The Funeral Was Ready to Start… Until the Man Everyone Buried Walked Into the Church Alive.

Chapter 7

“Terror,” he said finally. “Not at the casket. Before I understood the casket. At you. At Lily. At the people in the pews. Because I realized — you were about to go through something. That room was full of people preparing to carry something very heavy, and I was the reason they were going to carry it, and there was going to be two weeks of grief in you that I had caused, even if I hadn’t meant to.”

He paused.

“And then Lily said Daddy and I stopped being afraid of anything.”

The funeral for the man in the casket was held six weeks later.

His name was Michael Resendes. He was forty-four years old and had been a merchant marine for twenty years, had a sister in New Bedford who had been looking for him for three weeks before Reyes’s office found her. He had been on shore leave and had gone into the water from a dock on the north end of the harbor and the determination was accidental, or at least not otherwise, and his sister was a woman named Paula who cried without trying to hide it and thanked Miriam for coming without asking why she had.

Miriam had brought white flowers.

Daniel stood beside her through the service. Lily sat between them, serious and quiet in the way she sometimes was in church, and held both their hands. She had asked, before the service, who the man was, and Miriam had told her: he was someone who was lost, and his family is going to say goodbye, and we are coming to be with them.

Lily had considered this. “Like we almost did,” she said. “Say goodbye.”

“Yes,” Miriam said. “Like we almost did.”

At the reception after, Paula Resendes found Miriam by the side table with the coffee.

“I keep thinking,” Paula said, “about what it would have been like if we never found out. If he was just — gone, with no explanation, no closure.” She shook her head. “I think that’s the thing that would have been hardest. Not knowing.”

Miriam thought about the detective’s file. About the boat in Ponta Velha. About the letter that had not arrived.

“I think so too,” she said.

Paula looked at her. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family. The detective told me a little of it.”

“I’m sorry for yours.”

Paula nodded. She picked up her coffee cup. She said, not without some humor: “My brother would have found it very funny, I think. That his funeral ended up being someone else’s resurrection. He had a dark sense of humor.”

Miriam thought of Daniel walking through the doors of St. Augustine’s church. The casket lurching. The moment before Lily said Daddy.

“I’m grateful for him,” Miriam said. “Michael. For the strange way it all worked. Without—” She stopped, because the sentence was complicated, because gratitude and sorrow were occupying the same space again.

“Without him being found, they might not have investigated,” Paula finished quietly.

“Yes.”

Paula looked at her coffee.

“Then I’m glad he was found,” she said. “And I’m glad he could give your family something, even the way it happened.” She looked up. “He was a good man. He would have liked being part of a story that turned out well.”

The trial of Warren Gibbs lasted eleven days.

Miriam did not attend every day. She attended when she was needed, when she was relevant, and otherwise she continued the work of being the person she was and caring for Lily and rebuilding the ordinary routine of a life that had been interrupted. She had learned during the two weeks of Daniel’s absence that she was considerably more capable than she had known, and she had learned during the weeks after his return that capability and needing someone were not opposites, that a woman could be capable and also reach for her husband’s hand in the dark and these were not contradictions.

Daniel testified for three hours on the seventh day.

He described the friendship, the fishing trip, the water, the boat. He described Warren with the measured care of a man who had been required to locate betrayal inside something he had believed was genuine and was still in the process of understanding how this was possible. He did not perform anger. He was not, she thought, performing anything.

The jury was out for four hours.

The verdict was guilty on all counts.

She heard it the way she had heard the casseroles on a Thursday — as the point at which a thing became real, as the moment when the impossible arithmetic of the situation resolved into something with a clean answer, and the answer was: this happened, and it is finished, and the person who made it happen will not make it happen again.

Outside the courthouse, Marcus put his arm around Daniel’s shoulders and said something in his ear that she couldn’t hear, and Daniel laughed — the real laugh, the one that came from somewhere uncalculated — and she thought: there it is, there he is, the person who walked out of the water and back through the door of their life.

She had been telling Lily that her daddy found his way home.

She was still finding out how true that was, in all its dimensions.