True Believers(29)

He sent up a silent prayer that he might get lost enough in it today to forget all about Sister Harriet Garrity, then he headed out the door and down the stairs toward the sacristy.




11

For Marty Kelly, the six o’clock bell was like an alarm clock. He had been sitting in the little changing room just off the sacristy, with Bernadette beside him, for so long he had begun to feel the tops of his legs going to sleep. He had, as well, been noticing things he had never noticed before. The ceilings in this church were much higher than ceilings were other places. That was what made the rooms feel so big. The windows in this church all had thick panes that couldn’t be seen through—or they did up here. Marty couldn’t remember what it was like in the basement, where the meeting rooms were, because every time he had been there he had resented it. It was the one thing Bernadette ever did that really upset him, insisting over and over that they should take courses together. Bible study, catechism, marriage encounter: Marty had hated them all. He had especially hated sitting at the wide conference tables with a book open in front of him, knowing that anything he could think of to say would be foolish, or worse. It had been like being back in school again, where the only thing he had ever been able to do right was to keep his mouth shut.

Marty got up off the step he was sitting on and went to the door on the other side of the door to the sacristy. It was all a matter of logistics. If he went through the sacristy, he would come out on the altar, and that wasn’t what he wanted. Bernadette would have hated the idea of being laid out there, as if she were some kind of pagan sacrifice. If he went out the other door, though, he would go into the church proper just to the left of the Mary Chapel. That would lead him right to the Communion   rail, which was made out of marble and set in place, so that it couldn’t be removed. When they ended the practice of kneeling at Communion  , the churches with wooden rails had taken them out. It had happened so long ago that Bernadette hadn’t even been alive, but she had always refused to go to a church without a rail anyway. At least she hadn’t been one of those people who dropped to their knees in front of the priest as soon as they got to the head of the Communion   line, holding up everybody who was waiting and getting themselves talked about, in whispers, until the end of Mass. Bernadette never did anything obvious like that. It wasn’t in her nature.

Marty looked up one end of the narrow hall and down the other, but nobody was in sight, not even the homeless people. If this day was like any other day, Mary McAllister would be rounding them up to take them to the soup kitchen, where they would be given breakfast and kept out of the cold for an hour or two. Eventually, they always wandered off. The ones who weren’t crazy were pickled in alcohol. They never knew where they were. Down at one end of the hall, there was a window. Marty was sure he saw a trace of lightening sky. He always thought of February as the dead of winter. He forgot that spring was only a month away.

Marty went back into the changing room and looked down on Bernadette lying on the floor, curled up as if she were still sitting in the truck—but not quite as curled up as she had been. Her body had been so stiff, but now it seemed to be relaxing a little. He leaned down and touched the skin of her face, then stepped back quickly. She felt like polished rock, and she really was cold. He had heard on television that people got cold when they were dead, but he’d never really understood what that meant before now.

He leaned over and got his arms underneath her. It was true. She had relaxed a little. She was still stiff, but not as stiff. She didn’t feel rigid.

He lifted her in his arms and waited for a few seconds, to make sure he had his balance. She weighed almost nothing, even as a deadweight. When she’d been alive, he’d been able to carry her around like a bag of groceries, taking her from the living room to the bedroom to the kitchen just because they were teasing each other and it was a game they could play. They had played a lot of games in their time together, and made love often enough to make Marty bored with the pictures in Playboy, but what he had loved most was the way they were together in bed when they weren’t making love. That was what Bernadette had given him that he had never had: that sense of companionship; those hours of being easy and without the need for defense. It bothered him that he could no longer remember what they had talked about in the dark. It bothered him even more that they might have talked about nothing in particular, but just rambled on, warming in the sounds of each other’s voices.

He took her out into the hall, and then across the hall into the side of the church proper. There was a little corner there that was cut off from the people in the pews. The only way they could have been seen was by somebody praying in the Mary Chapel, but the only person in the Mary Chapel was stretched out on a pew and fast asleep. Marty looked at the pews in the center of the church and felt a moment of hesitation. What had happened to Mary McAllister? Usually she had the homeless people up and moving by this time. He hadn’t intended to do what he was going to do in full view of thirty people—and especially not these people, who were not right in their minds and might be set off by it. On the other hand, he didn’t see what else he could do. If he waited any longer, Father Healy would come down to change. The Sisters of Divine Grace would come over from their convent. He wasn’t stupid enough to believe he would be able to get past all of them with Bernadette.