and evening; and that would have been the end of my day had the phone not rung while I was still downstairs. I ran to get it, thinking it was Father Greg calling back to apologize, calling to tell me to come speak with him after the service, calling to tell me he was proud of me, calling to tell me that if a man can reach out to another man in his time of need, then he is bringing God into both their lives and they are both the better for it.

  But the voice on the other end was not his. It was Josie, and it took me a few seconds to collect myself. I was suddenly embarrassed, and I didn’t know why.

  “Good break so far?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said.

  She hesitated. “Actually, isn’t it always kind of a letdown? There’s all this buildup and expectation, and then it’s, like, where’s all that fun I’m supposed to be having?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh my god, Mom. I don’t need an audience!” Josie breathed harder, as she must have walked away and tried to find privacy in her house. I waited. “Actually, I was having fun at your party, for a little bit,” she said finally.

  “Me too.”

  “Even though Mark’s mother was a total psycho and made us pull a Houdini for no real reason. We weren’t even drunk yet. Anyway, it’s kind of bugged me how it ended. I mean, we didn’t even say good-bye to you.”

  As she spoke I walked out of my own kitchen and cut back toward Old Donovan’s office. “It’s cool,” I said.

  “Actually, it wasn’t. What was cool was how you handled the whole thing. You just stood there calmly, taking the heat for all of us. We stood there doing nothing. When I got home, I was, like, Why did I do that? I suck.”

  I was quiet on the other end. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “Seriously,” Josie continued. “You didn’t fight back. At first I thought that was weird, and then I thought, Oh my God, he’s just going to take all the blame—for us.”

  “It was my fault, I guess.”

  “Hello? Let’s get real here. We were all there together.”

  “Get real? People do that?”

  “Jesus, you’re cynical.”

  “Look,” I said, trying to sound a little warmer. “I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

  “Well, I did,” she said. “I thought it was cool. I thought you were pretty cool.”

  As she spoke it felt like she reached through the phone and brushed my chin with her fingertips. I had to pace while we talked. “Thanks.” I could barely say it.

  “I felt bad”—she lowered her voice—“like I was a stuck-up bitch. And then I figured we got you in serious trouble.”

  “I don’t think that. Besides, nobody said anything to me. Believe me. Remember? None of us were supposed to say anything. You, Mark, Sophie, me. I don’t know, dumb, deaf, blind, and dumber?”

  Her laughter came through the phone like a hug. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said.

  Neither of us spoke for a moment. There was only her breathing, and I could picture her running her hand through her hair while she was thinking. I could see the tilt of her head and that slope of neck I was so used to studying in Mr. Weinstein’s class. I waited. “Listen,” she finally said, “I’m trying to get a jump on my New Year’s resolution. I’ve decided that I need to become less of a bitch. It’s hard, because everybody else around me is one, but I want to try. I don’t want to be like that. I want to be different, you know?”

  “Yeah. I know how you feel. I want to become someone else too.”

  There was a pause. “So, listen. Sophie and I were going to call Mark and hang out today. You want to come?”

  And, all of a sudden, I had plans. Not an activity, not a job, not some prearranged social disaster waiting to happen that Mother had set up. I had plans to hang out like a normal kid my age. I’d been invited. Get real, Josie had said, and I wondered if that was what they were when they all hung out. Real. In school there was a script. I could talk about the homework, or the books we were reading. I could talk about geometry theorems, but I never talked about how they twisted together in my mind like the braids Josie sometimes wore in her hair. I would never tell her how I noticed that. Was that what I was supposed to talk about now? What I really noticed? I did want to get real, but what had they noticed about me? What was real about me? This was what I thought I had wanted, but now I wondered.

  + + +

  Josie and Sophie picked me up a little while later, and we headed to Josie’s house. Ruby, Josie’s family’s housekeeper, made us hot chocolate while we waited for Mark. Even though our families had once been close, I had never really hung out with Mark alone. As far as I knew, neither he nor I hung out with many of the other kids at CDA, but his cultivated distance somehow gave him the appearance that he didn’t need anybody else. I admired that more now.

  When he arrived, he came right in through the kitchen door without knocking. He kissed Ruby hello. He kissed Sophie and Josie hello too. “Donovan’s in on this too?” he asked the girls, but it was a rhetorical question. “Good to see you again, dude,” he said to me. He stuck out his hand, and I took it.

  “Sorry about the last time,” I said.

  “Dude,” Mark said, “it was all my mom. She flipped. Let’s not eve
n talk about it.”

  Josie led us out the back door and up the hill to the pool house. We turned on the stereo and sat on stools around the bar. Mark stood behind the bar, packing a bowl. He got it cooking and passed it. Josie had us exhale through a little cardboard tube filled with dryer sheets.

  I hadn’t said much since I’d gotten there and, after the weed, Sophie and Josie wrapped themselves up in private conversation. Mark played with the soda gun behind the bar, so I turned on the TV. I stood a couple of feet away from the screen and flipped through the channels. There was something satisfying about watching people appear and disappear instantly on my command. A sullen and spooked John Walker Lindh stared into the pool house from the TV. It was a still photograph, the one all the news stations had been using since they’d caught him running through the tunnels of Tora Bora in December. Behind the smeared soot and the scraggly beard, his eyes glowed intensely white. A subtle smirk rose in the corners of his mouth. Everyone knew his story: He’d been caught with a bullet in his thigh, burrowing through the hills of Afghanistan like a mole, the wayward American fighting for the Taliban. He stared out like he was waiting for me to get the joke.

  “Dude’s fucking crazy,” Mark said from across the room. I turned around. “Not you, Donovan.” Mark laughed. “Fucking Lindh.”

  “I don’t know,” Josie said. “There’s something so sad about him.”

  “Well, turn it off,” Sophie whined. “He looks like a monster.”

  “He’s just scared,” Josie continued. “That’s what I see.”

  “Oh my God,” Sophie said, pointing behind me. “Now, that woman is crazy. How is she going to let her marriage with Michael Jordan end?”

  “Does that mean Michael Jordan is single?” Josie asked, and both girls laughed. The news had jumped to another story already. No time to linger or ask questions or analyze or develop. Move, move, move. On to the next suggestion.

  “Turn that off, man,” Mark said, holding up the empty bowl. “Let’s repack this.” I snapped off the TV and joined them at the bar.

  “I think that Lindh guy thought he was doing the right thing, even if he wasn’t,” I said.

  “They should name a prison after him,” Mark said, sparking the bowl.

  “That is not funny,” Josie said.

  “Oh my God, enough about that guy.” Sophie pouted. “I hate it.”

  Mark took a big hit, and when Sophie handed him the tube to exhale, he waved it away. He leaned over the bar to Sophie and looked her in the eye. She giggled and leaned forward. They kissed, and a little smoke slipped from between their open mouths. Sophie broke from the kiss and exhaled through the tube. “Why waste any of it?” Mark said, and slapped me a high five above the girls’ heads. Sophie took a hit, and she and Josie followed. Josie exhaled a tiny stream through the tube. “Think that’s hot?” Mark asked. I nodded while my heart raced.

  Josie looked at me. “Have you ever recycled?” she asked. I had never smoked pot before that afternoon, but I hadn’t admitted that, either. Alcohol and pills were so easy; they were in every house I’d ever been in. I was too slow to answer Josie, though, and when she took a small puff, she pulled me to her lips. The smoke came into my mouth, followed by her tongue, which flickered gently, then slipped out. I held my breath and tried to smile, which was harder than I thought because the smoke burned more than the cigarettes I’d had, and worse, I thought my stomach was going to explode. How many times had I stared at the back of Josie’s head and wondered what it was like to be close to someone so beautiful? But there was more. She was looking at me. My eyes began to burn, too. I froze, and my neck and shoulders tightened. Get real. What did Josie see? There were so many Aidans, stacked like Russian nesting dolls within me, who I never wanted her to meet or know. I exhaled through the tube and coughed.

  “Nice one. When you cough, you get off,” Mark said. “And fuck it, by the way,” he added to Josie. “Dustin can suck it.”

  “Dustin?” I asked, desperate to swing the spotlight somewhere else.

  “Yeah, I guess I’ve been dating him for a couple of weeks,” Josie said.

  “Trust in Dustin Dustin?” I asked. Sophie and Mark laughed.

  “All right, that was lame, but he won, didn’t he?” Josie was right, but Dustin had become the junior-class representative because the whole baseball team had done a shakedown to get votes for him.

  “But he’s not going to know about that,” Josie said. “Or any of this.” Then she smiled at me. “Got it?” I nodded. “Okay,” she said, pointing from me to Mark, “your turn.”

  “No. That’s cool,” I said, glancing at Mark. “I should just come back the way I came, right?”

  Mark leaned back against the shelves behind the bar, with a wry half smile.

  “No way,” Josie said. “This is a circle.”

  “Yeah,” Sophie said. “Girls do it all the time. What’s the matter with you boys?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Sophie and Josie protested and, still amused, Mark watched us bicker. A dull ache gripped me. I couldn’t look at him again. My body felt like a machine. I could respond any way I was asked to. Don’t ask me to start. Just kiss me and I’ll kiss you back. A kiss was nothing—I knew that. A kiss was so simple. It was what followed that frightened me. I didn’t want to move, but I wondered if I could end the debate right there by kissing Mark, and then we could all get back to feeling like we were getting away with something together. That’s all I really wanted—for the circle to continue and for me to remain a part of it.

  “You’re acting a little uptight, man,” Mark finally said. The girls laughed.

  “No, I’m not,” I said. I hesitated while they looked at me. “I think I’m stoned,” I continued. “Am I supposed to do something now?”

  “Listen,” Mark said to the girls. “You all need to ease up. You’re going about this the wrong way.”

  He stepped forward, away from the shelves, and pointed to the bowl in my hands. “Hit that, dude. Before it goes out.” I did, and as I took the smoke down into my lungs, he reached across the bar and pulled me by the shirt collar toward him. He yanked me to his lips and popped open my mouth. The smoke rushed out of me. He huffed it in, pushed me back across the bar, pumped his fist, and exhaled through the tube into the air above us. His lips had been dry and firm, and I couldn’t tell if he had wanted me to press back. I didn’t know if I wanted to or not. Static buzzed through me, and I had no idea if he had it humming down in him as well. His face was cool and collected as if it were chiseled out of stone, and I felt like I was melting with sweat. Eyes were all over me, watching me, eyes in the room—eyes across town, floating closer, hovering like gigantic birds outside the windows, watching, waiting for the moment to crash through and strike.

  “Like I said before”—Mark grinned—“why waste any of it? This is premium bud, dude. It’s not every day we get the budalicious from the BC.” He put his hand back up in the air above the bar and I slapped it again, quickly and automatically and with a giddiness loopy with fear.

  The girls hooted, and the room spun a little. “Budalicious,” I mumbled. “Yeah.”

  Mark and the girls laughed. I hoped they couldn’t tell I was trembling. I was dizzy and damp with sweat, and I braced myself against the bar. This is what I want, I kept telling myself. This is different. Keep it together. If one little Aidan doll cracked, so would another, and I’d fall apart one shell at a time until they saw the tiny, terrible nugget at the heart of it all. I’d never thought of myself like that before, someone with a pit of darkness at the center of me. I didn’t want to think about it. I slumped down onto a stool and forced out a loud I-dare-you-to-doubt-me laugh I stole directly from Father Greg.

  “Are you totally stoned?” Sophie asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Good,” Mark said. “Relax into it, man. Welcome to the group.” We slapped hands again, and this time like we meant it.

  Josie grabbed the bowl from me and
lit it. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to lean in to her or not, and she knew it. She wagged her finger and grabbed the tube. She blew right at me through the shit-brown dryer sheets, and the smoke washed over my face. She walked behind the bar, next to Mark. “Tell you what?” she said to all of us. “I know my dad watches this stuff like a hawk, but we could pour out just a little vodka, then refill the bottle with some water. I bet he’d never have a clue.”

  “I’m not having anything to drink,” Mark said. “I have to see my parents later. They want to have another family night, whatever the hell they think that is.”

  “You just smoked a bowl,” Sophie said.

  “That’s different,” Mark said.

  “Everything’s different to you, Mark,” Josie said.

  “I’ll have some,” I said to Josie.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, and I won’t spit it all over anybody this time either.”

  Josie burst out laughing, and Sophie did too. I puffed my cheeks and made a big scene, and Sophie pretended to get showered with my spray. She laughed so hard, she started to cry.

  We drank and the afternoon became hazier, punctuated by Josie’s and Sophie’s laughter. They barely had to exchange more than a few words for one to know what the other was saying, and it set them off again and again. It swept into me. I was still nervous and confused and not sure if they were making fun of me or not, but I began to feel like I could really be a part of this.

  I tried not to look Mark in the eyes too much, but when we spoke together, he was completely calm, the same disaffected-smile-wearing Mark I always saw around school, but with less distance than usual—as if that smirk wasn’t aimed at but instead included me. And later, when he decided it was time for him to start walking home, he asked if I wanted to join him.

  “I’m supposed to see Dustin later, but maybe I’ll skip it,” Josie said. “Skip your family night,” she said to Mark. “We’ve got our own thing going on here. We’re like a perfect square.”