by Ann Bauer
But all this turned out to be moot when we exited into the lobby of Mason & Zeus and found Madeline waiting for us, hair pulled up on her head much the way she’d worn it in bed (was this purposeful, I wondered?), a big bronze necklace like a shield around her neck.
“Joy is ‘on vacation,’” she said, making little hooks with her fingers in the air. “I found a message on my office phone—you know, the one I never answer?”
“She’s running scared,” said Isaac. “Have to admit, I’m relieved. One less thing to deal with today.”
“Don’t get used to it.” Madeline was all business this morning, which helped calm me. All that corporate attitude masked her appeal. “She only has two and a half days of PTO saved.”
The three of us walked back to the Mount Olympus conference room, the one where I’d had my photo shoot and where we’d sat before our Thai dinner just a week before. I remembered the warmth of that night and it came to me all at once that none of this would have happened if I weren’t lonely. Simple as that. The things that go on in mankind’s world—decisions that affect whole populations of people, accidents, bombings, scientific discoveries—often result from one person’s desires. To be loved, to be important, to escape.
“So what’s our plan?” Isaac asked as we sat around the table in exactly the configuration we’d been in that much simpler night.
“You tell me.” Madeline gave him a wide-eyed stare. “Why do you think I brought you all the way up from Texas, Million Dollar Man?”
“Okay, is there any reason to change our agenda for today? Any reason you can see that we shouldn’t just go ahead, prepare to open for business on Monday?”
“Gabe?” It was the first thing she had said to me since we walked in: my name.
I looked at her, and she wasn’t angry, only curious. In fact, there might have been a flicker of new interest in her eyes.
“Is there anything else we should know?” she prodded, the CEO talking. “Any more, um, history that could come out?”
I pictured the funeral. Not Laura Larimar’s but the one that I’d caused when I was a little older than Chase. The church had been dotted with cops in full uniform, not because of me but because our neighborhood was full of the guys who patrolled Newton and Wellesley but couldn’t afford to live there. After the service, one of them had put his meaty hand on the back of my neck and pulled me outside.
“Yes.” I said to Madeline, still feeling Officer Pilot’s palm, sweaty but sheltering. His touch transmitted knowledge; it confirmed what I’d done. Two decades later, my stomach still went liquid at the memory. “There are a few things you should know.”
“Hey, Father Gabe?” Candy poked her head through the door. “You’ve got a phone call. Should I just send it on in here?”
I looked around for a phone but didn’t see one. “Right there,” Isaac said, pointing to a black thing in the middle of the table that was shaped like a turtle with a speaker on its back.
I couldn’t think of a soul that would know I was here, other than the thousands of strangers who’d read about me in the paper. “Did you get a name?” I asked Candy.
She looked at a piece of paper in her hand. “Jemmalyn Smythe,” she said, pronouncing the last name with a drawn-out sound.
I shook my head. “I don’t know any …”
“Jem,” Madeline said softly. She got up, brushing something I couldn’t see from the front of her skirt. “C’mon,” she said to Isaac. “We can continue this later. Let’s give Gabe some privacy so he can talk.”
Isaac sat looking up at her, though, even standing, she only barely cleared his head. “But I want to know what Gabe was about to …”
“Really. I think we need to go.” She had moved to the door, face flushed. “Now.”
Isaac stood slowly and gave me the same look Officer Pilot had so many years before: a mixture of pity and accusation. “Fine. You’ve got another pre-launch discount session today at 11. The widow of one of our old maintenance guys. Do me a favor and forgive this one, whatever she’s done, okay?”
I paused, bracing myself for his response to the truth. “I can’t make any promises.”
Isaac sighed loudly and shambled after Madeline, who was using her entire body to prop open the heavy door. “Yeah, this job would be so much easier if I were still getting drunk.”
Once they were gone, I stared at the black turtle. Was I supposed to push a button? They were all marked with mysterious arrows and arcs. But as I was about to press the only red one, Jem’s voice popped out, raspier than I remembered, from the speaker box. “Gabe? It’s me. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine!” It felt comfortingly familiar, speaking aloud to a disembodied voice. “How are you?”
“Good. But … I read the newspaper article this morning, and I just thought …”
“Wait. The story got picked up in Cleveland?”
“Nooo.” She sounded wary. “I know this might be hard to believe, given my history. But I’m not stalking you!”
“Excuse me?”
She sighed, and I wondered how I was managing to exasperate everyone I talked to today. “So, I set a couple of Google alerts after I left Chicago. Just to keep up, you know, on this business idea of yours.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” I said, more defensively than I’d intended.
“I know.” Jem was unflappable. She took a breath, and when her voice came out of the box next it was the one I recalled from my apartment, talking to me through the dark. “That’s why I called. It seemed like you were just going along with all this. And now, all of a sudden, people are talking about you being a drug dealer.”
“But I was.” I leaned back in my chair, released by her stark language. That’s when I noticed the mural of Zeus, with his wild hair and thunderous beard, looking down on me from the ceiling. “I was a … drug dealer. When I was younger. It’s true.”
“Oh, Gabe, we were all something,” Jem said. “That’s not important now.”
“I sold cocaine to high school students,” I said, savoring every word. “And I loved it. Not just the money—when I was nineteen, I’d carry around a wad of hundred-dollar bills like it was pocket change—but the power. People needed me; they waited for me. It was great. It was so much more important than being a priest. So much more … straightforward.”
“So why did you stop?”
I thought back. The answer I wanted to give—the one I’d been telling myself for twenty-three years—wasn’t accurate. Alone in that conference room with only Jem’s voice, the truth bubbled out of me. “Because I got arrested.”
“So the system worked, right? You did something wrong, you got caught, you changed.”
“No!” The word echoed off the walls of the large empty room, and there was silence from the turtle. “I’m sorry,” I said to the table. “I didn’t mean to shout at you.”
“It’s okay.” She sounded very far away. “Listen, Gabe, I’m really worried about you. But I have a guy coming in. Stage Four lung cancer, I’m his last hope. Can we talk later? Will you call me?”
“Sure.” I breathed slowly and reminded myself this was not Jem’s fault. She had no way of knowing these were the questions I’d been avoiding for a lifetime. “Do I have your number?”
“I thought so. Didn’t we program it into your phone?”
“You’re right. My old phone. I switched …” I looked at the shiny new one Madeline had given me; the only people who used it were from the agency. Scott had called the night before, asking in a whisper if I wanted to split a quarter ounce.
“Oh. That’s why you haven’t returned my calls.” I could hear distraction in Jem’s voice; a dying patient was about to walk through her door.
“Go heal the sick,” I said gently.
She snorted. “I’m afraid there’s almost no chance with this one.”
“I have faith that whatever you do will improve this man’s life.”
“Maybe.” She was silent for a second. “Maybe
letting him die in peace would improve his life.”
I blinked at the turtle. Her responses were never quite what I expected. “Thank you for calling, Jem. It helped. I’ll talk to you very soon.”
There was a click, and her presence vanished from the room. “There is a luxury in self-reproach,” I told myself, speaking aloud but softly. “When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has the right to blame us.”
I bowed my head, tenting my hands so that the fingers pointed to my forehead in a purposeful priestly pose. I had been punishing myself and trying to avoid public blame for two decades, first out of fear and then—or so I told myself—from a twisted sense of duty to the Church. But now the floodgates were open and regret rushed into me with the force of a storm. Soberly, I told myself I deserved whatever came next.
• • •
Forty minutes passed before Isaac came to retrieve me. I noted this by using the phone from my pocket, which reflected my face in its dark surface. Sagging jowls, wild eyebrows. It was as if going back and talking about Aidan had broken some magic spell. I was aging like the junkie I’d been intended to be.
“Whoa,” said Isaac when he pushed through the door. “You all right, Father?”
Our time apart had had the opposite effect on Isaac, who appeared rested and unhurried. I imagined that he’d eaten some soy-rich power bar and gone for a run. This was the unwholesome man whom the Church shunned, while I was its ambassador? I chuckled quietly, with derision. A little madly, judging from Isaac’s eyes.
“What’s going on?” he asked, sitting in the chair next to me. “Gabe?” He turned and put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m getting a little worried. It looks like you’re coming unglued.”
“I’m not sure I was glued to begin with,” I said. “Maybe taped. Or just propped, you know. The way you do when you’re a child and you break something; you fit the pieces back together like its whole and just leave it for someone else to find.” I stopped. Isaac’s hand was still on the small of my back, rubbing small circles the way my mother once had. “You called me Gabe,” I said. What Isaac was doing was making me sleepy.
“Yeah, well, thinking of you as a priest will make it harder for me to kill you if you’re cheating on Madeline with this doctor. Christ, you get a lot of action.”
Despite everything, I grinned. “The appeal of the forbidden. Some guys go into seminary just for this purpose. Nerds and virgins? They put on clerical robes and women just go nuts.” I shifted, like a cat nuzzling. “That’s why the dropout rate is 50 percent. Around junior year, the students who just wanted to get laid finally leave.”
Isaac pulled away from me and leaned back in his chair. “But you didn’t leave.”
“I was looking for something else.”
“What?”
After all this time, all these meetings and conversations where the word was tossed around, I still couldn’t say it. I could not admit aloud that my entire career with the Church had been so self-serving and small. Penance. Atonement. The search for absolution.
“I killed someone.” I hadn’t meant to say these words, but they came out loud and confident, unlike anything else I’d said all day. Isaac’s sudden jolt was satisfying. I sat up strong in my chair.
“I don’t mean I shot him or even that I set out to hurt him. But I caused his death. Recklessly.” I took a deep ragged breath. It hurt. “Worse, perhaps. I caused him pain, terror—him and his family—for a long time before he died. Months. And I knew it was happening. Only I blamed him for it. He was weak, ignorant. This is what I told myself. The truth …” I knew saying this would damage both of us, Isaac and me. Things would never be the same. But I was hurtling toward something, and I couldn’t stop. “The truth is that he was weak and ignorant. Probably learning disabled. Maybe even mildly retarded. He had issues; he didn’t understand cause and effect. He was tortured as a kid: lonely, unpopular, friendless—except for me. And I … I?”
The picture in my head shifted to Aidan huddled in his windbreaker on a corner in Jamaica Plain. I’d pulled up to sort out the cash he’d collected. Aidan had struggled with math; he wouldn’t have known if I’d cheated him. Usually, I hadn’t. But sometimes I’d take all the money and pay him in hash. I’d even roll the joints, because he’d been too uncoordinated. Eventually, I’d bought him a small wooden pipe and had presented it like a gift.
A sharp knock on the door brought me out of my reverie. Isaac stood but didn’t move to open it. His cheeks were red and raw, as if he’d been struck.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Um, it’s me? Candace?”
Candace. Had I met a Candace? I concentrated. Then the answer popped into my head. Candy! It was like solving a particularly challenging crossword clue.
“There’s a woman here who says she’s Father Gabe’s eleven o’clock. Her name is Georgia Wright?”
“Shit!” Isaac’s whispered, checking his watch. “It’s 11:05 already. Should I tell her we have to reschedule?”
I looked at the door. Candy was still waiting on the other side; I could feel her crouching close. I let my head fall back and saw Zeus thrusting his scepter toward me.
I closed my eyes. “No, I’ll do it.” I stood, eyes still shut, and took two steps forward, reaching out to touch Isaac’s arm. He flinched but let my fingers stay connected. His body was so different from mine: tight sinew and hard muscle, strong as Zeus yet a mortal man’s.
“Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them,” I murmured.
“What the hell does that mean?” Isaac’s eyes were wild, and it occurred to me that he might think I was making a pass at him. There’s a reason people refer to making love as “transcendent,” calling out for God as they climax, the way I had done with Madeline. The line between spirituality and sex is very fine.
“It means I am leaving my sins in your safekeeping, and you will help bear them,” I said, removing my hand so there would be no confusion. “That’s what we do when we hear others’ confessions. We pick up their burdens.” I breathed and nodded at him in thanks. “You have taken mine.”
When I opened the door, I half-expected Candy to tumble into the room, ear turned conspicuously toward us, in the manner of an old screwball comedy. But instead, she was waiting to the side, scrolling through the messages in her phone.
“Oh, good, Father.” She was vague, no longer riveted by my presence. This was interesting. Had the effect worn off for Candy now that she knew about my past or had something changed when I confessed to Isaac, reducing my godly aura? I brushed closer to her and set my face in a perplexed expression. She smiled and took my arm, tucking it in next to her spectacular breasts. And I’ll admit I was relieved that I had not lost all of my charm.
“We’re going to Floor 8,” Candy said the way everyone here did, like it was a distant planet.
She chattered as we rode the elevator. It had been a busy morning. Madeline had to be reminded twice about the earnings report that was due. This woman, Georgia, was unusual. Hard to place, Candy told me; I’d see what she meant.
Ted was waiting outside my workspace with a tall woman in a long striped skirt who turned as we approached. I mean no disrespect when I say that Georgia Wright had a purely animal look, as if she had only recently transmogrified from being a leopard or some other large cat.
“Gabriel McKenna,” I said, extending my hand to meet hers in a strong, sure grip.
“Nice to meet you,” she said in a very low voice.
It is not my habit to categorize people by race. Yet I found myself searching Georgia Wright for clues because she looked unlike anyone I’d ever met. She was tall and quite old, her face deeply lined in shades of gold: skin, lips, and eyes. Her hair, in contrast, was pure white and pulled back in a braided style.
“I’ll be back in forty-five minutes, Ms. Wright.” Ted turned toward me with a questioning look. “Father?” he asked. How could you? his eyes were saying. You have lied to me about who you are. Why should
I trust you?
As Georgia Wright slid into the room with feline grace, I took Ted’s arm exactly the way I had Isaac’s moments before. “I’m praying for your brother, Ted. I understand his pain and I will carry it for him. He is my brother, too.”
Ted hesitated then nodded and bowed toward me, hugging me with stiff arms before walking briskly away.
When I entered the room where I heard people’s lives, Georgia Wright was settling silently into a chair. I sat across from her, breathing in the unexpected scent of ginger and nutmeg. Or perhaps it was cinnamon. Whatever it was, it seemed to be coming from her breath.
“You are young,” she said, flashing three gold teeth.
“Not really,” I said, hunching forward, hands clasped between my knees. “In contrast, maybe.”
She laughed wickedly. “Ooh, I do like you.”
I liked her too, everything about her, from her wrinkled amber eyes to her smell. Aidan remained in my mind, but the thought of him became almost bearable now that I was sitting here, in the presence of someone who felt so right in the world.
“I can’t imagine what you’re doing here,” I said. All my filters seemed to be gone. “You don’t seem like the kind of person who needs to confess.”
“We all need to confess,” she echoed. “Confess your sins one to another and pray one for another, so that ye may be healed.”
“James 5:16,” I said, and she nodded like a teacher. “That passage is about the cleansing effect and healing that comes from confessing to a righteous man.”
“That would be you,” said Georgia Wright, and she pressed her lips together in a considering expression.
“I’m not so sure of that,” I said. “Being righteous is a much higher bar than being a priest.”
“Well, of course it is.” She raised the spectacles she wore around her neck on a chain, placing them on her nose but only so she could look over them at me. “Being righteous is as high as a man can go. You don’t get that in any school.” She spat the last word.