H2O: The Novel Part 18

"John Connor, sir," he said, extending a hand to my father. "I'm Kate's friend. And her plumber." They shook hands.

"Hey! Good grip there, John. A tradesman. My kind of guy," my father said. "Thank you for coming with her."

I could hear more clucking, one Italian hen whispering to another. "Are they going to sleep in the same bedroom? Surely Norm wouldn't allow that."

"Shhh," hushed another hen. "She might hear you. You know why she left all those years ago, don't you? Pregnant. The shame of it."

In that instant, I hated coming back here. I looked at John, who rolled his eyes in the direction of the clucking hens. He'd heard it, too. His eyes and smile calmed me as if to say, "Ignore them." I tried and failed. My ears burned in the vitriol of low voices.

"John and I met on the Internet," I said, loud enough for the gossips to pick up on. Murmurs ran throughout the room, and I decided to make this a little bit of fun. "I asked him to my condo, and we met for the first time in my bathroom." The murmurs instantly grew louder, and I could see people bending to whisper in each other's ears. My father looked confused.

"I have a plumbing business, Mr. Pepper," John said with a chuckle. "She found my address on the Internet and called me to fix a clogged toilet." They shook hands again. A sure sign of approval from Norman Pepper, the son and grandson of working men, Irish immigrants who built New York City. John and my father bonded, leaving me, for the time, to deal with the clucking hens.

Gossip rippled through the room as I made my way through the hugs of crying women whose tears dried up the moment I left them. In the eyes of my inbred family, I personified a mail-order East European bride, and John a mafia boss masquerading as a tradesman intending to take advantage of twenty-nine-year-old girls who didn't have the brains to find a husband.

As much as I regretted not seeing my mother in her last days, I was glad I had a home far away from this place.

And, I thought looking back at John as he laughed and talked with my father, perhaps I've found the right someone to share a home with.

I pulled my jacket tighter as we walked away from the brownstone. Despite the cold, I jumped at the chance to escape that stifling henhouse. I could still hear Aunt Isabella's last bombsh.e.l.l, the one that pushed me out the door. "Is she sleeping with him?"

I tasted acid in my throat as we pa.s.sed "the house," the site of my boyfriend's dreaded bedroom on a February evening long ago. The place that my slide from grace began. I stiffened, trying to divert my gaze. I felt John's glove slide past my wrist and envelope my hand. My heart skipped and I turned to face him. John smiled and pulled me along, his accepting silence a soothing balm.

We walked for blocks, my hand in his. He waited on me to speak, as if he knew I needed the time. Playgrounds, intersections, corner stores-each held dozens of memories, ragged fragments of the past given new life now that I'd slipped back into their presence. Mental rubble that I'd buried, jumbled images of a life I'd left a dozen years ago layered under the dust of a life newly made. A life far from here. I couldn't help but be reminded of the visions that plagued me in Seattle. Were these sights more of the same? This town was my nightmare.

We pa.s.sed Saint Michaels, my parents' lifelong parish. I tugged at John, anxious to escape the condemning stares of smog-stained stone gargoyles that leered at me from above the front door. I wanted to move on.

John had walked in silence for blocks, demanding nothing. I needed to hear him, to converse and connect with the present. The past clawed at me with every step.

"So. I have a question." I squeezed his hand and stopped, pulling him around to face me. I needed to see John, to grab some of that smile, that life that sprang from him with every step.

"Question?" he asked with that infectious grin. How could he be so childlike, so happy? It wasn't normal. He paused, then added "Should my answer be 'I do?'"

His last words astounded me. He wouldn't joke about something that important. I tingled with antic.i.p.ation that there might indeed be a hope for us, a future together. Yet, I dared not voice that hope, knowing what waited for us tomorrow at the funeral, and after. John might run when he discovered the dysfunction that sank its claws deep in my family tree. My relatives had started the windup to the big day. The past two hours were no more than a feeble practice session for the nuclear conflict we'd encounter tomorrow at Mother's wake.

"Okaaaay," I replied, trying to not focus on the dream that he might eventually pop the big question. I turned and pulled him along while I talked. "When we were still chatting over the Internet, before we met in person, you mentioned something that's been really bugging me."

"Yes?"

"In one of your e-mails you said something about my visions, where they might come from."

"I remember."

"That there might be an alternate source-other than being nuts or sick."

"That's true."

"Are you going to talk to me in two-word sentences all evening?" I asked, glancing at him as we stepped off a curb. A cabby honked at us, aggravated at having to wait until we crossed. I threw the driver an Ice Slice and we kept walking.

"I might," he said, smiling.

I shook my head and plowed on. "So, if I'm not nuts or sick, what's your diagnosis?"

"I'm not a doctor, Kate."

"I'm serious!" I protested, squeezing his hand hard enough to make him wince.

"I am too. But I might have an answer you won't like."

"Why?" I asked, looking at him as we strolled past my old elementary school. More memories, but most of the recollections of this place were good ones.

"You don't like it when I get 'preachy.' But you do need to hear this."

I sucked in a deep breath, bracing for a sermon. "I won't run."

"Your visions. It's possible someone's trying to get your attention. The question is, who?"

Again, John had voiced the words of that crackpot at the acupuncture clinic, and Dr. Lin at the hospital. I held my tongue, pulling him back before we reached the next street crossing. I used to be a guard at this light as a fifth-grader. I wanted to linger here. To remember. Colors in the fall, new cla.s.ses. School supplies. Growing up. The old maple on this corner had grown gnarled but persevered in the shackles of a cracked sidewalk.

"Okay. So I told you before I wasn't interested in that theory," I replied, breathing deep. "But I am now." I stood by the friendly old tree, my hand stroking ancient bark that had watched so very many children pa.s.s by. "Who would want to get my attention? And why?"

He nodded, at first biting his lip, and then spoke. "Some images come from G.o.d, Kate. It might sound strange, but it's true. He can find lots of ways to reach us. Does that surprise you?"

"No." I'd asked for this, although part of me didn't want it. Not now. I flaked a bit of bark off the tree, like shedding scales to expose the raw part of me. Something inside craved to hear more.

He continued. "And some images are not from G.o.d."

"From where, then?"

"For some people, that mental imagery comes from the enemy."

"The Devil? There you go again." I pulled away from the old maple, stepping into the intersection and walking away fast.

"You asked the question," he called out as he followed a few steps behind. "I warned you."

"Is that who's sending these pictures I'm seeing?" I asked, scared to turn and hear the answer-or see it in his face. "Is that who's responsible?"

"I'm not inside your head, Kate," he said with the patient endurance that always drew me back. "But no. It's not the Devil, based on everything you've told me."

I stopped on the next curb and waited on him. "How can I know for sure?"

John moved in front of me, his hands shoved deep in his coat against the cold. He smiled, an a.s.surance I desperately needed to see. "You have to ask G.o.d. Ask Him to reveal Himself. I promise you, He will."

I followed his stare. Long shadows growing toward us as the sun dipped behind the tall stone steeple of Saint Michael's.

For the first time ever, John's smile vanished, replaced by a deep sadness in his eyes I'd never seen, a part of him I'd never touched before. It scared me. He looked back at me for a long moment, his brown eyes strangely misty.

"So how will I know when He answers?" I asked.

His voice grew tight and broken as he shuffled closer to me on the sidewalk, moving out of the way of children brus.h.i.+ng by. "G.o.d reaches people in different ways, Kate. If all this imagery truly is from Him, then maybe you've been missing all His earlier attempts to reach you."

A cold s.h.i.+ver ran down my spine. "And if it's not? Not from G.o.d?" I hadn't spoken that name in years. It felt strange, yet good. Like uttering the name of a friend I'd not spoken to in far too long.

For a moment, the light went out of John's eyes. "You can't know it's from G.o.d unless you know the Word of G.o.d, Kate. To test the spirit of these visions." He bit his lip again. "And that's one of my biggest fears."

John led me through the cemetery the next morning, headed to the graveside service. I'd been so pummeled by aunts and other relatives that my emotions were shot. I wondered at times whether all of Mother's sisters realized how they murdered others through their verbal a.s.sa.s.sinations. I felt like I'd been run through a gossip gauntlet since we landed on the front porch at 122nd Street.

"It's going to snow, Kate. Can you hang in there?" John asked.

He gripped my forearm tightly, helping me across some icy patches of sidewalk. I looked up at the gray clouds, a sure sign that flurries threatened.

"I'll survive. I have to."

"I brought extra napkins. We'll keep you dry, I promise."

That little show of support meant a lot. I forgot my aunts, and the cold disappeared. I had John.

We stood at Mother's grave five minutes later, my father on my left and John on my right, at the head of the casket. Mother's coffin sat on a pedestal draped with something that looked like fake gra.s.s, its green in stark contrast to this dark day. The morning hung gray, the turf was brown, and the people were all dressed in black. Green was a garish contrast. I wondered at all the other funerals that had stained that gra.s.s-colored drape around its edges where it rested on fresh dirt. How many other mothers had it planted in this soil?

I felt like a tiny cog in a giant mortis machina, mother's corpse yet another in a long line of dying people. I looked around and realized that's exactly what this was, another cycle of the burial season in a never-ending trek through this frozen plot of ground in Queens. We have a little time on earth to enjoy life, and then we're gone. Funerals baseline your thinking very fast.

Flecks of snow drifted down when the priest started his eulogy. Mother had known him since he was an altar boy at our church; he joined the priesthood serving the same parish that had birthed him. He looked older than me, but not by much. I tried to listen to his words, but my eyes were locked on the sifting white of frozen rain, dreaded wet stuff. I pulled my coat collar higher around my neck and adjusted a broad-brimmed black hat, donated by Aunt Isabella. I feared blowing snow the most. I couldn't protect against that.

I remembered the psalm that the priest read, from another service like this one, but long ago. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me; Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."

Memories of Gramps came flowing back, of another wintry funeral, but with more tears than today. My best friend had died, and hardly anyone came to see him off. Just a few of our family, not even all Mother's sisters, his very children. I'd tarried so long at the graveside on that day that the burial crew had covered up the site before someone realized I'd been left behind.

For a long moment, I might have been laboring in another of my micro-visions brought on by a snowflake. In those precious memories, I crewed on the tugboat with Gramps, chugging around the harbor, moving freight or pus.h.i.+ng a big vessel. I was on the water, Gramps's favorite place to be. I thought it ironic that, after all those days getting wet as a kid, and as an adult reveling in the rain in Seattle, I now feared anything the least bit damp. I clung even tighter to John's arm. The priest ended his eulogy and I realized that, other than the psalm, I never heard a word.

Ten minutes later, the graveside service broke up, my aunts saying nice things about Mother and false niceties about me. Thank goodness for this bitter weather, too cold for them to tarry and whisper; they'd wait and do that at the house tonight. Someone would say, "I shouldn't share this, but . . ."

I called it the "deadly 'but'." The word always bound the opening phrase "I shouldn't tell you this . . ." with some hurtful story destined to slice hearts and destroy reputations. Gossip was my aunts' favorite pastime. Their excuse? "Well, it's the truth!" they'd exclaim with a shrug, justifying their verbal savagery.

As the family filed away, I pulled John toward me and laid my head on his shoulder. I wanted to stay here with him, to remain outside, to be normal again. I needed him. I'd depended on myself for so many years that I'd forgotten how good it felt to be part of life with another. He pulled me close.

The wind blew, a low whistle in bare trees, and silence wrapped its arms about us as we stood at Mother's side. Sighs of wind in the branches above and distant sounds of the city beyond the cemetery walls drifted to us, m.u.f.fled by falling snow. Yet, I heard another voice, a tiny whisper, gentle words. Words of supplication, asking for someone or for something.

The words came from John. I clung to his side, my ears p.r.i.c.ked, listening. He rocked gently as he whispered, talking to himself or to the wind, but not to me. It was comforting, his habit of speaking peace in times of trial, as he had when he had caught me in his arms days ago at my sink.

I watched flurries gather and settle on Mother's casket, white, the polar opposite of the world of black that consumed her. Tiny crystal flakes melted quickly and formed a gentle wet sheen on the polished lacquer of her final resting place. Mother lay there-wet-and she'd spoken her last vision. My mother's daughter, I took my place as the next in a line of Italian-bred women who saw things. For a moment, I started the slide back into my despair, until I caught more s.n.a.t.c.hes of John's whispering. At that moment, I realized what kind of man he was.

John prayed. For me.

Not since I'd been a pregnant teenager in a confession booth with this priest's predecessor, old Father Murphy, had I uttered a prayer. Prayers were acts of desperation, words invented to get you out of a jam, to unmake a terrible deed, or for weekly atonement at confession. I'd never heard a word uttered in thanks on my behalf. But his words printed themselves in my mind. I'd heard them clearly, and they melted away the coldest recesses of my dark past.

"Thank you, Jesus, for Kate, for what she's shown me, for what she's done. Heal her, Lord. She needs you." He took a long breath. "And I need her."

"I don't understand you," my father said at the cemetery curbside, where he waited with a hired limousine. "You never cried at your own mother's funeral." He wiped his eyes, red and puffy from many hours of tears.

"I can't," I said, hoping to avoid the entire issue of visions and tears. "It hurts too much."

My father nodded as if that explanation covered it, then put his arms about me. He hugged me for a long time, then released me and moved to the door of the limo. "We need to go. Your aunts are waiting for us."

John walked me to the other side of the limo and opened the door. He held my hand, ever the gentleman, while I bent over and sat down. I looked up to say "thank you," and as I did, I saw disaster looming. Above John an icicle had formed, dripping down from the stonework of an overpa.s.s that crossed the perimeter road of the cemetery, and under which the driver had parked to keep the family out of the wet. When I looked up, a deadly drop let loose from that spear of ice and fell, hitting me directly in the eye. As if a flashbulb had gone off in my face, I went blind. Moments later, when the flash faded, I saw my mother's face.

I was a small child, completely immersed in water, staring up through soapsuds that stung my eyes. Walls of pink and black surrounded me, the 1950s-era alternating porcelain tiles that framed our tub in the little brick house in Queens. Mother kneeled by the edge of the tub, ma.s.saging my hair under the water, was.h.i.+ng it free of soap, and singing.

I could feel the warm water embrace me; I was a water sprite, always ready to shed my dresses and head for the bath. I loved to swim in the tub, to run the water and hold my face under the hot stream, to blow bubbles, and make suds with lemon-sized b.a.l.l.s of soap. My hair grew down past my shoulders, to the middle of my back. I especially loved it when my mother would ma.s.sage the long tresses free of tangles after each was.h.i.+ng, rubbing my scalp and singing to me. A memory I'd lost many years ago.

I could hear her singing, hear her through the water that filled my ears. Like it had been yesterday, her words came back, her tune woven into the fabric of my heart, a Catholic melody she'd sing every night we entered that pink-and-black bathroom for my favorite part of the day.

Soul of my Savior sanctify my breast, Body of Christ, be thou my saving guest; Blood of my Savior, Bathe me in thy tide, Wash me with waters gus.h.i.+ng from thy side.

I blinked and woke from the hallucination, John daubing water from my cheek.

"You okay now?" he asked.

"Yes." But I'd lied. As he scooted in next to me, wedging me in between himself and my father, something troubling grabbed at me. The vision struck a chord from long ago. Her words were familiar, not because I'd heard them so many times, but for the pa.s.sion and her love for what she sang. I'd heard it, that same love, someplace else that I'd been recently.

I couldn't escape the sense that her song and my visions were now connected. A common theme was emerging, and it hounded me as we drove to meet the family for yet another gossiping meal. Mother-and something I'd done-were linked inextricably, but for a reason I couldn't yet decipher.

Truly, I had become my mother. But for some strange reason, I no longer considered that a curse.

"My father gave me this journal. It belonged to Mother." I placed the thick book in front of John on his airline tray the next afternoon as we watched the city disappear below us.

John took the journal and gently paged through it, not reading her private words but looking at the inserts. Church bulletins, a dried flower, a funeral announcement, a yellowed obituary for my grandfather. As he reached the front of the book, a little lock of hair fell onto the plastic table. Tied with a pink bow, the red curly lock lay stark on the white surface. John looked at the entry.

"Your birthday," he said. "This is yours, Kate." He held the lock up against my hair. I had lots more red in those days, and my hair had been much longer.

He held the book open where the clipping had fallen out, and I saw a verse written in Mother's handwriting with some music notes above each word. She'd captured the tune from my vision-in her journal.

"Anime Christi," John said. "Soul of My Savior. It's an old Gregorian chant."

"Can I see?" I reached for the journal. I could almost hear her sing as I connected with the book. Her words made me s.h.i.+ver, yesterday's vision revisited me in a way I'd never experienced. I saw in my sane state what I'd experienced in my crazy time. This could not be happening. The words jumped off the page; the song played in my head as though Mother were was.h.i.+ng me in the tub that very moment.

Soul of my Savior sanctify my breast, Body of Christ, be thou my saving guest; Blood of my Savior, Bathe me in thy tide, Wash me with waters gus.h.i.+ng from thy side.

"How did you know the name for this?" I asked John, my hand shaking.

"I studied church music," he said, shrugging his shoulders. How many men could rattle off something as obscure as the name of a Gregorian chant, including its Latin name?

"When?"

"In college. And after college. I have a couple of degrees." He winked. "It's not really important."

"It might be. You're a mystery, John Connor."

"Yep. Might just keep it that way."