Elders (33 page)

McLeod took a seat in the blue chair and began to remove his shoes as if he had returned from a day of tracting. The force of habit. He had to laugh, or half laugh, a single push of air through his nose. As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. As if his life had not changed forever. But he took off his shoes, still, and placed them back under the blue chair. He was like a man arranging chess pieces—just so. He noticed his companion’s shoes, a few feet from his own, slumping there in the darkness. Passos’s shoes looked like things grown up from the floor, like blackened roots protruding from the ground and retreating back to it, repenting their mistake. In the instant a rush of remorse and embarrassment, profound embarrassment, came over McLeod. It felt like a swooping chill, a sickness. The thought of repenting his own mistake—the thought of confession, or forced confession—brought to McLeod’s mind a terrible scene. He didn’t imagine God, or hellfire, or eternity. If he could have believed in these things he might have taken comfort in them—at least in the fact of their remoteness from him. But the scene McLeod imagined now had the hard feel of reality, time-bound, earthbound, the earth rushing up at him as in his falling dreams. He saw his mother and father at the airport, there to pick him up two months early. A dishonorable release, a ruined son. He saw the dead eyes in his father’s face. He felt his mother’s hug, too eager to comfort. And he wished in the depths of everything he was that he could repent everything he’d done, undo it.

As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened
. Elder McLeod became aware of his body in the room, of what noises it made. For a long moment he listened for movement from the bedroom, not moving at all himself, barely breathing. Maybe Passos hadn’t
heard him. Not going out or coming back. And just maybe—the idea occurred lightly, almost jokingly.

After a minute McLeod stood up, taking soft stockinged steps across the tiny room. He slowed his movements as he reached his goal—the light switch just to the left of the bedroom door. He paused, considering the room behind him: the desks, the chairs, the shoes underneath them. Something began to loosen in McLeod, to move. He willed it to move. He reached for the nub of the light switch for the entryway/living room, but he reached for it slowly, very slowly. He didn’t want the
click
to sound.

For the moment
he existed in that liminal space between subconscious and conscious, dreaming and waking. Something had drawn Elder Passos up toward the surface such that he felt he could almost control the dream, as if he were an actor in a scene he had written himself, and yet he worked to stay asleep so he could learn what would happen. He and his mother walked hand in hand in green woods, a winding trail of the kind he had seen in pictures, but never in person. The trail was soft from accumulated pine needles, and somewhere a stream ran down among rocks. The water burbled in a playful vein that belied the soberness in his mother’s voice. “If you go there, of course you’d need to take your brothers too.”

“Of course, Mom.”

“They look up to you.”

“It’s not forever, anyway.”

“You have to promise me you won’t forget about them.”

“Mom, come on.”

“Promise me, son. You’re a good boy, but promise me.”

“I promise you.”

The trail widened out and the water slid away and the dappled light through the trees undappled, got steady and bright until it filled the vast green field that opened up in front of them. In the far corner of the field, two trees. They stood a good fifty meters apart. Passos and his mother crossed to the first tree, a towering
mango, in a matter of steps. They plucked lunch from the reachable branches and ate it in the tree’s expansive shade. Passos in bed could almost taste the sweet syrupy pulp on his tongue, feel it in between his teeth, gritty and reassuring. His mother laughed at him—“My little pig!”—and cupped her chin to show him what she meant. Passos wiped the same spot on his face and came away with an orange-red slime.

“So,” his mother said, and she stood up and produced two homemade kites for them to fly, slanted boxes made out of grocery bags and balsam. The sun shone even brighter now. The wind picked up. The kites lifted and shrank to the size of postage stamps in a scrubbed blue sky. Toward evening Passos tired and sat down against the tree trunk. He read from his scriptures—his Bible in English—and only then did he notice the missionary clothes he wore. He looked over at his mother as she reeled in the kites, first hers, then his. She smiled mysteriously, as if thinking some private little thought. Then she turned her head, sensing his eyes on her, and her smile widened. “My little scholar,” she said.

Passos smiled too, though a bit unsurely.

“What is it, son?” his mother said. “You’re not in a hurry, are you?”

He shook his head.

“Good.” Her voice rebounded, light as a song in her throat. “Good, good. We’ll wait for the fireflies.”

Passos nodded. He felt content and secure. He read for a minute more, then closed his eyes, leaning against the trunk of the mango tree. He remembered the second tree, some distance away, and he opened his eyes to study it. He picked up a wind-fallen mango and
stood up and threw it as far as he could toward the tree. It fell well short.

He heard footsteps behind him. His mother gripped a green, spotted mango in her right hand. “Watch what your old mother can do,” she said. “Are you watching?” She cocked her arm far back behind her head, hopped once, then twice on her back leg, then whirled around like a discus thrower and sent the mango flying through the air. The oblong fruit described a rainbow arc until it thunked against a low bough, dropping what sounded like large pinecones, loosing a shiver of white fuzz. The fuzz—a snowy scrim—updrafted and eddied on the breeze. It finally settled on the ground around the tree, coating its exposed, prodigious roots.

Passos tilted his head. “What kind of tree is that?”

His mother looked surprised. “You never played Brazilian snowstorm, my little son?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why, it’s a snowstorm tree. Here.” She led them to the squat twisted tree base. Against the trunk, its bark gray and papery, his mother put out her hand to steady herself. She reached down and retrieved from between two roots a small green pod, cleanly burst down the middle, with its white fibrous insides showing. “These sides peel back,” his mother explained, “until it’s just the fluffy seeds, you see?” Then she lofted the pod straight up into the canopy of dark impenetrable green. Some leaves wafted down before another cloud of white, like an annunciation. Passos’s mother bent down for more pods and he followed her lead, collecting a handful and unloading it, one by one, into the tree. The snow shook down in successive waves. It fell on his hair, his neck. It tickled his
skin; it made him chuckle. He was chuckling with the sensation, then suddenly he was laughing, then suddenly,
boyishly
, he was spinning around. He put his arms out, gathering speed, spinning, making the white stuff coat him, making it swirl all around him in the darkening air. Over the
whoosh
of his movement he heard his mother laughing too, a bright, clear, girlish laugh. They laughed in chorus, mother and son—they didn’t know why they laughed, only that they did, as if in defiance of the dream that was dimming away now, bleaching out, the surface approaching in spite of Passos’s best efforts to stay under forever, to live there and breathe there, away from the world of waking sights, waking sounds.

The bedside clock said 5:34. He heard a subtle
click
in the hallway outside the bedroom. A band of yellow light appeared under the door. He listened for footsteps, thought he heard them: shuffling steps, soft as sails. Elder Passos jerked upright out of bed, caught in a sudden breathless clutch that breached the chrysalis of sleep once and for all. He pressed his ear to the wall. He heard a metallic scrape against the linoleum, the scrape of a chair leg, it sounded like. He heard the hollow knock of rubber against the floor. Was someone taking off his shoes? Or stealing theirs? He looked across the room for the first time. McLeod’s bed was empty, still made up. Of course, he thought. Of course. What kind of intruder turns on the light, anyway? Passos released his breath. Why had he rushed to the thought of an intruder? McLeod had gotten up early before. Not lately, but still. Nothing else made sense.

Passos lay back down as if to enforce a calmness of mind. He closed his eyes in an attempt to get back to sleep, a futile attempt,
he suspected, but he tried anyway. He tried to rejoin the dream with his mother—a pair of trees, a kind of snow, his mother’s laughter—but as he struggled to conjure these images again, another set of stimuli recurred to him with the sudden force of memory: the key in the front door, the scrape on the linoleum, the clatter of the outer gate before that. Hadn’t these been the very sounds to bring him up from his dream in the first place?

Elder Passos sat up again, trained his gaze on the glowing strip of light under the doorway. For a moment the strip seemed to waver, seemed surreal, and so, too, the idea of his companion leaving the apartment in the middle of the night. But what else could the sounds mean? Outer door, front door. The key in the lock, then footsteps inside. Passos rubbed hard at his eyes, sitting up all the way now, making sure he had left the dreaming state. But to wonder about a dream is to have left it already. Passos suddenly felt certain that his companion had left the house, alone, and in the night, a gross violation of missionary rules. He remembered McLeod’s shoes strangely placed at his bedside. Exactly when had he left? For how long? For what purpose? Passos didn’t know, but he didn’t need to know. I hold a trump card now, he thought.

Then he thought of his mother in the dream.
You’re a good boy, but promise me
, she’d said. That “but”—it pierced all the way to the bone. But what other options did he have? Should he pretend he hadn’t heard his companion coming in the front gate at five thirty in the morning? Should he turn a blind, uncaring eye? In the event of a companion’s serious misconduct—serious
sin
, potentially—a missionary did best to turn the matter over to the presiding priesthood authority. President Mason, in this case. Perhaps Passos had been handed a gift, he and McLeod both. It might
not be too late for a change of transfer plans—Passos to the office and McLeod to another companion, or home early if necessary, however the president saw fit to handle him. It could be as simple as a phone call: an apology to the president for calling so early in the morning and an expression of concern for his junior companion, who had finally gone beyond Passos’s ability to control, who needed more guidance than he could provide.

Elder Passos heard another short scrape of a chair readjusting under his companion’s weight. What was he doing out there? Why had he left the apartment? What had he done?

He couldn’t exactly go strike up a conversation about it with McLeod. Never mind that they hadn’t spoken in three weeks—to even go out into the front room would be to acknowledge what he knew, to tip his hand. Much better to make a private phone call to the president, give him and McLeod the out they both wanted. Elder Passos didn’t need McLeod’s parents, anyway. He only needed a recommendation from the president, a student visa, and the rest, he felt confident, would take care of itself. And of course,
of course
he would remember his brothers. He would bring Nana over too, if she could ever be persuaded. If not, he would return after four years, maybe less, with an American degree in hand, and the world that much wider, that much better for him. Elder Passos knew now to build his house on two foundations—the spiritual and the secular. He knew his mother would be proud of him. He was a good boy, she’d said. But what did she mean by that “but”?

Passos heard another sound from the front room, a different sound, a sort of scratching. Tapping and scratching. He tried to ignore it. He covered his ears. Then the scratching noise stopped
and a long silence followed. Elder Passos stiffened in his bed. If McLeod tried to sneak back into the bedroom, let him. He closed his eyes now, pretending to sleep. But the noise in the front room resumed. What was it? Where was it coming from?