Hideaway

dispose of it.”
    Hatch turned away from the painting and regarded the doctor with professional interest. “You're planning to sell?”
    “Oh, no,” the physician said, returning his pen to his breast pocket. His hand, with the long elegant fingers that one expected of a surgeon, lingered at the pocket, as if he were pledging the truth of what he was saying. “I'll donate it. This will be the sixth collection of religious art I've put together over the past twenty years, then given away.”
    Because he could roughly estimate the value of the artwork he had seen on the walls of the medical suite, Hatch was astonished by the degree of philanthropy indicated by Nyebern's simple statement. “Who's the fortunate recipient?”
    “Well, usually a Catholic university, but on two occasions another Church institution,” Nyebern said.
    The surgeon was staring at the depiction of the Ascension, a distant gaze in his eyes, as if he were seeing something beyond the painting, beyond the wall on which it hung, and beyond the farthest horizon. His hand still lingered over his breast pocket.
    “Very generous of you,” Hatch said.
    “It's not an act of generosity.” Nyebern's faraway voice now matched the look in his eyes. “It's an act of atonement.”
    That statement begged for a question in response, although Hatch felt that asking it was an intrusion of the physician's privacy. “Atonement for what?”
    Still staring at the painting, Nyebern said, “I never talk about it.”
    “I don't mean to pry. I just thought—”
    “Maybe it would do me good to talk about it. Do you think it might?”
    Hatch did not answer—partly because he didn't believe the doctor was actually listening to him anyway.
    “Atonement,” Nyebern said again. “At first… atonement for being the son of my father. Later … for being the father of my son.”
    Hatch didn't see how either thing could be a sin, but he waited, certain that the physician would explain. He was beginning to feel like that party-goer in the old Coleridge poem, waylaid by the distraught Ancient Mariner who had a tale of terror that he was driven to impart to others lest, by keeping it to himself, he lose what little sanity he still retained.
    Gazing unblinking at the painting, Nyebern said, “When I was only seven, my father suffered a psychotic breakdown. He shot and killed my mother and my brother. He wounded my sister and me, left us for dead, then killed himself.”
    “Jesus, I'm sorry,” Hatch said, and he thought of his own father's bottomless well of anger. “I'm very sorry, Doctor.” But he still did not understand the failure or sin for which Nyebern felt the need to atone.
    “Certain psychoses may sometimes have a genetic cause. When I saw signs of sociopathic behavior in my son, even at an early age, I should have known what was coming, should've prevented it somehow. But I couldn't face the truth. Too painful. Then two years ago, when he was eighteen, he stabbed his sister to death—”
    Hatch shuddered.
    “—then his mother,” Nyebern said.
    Hatch started to put a hand on the doctor's arm, then pulled back when he sensed that Nyebern's pain could never be eased and that his wound was beyond healing by any medication as simple as consolation. Although he was speaking of an intensely personal tragedy, the physician plainly was not seeking sympathy or the intimacy of friendship from Hatch. Suddenly he seemed almost frighteningly self-contained. He was talking about the tragedy because the time had come to take it out of his personal darkness to examine it again, and he would have spoken of it to anyone who had been in that place at that time instead of Hatch—or perhaps to the empty air itself if no one at all had been present.
    “And when they were dead,” Nyebern said, “Jeremy took the same knife into the garage, a butcher knife, secured it by the handle in the vise on my workbench, stood on a stool, and fell forward, impaling himself on the blade. He bled to death.”
    The physician's right hand was still at his breast pocket, but he no longer seemed like a man pledging the truth of what he said. Instead, he reminded Hatch of a painting of Christ with the Sacred Heart revealed, the slender hand of divine grace pointing to that symbol of sacrifice and promise of eternity.
    At last Nyebern looked away from the Ascension and met Hatch's eyes. “Some say evil is just the consequences of our actions, no more than a result of our will. But I