What Matters Most

by Luanne Rice

  “Yes,” Bernie said. “The high winds during that storm over the weekend knocked two limbs down from the sugar maple behind the cloister. One branch came right over the wall, nearly hitting a novice.”

  “Is she okay?”

  Bernie shrugged. “She’s taking it as a sign. To rethink her vows. Last I heard, she was on the phone with her mother in Norwalk.”

  “Signs can be very powerful,” Honor said mildly.

  Bernie gave her a sharp glance, looking for hidden meaning. But Honor didn’t react. “Anyway,” Bernie said, “the reason I came looking for you was to ask if you and John will help out with the grape harvest. It’s this weekend, and there’s so much to do, and with Tom gone…” She trailed off.

  “Of course we’ll help,” Honor said. “Have you heard from him?”

  Bernie shook her head. “No, and I don’t expect to. The whole point of his leaving was to sever ties. I thought maybe you had heard from him.”

  “I haven’t,” Honor said. “Maybe John has, but if so, he hasn’t mentioned it.”

  “I know it’s for the best,” Bernie said, staring at the hillside dotted with young artists. They were all far enough away that they couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  “Why is it for the best?” Honor asked softly. “This was Tom’s home. He loved it here. He’s been caretaker forever…. I know he felt he was carrying on his great-grandfather’s love for the land.”

  “He just felt it was time for him to move on. To go somewhere new,” Bernie said. “I’m just surprised he left Brendan…they’d gotten very close.”

  “Maybe he’s still in touch with Brendan. I doubt he’d just abandon him, Bernie.”

  “No,” Bernie said. “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “You’re devastated, aren’t you?” Honor said. “That he left?”

  Bernie tried to shake her head.

  Honor raised her eyebrow. She gave Bernie a long, questioning stare, letting her know that she wasn’t buying it. Ever since their return from Ireland, Bernie and Tom had had to face the reality of their relationship. It was a friendship—no, wait, it was a thwarted love affair. It was pure—they’d kept it so, all these years, since Bernie had taken her vows. Or had they?

  “You can’t answer my question,” Honor said.

  “I don’t know how to feel,” Bernie said. “In some ways, it’s a relief to not see him every day. Not to see him doing his hard work, and know how disappointed he was that…”

  “That he couldn’t be with you the way he wanted.”

  Bernie nodded. That was hard to admit, to say, even to her closest friend.

  “And it got even more intense after Ireland,” Honor said. “After Seamus.”

  The mention of his name did something to Bernie. She felt all that soft golden light—flowing over the land, the vineyard, and walls—trickle across her skin, her hands and face, making her melt, start to cry.

  “Yes, it did,” Bernie said, holding back tears so the girls wouldn’t see. “I’m not sure what I expected. I prayed for a healing—for all three of us. Myself, Tom, and Seamus. I’ve held such anger at myself for so long for making such a mistake, creating a life that I then abandoned. I think I wanted to be let off the hook. To see that he was healthy and happy.”

  “You said Seamus was healthy,” Honor said. “And relatively happy.”

  “He’s incredible,” Bernie said. “To think of what he’s overcome.”

  “He sounds it,” Honor said.

  “It just undid Tom, though,” Bernie said. “He’s so compartmentalized—I’ve always known it. The way he was able to live here, on campus, going about his duties as caretaker and groundskeeper, pretending there’d never been anything between us.”

  “Do you really think he pretended that?” Honor asked softly, with great patience, as if Bernie were a naive, somewhat misguided student.

  “I think he had to,” Bernie said stubbornly.

  “Bernie,” Honor said, “you can’t honestly believe that was possible for him?”

  “Then how,” Bernie asked, feeling as if she were falling, “could he stand it?”

  “How could you stand it?” Honor asked.

  “Prayer,” Bernie said. “That we could both come to love and accept the divine within ourselves. To quote Martin Buber, ‘All real living is meeting.’ Isn’t that so true?”

  “Bernie,” Honor said. “Could we please leave Martin Buber out of it?”

  Bernie glanced over, shocked by the vehemence in Honor’s tone. She saw her dear, oldest friend shaking her head with great exasperation.

  “You’re being a nun,” Honor said.

  “That’s what Tom always used to say,” Bernie said, gazing into the middle distance. The golden light seemed to hover in the air, holding particles of dust and pollen and salt spray. She heard waves breaking on the beach, just over the rise.

  “Well, he had a point,” Honor said. “Sometimes you see everything through the prisms of the spirit and the intellect…it distances you from life down here in the trenches.”

  “Believe me,” Bernie said in a low voice, “I feel very much in the trenches right now.”

  “Which part, Bern? You’ve barely talked about it at all, since you’ve gotten home. The part about meeting your son? Or the part about taking off your habit for two days?”

  “How do you know about that?” Bernie asked, her head jerking back to look at Honor.

  “Tom told John.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know where he was!”

  “I don’t. This was before he left. Your first day or so back, while he was packing up his things.”

  “What did he say?”

  “John went over to try to find out what was going on. Tom told him about Seamus, and St. Augustine’s, about that nun, he called her your nemesis….”

  “Eleanor Marie,” Bernie said.

  “Right. And then he told John how you’d stopped wearing your habit after you finally got Seamus’s file. He said that he’d looked into your eyes, known that you were questioning your vows. No, more than that. He said that you knew.”

  “Knew what?” Bernie whispered.

  “That you wanted to be with him. With them,” Honor said. “Tom and Seamus.”

  Bernie shook her head, closing her eyes. “He was wrong.”

  “About which part?”

  “There’s no being ‘with’ Seamus,” she said. “He’s a grown man now. He doesn’t need his mother and father to raise him—he’s already raised.”

  “That’s not what Tom said,” Honor said gently. “He wasn’t talking about the reality of what should happen…he was talking about what you wanted to happen. They’re different, Bernie. Don’t you get that?”

  Of course Bernie got it. She understood the difference between a deep desire and life’s reality extremely well. Over the years, when her students, the nuns, or her spiritual directees would come to her with a dilemma, hashing over in their minds the terrible and wonderful choices of life, she would always tell them to listen deeply.

  That was really it, her message as a nun and a child of God: listen deeply to your heart. That was how and where God communicated with people. Not so much in burning bushes or on mountaintops, in blue grottos or apparitions of the Virgin Mary, but more often in the depths of their own hearts.

  Bernie’s throat closed, remembering how she’d passed by Tom’s cottage that night just before he left. Located on the far end of the property, it overlooked the salt marsh and the banks of the river. He had the windows open, and she’d stood just outside, watching him fold his clothes, take books down from his shelves, box up his papers. She had held herself back, not knowing what to say, wanting to find a way to tell him to stay.

  Her own heart had been so broken. Twenty-three years ago, when she’d made her choice to come here as a novice, Tom had stayed quietly beside her, supporting her and helping her believe that her reasons—whether he agreed with them or not—had merit.

  Now
he had reached his limits. Whatever strength it had taken for him to stay close, let her find her way, was depleted. Or maybe he’d found new strength—the inner conviction he needed to pack up and move on.

  “Bernie, Tom saw you put your habit away and thought that meant that you finally knew you wanted to be with him.”

  “He said that to John?”

  “Of course he did. And Bernie, I love you—you’re my best friend. I know you pretty well. So don’t tell me, please don’t try to tell me, that you weren’t thinking that. Or, at least, that you didn’t realize he’d think you were thinking that.”

  “Honor! I took the habit off because I didn’t want it to shade my meeting with my son! I didn’t want him to see me as a nun before I had the chance to tell him I was his mother!”

  Honor nodded. She reached for Bernie’s hand with her own paint-streaked ones, clasped it tight. “I’m sure you did. I can understand your thinking about that. But aside from Seamus, can’t you see what it must have been like for Tom? And Bernie—I swear I’m not trying to give you a hard time here. But didn’t you maybe want something yourself?”

  It was a testament to how much Bernie loved and trusted Honor, that she didn’t just turn and walk away. “Want what?” she asked.

  “Well, a life with Tom,” Honor said. “That’s what.”

  “I gave that up a long time ago,” Bernie said. She looked long and hard into Honor’s eyes, saw skepticism brewing. Then, checking her watch, she backed away. “I’d better get back—I have a call in to Admissions at Princeton. Monique Blaschka wants to apply early decision, and I want to check out the lay of the land. Anyway, thanks for saying that you and John will help with the harvest.”

  “Anything for our Bernie,” Honor said, giving her a big hug.

  Bernie held on a few seconds before letting go. When she looked out at the hillside, she saw several of the students watching. She knew that there were school administrators who would never show their feelings in front of students, keep up a front of imperviousness to human emotion. Not Bernie. She knew to the depths of her being that the greatest lesson she could teach her students was that of love: the ability to open their hearts to the world and each other.

  Perhaps that had been Tom Kelly’s legacy, she thought. Having him so close by all these years had reminded her that God’s love came through people: the quiet eloquence of his backbreaking work, the way he’d respected her choices and decisions, the times he’d served as her sounding board on everything from trouble with the new irrigation system to a student injured in a soccer game.

  “You okay?” Honor asked now.

  “I’m fine,” Bernie said. “I’m glad we talked. Wherever Tom is, I’m sure he made the right choice. I wish him nothing but the best.”

  “Uh-huh,” Honor said, raising that eyebrow again as she turned back to her painting class.

  Bernie caught Agnes’s eye just before she walked away. Her middle niece was, in some ways, her closest. There had been times Bernie had wondered if Agnes had a vocation. But then Brendan McCarthy had come along and, at least temporarily, thrown that off track.

  Although Tom was gone, Brendan remained on the grounds crew. Bernie saw him now, on the next hill, working in the vineyard. His bright red hair gleamed in the sunlight. Her stomach fell, as if she had just started on the downhill side of a roller coaster.

  Agnes and Brendan were signaling each other. Bernie watched as she walked slowly away. She saw Agnes flash a silver paint tin and Brendan signal back with the blade of his pocketknife. She thought of young love, how it thrived on these hills: Honor and John, Bernie and Tom, now Agnes and Brendan.

  Then she thought of another red-haired young man, all the way across the sea. Hurrying back to her office, she tried to listen deeply to her own heart, but all she could think about was how empty it felt.

  Nineteen

  That night, after Cece went to bed and Agnes settled at the kitchen table, writing an English paper, Honor made some coffee and brought it to John in the studio. He hunched over a drafting table, sketching out plans for his next project. Sisela, their old white cat, lay sprawled across the surface; he worked around her.

  Honor stood back, watching him. He wore black jeans and a blue chambray work shirt, his dark hair was short and shot with gray, and even in the dim light, she could see the lines in his face. He had aged during his time in prison.

  So had she, during his time away. Missing someone that badly for that long did something terrible inside. It encased the heart in stone, made it almost impossibly too heavy to carry. But when she looked at him now, so grateful to have him back home, she felt as if the opposite was happening: they were both growing younger. Their hearts were free again.

  “Coffee?” she asked, stepping out of the shadows.

  “Thanks,” he said, looking up. “Did I hear the phone ring before?”

  “Yes—it was Regis. She’s thinking about coming down for the weekend.”

  “Get her to bring her roommates and friends,” he said. “They can help with the harvest.”

  “Good idea,” Honor said. “But don’t you think it’s a little odd, that she wants to come home again so soon? She just went back to college, and she was already here for Bernie and Tom’s homecoming….”

  “I think she wants to check up on everyone,” John said, absently petting Sisela. “Make sure we’re all still together.”

  John was a sculptor and photographer, known for working on a grand scale. He worked with ice floes and fallen trees, canyon walls and cliff edges. His last work had been a labyrinth, built right here on the beach, from the remnants of an Ice Age boulder he’d destroyed in one night of passion and rage; the sculpture before that had been a soaring chapel built of driftwood, granite rubble, and an iron cross, installed on the cliffs of Ballincastle, in West Cork. With their daughter Regis standing right there, a man had attacked it and them, and John had gone to jail for killing him.

  For six years, Regis had kept the secret of that day locked inside. She hadn’t told a soul what had happened, because she hadn’t been able to remember. Trauma had taken a toll on their family, and it wasn’t really until their last trip to Ireland, at summer’s end, when Regis had been able to face the judge and tell the truth.

  She’d broken up with her fiancé Peter, and headed off to her sophomore year at Boston College. Honor knew that her nightmares, of what had really happened at Ballincastle, had helped her break through, somehow guided her toward a new stage of healing. But the experience had left Regis, the daughter most likely to follow in her daredevil father’s footsteps, more tentative and insecure than Honor had ever seen her.

  “You’re worried about her?” John asked now.

  “Not really,” Honor said. “She seems to be doing really well. But I think you’re right about why she wants to come home.”

  “To check on us?”

  Honor nodded, sipping her coffee. “All of us,” she said. “Because we’re not really all together.”

  “Ah. Are you referring to the elusive Thomas Kelly?”

  “Yep,” Honor said.

  “Guess he finally got tired of hanging around my sister, hoping she’d break her vows.”

  “John, you make it sound so…”

  “So futile? So crazy? So like a pipe dream?” he asked, holding the coffee mug between his two hands. The nights were chilly, with a steady breeze coming off the water. The crickets were silent, replaced by the low, throaty call of geese flying overhead; the fall migration was under way. “Think about it. My sister took religious vows, but Tom’s been just as celibate. He might as well have become a priest.”

  “Where is he now?” Honor asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” John said. It wasn’t so much the tone of his voice as the way he wouldn’t meet her eyes that made Honor think he was being evasive.

  “Come on,” she said. “I know you’re in touch with him.”

  “Maybe,” John said.

  “Then tell me!”


  “I swear, I don’t know,” he said, smiling, pulling her close. “He didn’t give me the details. All I know is, it has to do with Seamus.”

  “Seamus, their son?” Honor asked. “But he’s in Ireland; Bernie told me he said he never wanted to hear from them again.”

  “That’s what he said,” John said. “But since when did something as blatant as a nun’s vows or a kid’s demand to be left alone ever keep Tom from hoping?”

  “He didn’t go back to Dublin, did he?”

  John shook his head. “No, I can tell you that much. He said something about ‘paving the way’ for Seamus. Not sure exactly what he meant beyond that.”

  “Maybe Seamus is coming over,” Honor said, her eyes shining. “Oh, I’d love so much to meet him. Can you imagine Bernie, if that happened?”

  “I’m almost afraid to,” John said.

  “What do you mean?” Honor asked.

  John stared down at his drafting table, line drawings he’d done of one huge boulder and what looked like a ring of Christmas trees. Sisela stretched, jumped down, ran away. John took a long drink of coffee, then raised his eyes to Honor’s. Sometimes she felt so glad to have him home, she almost couldn’t bear it.

  “My sister can seem so strong,” he said. “Act so tough. She’s got that sense of justice, of doing battle for the cause, for God. It’s what makes her get up in the morning, run this place like a Navy ship, never let anything get to her. But this is killing her.”

  “I know,” Honor said. “Of course.”

  “Not just meeting Seamus. I know she’s been moving toward that this whole time, and even now, I’m sure she’s trying to figure out a way to have a relationship with him. I think between her prayers and persistence, she’s working that out. But Tom’s another story.”

  “He always has been, when it comes to Bernie.”

  “Too much so,” John said. “It wasn’t honest, when you get right down to it.”

  “How can you say that?” Honor asked, leaning back, stepping slightly away.

  The studio was spacious and dark, except for the circle of light over John’s drafting table. Tall windows along the north wall reflected the lamplight, and outside the wind blew, making leaves rustle overhead.