MONASTIC LIFE

The last regression session of the day ended at sunset.

Some of what I had lost had begun to surface. Fragments. Faces without names, rooms without addresses. But the questions that mattered were still unanswered, and something told me that the answers were not in Dr. Xu Yun’s office.

They were somewhere inside these walls.

His door opened onto a small garden on the western side of the cloister. From there, as from almost anywhere in the monastery, the mountain filled the sky.

Mount Shasta.

At more than fourteen thousand feet, it is one of the tallest volcanoes in the Cascade Range, and one of the most revered mountains in America. The Native peoples of the region had considered it sacred for thousands of years. Pilgrims of every faith had followed them. And as a boy, standing with my grandfather beside two empty graves, I had sworn never to go near a mountain like it.

Now it towered over me, dormant, snow-covered, catching the last of the setting sun in bands of rose and gold.

I felt no fear at all.

I walked slowly, breathing deeply, letting the sound of running water and birdsong quiet the endless chatter in my head. It was early spring, but snow still lay in the shaded corners of the gardens, and the whole place had the hushed, expectant feeling of Christmas Eve.

The paths were narrow and winding, laid out, it seemed, to keep human feet from disturbing anything that grew. As I followed them toward the main square, I noticed a small group of monks watching my approach.

That was when I noticed something else.

I was wearing a robe.

I had not given it a thought until that moment. It had felt entirely natural. But it was not like the others. Theirs were black. Mine was deep blue, and over it hung a strange gray panel of cloth, like an apron, falling from my shoulders to my waist.

When I reached the square, the monks bowed deeply. They were smiling, the way people smile at an old friend come home.

“Welcome back, Roshi,” said a woman in her sixties.

I bowed back. It seemed the right thing to do.

Beyond the square stood a large wooden hall. I walked toward it, and by the time I reached its doors, at least a dozen more monks had stopped to bow and murmur their welcome. I pushed open the door.

Claire was inside.

She was standing alone in the center of the long room. She turned slowly, bowed, and spoke with a calm formality that stopped me where I stood.

“It’s been a long time. I’m glad you’re back. We missed you.”

Something was wrong.

Her braids were gone. Her hair was cropped close to her head. And the golden freckles I had studied by the light of a dying glow-stick on the C-train were not there.

Dr. Xu Yun appeared at my side.

“I see you and Anna are getting along again.”

“Anna?” I stared at him. “You mean Claire.”

The young woman smiled.

“No, Roshi. I’m Anna. Anna Morales.” She tilted her head. “You must be thinking of my sister.”

Morales.

I put one hand over my mouth. The other found Yun’s shoulder and held on.

“Claire and Anna,” I said through my fingers, “are the Morales twins?”

“Yes, of course,” Yun said, as though I had asked whether the sun was out.

Footsteps came running from the back of the hall.

Braids. Freckles. A blur of blonde hair.

Claire threw herself at me, rose onto her toes, and wrapped her arms around my neck until her feet left the floor. She weighed nothing at all. Ninety-six pounds, I would have guessed. An angel’s wing.

I did not hold her.

In my mind, the Morales twins were two children in county foster care, two names in a file I had been paid to destroy. The last memory I trusted was fourteen years old, and in it, Claire was a little girl.

She was not a little girl now. She was a grown woman. I knew that.

But she had known exactly who I was from the moment she slid a piece of cardboard under my table at St. Catherine’s. She had known on the train. She had known on the hill above the Mississippi. And she had said nothing.

I took her hands and gently unlocked them from my neck. Then I leaned close and spoke so that only she could hear.

“I don’t want to see you again. Please go. What you’ve done to me is unforgivable.”

She did not argue.

Tears ran down her face without a sound. She turned and walked toward the back door of the hall, and I watched her small figure grow smaller.

Beside me, Anna had seen everything. Perhaps twins always know. She raised her left arm and pushed back her sleeve.

Around her wrist was a beaded bracelet.

It was identical to mine.

“Roshi,” she said softly, “when Claire and I turned seven, our parents gave us these. One each. They said they stood for a love that would never end. After the accident, we never took them off. Not until you came back to Boston.”

She looked toward the door through which her sister had gone.

“When we were twelve, you came back to Boston and testified for us against Trust Mutual. You had kept a copy of everything. Because of you, the court ordered the insurance money paid to us. And your friends Brandon and Lara Pierce adopted us. They have been the most loving parents we could have asked for.”

Brandon Pierce. The third envelope.

Do Not Open Unless Requested by Sender.

“The day after the hearing,” Anna went on, “we were at the window of our new house, watching you get into your car. Claire ran outside after you. She called your name, and she took off her bracelet for the first time since our father tied it on, and she gave it to you. I knew then how much she loved you.” She hesitated. “She still does. More than ever. But not the way a grateful child loves the man who saved her. She loves you the way a woman loves a man.”

I looked down at the beads around my wrist. The mysterious bracelet. The one I had found in a police envelope in a Boston precinct with no memory of where it had come from.

Then I looked up at the back door, where Claire had disappeared into the evening.

The light came without warning.

It was white and blinding, and it flooded everything. My knees buckled. Yun caught my arm. And in that single, endless instant, every lost year came rushing back.

All of it.

I remembered.

The safe houses for orphaned children I had helped found, with the Morales twins as trustees. My training under Roshi Deshan. The morning the world fell away and I saw it, truly saw it, for the first time.

And I remembered the bench.

The day in the park had not happened in 1995. It had happened only days ago. I had gone to Boston with a single purpose, and somewhere between Mount Shasta and that city, my mind had come loose from time. For months I had wandered the streets of Boston, sleeping in doorways and eating in shelters, which was why St. Catherine’s had felt so strangely familiar. And on that last day, my mind had gone back to my old life as a lawyer. I had walked through pieces of it again as though I were still living it. My partnership. Mrs. O’Brian’s claim. Eli. The bench.

And on the bench, the one person who had come to bring me home.

Most important of all, I remembered why I had gone to Boston in the first place.

The garden. The stone bench under the magnolias. The man kneeling in front of me with his hands in mine was no longer faceless. I knew his name now. I knew who lay in that bed in Boston. I knew exactly what I had promised him, and what it would cost.

And I remembered that I had failed.

There was no time to lose. I had to go back and finish what I had started, before it was too late.

The hall where I stood was the zendo, the meditation hall, the heart of the monastery. Here our sangha, the community of monks and lay trainees, sat in silence each morning before dawn. Here I gave my dharma talks, my teachings on the nature of reality, of love, of compassion. More than sixty monks lived within these walls, and more than three hundred lay trainees came and went. Reverend Dr. Xu Yun was my second. If I were ever unable to lead them, he would take my place.

I looked at Anna, and a question rose that I was almost ashamed to ask.

“Anna, there’s one thing I still don’t understand. You and Claire were born in Uruguay. How is it that you look Swiss? Pale skin, blue eyes, hair that’s almost silver. In a thousand years, I would never have guessed you were the Morales twins.”

She smiled as if at a child.

“Roshi, you were born in Ecuador. How is it that you look like a Spaniard and not an Inca?”

She had answered my question with a question, the way a good student of Zen always does.

Of course. All across South America there were families of unmixed European blood. The Moraleses had clearly been among them. I had grown up behind walls built on that very distinction, and I had spent the first half of my life sorting people by the color of their skin and the size of their houses.

I had learned better since. I had simply forgotten it for a while.

“Thank you, Anna,” I said.

Then I ran after Claire.

I loved her. I was a monk, and I had taken a vow, and I loved her anyway. And soon, I knew, it would no longer matter what I had vowed or whom I loved.

My time was almost over.

I wanted to spend every minute of what was left of it with her.