my car and all the scrambled eggs I could eat in places like Denny’s, the counters sticky, the lighting dolorous. I told everyone that I was leaving the church-no sabbatical, this, no hiatus or retreat-because I could no longer bear to throw the drowning victims of reason and birth, my congregation, life preservers with long ropes attached to nothing.
Dave Sadler, the deacon with pancreatic cancer, now had a tumor so large he couldn’t digest his food. He was starving to death in a hospice, and somehow I was supposed to reassure him that everything in the end would be all right. Caroline Pearce, three years old, had seen one of her little-girl legs sliced off by the metal that ripped through the side of her mother’s car when a pickup plowed into it as she and her mother were returning home from day care. Beside her bed in the children’s wing of the hospital-a room infinitely cheerier than the intensive-care unit where she had spent the first days after the accident, but still an awfully dark room for a toddler-I was supposed to smile. I was expected to console Nathan Bedard, a third-grader with a particularly virulent form of leukemia who’d be dead in two or three years, and I was supposed to inspirit his aunt and uncle, neither of whom had worked in almost a year and were in the process of selling the trailer in which they lived. Once the trailer was gone, they would bunk with friends and relatives-including Nathan’s parents-for a while, but they had no idea how or where they would live for the long haul.
And I was supposed to find comforting words for fifteen-year-old Katie Hayward. I was supposed to help the little girl I’d watched grow into a young woman-a wise and pretty reasonable young woman, it seemed to me, in spite of all that she’d seen and suffered-make sense of the fact that her father’s anger was boundless, and he was, in the end, capable of murdering her mother in a manner that was simultaneously intimate and violent.
From those letters I considered sending to my friends, mostly (but not all) discarded and deleted, I remember one paragraph perfectly: “I don’t think I have ever had a predilection for depression, but at the moment I feel as if a friend who has always provided me comfort and counsel has gone away. I no longer know quite what I should be saying to others and have never before felt so personally and spiritually alone.”
I tend to doubt that Heather Laurent ever saw that sentence, however, because the laptop was still on the porch when she appeared at my door, and though later we would stand beside it and listen to the murmur of the shallow river, she wasn’t the sort who would have leaned over and tried to read the words that were at least partly shrouded by the glare from the muggy, overcast sky. And when she arrived, initially she sat down in the chair at the wrought-iron table that was across from the seat in which I had been composing my e-mails.
“This is a beautiful little village,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“The tragedy doesn’t change that, you know. The tragedy doesn’t make it any less lovely.”
“Visit this place in mid-January. It gets pretty bleak.”
She smiled and ran two fingers along the chain around her neck, resting them for a moment on the small cross. “You know what I mean,” she said. “People understand the aura of a little place like this.”
Briefly it crossed my mind that this woman was a nun. It was possible, I decided, that I had just mistaken a Catholic nun for a cable celebrity. “Are you with the church?” I asked.
“The church. Is there only one?”
“Oh, this afternoon they’re all equally suspect.”
“You sound awfully disillusioned.”
“Maybe just awfully fed up.”
“Well,” she answered, “I’m not here with any church. I’m just a writer.”
“And you’re not with… anything?”
“I write books,” she said, and it was clear in the gentleness of her tone that the fact that I hadn’t a clue who she was didn’t bother her.
“Are you going to write a book about our tragedy?”
“I hope not.”
“That’s not why you’re here?” She shrugged. “Maybe you’re why I’m here. You. That girl. This town.”
My anger then was still embryonic, it was still merely in utero fury-a hostility toward the universe conceived roughly twenty-nine hours earlier. Had Heather arrived at my home a few weeks or even days later, I might have been unable to hold my tongue. I might have thrown her out of the house. On the other hand, had she arrived a few weeks or even days later, I might have been gone. I’ve no idea for sure where I’d have wound up-Texas, most likely, or southern Illinois-but I think there’s a good chance I would have pressed “send” on one (or more) of those e-mails and gotten the hell out of Vermont. Had Heather come even Saturday or Sunday of that week, she might have found an empty house and a stunned deacon or steward murmuring, “He left. He just up and left.”
But that afternoon I was able to satisfy my anger with essentially harmless morsels of sarcasm.
“Well,” I said evenly. “I guess I should be flattered.”
“Don’t be. Don’t give me that much credit. Do you have any family, Reverend Drew?”
“No. I’m alone.”
“No wife?”
“Nope.”
“A partner?”
“I date.” Usually I gave the inquisitive a bit more of a bone, but that afternoon I was in no mood to discuss the history and vagaries of my life choices. There were women in my past, but not a marriage.
“Are you from around here?” she asked.
“I’m not.”
“Have you been in Vermont-with this congregation-a long time? Or are you an interim minister?”
I looked longingly through the screen door at the pitcher with iced coffee on the kitchen table. “Are these questions the preface to a more extended inquiry, Ms. Laurent, or merely an attempt at conversation?”
“Please, call me Heather. I’d like that.”
“Next time I will,” I agreed. The first Heather I had ever known had taken off all her clothes for me. I was five, she was seven. She lived two houses away. We were upstairs in her bedroom on a summer afternoon, and she promised me she would strip if I could find her red bathing suit. It wasn’t a difficult search: I found it in the third dresser drawer I opened, wadded into a ball at the top of her underwear and T-shirts. She was the first female I ever saw naked. “And these questions?” I asked again.
“I haven’t a clue. Really and truly. I’m just giving them voice as they come to me.”
“In that case, I’m going to get some more iced coffee-though it’s been sitting out so long by now it will merely be watered-down tepid coffee. Still, you are welcome to have some. In my current state of mind, this is an act of courtesy that has demanded a herculean resiliency. If I rise to that occasion, will you tell me why you’ve come to see me?”
“I drink tea.”
“Then you’re out of luck. I don’t drink tea.”
“Have I come at a bad time?”
I leaned forward in my chair and looked deep into her face. The edges of her lips, adorned with a lipstick so lustrous and red that I thought of the vestments I wore when I’d preach on Pentecost or Palm Sunday, were curled into a smile, and I realized that she had meant this as a joke. She understood there had been few worse times in my life.
“I think this counts as one, yes.”
“Pour yourself that coffee,” she said. “I don’t need any. But I would like to stay and visit. May I?”
I rarely saw lipstick like that in Haverill. I rarely saw a silk blouse.
“I have nowhere to go,” I answered.
“No meetings? No parishioners?”
“There are always meetings. There are always parishioners.”
“But you have some time.”
I nodded as I stood up and listened to her as I opened the screen door and retrieved the pitcher.
“I have nothing at all on my calendar this afternoon or evening,” she said. “And I have a sense you can appreciate how liberating that sensation is. I just finished one of the world’s longest book tours.” Then she rose, too, and followed me inside.
“What’s your book about?”
“My new one?”
