Marcia Talley: Through the Darkness

“What kind of man would abandon his pregnant girlfriend and elope with another woman?” Emily asked me during a quiet, and increasingly rare, mother-daughter moment as we worked side by side in her utility room, catching up on the laundry.

“You don’t know that he did, Emily.”

Emily seemed to have aged ten years in the past week. Worry lines had deepened on her brow, and not all of them, I thought, could be blamed on Timmy.

“How can I live with him now?”

“A marriage has to be based on trust,” I reminded my daughter as I added a scoop of soap powder to the washer. Then I gave her some advice my mother had given me when Paul and I had been going through a rough patch.

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the truth. The only people who do are Joanna and Dante. You’ll have to make up your mind one way or the other: either he fathered and knowingly abandoned that child, or he didn’t. Then, you decide if you can live with that.”

“What do you think, Mom?” Emily asked, tears pooling in her eyes.

“What I think isn’t important. It’s what you think.”

“But Dad never cheated on you.”

“No, but I didn’t find that out, not for certain, until years later. What it all comes down to, Emily, is trust.” I gathered her hands in mine. “Do you trust your husband?”

The tears spilled over and rolled down her cheeks. “I don’t know, Mom. I just don’t know.”

Emily was wrestling with personal demons, too. “I helped hound a man to his death,” she confessed to me later that same afternoon. “Roger was guilty of pedophilia, that was true. But, I know now that he never would have harmed Timmy. Oh my God, Mother, I feel so terrible about that. Roger was a creep, but he didn’t deserve to die.”

“Nobody deserves to die,” I said. “But we all do. Some of us sooner, some of us later.”

“Mom,” Emily said with a sudden smirk and a reassuring sarcastic twinkle in her eye. “Sometimes you are so profound.”

On the seventh Sunday in Easter, Paul and I attendedMorning Eucharist at St. Catherine’s with Emily and Dante in tow. At first I thought we’d come at the wrong time. The pews were virtually empty.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Paul as we slid into our regular pew on the right side of the sanctuary, three rows from the back.

“I hear we’ve lost some families to St. Anne’s,” Paul explained. “And St. Margaret’s picked up a few members of the We Hate Roger Club, too.”

“It seems wrong to punish Eva for something her husband did,” I whispered back as I opened my hymnal, thumbing through it, looking for the number of the first hymn.

In the pew beside me, Emily stirred. “I’ll need to be praying about that myself,” she said.

“The concern isn’t over what Eva did, it’s what she didn’t do,” her father said. “Some of our parishioners feel betrayed. In spite of the advice Eva got from the bishop, the congregation should have been informed about Roger’s, um, proclivities.”

“And he certainly should have registered with Maryland’s sex offender registry,” Emily reminded us. “Pastor Eva should have made sure that was done.”

Dante scurried in from delivering the children to Sunday school, just in time to join in the opening hymn. With so few people in the congregation, Dante’s fine tenor was a standout. I caught Emily looking up at him with pride as he soared into the upper reaches of “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” and I felt a wave of relief wash over me. Perhaps their marriage was on the mend after all.

The service was what I expected, being the Sunday following Ascension. A reading from John. Full-blown Easter hymns. It’s that time in the liturgical year where Jesus has gone up to heaven, but the Holy Spirit hasn’t arrived. Humankind is adrift, so to speak, and Eva had told me that under the circumstances, she thought it’d be the perfect time to preach about feeling alone, when we’re not actually alone.

So I was shocked and surprised when in place of the usual sermon, Eva announced she was leaving St. Cat’s, removing herself from the midst of the devastating conflict so that the church she so loved could begin to heal. She’d requested, and the bishop had granted, six months of “spiritual renewal” leave. An interim would fill in during her absense.

I saw her after the service at coffee hour, of course, but she was mobbed, so I didn’t get to ask her about it until the following day, when I simply showed up at St. Cat’s, uninvited.

I found Eva sitting in the sterile wreck of what had once been her office. Packing boxes, large and small, were scattered everywhere, some already sealed with packing tape and marked STORAGE.

“Eva, at services yesterday, you didn’t say where you were going.”

“Until this morning, I hadn’t really decided.”

“I’d like to stay in touch while you’re away.”

“It won’t be easy.” She smiled wanly. “I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stand the solitude of my own, rather sorry company, but I inherited a cabin from my parents some years ago, up in the Sawtooth Range of Idaho. No phone, no TV, and back then, no electricity, either, although I’m happy to say that particular deficiency was remedied a few years back. We’ve got indoor plumbing now, too.”

“What about Roger?” I asked.

“I sent his body back to Medina, Ohio,” she said. “He’ll be buried there in the family plot.”

“No service?”

She shook her head. “Roger didn’t want any service. He felt he didn’t deserve it, after all the wicked things he’d done.”

Eva put the books she was holding into a box, nestling them along the sides among some embroidered cushions that had once sat out on the window seat in her office. I’d often seen her sitting there, watching the birds. “I did hear from Roger, you know.”

“You did? I’m so glad.”

“He mailed me a letter, confessing to everything. You know Roger’s handwriting.”

I smiled, although I didn’t have a clue what Roger’s handwriting looked like.

“The post office couldn’t read one of the numbers, so they first sent it to the wrong zip code. It didn’t find me until yesterday.”

I was dying to know what the letter said, but unless Eva volunteered the information, I would respect my friend’s privacy.

“The letter came in one of those videotape boxes,” Eva added. “Do you know what else was in the box?”

I shook my head.

“Roger’s gun.” She smiled ruefully. “He wrote that he didn’t have the courage to use it.”

Eva wrapped a ceramic pencil cup holder in newspaper and placed it carefully in the box. “It was good to see Dante and Emily at church yesterday. How are things going with them?”

I had no secrets from Eva. “On the mend. I’m taking the children for a week so that Emily and Dante can have some time to themselves.” I paused. “Besides, it will give me time to take Chloe in hand and teach her a little bit about Internet security. Do you know what I found out?”

“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

“That little scamp, and her best friend, Samantha, had profiles on Myspace.com. It’s a social networking website,” I added before Eva could ask me. “Thanks to Sam’s older sister, who’s all of fourteen, anybody in the world could see a picture of Chloe, know her name, what zip code she’s from, and that she likes to go to Ben and Jerry’s. Hello?

“I made sure she erased her profile,” I added.

“And that woman who kidnapped Timmy?”

“Awaiting trial,” I said. “God only knows when. Connie was slated to get the reward money, you know.”