Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [39]
Then she backed away, stunned and bloodied. It was impossible for her mind to process what she had seen and she was reduced to an organism reacting to horror. She ran to her neighbor’s door and pounded with both fists, unable to accept that there was no one home to answer her cries. Her mind was racing as she willed herself to wake up from her nightmare. A neighbor across the street finally heard her and called the police. They arrived within minutes. Lydia had exhausted herself by then, sat breathing heavily on her front stoop, staring blankly as shock set in.
She could remember refusing to be moved from the front stoop of her house. A female officer sat beside her, trying to convince her to move into the house out of the cold. But Lydia wouldn’t, thinking inanely that she should be there to stop her grandparents from seeing what she had seen when they arrived from Brooklyn. She sat there, shivering, wrapped in a blanket, trying to imagine how this wrong could be righted.
It was while she was sitting on that stoop that she first saw Jeffrey. He pulled up with another man in a black car. He walked toward her, his eyes on her the whole time. He looked strong and important to her, like someone who would have rescued her mother if he could have. He knelt before her and asked the female officer to leave.
“Hi, Lydia,” he said softly. “I’m Agent Mark. I know you’re really scared and sad right now, but maybe you can help me find the person who did this to your mother.”
He put a gentle, sympathetic hand on her shoulder and she nodded, then started to cry. He gave her his hand, helped her stand up from the stoop, and led her inside.
Lydia slowed to a halt in front of the church and stretched out her back. She wiped the sweat from her face with the bottom of her shirt. The church looked like it was waiting for her. Even in the throes of the restlessness that beset her as her mother’s anniversary approached, she had never reflected on the details of the day she found her mother’s body. Why has this come back to you now? Why is the pain so fresh?
Her head was so crowded with thoughts and memories, she could barely hear her own voice through the cacophony. It reminded her of something a meditation teacher had said to her once: “Your mind is like a roomful of monkeys. You can barely quiet one before another starts shrieking. You must breathe to quiet your monkeys. Only then will you find inner peace.” Lydia had been as big a failure at meditation as she had been at therapy. She walked in a circle with her hands on her hips now, catching her breath before she went inside.
She knew she had come to see Juno. Do you really think he’s going to heal you, Lydia?
She walked up the steps and pushed open the heavy wooden door. A mass was in progress; the priest stood at his pulpit, about twelve people in the pews before him. She slipped in quietly, unnoticed, she hoped, staying to the back of the church. She dipped her right fingers into the holy water by the door and crossed herself, more out of a reflexive respect than anything.
She discreetly reached for the three quarters she had placed in her bra and dried the sweat off them on her shorts. Placing them in the box provided, she lit three votive candles.
“Let us pray,” she heard the priest say.
The silence was so heavy it was almost sound. She sat in the backmost pew, then knelt as the others did. She wondered what they were praying for. Wondered what she should pray for. Ridiculously, she began to wonder, if she found a genie’s lamp on some deserted beach and was granted three wishes, what they would be. Right now, a cigarette would do.
When she opened her eyes and sat back, she saw Juno at the altar. He began to play his guitar. The acoustics