Innocence

“It’ll be worse than bad. Latest word is that they engineered the weapon, the bug, for a 98-percent mortality rate. It exceeded their expectations. Then they lost control of it.”

“I’m scared for Gwyneth. Telford was dying and he spit on her.”

Mr. Hanlon looked up, surprised, but then turned away at once. “Where did Telford find her?”

“He got to the child before we did. She’s contaminated, too.”

He was silent, not because he had nothing to say but because he had too much. Then: “Though I always hoped for better circumstances, I’m honored to have you in my home at last. Addison Goodheart is a more appropriate name for you than Son of It.”

72

TEAGUE HANLON, BOTH GUARDIAN TO GWYNETH and the benefactor who had given Father a key to the food bank and the associated thrift shop, was not the high-priced attorney that I might initially have imagined. Once a fighting marine who’d gone to war, he was now a priest and the rector of St. Sebastian’s, the man to whom Gwyneth’s father and mine had turned when in need, the man who worked through Judge Gallagher’s mother, his parishioner, to ensure the transfer of the nameless girl into Gwyneth’s custody. He was the nexus of our intersecting lives.

We were in the basement of the rectory behind St. Sebastian’s on this terrible night, and Father Hanlon didn’t wear the Roman collar here that identified his office when he was in public.

Prior to his revelation, the chalice of my heart had been filled to the brim with emotion, and now it overflowed. I sat on the edge of the armchair, searching for an adequate response and at first finding none. The intense tide of feelings did not wash me away. I had taken a master’s degree in stoicism before I learned to walk. I needed only to sit quietly for a moment, seining those deep waters for the right words.

I said, “You fed us all these years.”

“The food wasn’t mine. It was all donated.”

“You clothed us.”

“With secondhand garments also donated.”

“You kept our secret.”

“The least expected of a priest who hears confessions.”

“You never raised a hand against Father.”

“I saw his face only a few times.”

“But never harmed him.”

“I was able to meet his eyes only once.”

“And didn’t harm him.”

“I should have made myself meet them again and again.”

“But after each encounter with him, you fell into despair.”

“I suffered periodic depression before I ever knew about you and the man you called Father.”

“Yes, but the very thought of us made those depressions blacker. You said so yourself in your note to me, and we gave you nightmares, yet still you sustained us.”

Standing with his face in his hands, he spoke in Latin, not to me, but perhaps in prayer. I listened, and though I didn’t understand the words, his great distress was evident.

I rose from the armchair, took a couple of steps toward Father Hanlon, but halted, for it was not given to me, in my difference, to be able to comfort people. In fact, quite the opposite. As on the night when Father had been brutally murdered while I lay watching from under an SUV, I felt inadequate, useless, and I was ashamed of my helplessness.

The Latin words crumbled in his mouth, falling from his lips in broken syllables, and he faltered in the prayer, taking deep shuddery breaths and expelling them with tortured sounds that might have been half sobs of grief and half expressions of disgust.

Given my twenty-six years of experience, I could only imagine that my presence was the cause of such powerful, unchecked emotions. I said, “I’ll go. I never should have come here. Foolish. I’ve been foolish. And reckless.”

“No. Wait. Let me pull myself together. Give me a chance.”

He had given us so much that I owed him anything he asked.

When he regained control of himself, he went to the door through which we had arrived and seemed to check the locks to be certain that he had secured them. He stood listening to the storm, his back to me, and at last he said, “It’s an east wind, like the one that parted the sea.” That thought led him to another, and he quoted: “‘They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’”

Although there was much I wanted to say, I knew that I should not. His mind and heart were out of alignment, and only he could bring them into harmony.

He said, “The North Koreans, what’s left of them, announced a short while ago that birds don’t contract the disease, but they do carry it. There’s no quarantine that can prevent birds from flying.”

They made movies and wrote books about planet-killing asteroids, stories that evoked a frisson of horror in audiences and readers. But in the end, no million-ton mass from outer space was necessary to put an end to civilization. The murder of one man could be committed with something as small as a few drops of nectar from the oleander plant instilled in honey, and all of humankind could be murdered most efficiently by something even smaller, a mere microbe of malevolent invention.