Eppie sat on a dusty swing that was a bit too small for her and pushed herself gently back and forth. The neighbors who had lived in the now vacant apartment downstairs had bought the swing set for their two small children the previous year and placed it in the common yard which was shared by both apartments. The children had used the swings a few times in the weeks that followed, but then grew bored with the monotony of the things. When the family moved out at the end of the summer they had left the swing set behind, and so it sat forlornly in the yard for the rest of the year and, for want of use, embarked prematurely on the process of rusting away.
Eppie gave the swings their only practical use, which was to provide a place for her to sit and wait for one of her roommates to return home and let her into the apartment on those occasions when she would arrive while they were both out. Today she had returned from school at her normal time, about five o'clock, and had been mildly surprised to find the apartment locked and unoccupied, since Allison was usually there during the afternoon and Rachel almost always made it home by five.
Eppie rocked slowly to and fro on her swing and looked up at the locked door of the apartment on the second floor. She wondered if this place would ever grow to feel like a home to her. She had been living with Rachel and Allison for almost a month now, and although her domestic life was greatly improved as a result, she nevertheless retained a certain uneasiness about the arrangement. Eppie had felt unsure about things from the start, yet the cause of her unease was not entirely clear to her. It may have been due to the fact that she had just recently met Rachel, and had not known Allison at all, on the day that Rachel had brought her back to the apartment to live. Why would these women adopt a complete stranger? she asked herself. Was she so special that she deserved the sacrifices that they had made on her behalf? She did not see how it could be so. Perhaps, too, it was due to the unshakable feeling she had that she must owe her roommates something in return for their generosity. But while she felt deeply indebted to them, she was unable to determine precisely her obligation to repay. What did they want from her in return? she had asked them several times. What must she do to earn her keep? It was a reflexive question on her part. Her childhood years, spent under the thumb of a repressive overseer, one who constantly demanded things from her and never gave back anything in return, had taught her to feel that the needs of adults were to be attended to by children and not the other way around.
We want nothing from you, Eppie, was the peculiar answer that she now received. We just couldn't bear to see you go back to that awful environment that you came from. You deserve better than that. We wanted you to come and live here with us to save you from that kind of life. We hope you like it here. We only want you to have a nice place to live until you are old enough to have a place of your own.
As much as Eppie preferred her new life to her old one, the present situation seemed entirely backward to her. At an age when most of her schoolmates were finding ever greater levels of responsibility forced upon them, Eppie felt that the responsibility for living her own life was now somehow slipping away from her. Rachel and Allison required nothing of her. Their goals for her had already been achieved. She had been liberated from the oppressions of her past and was now free to recreate her life according to whatever form or fashion she chose. She was free now; that, and that alone, was the goal. The path which she chose for herself from this point forward was little more than an afterthought. The main point was that she would be her own person, her own self, a being of her own design and creation. No one else could lay claim to the story of her life because she would be the sole author. Autobiography was the only proper way to live one's life, Rachel once told her.
Eppie felt uncomfortable with the sudden absence of constraints in her life. She had heard that animals which were born in captivity were unable as adults to adapt to life in the wild. When the locks on their cages were sprung and the doors flung open they would tentatively approach the newly offered exits, stick their noses out and sniff the scent of the world as it existed in all its unbounded freedom, then turn back in fear to those familiar confines in which they had been raised. To them a cage was not a trap which robbed them of their freedoms, but a refuge within which they could live comfortably, unassailed and unmolested by the dangers of the wider world. That their lives were narrow and incarcerated was a thought completely foreign to them. They made their own freedom within the world that they knew, and no greater freedom was known to any creature which roamed the land.
Eppie believed that she knew of their nature. She had fled from her past life not because she had not been free but because she had been abused. Absent that abuse, she would have been able to stay in her parents' home and live out her adolescent years under their rule, bearing up under the burden of her assigned chores as the fair price of her upbringing. Her parents were poor and uneducated, and their views of what constituted a proper family life were not as progressive as others might hold, but Eppie would not have held them to a standard that they were unprepared to meet. She might very well have grown to a life as mired in poverty and narrow in knowledge as that of her parents, but that would not have compelled her to leave either. She would have been content to stay where she was, in a state of domesticated servitude, and her life would have retained at least some shallow sense of home and family, tenuous as they might have been.
Her new life, in contrast, for all its security, felt strangely formless and empty. She went to school each day with classmates who spoke unselfconsciously of their family lives—of trips to amusement parks and camping excursions and Sunday night dinners prepared, as they had been for decades, from old family recipes. She had never experienced such things when she had lived with her parents, but at least she had had the facade of a family life which had allowed her to feel that she was where she belonged. Now she looked up at the locked door of an empty apartment and knew not at all where she belonged. A life unafflicted by abuse was a great relief, but it was not by itself tantamount to fulfillment. She longed for a real mother and father and a sibling or two. It would be nice, she thought, to have some semblance of a family around which to orient her life. Sadly, she realized that she was now an orphan and would remain so for the rest of her youth. Perhaps later on, after she had reached adulthood and the painful memories of her late childhood were not so raw, she would reestablish contact with her mother and they would talk as equals, woman to woman, about the trials of those earlier years. Perhaps by that time her mother would be able to see her own failings and ask for her daughter's forgiveness; and perhaps her daughter would be mature enough to give it.
And perhaps, too, her mother would have come to her senses during those intervening years and divorced that psychopathic monster that she had so foolishly allowed to take over their lives. Maybe Eppie's decision to leave home would help to bring that about. She hoped so. No matter how hard she might try, even if she truly wanted to, she would never be able to forgive him for his brutality. She never wanted to see him again. Never.
Eppie considered her future with the sense of sobriety dictated by her circumstances. She placed a hand over her abdomen and tried to imagine the new life which she knew to be forming itself within her. She was in her freshman year of high school and was currently taking the first and only biology class in the school's curriculum. The textbook described the process of sexual reproduction in a starched, clinical vocabulary—chromosomes and mitochondria, and gametes merging into zygotes. The processes of unification and division at the cellular level were explained in intricate detail in the most exacting scientific terms. What happened both before and after those esoteric little cells began their highly choreographed dances was only alluded to in the most vague and indirect manner. Sex education was not on the curriculum until sophomore year. Eppie winced as she imagined herself sitting in that class in a year, the teacher in the middle of a delicately-worded lesson on the risks of unprotected intercourse, her classmates stealing glances at each other, fighting to suppress their giggles, then a nasally voice on the intercom interrupting to call her from the room embarrassingly to tend to some problem that a daycare provider was having with her infant child.
Her heart sank to think of the challenges that lay before her. She wondered if the child she might bear would bring her blessings greater than the burdens which the world would place on her. She had little experience in her life by which to believe so, for she had never felt that she had been looked upon in any way as a blessing by her mother. Her memories of her childhood ran counter to all of the idealized images of the loving relationship that was supposed to exist between parents and children. She wondered in turn what the chances might be for a child of her own. Would a child of hers fare any better in the world than she had? Would she be able to protect a child from all that was bad in the world? Did she have any reason to believe that she would be a better parent to her child than her mother had been to her? That she would make the right choices where her mother had made poor ones?
And she wondered too if this one child could transform her life from one of sadness and torment into one of tenderness and joy. Was it possible for a child to do that? And even if it was possible, was that too great a burden of expectation to place on a child even before it was born? What if the anticipated joy never materialized? What if it were swallowed up by the weight of worry and fatigue and hardship that single parenthood would surely bring to bear upon her? What then? Was that what had happened to her mother? Was that why her mother had always seemed so cross and irritable with her as a child, the reasons for which she did not then understand? And would she respond to her own child with the same uncaring distemper if her happiness did not percolate in the way that common opinion taught her to expect that it would? Was the life that her child might inherit from her already foretold in failure?
She sat solemnly on the creaky swing set and wondered.
* * *
The jail cell door clanged shut behind Rachel and Allison for the second time that day, the women having just finished a telephone consultation with their attorney. Allison crossed the cell and kicked in frustration at the thin foam mattress lying on one of the steel-framed beds, then she sat down indignantly upon it.
"Assault," she said, still in disbelief. "They're charging us with assault. On a police officer, no less."
Rachel sat on the bed opposite to Allison's and furrowed her brow in confusion. "I still say they can't charge us with that," she said. "We didn't assault anybody. We were protesting peacefully and we submitted willingly to arrest. It was Billy who caused all the trouble. He's the one who started throwing things and fighting with the cops. We were already in the back seats of the police cars when everything got out of hand. Why should we be held on the same charge as him?"
"Well, it's not exactly the same charge," replied Allison. "He's being charged with assault and battery," she said, rolling her eyes.
"Still," said Rachel, "they're saying that we fought with them physically, and that's just not true. We have the video to prove it. These charges will never stand up in court."
"But we don't even have the video at the moment," said Allison. "They confiscated it along with everything else when they brought us all in here. I’m glad I told Sonny about it, though. He said he should be able to get that back for us, probably by tomorrow. He thinks he can get a hearing for us tomorrow, too. And if he can get the district attorney's office to look at the video, he thinks he can get the assault charges dropped altogether—except for Billy, of course; he's going to be here for a while. But the rest of us would just have to pay a fine for obstructing official city business or some crap charge like that. Unfortunately, none of that can happen before tomorrow, so it looks like we're going to be spending the night right here."
Rachel leaned her elbows on her knees and rubbed her temples with her fingertips. She wondered if her father knew of the situation that she and her friends found themselves in. She often succumbed to the same thought whenever things went badly for her. Of course he knew, she scolded herself. He knew everything. He always knew everything. The medical examiner's crew and the cops probably both reported back to him within minutes of the altercation that morning. They all probably had a good laugh about it as she and her friends were being marched into the police station. He and the D.A. were probably yucking it up over the video right now.
Rachel closed her eyes and covered them with her palms, trying to push the thought from her mind. She shouldn't think about him, she reminded herself. It would only make her angrier.
"How's Judy, by the way?" she asked Allison, suddenly remembering her friend's injury.
"Pretty good, all things considered," said Allison. "She's got a broken leg and a nasty bump on her head, but fortunately she didn't have to go very far to get medical attention. Sonny talked to her this afternoon. He said her spirits seem to be holding up pretty well, but she's going to be in a cast and on crutches for a couple of months. It's going to be hard for her to get around for a while."
"She's a real trooper," said Rachel. "We'll have to pay her a visit as soon as we get out of here."
A duty officer came into the holding area pushing a food service cart ahead of him. He made his way slowly down the row of cells, pausing before each one to lift a tray of food from the cart and slip it carefully between the horizontal serving slats in the door. Each metal tray clacked hollowly as it slid onto the metal ledge welded to the inside of the bars. The officer moved methodically from cell to cell, as though he had performed the task a thousand times, speaking not a word to any of the cells' occupants, all of whom seemed to remain outside his field of vision. Rachel watched the man as he went robotically about his chore. She wondered if he ever left a tray of food perched on the ledge of an empty cell by mistake.
Rachel waited until the officer had dispensed with all of his trays and had left the room before she stood up and retrieved the tray from her door. Given the duty officer's melancholy air in distributing the rations, it seemed inappropriate somehow to display much eagerness in accepting them. But she was hungry, and she knew that Allison must be equally so, since neither of them had eaten anything since early that morning.
She returned to her bed and handed one of the two plates to Allison, then she lifted the round metal top from her own plate. She immediately lost a good portion of her appetite when she saw the food which waited underneath. A thin, black hamburger patty sat crookedly atop an open bun which was flattened equally on both its top and bottom halves. A stiff, cold square of yellow cheese, far larger in diameter than both the meat and the bread, lay across the top half of the bun. The sandwich was surrounded by a haphazard pile of greasy french-fried potatoes, the stalks as pale and limp as if the fryer had been left unplugged. A plastic cup of applesauce, recognizable only by the label imprinted on its foil covering, and a half-pint carton of skim milk sat next to the plate.
Rachel stared morosely at the items on the plate. She gratefully tore open the small packets of ketchup and mustard that came with the meal and squeezed their contents liberally over the hamburger and fries. She and Allison ate their meals in silence, chewing only as much as was required and swallowing quickly in order to allow as little time as possible for their taste buds to register their objection. The food was finished promptly, and Rachel washed the last of it down with her milk. She returned the tray with the empty plates to its former place on the ledge in the door, hoping vaguely that its presence there would metaphysically call the duty officer back to retrieve it from their sight.
She wandered back to her bunk and stretched herself out on the mattress. She rolled over a few times, trying to find a comfortable position on the thin padding, and eventually wound up lying on her back. She stared up at the ceiling. Her dinner had certainly not pleased her palate, but it had effectively placated her hunger pangs, and she felt better for having eaten. She placed a hand over her stomach and felt its contented rumblings as it went about its job of digesting the high-calorie meal.
Suddenly Rachel bolted upright on the bed. "Oh my God," she said, with a look of wide-eyed astonishment on her face.
Allison turned at the unexpected movement. "What's the matter?" she asked.
"Eppie," said Rachel. "We forgot all about Eppie. She can't get into the apartment. Did you tell anybody to go over there and let her know what's happened?"
"Shit," Allison cursed. "I didn't even think about that. I thought we'd be out of here by now. What time is it?"
"I don't know," said Rachel. "They took my watch when we came in here. What time do you think it is?"
"It must be after six," said Allison, looking at a small window near the top of the far wall. "It's already dark outside."
"Damn it," said Rachel, "she's probably been sitting outside the apartment for a couple of hours by now. We need to call somebody and tell them to go over there and let her in."
A pained expression came over Allison's face. "Who are we going to call, Rache? Everyone we know who has a key to the apartment is locked up here with us."
"Well, then, we've got to give one of our keys to the police and tell them to have somebody drive over there and give it to Eppie so she can let herself in."
Allison's mouth curled with hesitation. "I'd rather have them just go over there and pick her up and drive her back here so we can give her the key ourselves. I don't like the idea of giving a key to some cop and sending him over to our place on his own. If Eppie isn't there he might decide to let himself in to check things out. I don't trust these cops. They'll do anything if they think they can get away with it."
"Whatever!" Rachel said in exasperation. "I don't care whether the guy picks her up or let's her in himself. It doesn't matter to me. I just don't want Eppie to have to sit outside in the dark by herself as the sun goes down and wonder what's happened to us. We need to have somebody go over there right now."
The two women stood up and called for the guard as loudly as they could. When a minute or so had passed with no response from outside the holding area, Rachel picked up the metal tray and unceremoniously dumped its contents onto the floor, then began banging the tray against the bars of the cell in a rhythmic fashion, making a cacophonous racket.
A flustered guard bounded into the holding area and scowled at the two cellmates. "What the hell do you two want?" he yelled above the din.
Rachel dropped the tray on the floor and both women began talking feverishly, each attempting to explain their predicament to the guard at the same time.
"Hold it, hold it," said the guard, raising his hands. "I can't follow a word you're saying if you're both going to talk at once. Now both of you just simmer down and one of you tell me what the hubbub is all about."
Rachel drew in a deep breath and tried to calm herself while Allison explained their situation to the guard.
The guard put his hands on his hips. "You've already talked to your lawyer, haven't you?" he asked.
Yes, Allison acknowledged, they had already called their attorney.
"Well then, you should have taken care of it then," said the guard.
Allison felt the muscles in her jaw start to tighten. Look, you moron, she wanted to say, if we had thought of it then, we would have taken care of it then, but we didn't, okay? And we want to take care of it now. So just get your fat, fascist ass in gear and help us out.
"Please, officer," she said politely. "It slipped my mind when I spoke to our attorney earlier. We're sorry to bother you, but it's very important that somebody go over to our apartment and bring our roommate back here. She's locked out in the dark and she's only fourteen years old."
The guard sneered at Allison with a look of inconvenience. "Where did you say your apartment was?" he asked.
Allison gave him the address.
"All right," said the guard unenthusiastically. "I'll give it to the dispatcher. We'll have a unit go by and pick her up."
Allison and Rachel both thanked the guard profusely as he turned and walked to the door. As he was about to leave he turned back toward the women. "And next time you want something," he said, "don't go banging on the bars like that, you hear? You're only getting on my nerves that way."
Ten minutes later a patrol car crawled up the street in front of the duplex apartment building and turned slowly into the driveway. An officer stepped out from behind the wheel, aimed his flashlight across the yard and surveyed the area in front of the building. He left the engine running and the headlights on as he walked away from his car and searched the yard on all four sides of the building. He climbed the stairs to the porch on the second floor and knocked firmly on the door. When no answer came he moved to the window and shined his flashlight into the darkened rooms of the unoccupied apartment. For good measure he knocked at the door a second time, then went to the railing and scanned the yard again from above while he waited for any response. Receiving none, he descended the stairs and returned to his car, where he picked up the handset to his radio and had a brief conversation with the dispatcher. A minute later he closed the door and shifted the car into reverse. The vehicle backed carefully out of the driveway, paused for a moment as the transmission shifted again, and then moved away up the street as slowly as it had arrived.
* * *
The Mayor pulled his car into the parking lot of the shopping center a few minutes before seven o'clock and realized that he would have to be quick about this. Both stores closed at seven and he felt compelled to pick up both items before heading home. He would feel guilty if he arrived without either one.
He decided to hit the drugstore first, just in case they didn't already have the prescription filled and ready to go. The clerk said yes, he was sure that the pharmacist had filled the prescription and left it here somewhere in the for-pickup bin. It would only take a minute to find it.
Fine, the Mayor said. He was just going to pop in a few doors down to pick up another order while the clerk searched for the prescription.
The Mayor hurried down the sidewalk to the flower shop and was relieved to see that it was still open. The florist had his order ready. It was an easy order to fill—a dozen long-stemmed red roses with baby's breath; the same arrangement that the Mayor ordered every week. The Mayor gave the florist a twenty-dollar bill and told him to keep the change. He apologized for not being able to stay and chat, but he had to pick up a prescription at the drugstore before they closed. The florist waved a hasty goodnight to the Mayor as he left and then looked at the twenty-dollar bill in his hand. He wished he had more regular customers like the Mayor. He would have to make sure to vote for him again in the next election, he thought, as he punched the buttons on his cash register.
When the Mayor returned to the drugstore the clerk had found the prescription. As he handed his credit card to the clerk, another employee stood before an electrical panel on the adjacent wall and began pressing a series of switches. The ceiling lights snapped off over each of the aisles in succession, leaving only the soft glow of the overnight lights at the front and back of the store.
"Hey, Tony, hold on a minute, will ya?" the clerk yelled out across the store. "I still got a customer here." Then to the Mayor he said, "He's always in a hurry to close up and get out of here. He and his girlfriend just got married a couple of weeks ago and moved into their own place, so he wants to get home to be with her." The clerk shook his head. "Ahhh, they're newlyweds, you know? They still think it's torture to be away from each other for more than a few hours."
The Mayor smiled as he signed the credit slip. "Yes, I know how that is," he said. "Sometimes that's a very difficult feeling to resist."
"Well, I give that stuff another three months at the most," said the clerk. "Then we'll see how fast ol' Romeo moves to close up at quitting time. You mark my words, he won't be flipping the light switches off right at seven o'clock anymore. That stuff never lasts as long as you think it will."
"I guess you never can tell," said the Mayor as he picked up his package from the counter and headed for the door. "Please tell Tony I'm sorry I held him up."
The Mayor returned to his car and maneuvered it out of the parking lot. A light rain started to fall as he drove out of the downtown area and entered a residential section of the city. He turned the windshield wiper control to an intermittent setting and switched on the fan for the defogger.
The straight, perpendicular streets of the business district gradually gave way to the meandering lanes and circular cul-de-sacs of the private neighborhoods. The neon lights and plate-glass windowed storefronts disappeared into the fog behind him, and his headlights cut through the mist among the modest single-story ramblers and the more elegant two-story colonials which sat grandly back from the road atop thick, wide lawns.
A red traffic signal stopped the Mayor's car at the last major intersection on his way home. As he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and waited for the light to change, the Mayor looked down at the packages resting on the passenger's seat next to him. The contrast between the two items struck him with a new and unsettling irony.
He thought of his wife and wondered how much less of her he would find tonight when he arrived home. For months now he had been noticing each night when he greeted her that a tiny bit more of her personality had slipped away. It was a phenomenon precisely opposite to that which he had experienced some twenty-five years earlier when, as a new father, he would return home from work each evening to find that his infant daughter had grown in small and subtle ways in just the few hours since he had seen her that morning. During the day she would have learned to make a new sound, or perfected a new movement of her arms or legs, or simply grown by that slightest bit that seemed so large to her proud, perceptive father. At the beginning of her life his daughter had changed noticeably day by day, almost hour by hour, into a larger and more complete person each time he saw her. Now, as if in some unavoidable way dictated by the grand circularity of life, his wife was slipping away from him just as steadily, just as subtly, in the opposite direction.
The flowers would help, he reassured himself. Many things that used to bring some sense of recognition and comfort to his wife's increasingly obscured world had by now lost their power to reach her. She could no longer read or write letters, no longer recognized voices on the telephone. Even long-treasured family heirlooms and photographs now failed to evoke clear memories. But a bouquet of roses, he found, still brought forth an undiminished sense of remembrance to brighten her troubled mind. Each Friday evening, when he would present her with a simple arrangement of red and white flowers, her blank face would be transformed by an uncontainable smile, and a breezy happiness would flutter into her voice. A wave of clear and cherished memories would flow copiously back into her consciousness, the same memories which she had experienced at precisely the same time the week before, but which she had since forgotten, and the two of them would spend a precious hour or two reliving those memories again, replaying scene after scene from years gone by, episodes which lived deep in her memory, unextinguished by the passage of time or the progression of disease.
He had been a romantic devil in his youth, the Mayor thought to himself with a smile. He had presented his new beau with a dozen roses on their very first date when they were both still in high school, and she had received them with such delight that he made it a practice to repeat the gesture every year on the same date throughout their courtship and on through their marriage. He had even gone so far as to give the elaborate reenactment a name; he called it his Rose Recital.
Each year he would recreate the event exactly as it had occurred that first time. He would park his car along the curb rather than pulling it into the driveway, and he would walk carefully, with more than a slight bit of nervous hesitation, up to the front porch. There he would stop for a moment to reach into a pocket of his jacket, withdraw a small black comb, and run it quickly through his hair. Then he would compulsively pull on the lapels of his jacket and adjust the knot in his tie before stepping up to the door and ringing the bell.
This entire series of gestures would be observed discreetly by his wife from an upstairs window, just as she had done on that first evening. Upon hearing the doorbell she would scurry with dancing feet down to the first floor in her prettiest dress and, after counting to ten under her breath so as not to give an impression of undue haste, she would open the door.
There she would find him standing with one hand held conspicuously behind his back, trying to look as self-assured as a teenaged boy in an ill-fitting jacket and slacks possibly could. He would deliver his rehearsed greeting—a clumsy pairing of words and body language stitched together as a hybrid from a pair of discordant adolescent male role models—part James Dean, part Pat Boone—and she in turn would try to refrain from laughing aloud as she let him into the house. He would continue on for a minute or two with some idle chatter about where they might go and what they might do that evening, and she would cheerily reply that it all sounded like a wonderful way to spend an evening.
Then, finally, he would face her directly and bring the flowers out from behind his back and present them to her. And that warm, wonderful smile would cross her face, the only part of their annual ritual which was not purely scripted. At that point the reenactment would end and they would embrace each other in a kiss and profess their undiminished love to one another—words that they were unable to exchange as strangers on that first night, but which they had grown to know in the years that followed.
As his wife's disease had progressively weakened her abilities over the past few years, however, he had had to forego his Rose Recital, or rather, he had been forced to change its frequency and its script. When he first realized that her memory was fading he began bringing roses home to her once each month, then it became twice per month, and then every week, as it was now, the frequency of the act increasing as the duration of her memory shortened. And he would no longer perform his sweetly sentimental imitation of himself as an awkward teenager trying to act grown up, for her ability to play her part as the love-struck young maiden had left her. So he would now come home and give the flowers to her directly in her chair and kiss her tenderly on the cheek and tell her that he loved her—an oath that he would never remove from his daily routine no matter how short her memory might become, for as long as it would bring that beautiful smile to her face, he would know for certain that she had not left him completely.
A bouquet of roses, he thought, might turn out to be the final connection that she would experience with the world before she left. The thought made the Mayor both sad and happy at the same time. He knew the stark reality that his wife's condition would continue to steadily worsen, and that it would eventually take her from him, but he found comfort in the possibility that she might pass away with a bouquet of red roses at her bedside and a resultant peaceful, pacified smile upon her lips.
The Mayor looked up and suddenly realized that the light before him had turned green. He snapped out of his daydream and guided the car forward through the intersection. The rain was starting to come down harder now, and he flipped the windshield wipers up to normal speed. He kept the car well below the speed limit, owing to the reduced visibility granted him by the water running across the glass in front of him.
As he drove onward, his thoughts turned to the prescription medication which lay on the seat next to the flowers. The doctors had told him that the drug would be useful for his wife—that it would help her to sleep when she became restless and calm her when she grew agitated, as she occasionally did. Yet, although the pills did indeed have their prescribed effect, he disliked their use intensely and he instructed his wife's caretaker to administer them as sparingly as possible. His wife did not need sedation, he told Rosalynn. She only needed attention to her physical needs and caring for her soul. He would allow pharmaceuticals to be used only on those rare occasions when her emotions ran away with her and allowed her no peace. The pills would blunt her anxiety by making her groggy, dulling her senses and snuffing out what little remained of her vitality. It would take a long time, sometimes several days, for her to recover from the effects of those pills. And even when she did shake off the drugs, she never completely recovered all of her former faculties, for a great deal of time, as measured by the cruel hourglass of her disease, would have elapsed in the meantime.
The Mayor despised those pills; he bought them only as a last resort. He felt a familiar urge to grab the small paper bag, roll down the window of the car and fling the package onto the side of the road. Let the rain wash those pills down a gutter, he thought, where they would not be able to steal away any more of her remaining days. But he would not allow himself such a rash indulgence, for he knew that barbiturates were occasionally the only way for his wife to cope with her demons. Better for her to sleep quietly for a day or two than to suffer through the psychological perdition within which her disease sometimes trapped her.
The Mayor pulled his car onto his driveway and came to a stop before the garage door. He pressed the button to activate the automatic door opener, and as he waited for the door to lift, he glanced down again at the items on his passenger's seat—one which brought his wife back closer to him and another which pushed her farther away—and an eerie realization came upon him. He knew that he could not do without either one.
And then, for no apparent reason, he thought of Tony, and he wondered if the young man had yet made it home to his new bride. Perhaps at that very moment, the Mayor thought, he was presenting to her a fresh bouquet of flowers.
* * *
The empty church was in the process of being closed for the evening. It had been an uneventful day for Father Andrew. There had been no mass celebrated that day, for it was Friday, and the few parishioners who had come to the church had for the most part attended to their business personally. Some had come in merely to sit in the pews by themselves for a short time, reading from a bible or kneeling in prayer, perhaps working their way methodically through a string of rosary beads. Others had stopped by to see Andrew about some organizational matter or other. The church parking lot was badly in need of resurfacing, and the contractor had wanted to go over some final details before starting the work. The printer had delivered the programs that had been ordered for the upcoming season of Advent. The church deacon, too, had come in for a couple of hours to tidy up the chapel before the weekend services and to sort through the mail. Andrew was sitting at his desk in the small office he kept at the back of the church, catching up on some overdue paperwork, when the deacon appeared in his doorway. The old man already had his coat slipped over his thin frame, and his hat waited patiently in his hand. Andrew looked up from his work.
"On your way home, Henry?" he asked.
"Yes, Father, I am," answered the deacon, "unless there is something else to be done before I leave."
"No," Andrew said, as he took off his reading glasses and rubbed his tired eyes with his fingertips. "I think we've finished our work here for the day."
"I've closed and locked all the windows and the doors, Father," the deacon said. "Only the candles remain for you."
"All right, Henry, I'll take care of those," Andrew replied. "Thank you for your help. Goodnight."
"Goodnight, Father," the deacon said, as he placed his hat on his head and turned toward the exit at the rear of the building. Andrew sat back in his chair and listened as the soft footsteps of the elderly man's dress shoes could be heard moving down the tiled floor of the hallway toward the rear exit of the church. A few seconds later Andrew heard the door being pushed open, and a moment afterward he heard it close forcefully, metal upon metal, as the heavy door returned with a reverberating thud into its frame. The sound of the door's closing echoed quickly down to nothingness, and all became silent once again within the cavernous confines of the sealed church. Andrew sat motionless in his chair for a minute or two, listening carefully to the silence, as if he required the stillness to prove to him that his day's labor was truly complete.
With a weak sigh Andrew eventually rose from his chair. He spent another minute or so straightening up the papers on his desk, then he gathered up his own coat, switched off the light and closed the office door behind him. Slowly he walked out into the darkened chapel, his path illuminated only by that faint portion of light from the street lamps outside that was able to penetrate the stained-glass windows, and he made his way across the chamber to the far wall. He laid his coat across the back of one of the pews and turned to face the wall.
Before him stood a rack of wrought iron which held an array of short, stubby candles arranged in straight, graduated rows—four rows of a dozen candles each. Each candle was set within a red, semitransparent glass cylinder with a wide, florescent opening at the top. At the foot of the rack, a padded wooden kneeler offered itself to any of the faithful who wished to make their petitions in prayer. From the wall above the candles, a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary, clothed in a pale blue and white hooded frock and standing lightly on a small pedestal affixed to the wall, looked down upon the display with a loving, maternal gaze.
Andrew stood quietly before the modest shrine in the still and silent church. His face glowed softly as he looked down into the warm light given off by the rows of flickering candles before him, and the moisture in his eyes caught the brilliance of each small dancing flame. No more than a quarter of the candles were lit, and during the daylight hours their effect was barely noticeable, but burning together into the evening in that removed corner of the dark chapel, they now produced a substantial incandescence which bathed much of the wall behind them in an oscillating orange hue.
The priest raised his eyes to the luminous figure of the woman poised upon the pedestal above him—the holy saint for whose intercession each votive candle had been lit—and he saw the Virgin's peaceful countenance looking back down to him, as he always did. Her face returned his gaze with a mild and merciful aura—a visage which, when observed at such an hour, and in any mood of comparable melancholy, could captivate his spirit in a way that even he did not fully understand. Occasionally, when he paused to study the candlelit image of the Madonna at night, he felt in some marginal yet meaningful way renewed. In her comforting presence he sometimes recaptured the essence of the creed which had first brought him to the priesthood. It was not always there, he found, or, perhaps more justly, he did not always perceive it. When he did, the sensation always made him feel small—an admonishment that he had foolishly allowed his minor trials to get the better of him—but it was a feeling that restored him as well. It was a welcome humility that he knew must remain at the heart of his vocation.
Looking into her untroubled eyes now, Andrew searched for that element of reassurance and, he hoped, approval—some mute message telling him that his work was good and proper, and that his efforts were looked upon with favor by those of whom that favor mattered. He stared transfixed into the face of the blessed saint, and for a considerable time his thoughts lingered there.
Eventually, though, as if some secret allotment of time had expired, Andrew lowered his eyes once again to the array of candles before him, and he prepared himself to perform his final task for the night.
With his right hand he reached down to the side of the iron rack and lifted a small copper candle snuffer from the cradle in which it rested. He hesitated for a moment, holding the implement delicately in his fingers as he whispered a brief prayer, and as he did he placed the bell of the candle snuffer over the first small flame and held it there until it died.
Dearest Mother, Grant the entreaty for which this humble flame was enkindled,
And bless the soul whose faith has set it alight.
Such prayers were not required by church doctrine as a part of the task, but Andrew felt that a short rite of deference was appropriate nevertheless. He repeated the prayer solemnly as he slowly extinguished the candles in each row one by one.
In the Catholic tradition, the candles had been lighted by members of the parish as a token of their prayers on behalf of loved ones, usually those who were seriously ill or who had recently passed away. Parishioners were free to come to the church and light a candle whenever they so desired. They were not required to reveal to anyone, not even to the parish priest, the reasons for which they had chosen to light a candle. Those were private matters between the petitioners and the saints to whom they appealed for intercession. Nor was there any prescribed limit imposed by the Church on the length of time that a candle could be left to burn. In centuries past, votive candles would routinely burn for days on end, until either the parishioner who lit the candle chose to return to extinguish it personally—the prayer which accompanied its lighting perhaps answered forthwith—or the candle itself burned down to nothing and the flame died out naturally. With the advent of modern municipal fire codes, however, candles could no longer commonly be allowed to burn around the clock in unoccupied buildings, and exceptions, even for churches, were rarely permitted. It was a reasonable rule which Andrew well understood and with which he certainly agreed, yet the nightly task of snuffing out the sacred candles remained an act which always saddened him.
Perhaps it was the vacant hour of the evening, after a day in which no mass had been celebrated and no congregation had gathered within those walls, and all of the smaller affairs of the day which substituted as his priestly service had been attended to, which cast a gray pall over his spirits. Perhaps it was more the haunted and hollow sound of his solitary footsteps on the marble floor which echoed throughout the empty church, or the long, lonely shadow silhouetted by the candlelight high and ghostly among the statuettes and stained-glass windows of the opposite wall. Or perhaps it was simply the act itself, the smothering of each tiny flame representing in his mind's eye the suffocation of that narrow spiracle of faith which had led some undeclared believer to first put each candle to light.
Whatever the underlying reason, Andrew's mood was characteristically dour as he touched out the last of the candles, set the candle snuffer back in its cradle, and made his way down the long center aisle between the rows of pews to the main door at the front of the church. He looked through the window and saw that a steady rain was falling outside, so he retrieved an umbrella from a stand near the door. He cinched up his overcoat as he opened the door and stepped out into the dank and chilly evening.
As he turned to lock the door behind him, Andrew was taken by surprise to see the outline of a person huddled deep in the shadows in a corner of the recessed doorway. He turned toward the figure and saw a teenage girl with very damp brown hair, a girl whom he did not recognize. She wore faded blue jeans and white sneakers, and a light blue jacket that appeared unsuited to the weather. The girl's eyes met Andrew's contritely, as if she feared that she was trespassing upon restricted grounds, but she did not speak.
Andrew opened his umbrella quickly to fend off the rain and gave the girl a smile of reassurance as he approached her.
"Hello," he said in his friendliest voice.
"Hello," the girl replied meekly.
"I'm the parish priest," Andrew said. "Are you here to see me?"
"Oh, no sir," the girl replied respectfully. "I'm just standing here to get out of the rain. Is it all right for me to wait here a little while?" The girl stood with her arms thrust deeply into the pockets of her jacket, and Andrew noticed that her lower jaw shivered as she spoke.
"Well, certainly it's all right," he said, "if that's what you want to do. But aren't you cold out here?"
"Yeah, a little, I guess," replied the girl. "I'm hoping the rain will let up before much longer. I'm okay for now."
Andrew turned and looked around at the wet, deserted streets. The rain seemed to be growing stronger. "Are you waiting for someone to pick you up here?" he asked the girl.
"No," the girl said. "I live a few blocks over that way." She nodded her head toward the west. "I got locked out of the apartment and it was starting to get dark, so I decided to walk over to a friend's house and wait there until my roommates get home. But the rain caught up with me along the way, so I ducked in here to wait it out. I hope that's okay." Her voice was filled with apology.
"Of course, of course," Andrew assured her. "It's fine. You're welcome to stay here as long as you like. But you really shouldn't be standing out here at night in this kind of weather, especially if you're all by yourself."
"Well, I don't really have anyplace else to go right now," the girl said. "I can't get into the apartment where I live, and I don't really know any of the neighbors very well."
"How far away does your friend live?"
"She lives about two or three miles from here, maybe. I could walk there in about thirty minutes or so, but I think I'd get soaked if I left right now."
"Are you sure your friend is home tonight?" Andrew asked. "What would you do if you got there and nobody was home?"
The girl shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know. I guess I'd just turn around and walk back to the apartment again."
Andrew looked at the girl and was caught by a good measure of admiration at her self-reliance. He felt an unburdening sense of compassion flow within him as, almost imperceptibly, his earlier feelings of sadness left him. He knew that his day's work was not yet complete.
"You know, we run a mission just around the corner from here," he said. "That would be a good place for you to wait for a while. I'd be happy to walk over there with you, if you'd like."
The girl hesitated. "The homeless mission?" she said, a look of apprehension crossing her face.
"Oh, come on now," Andrew said good-naturedly. "Don't let the name put you off. It's not as bad as you might think. They're very nice people over there. They have soup and sandwiches if you're hungry, and it's a lot warmer and drier over there than it is out here."
The girl was silent for a moment as she considered the priest's offer.
"I guarantee you'd be much more comfortable there while you wait for your roommates to return," Andrew said. "Why don't you let me walk you over? It doesn't look like the rain is going to be letting up anytime soon."
The girl looked up at the rain as it fell through the glowing circle of light which hung like a misty halo around the street lamp overhead. The priest was right; the rain was growing heavier by the minute.
"Okay," she said finally, with a smile of relief. "I guess it doesn't sound so bad. Thanks."
She stepped out from the doorway and huddled under the umbrella next to Andrew. The two of them then walked off together across the parking lot, stepping gingerly around the large puddles of water that were accumulating in the potholes which dotted their path. They turned up the sidewalk toward the mission.
"By the way, I'm Father Andrew," the priest said, offering his hand.
"Very nice to meet you, Father," the girl said, shaking his hand. "My name is Eppie."