Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [93]
“I remember when the kid died. My wife and I went to pay our respects and he was destroyed, I mean he could barely function. Then I heard a couple of months later from my wife that his wife had left him, went back to her family in Colorado. Then he lost his job. I wondered how he would survive but then I heard that he was doing some volunteer work at the Church of the Holy Name and I figured he’d found God.”
“But maybe he was just looking for victims,” said Jeffrey.
“Or both,” said Lydia. “I think we have some more gardening to do.”
Juno sat alone in the back pew of the church. His hands were neatly folded in his lap and his head hung low. The glow around him that Lydia had always perceived, seemed dim and she was not sure how to approach him. He was fragile and fading like a specter. She stood watching him, listening to the police shuffling around her, speaking in low voices as though mass were in session.
There was a horrific amount of blood splattered on the walls that contained the garden, across the flowers, and even on the face of the Virgin. A rosary lay near the door. Lydia didn’t hold out much hope for Father Luis. She had asked the police to hold off on digging up the garden for a few minutes, until she talked to Juno. And now she stood wondering how she would begin, his fear radiating off him like a visible aura. She approached him slowly.
Juno heard Lydia’s footfalls and sensed her hesitation. He wanted to tell her not to worry, that he already knew. But his voice failed him and he sat silent and waiting. She could not know that he had lost not only his uncle this day, the man who raised him, but his mother and father as well.
Sitting in the last pew, praying, Juno had become invisible to the police. They’d rushed into the church just minutes after his call. He heard them run through the living area behind the church and then move out to the garden, where, he noted, the rushing ended and voices became hushed. He could only imagine what they found there, for no one had told him. So he waited. Whispered phrases floated to him on the wind that blew in from the open door; phrases like “blood splatter,” “handprint,” “blood-soaked cloth.”
Then, as two officers walked passed him, he overheard one of them whisper, “This poor guy has had nothing but tragedy in his life. His uncle was the only parent he ever had. I’ll tell you about it later.” He recognized the man’s voice as someone he knew from childhood, a boy named Jimmy O’Neill who had attended catechism classes at the church.
At first he was confused and wondered who Jimmy was talking about. Then he realized that he meant him, Juno. He almost laughed in disbelief as he thought, Until now I have never known any suffering. He couldn’t imagine what the man meant. His blindness, maybe?
But a cold dawning was moving over him. Then Juno remembered a day long ago on the playground behind the church. In a downward spiral of thought, he remembered Jimmy taunting him one day when they were children, making fun of his parents, saying that they had died in some horrible way. He remembered his conversation with his uncle. And then he remembered nothing else about the incident. It was a blank wall in his mind that he could not pass through. He remembered his uncle’s words: “Jimmy has told you something and I have told you something. You must look into your heart and decide what you believe. If someone told you that God did not exist, would you believe them?”
He could not remember what he had decided that day. He could not remember thinking about what had happened to his parents ever again. He knew he had sewn his uncle’s story of his parents into his soul, like a jewel in the seam of a coat. The knowledge of it, though he never saw it or touched it or thought of it after that day, was a secret treasure that he