Chapter 3

The rain had stopped. Though classes were in session and the buildings formed a brightly lighted barricade against the dripping night, the campus felt like a small, humid room where dense drapes and carpeting digested all sound and incubated the air into the likeness of dusty mold. Damp, and hush'd, and close as a sick man's room when he taketh repose an hour before death, Hance thought as he crossed the common.

He had become a reluctant participant in the detritus of events that should not have concerned him and that he would have warned against had he been thinking clearly. As he trampled mushrooms into velvety goo and heard the bloated splats of raindrops fallen from wherever they had lost their grip, he could do no more than reflect upon humanity’s unending inability to see that all those old sayings about times changing, people staying the same, and season following season were falsehoods, caused most likely by unrelenting unrequited hope.

In Hance’s sphere, people really did change, and though season followed season, no summer, winter, spring and autumn was like the one the year before. Each had its own ambience and an event to distinguish it from all the others. There was the spring he discovered Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, and the spring his mother died; the autumn he learned about Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Agincourt Carol, and the autumn he first read Tennyson, whose assessment of the season's deathroom atmosphere always impressed him as the most accurate.

Autumn this year would be marked by the deliverance of Father Dario and two dozen students from the hands of the authorities. The woods where the homeless had pitched their camp belonged to the town, which that day had decided to arrest the squatters on charges of trespassing. From what Dario had told him, Hance gathered that as the police approached, the homeless receded into the woods, apparently as smooth and silent as a hump of ink hugging the corner of the paper absorbing it from the surface of a valuable desk. Dario and the students stayed. They had no reason to run away. They were there to help the homeless. The police apprehended them on charges of aiding the trespassers and hindering arrests.

The police had allowed everyone they arrested one telephone call, and the students phoned the lawyer who had offered to come to their aid. With the lawyer on the way, Dario called a fellow priest––Hance. He said his car, as well as the students’ cars, had been towed from the campsite to the municipal pound. He needed a lift to the facility, which was too far to reach on foot. If Hance could bring him and a couple of students to their cars, they would go back for everyone else.

Sacerdotes tui induantur justitiam, Hance thought as he started up his car, a non-descript compact from the last century. May thy priests be clothed in justice. May they also be clothed in common sense and the ability to consider the consequences of their actions, especially if the justice they fight for is unpalatable in some circles.

Dario and the students were waiting for him outside the police station, an incongruous but cozy Tudor-style building behind mountainous rhododendron bushes. They all were talking about their experience as if jail were the best stop on a house tour.

Nobody apologized for dragging him out on a rainy night. Nobody complained about the possibility that they were arrested without cause, either. They were leaving that business up to the lawyer, who remained behind, still bailing out youthful offenders.

As Hance opened the doors for Dario and the other passengers, he noticed a girl standing on the flagstone path to the station’s entrance. The light over the door rimmed the outline of her head, casting her face in shadow. But her dejected stance and lack of concern for what could happen to her was enough to identify the girl who had auditioned for him earlier in the day.

Hance heard his passengers telling others they would return for them. Nobody directed a promise to the girl. “She was at the camp?” he asked Dario before pulling away from the curb.

Dario followed his stare. “A student of yours?”

“She’s new to the department.”

“Ah,” Dario said, and resumed marveling at how easily the homeless people had avoided capture.

Hance would have preferred to go home after depositing his passengers at the pound. But when Dario invited him to help out with “just one more car load,” he thought refusal to participate would appear selfish and rather afoul of his calling.

He was not aware the girl who had auditioned for him was in his car until the three other students had left him with gleeful thanks and she remained alone in the back seat. She sat as if waiting for the others to return. “We’re supposed to get out here?”

“Yes, if your car was brought here.”

“Oh. All right.”

She slid out of the car and closed the door without giving thanks.

She stood at the gate to the pound. While others joked with the officer on duty, she stood, looking around, her hands at her sides, with an aloofness that struck Hance as willful isolation.

Convinced the girl was yet another one of countless creatures that proved both God’s sense of humor and the range of his imagination, Hance put the car in gear and almost drove away, leaving her to the mercy of her peers. But she continued to stand with her hands at her sides. It was then that Hance really noticed what she was doing with her hands:  nothing. Unlike the other students, who were pulling out keys from pockets and handbags, she alone was still. She had no keys. She had no handbag. The pockets of her tight-fitting jeans were flat and empty.

She must not have a car, Hance reasoned. Either she trusted someone would give her a lift, or she did not care if nobody helped her. Nobody seemed to notice her. Her peers filtered through the gate into the pound, which was nothing more than a gated parking lot.

Hance imagined the girl being ignored and made to walk home. He sensed resignation had already dulled her further. He got out and opened the passenger door for her. “Here, I’ll give you a ride back.”

She got into the car readily enough but restricted conversation to directions: “Please turn left here. … Please make a right. … A left at that light. … Go straight until you reach the fourth building, the one next to the deli. That’s it.”

They were on a street where neglected houses were separated from the road only by sidewalks and from each other by passages large enough to hide smelly garbage cans. The girl had pointed to a dwelling whose facade of pale green aluminum siding was depressed toward the corner of the lower floor as if a great beast had scratched its backside against it. Half a flight of steep yellow brick steps stopped on a concrete landing before a glass door fronted by an aluminum grille.

The girl left the car with neither thanks nor goodbye, dashed up the steps and facing away from the door, burrowed through her pockets, as if digging for keys. Hance, who suspected the neighborhood was as rough in character as it was in appearance, preferred to wait to see her go safely inside, but the longer she excavated, the less comfortable he felt about sitting there. An unenlightened neighbor might think he was stalking her.

He pulled away, glancing in the rearview mirror to make certain she got into the house. Though the streetlight was on the corner half a block away, he had no doubt the blur he saw speeding into the passage between the house and the deli was the girl, who was now no longer on the step.

He drove around the corner in the direction she had fled, parked across the street and pretended he was going to the liquor store, which he calculated was alongside the end of the passage the girl had taken. The sound of giggles and sneakers slapping the pavement enticed him to look into the passage.

A large cardboard box filled the passage about twelve feet in from the sidewalk. The side of the box against the liquor store had buckled, slanting the roof.

From where he stood, Hance perceived a sleeping bag, a swath of material that could have been a blanket or a towel, and open, empty fast-food containers. The dwelling of rodents, not a human. He could not see through the other end of the box. But the girl was there. He sensed her desire to be seen but unseen.

Hance would not allow himself to go farther. She would run. Perhaps a passerby would summon the police. He was certain he would be able to explain himself, but he could not subject the girl to that sort of attention. She might run to a place where he would never find her. He took a step back. He wanted to say her name, but realized she had never told him her name; nor had he asked. He had no choice but to say, “Hello.” He spoke softly, with a gentleness that he hoped conveyed concern and an admonishment against running away.

“Hello, it’s—" What to call himself? Father Hance? Professor Hance? Which would make him sound less like a predator? He waited for a man to leave the liquor store before saying, “It’s John Hance.”

The box quivered, making the sound of dried swamp grass rustling in the breeze. The girl was there. He caught the same scent of salted apples she had emanated during her audition earlier in the day. Hance wondered if she would flee. No. She stayed. “I just want to make sure you’re not living in conditions that could hurt your voice," he said.

The box shuddered. The girl appeared, speaking through the hair that swung over her face as she bent double, compressed by the height of the box. “Sorry about M’lissa. She thinks you’re from the department of family services or something.”

“Who?” 

“Melissa. My friend.”

There was another girl? More than one? How many lived in that box?

“Didn’t you tell her who I am?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t know it was you. You look different in the dark.”

“I do?”

She eyed his hands. “Did I leave something in the car? Is that why you came after me?”

“I came after you because I didn’t see you go into the house. Don’t you live there?”

“I can go where I want. I’m eighteen.”

He felt she looked at him as if seeing a naked man for the first time. “You must live somewhere. You don’t wear the same things to class every day. You keep clothes somewhere. Laundered clothes.” Her hair was clean, too. And her nails were trimmed and polished.

“I use the laundry room at the student center.”

“Where do you get the money to use the laundry room?”

“I do laundry for classmates. They pay me enough to do mine, too.”

“What else do they pay you for?”

“Little things. Cleaning their rooms. Doing their dishes, if they’re in an apartment and they can cook.”

Hance thought of a practice that had accompanied him into modernity. “Do you do research for them, too?”

“I hardly have time to do my own assignments.”

He believed her. “You do your work in the library, I take it.”

“Can’t afford an Internet café.”

“Do you have a cell phone or a laptop?”

“Can’t afford those, either.”

“How do you stay in touch with everybody?”

“We write notes.”

“Of course. The same technique that’s been behind the progress of civilization for thousands of years.”

“I’m not backwards if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I was thinking you’re resourceful. You’ve got to be resourceful, if you can survive on limited means.”

"I do what's got to be done, that's all. I don't want to live ..."

Hance thought the mumble was a euphemism for "in a shelter."

"So you've been living here?"

"Sometimes."

"Where are you when you aren't here? With a relative, a family friend?"

She said nothing.

"Are your parents alive?" Somebody was paying her tuition.

"Like I said, I'm eighteen. I can live where I want. I don't need parents."

Her parents had to be alive, for her to speak with such vehemence against them.

Hance again regarded the box and its fragments of an attempt at a normal life.

"This really isn't the place for a singer. The stress and the weather could ruin your voice. Gather your things. I'll bring you back to the college. The nuns have guest rooms at the convent and in some of the dorms. I'm certain they can make you comfortable until we sort out something better for you."

"These aren't my things. They're M'lissa's."

"Where are your things, then?" Back at that house? Had he made a mistake in coming after her? Was she really well off?

"I don't have anything."

"Nothing? What about your textbooks?"

"They're back at the camp."

"In the woods? Why did you bring them to the woods?

"I couldn't leave them here. Somebody would take them and sell them."

"Am I to understand you lived at the camp?"

"You won't tell anybody?" She shoved tears off her cheek with the back of her hand, stirring the scent of salt. "Promise me you won't tell anybody!"

"I can't promise you that. I'll need to tell the nuns the truth about you. They'll want to know the truth. Without the truth, I can't help you. Nobody can." He could never tell the truth about himself. Nobody would believe him. Nobody would help him. Who was he to believe he could help this girl?

She agreed to return to the campus with him. He ached for her, in his heart and elsewhere. He resolved to place her in the care of the nuns and be rid of her.