The Mill River Recluse (18 page)

Father O’Brien stood up and walked around the hospital room. For a few minutes, he stood at the window, staring outside. Mary was still quiet and unresponsive. Circling back toward the bed, he looked out the small glass window in the door to the room. No one was visible in the hallway outside. Casually, he reached toward the tray on which Mary’s lunch had grown cold. Next to the plain white bowl of soup was an equally plain soupspoon.

With a trembling hand, he reached for it. The spoon was old, slightly bent. Dulled by repeated washings in the hospital kitchen. A
lovely
thing. He held it in front of him, rocked back on his heels to look out the door, to check once more that no one was headed toward the room. The guilt that he always felt about his spoon habit bubbled up inside him, but he pushed it away and pushed the soupspoon into a small pocket that he had sewn inside the sleeve of his jacket. It would make a fine addition to his collection.

“Thou shalt not steal,” whispered a voice from the bed. Mary was looking right at him. She had seen everything.

In the moment of silence that followed, while his lower jaw battled gravity and lost, Dr. Mason burst through the hospital room door. Mary’s glazed demeanor immediately returned.

“Hello, Mrs. McAllister, how are you doing today?” Dr. Mason asked, nodding to Father O’Brien. As usual, Mary cringed slightly but otherwise did not respond. The priest watched as Dr. Mason took Mary’s pulse, very carefully examined her eyes, and listened to her heart. Father O’Brien wanted so much to tell him that Mary had spoken, but the hard, thin form of the spoon in his sleeve stopped him. What would he say if the doctor asked what exactly Mary had said?

“No change, I guess,” Dr. Mason muttered under his breath. “It’s good of you to keep coming by, Father. She’s just going to take some time, and your visits can’t do anything but help. Have you any idea whether Mr. McAllister will be here this evening?”

“Mr. McAllister...Conor, you mean?” Father O’Brien asked, forcing his jaw back into action. Dr. Mason nodded. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t be. He’s made a habit of coming by after work each evening.”

“I should still be here, and I’d like to speak to him about Mary’s condition. If you should see him this afternoon, would you make sure he knows to ask for me when he arrives?”

“Certainly,” said Father O’Brien. Dr. Mason smiled, glanced back at Mary, and left to continue his rounds.

“Mrs. McAllister,” Father O’Brien began, drawing his chair closer to her bedside, “Mrs. McAllister, can you--”

“I want to go home, Father,” Mary said, turning to face him and focusing her good eye on his right sleeve. “Please tell Grandpop and the others that I want to go home.”

Her perfect, lucid speech shocked him. “I’m sure that they’ll take you home, Mrs. McAllister, as soon as you are well.” She seemed to have forgotten about the spoon incident, and he was relieved. “But, how long have you--we didn’t know that you were aware of anything around you,” Father O’Brien stammered.

“I remember Grandpop telling me about Patrick,” Mary said, her voice cracking just a little at her mention of Patrick’s name, “and I felt the anxiety, like I used to have but much worse than it had ever been. It came up over me and everything went blurry. I remember bits of conversations, people coming in and out of the room. I remember the doctor taking the bandage off my eye, and still not being able to see out of it. My thoughts came and went, and I didn’t care. Until a few days ago, I wanted to die.

“And then Grandpop came by again. I don’t know what day it was exactly, but I remember him saying something about Brattleboro, a retreat there for the mentally ill. He said to me, ‘Mary, please come back to us, I don’t know what to do. I won’t let them send you away, but I just don’t know what to do.’” Tears squeezed out of the corner of her eyes--both of them, Father O’Brien noticed--and she was quiet a moment as she wiped them away. “When he had gone, I realized that Patrick wanted to hurt me, maybe kill me, and that if I didn’t get better, he would have gotten exactly what he wanted. If something were to happen to Grandpop, Patrick’s parents would be more than happy to send me away. No one would be left for the horses.” The tears were flowing faster now. “And, most of all, Papa would have wanted me to get better, I know it. I began to try, really try, to live again, but it is so hard here, surrounded by strange people who think I’m crazy. I just want so much to be home, Father.”

His mind whirling, Father O’Brien leaned back in his chair. He still could not believe that she was speaking so lucidly when only a few days before, she had been despondent. “I think I should call Conor,” he said. “If we’re going to get you out of here, he’s going to be the one to do it. And you’ll need to speak to many more people than just me.”

“I know,” Mary replied. “But Father, please don’t tell anyone about my anxiety. Everyone thought it was gone, but it never really went away. I can’t control it, I couldn’t ever control it, and now it’s worse than it ever was. I don’t want the doctors or Patrick’s family to send me away.”

“Of course not,” Father O’Brien said, standing up to leave.

“Father...why do you steal spoons?” She looked up at him with watery eyes and, for the first time in weeks, smiled. Despite her words, the tone of her question was not accusatory. She spoke lightly, as if amused by a magician performing a trick. Father O’Brien opened his mouth to reply, but she continued. “I wondered, when you took a spoon from Patrick’s mother the day you came to the house to help plan our wedding, whether you regularly pilfered fine silver. I thought that maybe it was because your church stipend was so modest...but today, the hospital spoons are surely worthless.”

Father O’Brien stood at her bedside, feeling more than ever the way his right sleeve hung more heavily than his left.
She had seen him that day at the McAllisters’.
He thought about what excuse he could give her, but even with only one good eye, she would most surely see through any lie. He sighed, sat down again. She waited.

“The truth is, Mrs. McAllister,” he began.

“Please, just Mary.”

“Mary, then.” He paused. “Considering what I’m about to tell you, perhaps you should call me Michael.” And he told her of his sins, a hundred and twelve of them, collected in a box in his office, with the one hundred and thirteenth up his sleeve. How his attraction to spoons began shortly after he entered the seminary. How it intensified after he took his vows and drove him to steal them, one by one. How he had sewn special pockets into the sleeves of all his clothing to assist in his theft. His voice cracked as he spoke of his guilt, how he always confessed his most recent transgressions and was still powerless to stop. Expecting her to react with disappointment and disgust, he begged her not to tell anyone.

She spoke quietly after a moment, and her response surprised him. “No one is perfect, Michael, not even priests. Some are less perfect than others. Overall, you are a good person. You are caring and kind. In our world, even small gestures of kindness are remembered, and you’ve done so much more. Your coming here over the past days and weeks has helped me, probably more than I realize right now.” Father O’Brien felt his lower lip begin to quiver and he bowed his head, blinking rapidly. Mary reached out a hand to comfort him. “Michael, yours is a minor flaw. I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

Chapter 13

It was seventeen minutes until snack time.

Claudia watched the minute hand of the clock on her classroom wall creep toward the twelve. It was the last period until the school day ended at three o’clock, and her fourth-graders were working on multiplication problems in small groups. The last period was always the hardest because the kids were eager to go home and easily distracted.

“Miss Simon! Miss Simon!” wailed a girl’s voice. Claudia looked up and saw Mia Wallace writhing in her seat. A group of boys sitting behind her were sniggering to themselves. “Travis wiped a booger on my back!”

Mia Wallace was the class outcast. She was twice the size of a normal fourth-grader, and Claudia knew that most of the other kids called her “Mia Walrus.” She had even caught Travis Shay imitating Mia at recess, slithering along the ground shouting “Me a walrus!” to anyone who would listen. Claudia empathized with Mia. She remembered well her own school days as a fat child, and it was even more painful watching the nine-year-olds’ cruelty being inflicted on someone else. She would not tolerate it.

“Travis!” Claudia said, standing up.

“I didn’t do it, Miss Simon! I was only pretending! See? There’s nothing on her!”

Claudia inspected Mia’s back. There was no sign of any booger.

“Just the same, Travis, that’s a horrible way to treat people. I think Ms. Finney would be interested in hearing about this. Go down to her office,” Claudia said, walking over to her classroom intercom. “And don’t dawdle in the hallway. I’m going to tell her you’re on your way.”

Mia smiled at Claudia. Travis rolled his eyes and left for the principal’s office. For him, it was nothing new.

After a few moments, the students resumed their discussions. Claudia tried to focus on grading the stack of papers in front of her, but she found herself instead thinking about the carrot sticks and peanut butter she had in her desk drawer. Her stomach rumbled almost loud enough to be heard over the chattering of her students. Lunch had been three and a half hours ago.

“Miss Simon, we can’t get this one,” said Rowen Hansen, carrying her book and paper up to her desk. The two other girls with whom Rowen was working followed.

“Let’s see,” Claudia said, looking at Rowen’s paper and the multiplication problem. She saw immediately that the girls hadn’t moved the proper number of spaces to the left as they worked out the problem. Very slowly, Claudia worked out the problem, showing the girls how to indent the proper number of spaces, until the girls smiled with comprehension. She handed the book back to Rowen, but as she let go of it, the bound pages slid out of the spine and fell to the floor.

“Uh-oh, I think your book came unglued,” Claudia said, reaching for the pages.

“I know. It’s been that way since last semester,” Rowen said. She held out the cover for Claudia to see. “I told Mrs. Shultz about it last semester. She tried to get me a new book but the school didn’t have any more. Then she glued the pages back in, but they fell out again last week.”

“Oh. Well, you’ll need it tonight for your homework,” Claudia said, “but first thing tomorrow morning, I’ll try to glue it for you again. And I’ll double-check about getting you another book. Maybe there’s an extra one now that wasn’t available when Mrs. Shultz checked.

Okay?”

“Okay.” Rowen smiled and carefully carried her math book and papers back to her seat.

Claudia looked at the clock again. Two minutes until the bell rang. One minute. Then her students were jumping up, stuffing their books and papers into their backpacks, running for the hall where their coats and snow boots waited. “See you tomorrow,” she called as the last children filed out the door.

Claudia lunged for her lower right-hand desk drawer, pulled it open, and fumbled inside for her insulated lunch bag. She removed a plastic sandwich bag full of carrot sticks and a little Tupperware container of peanut butter.
Best snack in the world
, she thought to herself as she dipped one of the carrots into the peanut butter and popped it into her mouth. That particular carrot was a little large to be eaten in a single mouthful, but she didn’t care.

“Claudia, hi,” said a voice to her left. Startled, Claudia turned to see Kyle Hansen coming through her classroom door. He was wearing his police uniform and smiling at her. The carrot and peanut butter stuck to the roof of her mouth, and she realized with some degree of alarm that she could not finish chewing in time to reply properly.

“Oh, hi,” she said, standing up and putting her hand over her mouth. She chewed ferociously and swallowed, hoping that part of the half-chewed carrot wouldn’t lodge in her throat. “I didn’t expect to see you back here so soon. You just missed Rowen. I think she’s putting her coat on in the hall.”

“Yep, I already saw her. I’m on the evening shift tonight, and I told her I’d pick her up at school before I left for the station. But actually, I wanted to say hello to you while I was here.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and shuffled his feet. “And, actually, I, uh, I was wondering if you might like to have dinner with me sometime this week. Something simple, maybe, like pizza.”

“Oh.” Claudia swallowed one more time, to make sure that no little bits of carrot were left to fly out of her mouth.

“Or, we could make it just coffee, if you’d like,” Kyle said. “I know you’re probably swamped with papers to grade in the evenings, so we wouldn’t have to go for dinner if you’d rather not.”

He took a step backwards, and Claudia realized that he assumed her hesitation to be a prelude to rejection.

“Pizza sounds great,” she said, with more honesty than Kyle realized.

“Really?” His face brightened. “How about tomorrow? I’m on tomorrow at eleven, so there’d be plenty of time for dinner before my shift starts. I could pick you up at about six.”

“Perfect! Do you know where I live?”

“You’re renting the house next to St. John’s, aren’t you?”

Claudia smiled and nodded. “Yeah. Mill River’s so small. I keep forgetting that everybody knows where everybody else lives.”

“Dad! Come on! I want to go home and check on Sham!” Rowen said, sticking her head into the classroom.

“I’ll be right there, kiddo,” he said, and Rowen disappeared back out the door. He followed his daughter, pausing to grin at Claudia again. “See you tomorrow, then,” he said, and was gone.

Claudia sank back into the chair at her desk. In slow motion, she reached for another carrot and twirled it in the peanut butter. She actually had a real date. With Kyle. And pizza. Each of those facts was exciting and terrifying, but sitting in her empty classroom crunching carrots, Claudia resolved to get over the terrifying parts and thoroughly enjoy herself.