The day melted away again, I was back at home on my bed, and there She was before me.—Good girl, Síle. I knew you’d make it right.
I opened my mouth, but at first I didn’t know how to ask what I was so desperate to know.
The way Our Lady smiled then, it reminded me of the beginning, only there was just myself and Tess left now.—You were made by God to wander the world, high and low, bright and dark, and bring the Light, God’s light, to every man, woman, and child you encounter. To walk in the joy of Creation, and to share in that joy.
And I said,—That’s lovely, Mother. Thank you. I …
—What is it, child?
—Have I … I hardly dared to ask.—Have I undone it?
The Blessed Mother nodded and kissed me on my forehead. She’d never kissed me before, and how it thrilled me. And the relief of it, I’d never in a million years be able to describe the relief.
A half hour later I knocked on the door of the youth center, and Tess emerged in a slouchy hat, a crimson rain jacket and well-worn hiking boots. “This way,” she said, and a couple minutes later, we were walking down a muddy lane between two hedgerows, as if the town were even smaller than I’d thought.
“How are you feeling today?” I asked.
“It’s becoming more real to me,” she sighed. “It felt so good to sit and chat with you the other night—to forget for a while.” She hopped nimbly over a puddle in the lane. “I wish you had more time. I’m afraid I’m bound to be terrible company today, but it wouldn’t have felt right not to see you before you go.”
“Well, I’m glad we’re doing this. It’s good to see you.” I watched her cast half a smile into the gloomy sky. “Besides, I haven’t gotten any exercise all week.”
“You’ll have it today,” she replied. “It’s just under ten miles to the well and back.”
We walked in silence for a minute or two. There weren’t any houses beyond the hedgerows now, just cows grazing in green fields. I waited for Tess to speak again.
“I wasn’t sure I was going to tell you any more,” she said finally. “Did you listen to the tapes? I was going to ask you the other night, and then I didn’t.” She glanced over at me, and I nodded. “I don’t remember what I said.”
“Way more than you told me,” I said teasingly.
She hesitated. “Tell me what I said.”
“You told Father Dowd the apparition showed you her heart.”
For the next few paces, Tess closed her eyes. “There’s a bluebell wood not far from here,” she said as we kept walking. “If you’d come in the spring, I’d have taken you there.”
“Maybe next time,” I said.
She opened her eyes and smiled a little. “Just don’t let it be another twenty-five years, all right?”
I smiled back. “I promise.”
“Orla and I used to spend all afternoon there in the summer holidays sometimes, when the weather was nice.”
“All afternoon?”
“All afternoon,” she sighed. “Just talking and making flower chains.”
“What did you talk about?”
She smiled sadly. “Boys, mostly.”
“You don’t miss it?”
“What?” Tess gave me the closest thing to a laugh. “Talking about boys?”
“I’ve always been curious about the whole celibacy thing.”
She seemed amused. “Why?”
“I could never go the rest of my life without…” I remembered who I was talking to, and fell silent.
“You don’t understand it because it’s not your calling,” Tess replied.
“You never wanted a partner, though? Kids?”
“Everyone wants those things at some point in their lives. The younger priests, they’ll even admit as much to the congregation because they understand it’s important for people to see we’re as human as they are.”
“If you want marriage and children, though, how does that jive with being ‘called’?”
Tess paused to formulate her answer. “It’s like going to a place on holiday, falling in love with it and wishing you could live there for always,” she said gently. “But you come home again because it’s where you belong.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said. “I think we can ‘belong’ wherever we want to be.”
Tess looked at me. “So you’d say you belong in New York?”
I could tell by her face that my face had betrayed me. I’d lived there all my adult life—traveled to warmer, greener, sunnier places I hadn’t wanted to leave—and yet I’d never truly given it any thought.
We came to a turnoff. A wooden signpost for ST. BRIGID’S HOLY WELL pointed right, and I followed her onto a track even muddier than the first. Tess took a breath, looked as if she were about to speak, and closed her mouth again. I waited. Finally she said, “You said you’d spoken to Orla.”
“Yes. I’ve talked with her a couple of times now.”
“And she said she didn’t believe she saw it. That she only convinced herself to hide Síle’s illness.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If you all saw it, then how come only one of you is in a home?”
Tess gave me an unreadable look—or, rather, there were so many emotions vying for control of her face that I couldn’t tell which would win. “That might be the one thing you came here to find out.” It was the only thing she’d ever said that didn’t ring true.
Lightly she ran her fingertips along the dull green leaves in the hedge. “There’s loads of fuchsia here in the summertime,” she murmured, and again we walked in silence for a bit. “Seeing as we’re headed to her well, would you like to hear about Saint Brigid?”
“Sure,” I said.
“There’s a legend says that when she was a child, a host of angels carried her, asleep and dreaming, over the sea and back in time to witness the birth of Christ.”
“That’s a nice story.”
“Isn’t it? There’s such a depth and richness to the history of our Church that most people never explore,” she said. “So many nooks and corridors that lead you to something obscure and wonderful.”
“I never looked at it that way.” I smiled. “But you know what I think of the Church. Dusty and humorless and completely out of touch.”
“Aye,” she said earnestly, “but it doesn’t have to be that. There’s a beautiful painting in the National Gallery of Scotland by an artist called John Duncan. He painted two angels carrying Saint Brigid across the sea, with seagulls and seals bobbing in their wake. The angels have wings colored like the sunset, and if you look closely you can see their robes are embroidered with scenes from the Old Testament.” She sighed. “I went to Edinburgh when I was nineteen, and I just stood and looked at that painting for what felt like all afternoon.”
“You sound like Síle,” I said. “Painting pictures with words.”
Beyond the hedge, sheep were nibbling on weeds growing among the ruins of an old stone farmhouse. “You’ve been spending a lot of time with her,” Tess remarked.
“I wouldn’t say ‘a lot.’”
“But you’ve been to see her several times.”
I nodded. “She said to tell you she was asking for you.”
“And you said she’s doing well?”
“Very well,” I said. “She draws and paints all day and goes for walks by the sea.”
“That sounds like a good life,” Tess replied. If anyone else had said so, it would’ve sounded sarcastic.
“If you forget she isn’t allowed to leave.”
Tess glanced at me sidewise. “She’s bewitched you.”
I laughed a bit too merrily. I didn’t want her thinking of that fossil on the beach. “Síle bewitches everybody, doesn’t she?”
“I liked her,” she said. “I always liked her, even when Orla didn’t want me to.”
At first I didn’t reply—what if she shuts down on me?—but in the end, my curiosity won out. “She told me you used to go up to the grotto alone, witho
ut telling anyone.”
Tess looked at me. She didn’t answer; she didn’t have to.
The hedge had given way to a low wall, the rough stones mottled with lichen. “You never told that to Father Dowd, did you?”
“I couldn’t tell him, because then he’d have to know what was said, and if I’d told him the truth…” She drew a shaky breath. “I’ve never told anyone what she said to me those days I went up alone.”
“You can tell me.”
She gave me a weary smile. “Confidin’ in a journalist? Even I’m not as foolish as that.”
“I’m not a journalist right now. I even left my recorder at the B and B.” I reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “Look, Tess: I know we don’t know each other as well as it maybe feels like we do, but I’m not going to spend the rest of my time here driving around looking at castles and drinking in pubs. Not if I thought I might be of some use to you.”
I watched her blush. “That’s very kind of you.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
This time she didn’t answer right away, as if this were the first time she’d actually stopped to consider how she felt. “I failed him,” she said at last, and when she turned to me, her eyes were glistening with unshed tears.
“C’mere,” I said, and we stopped walking. I put my arms around her, and she laid her cheek on my chest. “It’s okay, Tess. You didn’t fail anybody.”
“You don’t know,” she said as she wept. “You don’t know.”
I could have texted you. I could have told you I’d met the kid and something wasn’t right. “That’s it,” I said softly, and stroked her head through her woolen cap. Her hair smelled clean, the scent something sweet and unidentifiable. “Do you want to talk about Owen?”
She shook her head against my chest.
“Tell me,” I said. “Let me listen.” He was definitely listening to something. But you won’t tell her that, will you?
For a while Tess could only cry. “He was in so much pain,” she murmured. “It didn’t matter that he’d family and friends. He was completely alone. He wasn’t really, but he felt it, and it got to the point it was all he knew. I told his parents he needed to see someone, and they wouldn’t have it, they didn’t listen. I went to them again and again, and it did no good. Now I don’t even know how to speak to them. I can’t look at them. I’m so … I’m so…”
“You can tell me,” I said.
She broke from me, gently, and looked me in the eye. “I’m so angry. But it … it goes beyond anger.”
“You did everything you could. You know that, right?” I could have told you.
Tess hesitated for a second before unzipping her jacket and pulling something out of the inside pocket: a piece of notebook paper, folded and crumpled. Silently she offered it to me, and I unfolded it to find a hasty boyish scrawl in red ink.
Dear Tess
I don’t have a choice, I don’t really. They tell us we always have one, that we can grow up to be whoever we like, but you know as well as I do what a lie that is.
I’m writing this not only to say I’m sorry but because She told me to. She says to say She’ll go on waiting for however long you need.
When Ciara comes to see you tell her I love her and I’m sorry I never said it.
Thank you for all you’ve done for me, Tess. You’re the best of everyone.
Owen.
Her cheeks were blotchy, her eyes desolate. “He left it on my desk.”
“Did you show this to his parents?”
She sighed. “How could I?”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said, because there was no way I was going to share what I was actually thinking: I’m off the hook. And then: You won’t show it to his parents and you showed it to me. “Do you think he really saw her?”
She looked down, staring through the muddy ground. “I don’t know.”
“It isn’t your fault, Tess. No matter what, you did your best.” It hit me then, that when people talked of her impossible goodness, it wasn’t idle flattery. They called her a saint because they expected so much more of her than they could anyone else, and in turn she demanded it of herself. Or maybe it was the other way around. “Those kids know they can come to you when they’ve got something on their minds. Who do you go to?”
We walked in silence for a minute. “I don’t,” she said finally. “I can’t.”
“You can. You have to. You’re no good to anyone else if you don’t take care of yourself first.”
She gave me another sideways look. “Who do you talk to?”
I didn’t answer right away. “I have a few good friends.”
“In New York?”
I nodded, but it didn’t sit easy with me—having to lie to her, to leave so many things out. Andy didn’t get why I wanted to write this story, I hadn’t talked to my best friend from college in nearly four years, and I fully expected every friend Laurel and I had in common to side with her. Did I know anyone who would hear about my going for a hike with a nun—not to mention kissing a nun, albeit long before she became a nun—and not laugh?
“And you … tell them everything?” she asked.
“Define ‘everything,’” I said, and she smiled. A bit later, she lifted a finger to indicate the next turnoff. Tess hopped up onto a stile beside a rusty gate, sat on the old stone wall, and swung her legs over. “We’re almost there,” she said as I climbed over after her. I looked behind us and saw a small parking lot at the end of a gravel track. All along we’d been closer to the main road than I’d thought.
A minute or two later, we arrived at the well, set into a hillock and flanked by thorny trees with bits of faded cloth tied to the branches. A circular ledge enclosed the well itself, and different kinds of ferns and mosses grew out of the old masonry. The water was thick with algae, and from the dimmest corner came the listless gurgling of the old spring.
“Here it is,” Tess said softly. “The water that worked the only miracle I’ve ever seen with my own two eyes.”
“It’s a charming spot,” I replied, and we stood there quietly as if we were back in the church.
“I’m ready,” she said finally. I let her words hang between us for a minute, in case they didn’t mean what I wanted them to mean. “I need this,” she murmured, almost to herself. “All along, I’ve needed this. And it might as well be here.”
“Okay,” I said.
Tess took a seat on the ledge and drew a deep breath as I sat down beside her. “When you hear talk of other apparitions, at Knock or Medjugorje,” she began, “the people who’ve seen it believe they’ve been blessed. We weren’t blessed. I wasn’t blessed. That much I know for certain.”
“I don’t understand. I thought you were blessed. I thought that was why you became a nun.”
“No,” she said. “No.”
I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner: “When you spoke of the apparition, you said it, not she.” If you really think it was the Blessed Virgin Mary they saw up there, then you’re every bit as daft as we took you for.
Tess gave me one of those eloquent looks.
“Start at the beginning,” I said. “Tell me the little things—the details. Tell me how you felt when she showed you her heart.”
When Tess regarded me then, her gaze bright and penetrating despite her sadness, I marveled that she couldn’t see clear through me. “This isn’t about the story anymore, is it?” she asked.
I smiled a little. “I don’t know if it was ever about the story.”
She nodded, as if she’d suspected as much from the very start.
“You told Father Dowd she said it was easier for you to show compassion to people on the other side of the world than to the people you saw every day.”
Tess sighed. “And every time she came and spoke to me, aye, it was a variation on that.”
“How did you feel?” I asked. “When she came and you realized what was happening, and she spoke to you, how did she make you feel?�
��
“It was queer. Very queer. I’ve never known a feeling like it before or since. I felt weightless, almost like I was becoming a part of the light that shone out of her and through her. Almost as if there wasn’t any ‘me’ anymore.”
“And how did you feel then? Did you panic?”
She smiled. “Not at all. It was the loveliest feeling I’d ever known.”
“To feel like you were dissolving? Really?”
“I felt pure. For the first time in my life, I knew what that meant.”
“Wow,” I said. What she’d said was either inspiring or insane. I put off deciding which.
“In those first few weeks, it was very difficult to go back to ordinary life—what I’d begun to see as the impurity all around me. The filthy world—the filthy relations between men and women—all the filthy thoughts in my own head.”
“Tess,” I said, “I’ve never known anyone so hard on herself.” You’ve never had a filthy thought in all your life.
She gave me a helpless look. “I don’t know any other way. But I … let me go on, please. I need to tell you everything.”
“All right,” I said. “What did she say when she went away? Did she say she’d come again? And physically—did she just kind of … fade out?”
“She didn’t fade, exactly. She was there and then she wasn’t, and all the light winked out with her. It was very disorientating at first, but over time, we got used to it.” Tess turned in her seat and ran her hand along the ferns growing inside the well. “She did say good-bye, in a sense—she’d raise her hand in a blessing. She didn’t have to tell us she’d come back. We just knew we’d see her again.”
“So that’s the way it went, the first few times you saw her?”
“That’s the way it went.”
“But you didn’t tell Father Dowd right away.”
“Once she’d left us, we didn’t know how to articulate it, even to each other. It won’t surprise you to hear that Síle was the only one who felt sure of what we’d seen. We saw a difference in her right away—before the apparition she was as changeable as the weather, and no wonder it put people on edge—but afterwards there was a calm, a deep calm, I’d never seen in her before. It was obvious to me it was a change for the better, but that new serenity seemed to aggravate Orla more than ever.”
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