“I’m not dating. I’m having a good time.”
“Any decisions on school?” Ryan admits she hasn’t shown much interest in Tiff’s life lately.
“I’m getting closer.”
“How’s your Italian class going?”
“Finito. Over. Guess you’ll be at Faye’s again today?”
“Where else?”
“Good luck. I mean it.” Tiffany puts her glass, spoon, and bowl in the sink and washes them. “You were more fun when you were just pretending to be getting married,” she says on her way out.
Ryan is growing tired of Tiffany’s evasiveness, her phobias about clutter and foul-smelling dishwashers, and her know-it-all manner of doling out advice when everything else in her own life is anything but fastidiously tended to.
“Where’d Tiff go?” Jason asks when he comes back into the kitchen.
“Hiking,” she says.
“Why you so pissed off?”
“Sometimes she just gets under my skin.”
He is too preoccupied with Harold’s situation to press for more information. In fact, he cannot seem to talk to her about much of anything else.
“Father Curran,” he tells her, “said that while he can’t condone Harold’s decision or recommend it, he says lots of old people reach a point where they’re tired of living, especially in a lesser physical state—which as we know isn’t entirely Harold’s case, or at least it wasn’t until he started this thing—and give up. Basically, he described everything Harold has already said. He said Harold has the right to refuse his medications. That it’s not my role to preach or teach here, but to help Harold make some meaning out of the life he’s lived, to help him find that peaceful place at the right time. He said I should stay open to him, walk on his journey with him, hold him up as best I can. If I’m a comfort to Harold’s soul, I should comfort him into this next life, and accept that we have no control over his life and death. ‘It is not your sin. It’s not his, either. Just pray for him and let God take care of the rest. And I, my son, will pray for you.’ That’s pretty much what he said.”
“I think I like Father Curran.”
“Let’s go to bed,” he says.
“Now?”
“Yeah.”
Afterward, he rolls over on his back, moist eyes closed, and sighs. She knows he’s disappointed in himself, not only for thinking of his own needs at the moment, but for having failed to save Harold. She wipes his tears from her shoulder, then wipes her own.
* * *
Overnight, Harold has grown weaker and his speech and breathing become more labored. He refuses his blood pressure medicine. Discomfort is apparent, though they have no idea how much he may be suffering, and Ryan is glad she took Lauren’s advice and phoned Harold’s doctor to ask him to have a hospice volunteer come and evaluate the situation.
“You have to help me die,” Harold tells Colleen that afternoon. She is a woman around Lauren’s age. Everyone of consequence seems to be around her parents’ ages. She is a former nurse with a clean, scrubbed face and short, light brown hair that hugs her scalp like a bathing cap.
“At this point, we can make a diagnosis to warrant our participation,” she tells Jason and Ryan, and Ryan is relieved to have professional help and to be told that this drain on their own bodies—on their lives—will soon be over.
Colleen smiles at Harold and sits down on the bed, telling him she can offer morphine for pain and shortness of breath, and something for anxiety. She tells him that it is okay to do this, to speed things along. He thanks her. She says she’ll return tomorrow. She takes Jason into the living room and gives him the Comfort Care Kit: liquid morphine that is to be administered by a dropper under the tongue (he will not need much, she assures Jason, and less and less each time), lorazepam for anxiety to be taken with the tiniest sip of water, and more cotton swabs for his dry mouth.
“Morphine is very constipating,” Colleen says. “Each day without nutrition the system breaks down, but the body still makes stool. The drug, however, slows down the motility in the GI system. That can be uncomfortable.”
For the first time, Harold asks for a glass of water.
“It’s better if you don’t drink it at this point,” she reminds him.
“Oh yeah. No,” he says.
On Monday afternoon, when Jason arrives after work, Harold has stopped talking and his breathing has become more labored. Jason gives him another dose of the pain medication. On Tuesday, he is semiconscious: Jason gives him an even smaller dose of morphine and slips a diaper on him; he helps Faye onto the bed, where she lies next to him and holds his hand. By Wednesday, Harold has passed into a coma. When Jason and Ryan arrive on Friday, Faye is lying alongside Harold and Jocelina is sitting in the armchair next to the bed. At 3:14 a.m. on Saturday, Harold lets out a few mild gasps and stops breathing. It is as Colleen said it would be—relatively peaceful. Ryan phones Colleen: There will be no need for her to come today. She phones the funeral home. They will pick up the body in about three hours.
“Not that soon,” Faye says.
“Please, Faye,” an exhausted Ryan entreats.
“All right. Tell them to come at seven. Seven will be fine.”
Chapter 26
Saturday, May 17
RYAN IS ANGRY with Faye for having brought all this about, although she knows this is bigger than Faye and Harold, that her anger is about Jason’s intimacy with faith, which leaves very little room for their own intimacy. Yet he takes her again that day as they try to recoup lost sleep. There is no caressing, no foreplay. He climbs on top of her and, burying his head in her shoulder, he enters her, but not before asking permission: To use her as a confessional; a holy prostitute; a source of absolution for his sin and a release of nearly two weeks of internal struggle?
“Is it all right?” he murmurs, leaving no time to negotiate because he’s pumping once, twice, three times, as though beating his breast while crying Mea culpa, mea culpa: through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
* * *
He grows pensive in the days following Harold’s death, which is reminiscent of the time before he left her.
“You’re in your head too much, Jason,” Ryan tells him one evening as he prepares his lesson plans. “You think something, and next thing you think you’ve said it but you never did. Even philosophers have soapboxes.”
“No reason to go ballistic on me.”
She throws her hands up into the air. “Ballistic? You think this is ballistic?” She is shouting now out of sheer frustration. “You men push and push us to our limits, and then when we explode, you call us psycho.”
“I never said you were psycho.”
“You intimated it. All I have to do is raise my voice and you think I’m yelling at you—I’m ‘ballistic’.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“And you’re making a good offense the best defense.”
They have makeup sex that night and tell each other it’s all right now. But it’s not all right. There is not much right about them. And yet they go on like this for two more weeks, until one morning they don’t speak. Later that day, she texts him at work and suggests they meet in Cambridge at a restaurant they’ve never been to before.
Chapter 27
Friday, May 30
SHE’S THERE BEFORE he is, sipping a glass of Merlot. He enters smiling, telling himself he has no idea what’s about to take place, only that he knows she’s all business by the way she nervously fondles the glass of wine so dark it resembles blood. She’s had a bad day, one that’s about to get worse.
“Sorry I’m late. Todd Neisman called a last-minute meeting.” He does not dare cross that electric fence and kiss her. He takes his seat across from her.
“No problem. I just got here.”
“Did you order for me?”
“Why would I do that?”
“To save time. You must be hungry.”
He’s trying to keep afloat and her buoyed with him, and so he dances around her heaviness in the hope that any minute she’ll return to her usual levity and lose the strained look in her eyes, but there’s nothing but thin ice to step on here.
“You too,” she says, still somber.
The waiter in a floor-length white apron asks if he can bring Jason a drink. Jason inquires what they have on tap and listens to a recitation that he wishes were longer to take up more time, stretch the minutes like an elastic band between now and when Ryan starts talking again. He selects a beer, barely conscious of what he’s asked for. It arrives promptly, and he gulps most of it before she’s done ordering her entrée, waiting for it to numb some part of him, any part of him. When it’s his turn, he requests the first thing he sees on the menu—and another beer.
“How’d you sleep last night?” she asks.
“Okay. Why?”
“You were all over the place.”
“Sorry. Guess you didn’t sleep well yourself then.”
“It’s okay. I wasn’t tired.” But her words are void of emotion, spoken with effort by someone who is fatigued.
He knows she’s gone through his school bag and found his copy of The Confessions of Saint Augustine, a white paperback with a light green border, dog-eared in many places, especially to a page where the book practically opens up on its own, the page where he saw a fresh tea stain this morning when he found the book not in its usual place and the half-drunk cup of tea left on the coffee table in the living room. She has never been able to be secretive: She’s too messy and thoughtless about cleaning up after herself. The folded corner of the page leads to one of his favorite passages, highlighted in yellow, an excerpt from “The Examined Life.”
Too late have I loved you, O Beauty, ancient yet ever new. Too late have I loved you! And behold, you were within, but I was outside, searching for you there—plunging, deformed amid those fair forms that you had made. You were with me, but I was not with you. Things held me far from you, which, unless, they were in you, did not exist at all. You called and shouted, and burst my deafness. You gleamed and shone upon me, and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrant odors on me, and I held back my breath, but now I pant for you. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and now I yearn for your peace.
He is not angry that she saw and read it; he is relieved to know that she knows what he contemplates, struggles with, confronts, and, as she often claims, does alone within the confines of his mind. Still, he fights her when she says it’s over. She cannot compete with God, she tells him, and she shouldn’t. She tells him she sees his strength, his faith, and his power to help. It’s all blended together and cannot be separated or spread over a spiritual world and a lay world, like individual wheat or gluten-free canapés on the same platter. It’s all connected; it’s all one.
He knows it. She knows it. How did she think they could do this? she asks. How did he? He cannot deny feeling hunted down by God at times, wishing God would just leave him alone. But his own perseverance is also relentless: How can he sleep without her by his side? How can he come home to anything—anyone but her? He’s tried so hard not to be afraid, not to care what others think. How can she throw away what they have been working on these past months? How can they fail again? Their only failure, she says, has been trying too hard to make right something so very wrong.
“Don’t you love me?” he asks, aware of using the turquoise eyes she loves to penetrate hers like a laser beam that will produce the desired response.
“I do. I love you for all you are, for your intensity in all you believe. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? I can’t share it. I wish I could. We can spend our lives getting over one hump after another, trying to fit together. But the only getting over is the fact that we don’t make each other happy. I can’t just be in love with love.”
“You’re just running scared, Ryan. You do that. You act like you want something, but then you can’t follow through. You can’t even find an end to your stories.”
“Fuck you! I’m not the one who left.” She does not lower her voice.
The waiter heading their way with a cloth-wrapped water pitcher executes an about-face. Jason is embarrassed.
“You’re not going to lecture me on following through,” she says. “And for your information, I’ve hardly been able to get a word down because I’ve been spending all my time with you!”
He hadn’t meant what he said. He just needed to punch back. He was coming undone. “I just don’t understand why this is so sudden. You keep everything in.”
“Me? You’re the one who needs a mind reader, unless you’re explaining church dogma.”
“What are we doing, Ryan? Come on! We’re good together. We make each other happy.” He tries to be playful—to lighten up as Father Curran urged when Jason was deciding whether or not to leave the seminary.
“But we can never sustain it,” she says having regained her calm. “And that makes me sad.”
“We’ll go to counseling.” He forces a smile.
“It’s bigger than that. I’ve seen you succeed, Jase—with Harold, kids at school, people in your outreach programs. I’ve seen what you’re best at—I guess what you’re called to do. But you need to understand that while I admire you for it—love you for it, just like everybody else—I don’t share enough in it. It’s always me looking at you, admiring you, getting frustrated by you. But it’s never me in the picture. It’s damn tiring trying to fit in where you don’t belong.”
He plays his last card. “There’s talk of Pope Francis being in favor of priests marrying.”
“It’s about time,” she mumbles sarcastically. “No—really, Jason. That’s awesome. But it won’t matter for us. You need to be an integral part of the Church in a way that has no room for me, and frankly, I have no room for it or any other religious institution.”
He looks down at the table. He’s quiet for a long while.
“You have no room for me, is what you mean.” He can no longer feign levity.
“You’re intent on making me the bad guy, aren’t you?”
“That’s it, then,” he concedes reluctantly.
“Jason, I hated you for leaving me, and I love you so much for trying again. It’s made me feel guilty and shitty and lonely. What it doesn’t always make me feel is good, and it can’t make you feel good either. We’re in each other’s way. And you know it as well as I do.”
“So we failed—again.”
“No, Jase. We learned.”
He has underestimated her, taken her for granted at times, and feels the pain of losing her now more than ever. But in his heart he knows what he’s always known is demanded of him, what he’s read over and over in another highlighted passage:
Truly you command that I be continent from the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. You have commanded self-restraint from fornication, and as for wedlock itself, you have counseled something better than what you have permitted …
“Is it okay with you if I say goodbye to Faye?”
“Of course! How can you even think you need to ask my permission?”
”Will you come with me?”
She takes a deep breath. He knows it’s so hard for both of them to deny one another, to deny themselves. But this is the beginning of the end.
“No,” she replies.
“You want me to tell Eric?”
“I’ve got that. I got us into it; I’ll get us out. The lying is over.”
“I’ll leave tonight.” He cannot envision spending a night under the same roof after breaking up.
“You don’t have to.”
“Yeah, I do. I’ll go back with you and get my stuff. I’m sure I can stay at the rectory at St. Gerard’s until school is over. Just three and a half weeks left.”
“I’ll drive you over there after you get your things.”
“Better if I take the T.”
“It’ll be late,” she sa
ys.
“Okay. I’ll take an Uber.”
“Will you go back to the novitiate?”
“Where else would I go?” Her question surprises him.
“I thought you might want to pursue the Brotherhood. You like them.”
And for once he sees things clearly: It’s not this or that or the other possibility. He knows where he belongs; because if this thing he has always felt about God is real, he needs to share it with others—bring it to others.
“I’ll always be here for you,” he tells her.
“I know. Me too.”
Can one feel relief and pain at the same time? In any kind of death, do they bear equal weight?
Their meals arrive and they dig in with gusto; they are hungry to get on with their lives. But they draw out the end, taking small spoonfuls of the shared crème brûlée then sipping slowly on their brandies. When they finally leave the restaurant, it’s with arms around each other, supporting each other like an old couple who have just fallen in love.
Chapter 28
Monday, June 2
THE DOCTOR SAYS Danni has made remarkable strides since her accident. Today she shed her immobilizing brace for a flexible one that allows her to bend the knee and, with the support of crutches, put a bit of weight on her injured leg. Just in time for the emergency Chamber meeting Eric called as acting chair in her absence.
He has visited her at the hospital and numerous times after she came home, bringing her and her parents takeout from Chez Alexandre’s and Baby’s Grill, along with his mother’s two-year-old canned peaches and jam. One night he made her tofu curry and rice, one of his mother’s favorite recipes. Thank God she is back to chair tonight’s meeting. It’s enough that he has to drop the bomb. At least Ryan had the decency to call him and not leave a text or an email. When he listened to her message saying they needed to talk, he phoned back immediately.
“Shoulda figured as much,” the grumpy appliance repairman, known as Electric Ed, barks when Eric announces the wedding is off. “This harebrained scheme of yours, Boulanger, was bound to be a bust.”
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