I did not go to the grave that afternoon. I went to the church. The funeral was over, my mother had been taken home by my cousins, and the deputies had walked Paul Gagnon back down the aisle in his orange jumpsuit with their hands on his shoulders as gently as two men could manage. The nave was empty and cold and smelled of lilies. I walked to the little side door at the back, the one my father had propped open with a hymnal every night for thirty years, and I sat down in the last pew in the dark, where he used to sit.
I do not know how long I stayed. I thought about Annette, a laughing nine year old with a gap in her front teeth, and the day they brought me into the kitchen and told me she was in heaven. I thought of the way my father had never again let me walk alone to the river, not even in my twenties. I thought of Paul, nineteen, soaking wet, carrying a body up a bank in the dark. And I put my hand in the rack in front of me, the hymnal rack, and my fingers touched something that was not paper.
It was a key. It had been taped to the underside of the rack with black electrical tape that had gone brittle and crackled when I peeled it. A small brass key, the kind that opens a metal box. I turned it over. There was a number scratched into the head. 14. I knew at once what it meant. In the sacristy there was a wall of old lockers where the altar servers kept their robes, and my father, who had cleaned the sacristy for thirty years, had a locker there that no one had ever asked about.
A door left open in the dark is a kind of prayer, and sometimes the answer arrives thirty years late, but it arrives.
Locker fourteen was at the end of the row. The paint had worn off the handle. The key turned with a click, and inside was a cigar box and a folded gray work shirt and a rosary of wooden beads. In the box was a stack of envelopes, a dozen of them, each addressed in the careful French handwriting of my father to a different person, and the last one on the pile said, Pour Michelle. I carried it out to the back pew and opened it by the light of the sanctuary lamp. It was three pages. I read it standing up.
He wrote that on the night of April 21, 1984, he had gone looking for Annette because she did not come home from the river. When he reached the bank he found Paul on his knees with the girl, trying to breathe life into her. And standing ten feet away in the reeds, wet to the waist and shaking, was his own younger brother, my uncle Gérard. Gérard had been given the job of watching the girls that afternoon. He had been drinking since noon. He had fallen asleep on the bank, and when he woke up, Annette was gone, and a stranger was bringing her out of the water.
“Gérard begged me,” my father had written. “He said he was a dead man if anyone found out he had slept while his niece drowned. He said the family would never forgive him. And God forgive me, Michelle, I let him walk away. I told myself it was kindness. I told Paul to run because I could not bear the idea of another family destroyed that night, and I told myself that the boy, with his record, was better off gone. I was a coward. For thirty seven years I sat in the dark in the back of a church and asked to be forgiven for being weak when my daughter needed me to be strong.”
There was a final paragraph, shorter than the rest. “Gérard has cancer now. If he tells the police that a man pushed Annette, you will know he is lying. Annette fell. Paul tried to save her. Please go to Paul, and please make it right. This is the one thing I never had the courage to do. If you are reading this, then I am dead, and the door of the church is open, and you are the bravest person I know.” I sat in the pew and cried like I was four years old again. Then I wiped my face and called the detective in charge.
My uncle Gérard was in a hospital bed at Lowell General, gray and sunken, with a tube in his nose. I stood by his bed with the letter of my father in my hand, and I did not raise my voice. I said, “Uncle Gérard, I know what happened. I know about the reeds.” He looked at me for a long time. Then his whole face crumpled, and he said in French, softly, “Pardonne moi, ma petite.” A detective in the hallway wrote down every word he said, and when he was done, my uncle asked for a priest, and I went to find one.
The charges against Paul Gagnon were dropped on a Monday morning. I was in the courtroom with my mother, who had decided at the last minute to come, in her black funeral coat, and who sat in the front row staring at the man who had once carried her daughter out of the river. When the judge said the words, free to go, Paul stood very still. Then he turned around, found my mother, and began to weep. She stood up, crossed the aisle, and put her arms around him. I had never seen her do that to anyone.
On a Friday night in November the three of us, my mother, Paul, and I, walked to the church at midnight. The new priest had been persuaded by the whole parish, and he met us at the side door with a key and a lantern. He propped the door open with a hymnal, an old black one with a cracked spine, and we sat down together in the back pew, in the dark, for one hour. Nobody spoke. At one in the morning, Paul wiped his eyes, smiled, and said, “Joseph would have said it was time to lock up.”
