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We went from there to pay an unseen visit to Nicolet.
Nicolet did not have Oliver’s money, nor his stable family. Her mother was an alcoholic who was in prison for a drunk-driving accident that killed two people.
Her father was a hard-working baker, up every day at four a.m. to go to a commercial bakery and make bread and rolls. It was repetitive work, but he loved it. Mostly they used big mixers, but Nicolet’s father would sometimes pull out a wad of dough and knead it in his hand, just for the pleasure of smelling the yeast, and feeling the elasticity of the living dough under his floured palms and fists.
Growing up, Nicolet was alone a lot, and I felt some sympathy for her. Her father would come home while she was at school, take a nap but set the alarm to greet her as she got off the afternoon bus. Then he would help her with her homework until she reached eighth grade and he found he was no longer able to keep up. He was not an educated man himself and felt ashamed of it.
He would stay awake long enough to make Nicolet dinner, and on occasion drive her to after-school events. At eleven he would go back to sleep, catch five hours, and start the grind all over again.
It wasn’t a great life, but as I watched him with his daughter I felt acutely the loss of my own father.
“A good man,” Haarm said.
I found his commentary irritating. It brought home to me the unseemliness of what I was doing, peeping into people’s lives, weighing them up, deciding on the basis of a few minutes of their lives whether they were good people or bad, and whether their actions had contributed to the tragedy we were there to understand.
Haarm seemed untroubled by the moral complexities. Of course he was even newer to this life than I, and perhaps his master had been even less communicative than Messenger. But I judged Haarm, as I judged everyone, and found him lacking. I was aware of my own hypocrisy, judging him for being judgmental, but I told myself that I was a better person than he because at least I cared. At least I had not shut myself off from the pain. And at least I recognized my own hypocrisy.
Humans really are geniuses at excusing their own behavior while condemning others—especially those others they don’t really know.
Haarm, I decided, was unfeeling and harsh and I resented his presence. He confused me. He unsettled things with Messenger. He was a third wheel, as the old saying goes, one more person than was needed in the tight little world of Messenger and Mara.
I hoped he would return to Chandra soon.
But what if Chandra did emerge from isolation with her mind gone? What then? Messenger had said that there could be only one master for each apprentice, so presumably he would go, eventually.
We followed Nicolet as at age eleven she suddenly began to take her music lessons seriously. She was never more than able on a piano, and the guitar was beyond her, but as she progressed into puberty her voice, which had been shrill and unsteady, deepened and widened and began to be a really extraordinary thing. By the time she was fourteen she was singing with a cover band, sneaking out to late-night jams while her father was sleeping, and rushing home to be in bed when he woke before first light.
“It is almost dull to watch,” Haarm said. “But her voice . . .”
I nodded. Yes, her voice. The girl had a gift.
Once a month Nicolet and her father would drive to the prison where her mother was finishing a seven-year sentence. And I saw that for both the father and the daughter, the impending release of the mother was fraught. They both made the right noises about wanting her home, but they had achieved a stability, the two of them. It was a lonely stability, a dishonest one, too, since Nicolet was sneaking out most nights and so sleepy that she often ditched school. But they had found a way to survive, to be happy, and that’s rare enough in this world.
Within two months of the mother returning home from prison, she was dead of alcohol poisoning.
We watched the funeral ceremony.
I’d only ever been to one funeral before becoming Messenger’s apprentice, my father’s. That had been a military ceremony, with blanks fired by crisply uniformed soldiers, a bugler, and something like a hundred people in attendance, many of them his fellow soldiers. There had been comfort in the formality of it all. I can never forget the ceremonial removal of the American flag that had covered his coffin, the careful folding of it into a neat triangle, the handing of it to my mother who passed it to me.
The ceremony made it more than just the death of one sad girl’s father. By that ceremony my father was inducted into the honored ranks of men, and some women as well, who had worn the uniform and died doing what they had been ordered to do. Even though I was young at the time of his death, I knew enough to feel the spiritual presence of long lines of brave soldiers and felt that perhaps, if there was any truth to our fantasies of an afterlife, my dad would have company and plenty of guys to swap stories with until the day when I would join him again.
But this was not that funeral. Four people attended this funeral. The father, the sister-in-law, the clergyman, and Nicolet.
> I saw in Nicolet’s eyes the moment she shut down the pain and pushed away all feeling, not just for her mother but her father as well. On that day the struggling remains of Nicolet’s family had died.
Nicolet had an excuse. Not enough of an excuse, for nothing is ever enough to excuse ruining a person’s life as she had ruined Graciella’s life. But there was at least some event we could point to and say, “Ah, it started here.”
The odd thing was that the coldness that now filled Nicolet did not hamper her talent. If anything she found a new depth, so that when she sang songs of love betrayed, she didn’t sound like a girl who knows little of life. There was an honesty to those kinds of lyrics now.
And this was how Mr. Joshua discovered her. He joined his greed and ruthlessness to her unsparing pitilessness, and a grim partnership was formed.
I saw that Messenger was watching me.
I said, “The title of this week’s lesson is monsters.”
Haarm laughed quizzically. “What’s that mean?”
“Demons and pimps, greed and ambition,” I said, not really caring if Haarm understood, knowing that Messenger would. “They come with excuses or come with none. Rich and poor, male and female, every race, every religion. Evil is an equal opportunity affliction.”
