You will always want the same things, her group leader had said, back before she’d felt the truth for herself. You’ll just stop being able to get them. The only cure is to break the cycle of wanting. She had shared that line with Brendan, one of the times he was pressing her to explain what made her church different and better than his. He’d laughed and retorted with something from one of his old saints. It is a hard matter to forgo that to which we are accustomed, he’d said. But it is harder to go against our own will. It was dark out now. She hoped he was safe. If she believed he was safe, he was.
“Sometimes,” Waldo said, “when we’re at a party, I’ll turn and see Sarah talking to some young guy and I’ll get so jealous I’ll have to sit down. Sometimes it wears me out.”
So why did you marry her? Wiloma thought. Why did you leave me for her? But these were old thoughts, the thoughts that had led her nowhere and almost cost her her children, and she put them out of her mind. On the dashboard the radar detector clucked and muttered and then cycled into its full warning hiss.
Waldo’s eyes widened and he pressed his foot gently on the brake. They’d been doing eighty, Wiloma saw. Waldo always drove too fast. Seventy-five, seventy, sixty-five. “Don’t look around,” Waldo cautioned her. “Act like nothing’s happening, like we’re just talking. Now move your hand real slowly over here and unclip the detector and slip it under your seat.”
She did as she was told, keeping her head and shoulders erect and facing forward. “Shit,” Waldo said. “If I get another speeding ticket this year I’m going to lose my license.”
She slipped the box behind her feet, and as she did she saw the state trooper tucked under the overpass at the base of the hill. His headlights came on as they passed him, and Waldo stared straight ahead with both hands clenched on the wheel. “Shit, shit, shit,” he whispered. She felt a glee that surprised her, and a desire, even more surprising, for him to step on the gas and send them shooting into the night with sirens wailing behind them. When the trooper took off after a small car that sped from behind and then passed them, she felt both relieved and disappointed.
Waldo took his right hand off the wheel and shook it several times. “That was close.”
“Pretty close,” she agreed. His face looked calm, and she was surprised when he pulled into the next rest stop and insisted on calling St. Benedict’s. “In case they’ve got any news,” he said, although she couldn’t imagine what would have changed since they’d set off. “And I want them to know we’re looking.”
She wondered if what he really wanted to do was to catch his breath away from her. He wedged himself into a phone booth, one hand crushed to his free ear to block out the cars roaring by. When he returned, he said, “It’s just what you thought.”
“They’re back?” Brendan was safe, then. Her worries hadn’t harmed him. “We were wrong?”
“We were right,” Waldo said impatiently. “I talked to one of the administrator’s assistants, and I told her you thought your uncle was headed for Massachusetts. And she got all excited — she said they’d sent one of the orderlies around Brendan’s floor, asking everyone if they’d seen or heard anything, and one of the old guys said he’d overheard Brendan talking to someone in the hall. She said this guy said Brendan said, ‘I want to go to Massachusetts. I want to see the reservoir,’ but that he hadn’t thought much about it because they all talk like that all the time, about the places they want to visit and can’t.”
“Except this is different,” Wiloma said. Although the trip couldn’t have been Brendan’s idea — he might have said something wistful, thinking nothing would ever come of it, but it would have been Henry who had leapt on the words, stolen the van, engineered the details. Henry had pushed their uncle, Henry was behind this. But the men Brendan had left behind wouldn’t know that.
Wiloma could imagine them sitting up in bed as the news spread, wheeling themselves into clusters near windows, laughing and whispering and already turning Brendan’s flight into legend. Misinterpreting his departure, the way she’d misinterpreted his arrival in Coreopsis so many years ago. When Gran had told her that Brendan was coming to them, she’d pictured another version of her father. He’d left his Order, Gran had said. He was coming home. For the week between that announcement and his arrival, Wiloma had felt as if her father had risen from the dead. Her uncle was coming to rescue her, she’d thought. But all he’d ever been able to do was listen.
The men in the Home, she knew, would be dreaming just as fruitlessly. Someone, she could hear him already, would be claiming he’d known about the plan all along. Someone else would be claiming to have helped. “I saw him,” someone else would say. “I saw him take the keys.” They were men who went years without visitors, who never got mail, who were starved for something to break their boredom. She couldn’t blame them for seeing in Brendan all their own frustrated hopes, but it was wrong to let them think he was something he was not. He’s not a hero, she wanted to say sternly to those men. He didn’t choose. He was pushed. And, she might have added, even if he had chosen, he had made the wrong choice. A hero would put himself into her hands and let his Healing take place. Surrender, he used to tell her. In surrender is salvation. He had been on the verge of surrendering himself to her when Henry had interfered.
Waldo eased them back into the river of eastbound traffic. “I told her it meant something.”
Wiloma’s attention snapped back from her vision of the deluded old men. “You didn’t …?” If he’d been shaken before, the phone call had calmed him down. Already he was speeding again.
“I didn’t,” he said. “She asked me where I thought they were headed, and I said I wasn’t sure, it could be a lot of places, we were just going to take a little drive and check some of them out. She wanted me to give her some idea, so she could maybe alert the police, and I said I couldn’t but that I’d call her as soon as we had any news.”
“They called the police?”
“Just the local ones, so far.” Waldo looked at her curiously. “You knew that — you told me that cruiser in Irondequoit called in about the van.”
“I forgot,” she said faintly. She had also, she suddenly realized, forgotten to call Christine and tell her Brendan’s arrival would be delayed. “Don’t call them again,” she said. “Please? Don’t call anyone. There are so many people involved already, I can’t keep everything straight … we can do this ourselves.”
“He’s your uncle. I’ll do whatever you want.”
Whatever you want, she thought sourly. Not for me, but in the hopes of getting that land. His words were kind but he avoided her eyes, and already she half-regretted bringing him along. If he’d had the sense to stay married to her, her half of it would have been half his. Automatically, just like that. It would have fallen into his hands. She hoped that thought had crossed his mind; she hoped he realized all that he’d lost.
19
HENRY STRIPPED FILLETS FROM THE SKELETONS OF JACKSON’S fried fish, set the bones and heads aside, and cut the flesh into pieces for his uncle. He stood roasted corn on end and sliced the kernels from the cob. Then he sprinkled salt over everything and set the plate in Brendan’s lap before he bent to his own food. From the practiced ease with which Jackson had made it, he realized that Jackson cooked over this fire every day.