Stripped Down

by Chelle Bliss

  Most of the day, I’d decided on the “swearing off him forever” option and screened my calls. The missed calls, I guessed, could be him. But as I finished brushing my hair, deciding I’d take Indra up on her offer of dinner and a movie, partially on Johnny’s dime, and I grabbed my cell, I noticed neither the calls nor text had been from Johnny. The 845 area code was Ellenville, and I immediately selected the message, spotting the camp number, and dialed it.

  Betta picked up on the second ring. “I’m okay, Mama. I promise,” she said, sounding a little stuffed up.

  “Do you have a cold?”

  “No.” She exhaled, and the sound put me on alert. That was no “exhausted kid” sigh. That was an emo, “in my feelings” sigh that my kid knew to use anytime she wanted to bend my ear.

  “What’s up, baby? Did something happen?”

  “It’s just…Connie…”

  “I’m starting to really not like this kid…”

  “Yeah, me too, Mama.” Betta cleared her throat, and I picked up the sound of a screen door shutting, as though she’d moved to a quieter location. “She’s a turd, I swear.”

  “Elizabetta, even if she is, that’s impolite.” She was quiet for a second too long, and I laughed. “Okay, why specifically is she a turd now?”

  “She told the entire camp I’m an orphan.”

  “Which is ridiculous. You have my eyes.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice rising in her excitement. “And I even showed them my locket with your picture and Granny’s and was all, ‘See, my eyes are just like my mama’s and her mama’s. And you all saw her bring me to camp, so you don’t know what you’re saying.’”

  “Good. That’s good, baby. I’m glad you stood up for yourself.”

  My chest tightened, and I had to force back the bubble of filthy words that wanted to fly out of my mouth. Lord, kids could be cruel, and the worst aspect of being a parent was that you couldn’t fight your children’s battles. You want to. You’re equipped. You could destroy those little cretins, but you have to let your kids fight for themselves. It was the worst sort of irony.

  “Yeah, well, it didn’t work all that well because Connie laughed in my face and told everybody I might have a mama, but even I didn’t know who my father was.”

  I closed my eyes, hating myself, hating Johnny, and really hating this stupid little Connie brat for being so vicious. “Oh, baby…”

  She didn’t speak, not for a long time, and I’d never felt more powerless as I did just then, listening to my nine-year-old daughter sniffle and cry on the phone, pretending she wasn’t heartbroken that I’d never told her anything remotely useful about the man who’d helped make her.

  “Mama,” she said finally, her voice cracking, each sound like a knife into my heart. “Do you think, one day soon, you can tell me…about…him? Not…everything, not if you can’t… If it’s too… Uncle Pat said…well. But maybe something…”

  “You have his smile,” I told my daughter, unable to keep the emotion out of my voice.

  “I…I do?”

  “Yeah, baby. And it’s beautiful.”

  The rectory had once been a barn. The building was a century old; the Church had purchased it years back, and priests like my uncle had lived under its roof for generations. But, if memory served, Uncle Pat had been here the longest.

  There were mementos of his life everywhere. In the bookshelves surrounding the small den and along the fireplace. There was no television, only a small radio and a stack of papers near the front entrance to keep him abreast to world events. Bibles and religious texts were placed around on the shelves and open on the coffee table, on the small desk in his private office and atop the dining room table. But among them was evidence of his personal life too. His family—a framed picture of Betta and Uncle Pat at her first communion with her wearing the same dress I’d worn at mine. He’d confirmed us both. All three of us at the Vatican when Betta was six, getting a blessing from the Pope, something Uncle Pat had been adamant about. And above the mantel in the den, there was a large portrait of my beautiful mother, Uncle Pat’s sister, on her eighteenth birthday. Hints of our lives were everywhere, connected to the world in which he was a man of God, someone who was supposed to be pious and forgiving.

  I prayed he’d remember that when I delivered my news tonight.

  “You want wine?” he asked, setting down the book he’d been reading when I walked through the door. He still had an attitude, and I suspected he hadn’t quite forgiven me for leaving him with Indra to sort out the mess Johnny and Liam Shane had made at my center.

  “If you have an open bottle. If not, don’t bother.”

  He ignored me. I watched him, his body hunched more now than it had been even a year ago. My uncle was edging closer to seventy-five, and time and his responsibilities had accelerated his aging.

  “I can do that,” I offered, walking toward the kitchen, but Uncle Pat made a noise, dismissing me, and handed over my glass before I crossed the threshold.

  “Sit,” he said, motioning with his chin to the couch. He moved to his armchair, shifting against the thick cushion as he rested both elbows on the armrests and held his glass in his hands. “Now…” He took a sip, closing his eyes as though he wanted to enjoy the flavor of the drink as it hit his tongue. “Tell me.”

  “Elizabetta called me this afternoon.” Uncle Pat kept still, his eyes narrowing as he waited for me to continue. “She was upset because the kids at camp were teasing her…”

  “Kids can be cruel.”

  “They were teasing her because she has no father.”

  He didn’t move but watched me closely, his features frozen as if something had taken over his body and immobilized him. “And?” he finally said, setting down his glass on the side table at his left. “What did you tell her?”

  My uncle could be intimidating. He was strong. He was intelligent, and he had a vicious temper when angered. He was never cruel, not to me, but if you crossed him, disobeyed him, or worse yet, disappointed him, that temper would surface, and forgiveness wouldn’t come easily.

  As a child, that temper petrified me. I only wanted to please him, make him proud. I wanted to be the best, do the best because I craved his approval. That had left me making promises I didn’t mean, swearing myself to a destiny not meant for me. That was probably why I’d clung to Johnny so tightly. Not only because I loved him, but because he showed me a freedom I never thought could be mine.

  I wasn’t a child anymore. It was time my uncle understood that.

  “I told my daughter the truth.” Uncle Pat sat up straighter, clutching the end of the armrests, but I didn’t let him intimidate me or interrupt my explanation. “Not everything, but some of it.” Then I matched my uncle’s posture, fixing my shoulders straight, lifting my chin to watch his eyes when I finished what I had to say. “Johnny Carelli is not a perfect man, but no one is. I have loved him since I was a girl, and I have never stopped loving him.” My uncle stood, jaw clenched, top lip shaking. Still, I continued. “We made a beautiful, perfect baby together, and she deserves to know the reason she’s never known who she is. They both may hate me for it, but I intend to tell them everything.”

  He clenched his fists into balls, squeezing them so tightly his knuckles went white. I stood, hoping he would calm, hoping he would try to see reason. He was supposed to know forgiveness and mercy. He was supposed to show compassion, but he’d never had any of those things for Johnny.

  “Uncle…”

  “When?” he said, the word coming out from behind his gritted teeth. I tilted my head, not understanding what he meant, and Uncle Pat flared his nostrils, holding his head in one hand before he clarified. “When will you tell that…that…boy about Elizabetta?”

  “Tonight, maybe? Or…tomorrow? I want to tell him first, before she gets back from camp next week.”

  He closed his eyes, his face flushing red.

  “Uncle Pat…”

  But he ignored me, lifting a hand
to silence me as he stumbled away from me and toward the fireplace, resting against the mantel. He moved his attention to the portrait of my mother, muttering to himself, his pale skin redder and redder the heavier he leaned against the mantel.

  “Uncle Pat?” I tried again, my heart racing when he continued to wave me away, refusing to look at me, then he fell, his small, weak frame crumpling as he landed on all fours. “Oh God! Oh my God!” I ran to his side, feeling his skin, my breath catching when I noticed how hot he was to the touch.

  “Samantha…” he whispered, falling onto his back. He reached for me, touching my face with his scorching palm, his bright eyes fluttering before they closed and he lost consciousness.

  15

  Sammy

  There is nothing more silent than a waiting house. It comes from death and from homecomings when babies and soldiers return. It comes from reunions that are long overdue, but always, there is the quiet until the moment of arrival.

  Tonight, there was only me and this old home, haunted by the ghosts of a hundred priests. We were all waiting for my uncle to heal, to recover.

  “It was a massive heart attack, Ms. Nicola. We’ve made him comfortable, but we won’t know the extent of the damage until he wakes up.” The doctor had been kind and thorough, but his tone wasn’t hopeful. Until he wakes up felt a lot like if he wakes up.

  “What can I do?” I’d asked, desperate for some occupation that kept me from pacing the ICU hallway, wondering how many hours I had left until I could sit next to my uncle’s bed to watch him breathing, lying there, looking lifeless and old. “Please,” I’d asked, not caring how pathetic I sounded. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Rest,” the doctor suggested, and when that didn’t elicit more than a frown from me, the man lowered his shoulders and touched my arm. “Go to his home. Find a book you know he’ll enjoy, and bring it back here. Maybe reading to him will help you both.”

  I knew busywork when I saw it, but at least there was something to do now that didn’t end with me aimlessly counting the watermarks on the hospital’s tile ceiling.

  There was a nonfiction book about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on the coffee table. I glanced at the cover, frowning at the writer’s name across the center, then went into my uncle’s office, figuring he still kept his collection of John Donne poetry and sermons in the same place.

  “Comfort and conscience,” he’d told me as a child, showing me the worn book, the edges rubbed down and pages dog-eared after years of use. “That is the message Donne delivers.”

  The desk was small, modest, and very old. It had been handed down to him from an old bishop he’d studied under at monastery, and he’d brought it with him to every parish he’d served. It was solid and thick, with a bank of drawers on both sides and a small thin drawer in the center. I sat behind it, immediately opening the right-side center drawer, where I knew he kept his favorite Donne collection. The swivel chair squeaked as I turned, flicking on the desk lamp when I didn’t spot the book in the drawer. There were small journals and boxes of pens, a few bundles of stamps, and two stacks of index cards, but the Donne wasn’t in the drawer.

  The bottom drawer was locked when I tried it, and the others gave me nothing but more of my uncle’s journals, a few random envelopes of pictures from his tenure at Trinity College, and several bookmarks from book readings I knew he’d attended, but still, no sign of the Donne.

  Then, just as I decided to give up and I reached across the desk to turn off the lamp, I spotted a sliver of gold peeking out from underneath and moved it aside. The lamp had a heavy base with two small openings on either side, and beneath the opening closest to me, taped to the base, was a small key. I grabbed it, my heart beating double time, wondering what secrets my uncle had kept that seemed important enough to hide.

  A thousand scenarios raced through my mind, none of them good. There had been surprises coming from gossiping mouths in every church—people you knew for years, doing despicable things, so you never quite knew who to trust. But my uncle had never given anyone any reason to gossip about him. He’d always been transparent. He’d always been open with his parishioners and bishops. There simply wasn’t anything to hide.

  So why was that drawer locked tight?

  I slipped the key into the lock, turning it with one twist, and I held my breath before I opened it, my heart somewhere near my throat by now, my breathing coming in wild, uneven pants.

  At first, there seemed to be only the brown leather book with gold lettering. It was familiar, like the one I’d seen my uncle hold for years as he read through each poem and sermon penned by the English poet. There was nothing suspicious about the book, nothing that would warrant being locked inside this drawer. So I grabbed it, not bothering to look at it, more focused on what else was hidden—a manila envelope with a typed name and date, NICOLA, AVA R. 10/01/1991.

  My mother’s name and my birthdate? He’d never let me see my birth certificate. Said it had been lost years ago. I’d always suspected he worried I’d ask about my father and he never wanted me to know.

  Funny how history repeated itself.

  Not funny at all how I allowed my uncle to convince me to do the same thing to Betta.

  The certificate itself held no surprises other than to note that my mother had been thirty-five when she’d had me. I’d always assumed she’d been younger. Uncle Pat had told me very little about their family. I’d never met cousins or grandparents; all, he’d said, had abandoned my mother for having a baby with no husband to speak of and him, for supporting her. No father was listed, but the time and place of birth were odd. My uncle promised our people had all been born and reared in New York. Generations, he said, of Italian Nicolas went back decades in the city.

  So why was my mother’s birthplace listed as New Orleans?

  The only other things in the folder were two pictures. One was of my mother and me in the delivery room. It was a typical early-nineties image, the pigmentation was bright, the scrubs colorful, but the smile on my mother’s face was wide, and her green eyes shone like wet glass as she smiled at the camera. She was beautiful, and a lump caught in my throat as I touched her face. I stared at that picture a long time, willing all that light and ink to come to life, just for a second, so I could know all her secrets, to find out everything I could about her.

  After a while, with my eyes blurring, I put the picture away, picking up the second photo, confused when I spotted another delivery room image, this one of my mother and me again, but joined now by my uncle, decked out in blue scrubs. It struck me as weird somehow that my modest uncle, who’d had to ask Sister Dominique to discuss tampons and menstrual cycles with me when I was eleven, would be a man comfortable enough to be in the delivery room when his sister gave birth.

  The picture was striking and…oddly intimate. The way he leaned close to her, his arms around her shoulders, him cradling both of us, looking fierce, like only he could protect us. A mix of consuming thoughts worked inside me—confusion, curiosity, and a real sense of wonder that there was something I was missing. Something significant enough that my uncle thought it should be locked away in his desk.

  The Donne book felt heavier when I picked it up, though it had been years since I’d held it. It was the same book I’d seen my uncle read a dozen or more times; it had the same binding, the same red-tinted edges on the pages from the time I’d spilled Kool-Aid over it at nine and didn’t clean it properly.

  Inside, though, a new world opened to me that had nothing to do with Donne or the sweet words he’d penned about love and sin or the sermons promising repentance for his misdeeds.

  The first letter was old. There was no address, no stamp at all, and the envelope was folded, the looping handwriting across the front carrying what looked like the carefully constructed letters that made up my uncle’s name. No “Father,” no “brother.” The envelope and the letter inside simply stated “Patrick.”

  She loved him.

  He loved her.
/>   One letter became two, then five, then ten, and as I sat there for hours, reading these impossible, unbelievable words, the story of my parents’ life unfolded.

  She’d been a parishioner in his church. A shy, timid woman with a strict father eager for her to marry. When she’d worked up the courage to refuse, he’d sent her to the new priest, hoping someone closer to her age could make her see reason, could convince her of the importance of obedience.

  It had backfired.

  I think of you, my mother wrote in the first letter, and my heart broke for her. My hands shook as I imagined what it had been like for her, remembering what it felt like to love someone so much…but be made to keep it deep inside yourself. I think of you always, with every waking breath and every blissful dream. I pray that God takes this love I feel for you from me. I pray not to want you. I pray that I will hate you. I pray for freedom from all the thoughts I have of you. It’s the same prayer I’ve said for two years now. Will He ever answer me? Will He ever let me be free of you?

  Patrick’s letters were stronger, but his patience didn’t falter. He started them with Donne.

  I am two fools, I know,

  For loving, and for saying so.

  He let the poet say more in two lines than he could in one.

  My sweet Ava, God has my promise, but you own my soul.

  I read the last letter, dated just eight months before I was born. They had a plan, put into action before any of my mother’s family knew she was pregnant. In the end, she would not let him leave the Church. She would not let him sacrifice his calling for her.

  Who am I to ask you to choose between your devotion to God and your love for me? Instead, I only ask that you stand by me, that you give what you can to me and our child, whatever that may be. God would not be so cruel as to damn a perfect soul made from the love He has borne between us.

  Patrick had done exactly what she wanted. He had never married her, but she had his name. So did I. Had he lied to his bishop? Had someone forged documents for them? They left New Orleans when he was transferred, which, from the last letter I read, came in time that no one would know of my mother’s condition. They’d hidden from her family and moved to New York, posing as brother and sister. My entire life, I’d been told that my mother had married a man on a whim, some local she’d met while on vacation in Rome. But he left her after a month, and she returned home to New York, already pregnant, with no idea where her husband had gone.