He held out his hands, the muscled forearms accentuated by his dark skin, his palms broad and fingers thick. He knew he looked more like the stereotyped Mexican laborers than an ordained priest and mathematics teacher. He could see it in the mirror after a shower, his naturally thick musculature broadened additionally from years of performing a majority of the manual labor around the church. He could also see it in the eyes of his white neighbors, the double takes when people realized that he wasn’t the hired help. He wondered how many more years he would be able to rebuild the parish when it fell into decay, and, when he could no longer, if there would be anyone left in the church to replace him.
He tried to shake off these worries as a midlife crisis, a product of seeing half his life gone by and the second half perhaps filled with a litany of sorrowful events. The Catholic Church was struggling. He was struggling. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure who he was anymore. He felt his hand playing with the rosary in his pocket. Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Amen.
His cell phone rang, startling him. Exhaling, he disentangled it from the rosary beads and entered the passcode. “Father Lopez.”
His adrenaline spiked. “Maria?” he said, trying to speak over the shrill shouts coming through his small speaker. “Wait, wait! Slow down a minute. He’s gone? Gone where?”
His eyes narrowed as the voice continued, hardly less shrill.
“What do you mean you don’t know? I don’t understand.”
Again the shouts over the phone, and Father Lopez could only shake his head. “Maria, hold on. You’re home? Can you wait? I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
The drive felt surreal. He had raced out of his office to the raised eyebrows of several nuns, threw his bag and disheveled stacks of papers into the backseat of his rundown Toyota Corolla, and likely gave the impression of a drag race start as he flew out of the parking lot.
The Catholic Church does not have the presence in Alabama that it does in other parts of the country, but his parochial school in Huntsville was still sequestered on a large parcel of land. He was driving quickly, however, and it didn’t take him very long to be out on the parkway, then to the interstate, flying toward Madison ten miles an hour over the limit, hoping he wouldn’t fall afoul of some particularly exuberant state trooper. They love to nail a priest. The early spring greenery of the countryside flashed unheeded in his peripheral vision.
He tried hard to focus on the road but was assaulted instead by the words of his brother’s wife, her panicked voice and unbelievable narrative. Miguel fleeing home? Armed? It was crazy. His older brother was the hero of the Lopez family. Football star, soldier, consultant for the government. Superman, Lopez thought, experiencing again the ever-present sense of failure. Always in your shadow, Miguel.
When his brother had returned home from Washington, he had left the power and intrigue of the Northeast Corridors to settle back into the slower rhythms of the South. Father Lopez had hoped other things could be left behind as well. He had hoped it might mean a new start for his brother, for the family. A new start for both of us. Even if Miguel had avoided speaking with him, at least both Lopez sons could be present at family gatherings. It had been a start, one Father Lopez had hoped would lead to reconciliation. Perhaps a slow one, but time did heal many wounds.
Suddenly, one panicked phone call seemed to threaten all that, and he prayed to God that something terrible hadn’t happened to Miguel. Time had been forced into a wild overdrive, like the wailing engine of his rundown car racing down I-65. We always stumble and stall, and then stand shocked when the bell tolls. Horns blared as he roughly steered to the right lane and took the turnoff toward Madison and his brother’s house.
Maria came running across the lawn even before he had set the emergency brake. Even after several children, her stunning figure was intact. Lopez had watched men of all colors and stations follow her as she walked: tall, statuesque; a refined Basque face accented with long black hair and a Flamenco dancer’s stride. The glances were often envious toward his brother when the two were together.
Today, she was a wreck, her normally well-coiffed hair was in disarray, her face was pale. Her eyes were red and raw. She crashed into him, holding him tightly, hot tears running into his shirt.
“Francisco, I’m sorry,” she wept. “I didn’t know who else to call. Something’s terribly wrong.”
“Maria, let’s go inside.”
They sat in the sunroom. The kids had been sent off to her mother’s place. Maria Lopez sat still and composed, her emotional outburst now tightly under control. He watched her intently, listening to every word, as she recounted the events from earlier in the day.
“After he left, I didn’t know what to do. I told the girls they would be spending the night at their grandmother’s house. I came back, hoping to God I’d find him here again, that he’d say he had overreacted. Francisco, I’m so scared.”
“It’s going to be okay, Maria. He’s just likely working through something right now.”
Her face hardened. “I know what you’re thinking, Francisco. It’s what I thought at first, too. But it’s not that, it’s not an affair. I’m sure of it.”
Francisco Lopez only nodded, although the thought had crossed his mind as well. He thought he knew his brother, whatever their past differences. The Miguel he knew was still very much in love with his wife and would never have abandoned his family. He was sure of that. But the Miguel he knew would not have packed up in a day with loaded weapons and left his wife in tears. He wasn’t sure what to believe anymore.
“Has he talked about anything? Things bothering him?”
“No. Lately, he’s been so strangely silent. But I’m his wife. I notice things. He’s been obsessed with the news, with the obituaries. He tried to hide it, but I’d catch him poring over the obituaries in the paper. I found hundreds of trips to papers’ obituary sites in the web browser history.”
“Was someone he knew sick?”
“I don’t know,” she said, throwing up her arms. “He never mentioned it. Why would he have to be scouting for deaths in thirty different papers across the country? But that’s what did it, what set him off today.”
Lopez merely raised his eyebrows in confusion.
She leaned in close to him, her face earnest. “He found a name, a death. After that, he started freaking out, packing! I went to his computer and looked it up. Nothing much, just a small notice of a pilot in Maine whose plane went down last week. In Maine. No one I’ve ever heard of. But that was it. He was searching for a name, or something, and found it. It’s like it pushed some button. Francisco, we have to find him.”
Lopez sighed. He didn’t know what to do. “We should call the police, explain to them what happened, and see what they recommend.” She only nodded, a desperate look in her eyes. “I’ll stay with you until we got this a little more mapped out, but tonight I have the special evening Mass. I have to be there.”
“Yes,” she said sadly. “I always hated missing it. Miguel hasn’t set foot in a church since we were married.”
Father Lopez nodded but said nothing.
“I’ve never seen him quite like that. When he left. Hesitant. Uncertain. Questioning everything he was doing. I’m not sure how to describe it.”