Nolan Trilogy

by Selena Kitt

  “Look,” she murmured, leaning back just a little, showing him, giving him a clear view of himself buried inside of her pink cavern, the swollen lips of her labia hugging his length.

  “Oh, Erica!” he cried, the sight of them together like that clearly too much—she’d done him in, and she knew it, rolling her hips in circles to finish him off, feeling him writhe and shudder and thrust as she milked every last bit of his orgasm with the tight, contracting muscles of her sex.

  Erica collapsed on top of him, smiling at the way he touched her, even now after it was all over, he kept his hands moving, stroking her shoulders, her back, her sides, making her shiver with delight.

  “Do you smell something burning?” she asked, sniffing the air.

  “You’re just catching a whiff of how hot you are,” Clay joked, eyes still closed.

  “I’m serious. I smell...” Her eyes flew open. “The coffee!”

  She bolted to the kitchen, yanking the percolator off the stove and tossing it into the sink, turning on the water. It hit the hot pot with a hiss and steam rose from the sink as she turned off the burner. Clay came wandering in wearing just his boxers, standing there, staring at her naked in front of the stove.

  “I promised I wouldn’t burn the place down.” Erica glared at the percolator like it was all its fault as she turned off the water in the sink.

  “Well, disaster averted.” He came over and looked into the sink, picking up the percolator and opening the lid, peering inside. “Black as sin in there. I think you’re going to need another pot.”

  Erica peeked into it and frowned. “Great.”

  She took his hand and he left the burnt coffee pot on the counter, following her through the living room. “Oh, hey!” She perked up, pointing to the rows of boxes—wedding presents—stacked against the wall that had been arriving over the past few days. The delivery boy from Hudson’s was making out like a bandit in tips. “I bet there’s another percolator in there somewhere. Whew. I’ll go through them later and find it. No one will ever know.”

  They went back to her room and Erica pulled on a t-shirt, much to Clay’s disappointment, which he vehemently expressed, but she complained of cold, so he relented.

  “Well, we might be low on coffee but...” Clay held up the paper bag. “We have donuts!”

  Erica snatched it, opening the bag and fishing out a powdered one, taking a big bite and tossing him the bag.

  “I kind of like you all messy with white stuff all over your face,” he remarked, watching her lick her fingers.

  They each ate two donuts and then crawled into bed, bellies full, utterly satisfied. They talked about school, which started back up tomorrow for the both of them. They talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up, which involved writing for both of them, but Erica wanted to go into broadcast media, while Clay wanted to be a “newspaper man”—whatever that was. They talked and talked, and Erica was sure they slept, at least a little while.

  When she opened her eyes, the light in the room had changed, the shadows different, and Clay was wedged between her legs, hugging her thigh, his cheek resting there.

  “Can I ask what you’re doing?”

  “Just admiring the view.” He smiled. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

  She ran a hand through his hair. “Anything.”

  “This scar.” He ran a finger across her lower belly. “What really happened?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  He raised his eyebrows, just looking at her, staring her down.

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Once upon a time there was a couple who couldn’t have children...”

  She started it like a fairy tale, and that’s how she told it. There was an evil priest villain and an evil witch social worker, and twin sister heroines, and in the end, Erica found herself telling him everything, absolutely everything from the beginning, her own beginning as a twin in the womb with Leah to Father Michael’s revelations about his parentage and Father Patrick’s sick and twisted crimes.

  He didn’t interrupt her. He didn’t ask questions.

  He just listened until she ran out of words.

  “Say something,” Erica whispered finally, unable to stand the silence one minute more.

  Clay lifted his face and she saw the tears on his cheeks. “I love you, Erica. You’re the most beautiful, special, precious human being I’ve ever met. I don’t care if you don’t love me and I don’t care if we never see each other again, I’ll remember you for as long as I live.”

  Erica blinked back her own tears, swallowing around the lump in her throat. She had told the story in such a way that she could remove herself from it completely, but he brought her back in an instant and her mouth quivered when she told him, “I love you too, Clay.”

  “Can I ask you one more thing?” Clay asked. Erica nodded. “Did that really happen? Was that fairy tale true?”

  “Yes, it happened. And yes, it’s true.”

  “Your father really has a hidden darkroom under his loft?”

  Erica stood, pulling on her underwear and a pair of her dungarees. Clay got dressed too, taking his cue from her. She pulled on a t-shirts and went into the jewelry box on her dresser, retrieving a key.

  “Come on.”

  He followed her down the hall, around the corner, through the living room and under Mr. Nolan’s loft bed. Erica pulled aside the tapestry to reveal a bolted door and a padlock.

  “My dad changed the padlock when he found out I’d been in the room.” She held up the key and fit it into the padlock, turning it and unlocking it. “I just borrowed his keys—told him I needed to use the car—and I took the key off his ring and got another key made. Then I put his back.”

  “Remind me never to try to pull the wool over your eyes.” Clay’s jaw dropped when she turned on the overhead fluorescents in the darkroom, staring at the pictures of nude women strung up on the line with clothespins.

  “This is nothing.” Erica opened the second door, remembering now where she’d seen a latch like that—in the inner sanctum, under the crosses, the access to the hole where Father Patrick had kept his daughter. She wondered if the same person had built them both. Erica took him through and turned on the light, showing Clay the reels of film stacked in the cabinet.

  “There are others at the church like this,” she told him. “Behind the room I told you about with all the adoption records—the records of removal. I saw the cases, although they were all locked. But they were just like these.”

  Clay held the film of one reel up to the light, giving out a low whistle at what he found there. “This is hardcore stuff. And you think the church is selling it to make a profit? Damn I hate being right so often about corruption and hypocrisy in the church.”

  “I think my father’s making it and they’re selling it.” Erica nodded. “It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

  “And Father Michael wants you to give him all of this because…?”

  “He’s going to confront Father Patrick,” Erica told him. “The reels from the Mary Magdalene rituals he wants so he can go to the Bishop with evidence. The others?” Erica shrugged. “Maybe just a little more incentive, to get Father Patrick to turn himself in.”

  “To the police? If your father was ever found out… Erica, it would be over for him. He’d go to jail.”

  “No,” she disagreed. “We thought of that. Once all of this is gone from here, there’s no way to prove it was my father. It would be his word against Father Patrick’s. And once word of the rituals gets out, once people know Father Patrick fathered a daughter by his own sister and that she gave birth to a baby with a birth defect—a child who was raised in secret until he took a fancy to her too and decided to keep her like his pet sex slave in a hole in the basement under the church… and then got her pregnant. Twice...”

  “Jeez when you put it like that.” Clay cringed. “So who was Father Patrick’s sister? You didn’t say. Where is she now?”


  “Father Michael told me she’s a nun at Magdalene House. Sister Benedict.”

  “Does she know he’s still doing it? All the Mary Magdalene ritual stuff, I mean?”

  Erica nodded. “She sends the Magdalene girls to him. She sends them to the rituals on a bus.”

  “You know this is crazy.” Clay sat on the bed. “Like, really, super crazy.”

  “I know.” She smiled thinly. “I told you we were a couple of bananas short of a bunch. I’d understand if you wanted to go. No hard feelings. Really.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Clay scoffed, standing and grabbing the box next to him on the bed. “Let’s get the car loaded up and drive this stuff over to Father Michael.”

  Erica heard the phone ring and swore. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

  “Will do,” Clay replied, sifting through the photographs he found on the bed. “I’m not going anywhere. Just gonna look through these nice pictures of… yowza!”

  Erica laughed, going back through the darkroom, coming out under the loft and running to grab the phone before it stopped ringing.

  “Hello?” she gasped.

  “Hello, Erica, it’s Donald Highbrow calling.”

  She nodded, still panting. “Hi there, Mr. Highbrow.”

  “I was wondering if you might know how to track down one of the girls from Magdalene House. You did such a good job of finding Leah’s roommates...”

  “Sure,” Erica said, grabbing a pen. “Give me the info.”

  She wrote it down, slipping the paper into her pocket and reminding herself to ask Father Michael about it. Given the extensive nature of Gertie’s card catalog, it was pretty likely they would be able to find the girl Donald Highbrow was looking for without too much of a problem.

  Erica stopped short at the door under the loft, realizing that in all of her candor, there was one thing she had missed telling Clay. She hadn’t revealed his mother, Gertrude Louise Webber née Phillips, had participated in the Mary Magdalene rituals as a “Mary,” that Clay’s mother could never have given birth to him, because she was sterile. Clay, like Erica, had been adopted.

  She considered telling him, but she remembered what her mother had said, up in the loft on the morning of Leah’s wedding when she had asked if Susan had ever told Rob about her feelings for Father Patrick, and her mother had said, “There are some secrets a woman keeps for a lifetime.”

  Erica knew this one was one of those.

  She crept back in through the darkroom, sure she would find Clay looking through dirty pictures or even watching one of the blue movies, but instead he was sitting in the same spot on the bed, holding an old, faded and yellow article in his hands.

  “What’s that?” she asked, looking over his shoulder and gasping when she saw the image of her father—Robert Nolan—wearing a Nazi uniform and doing the Hitler salute. “Oh my God, where did you find that? What is it?”

  “It’s in German.” Clay surrendered the article when she put her hand out for it. “Do you read German?”

  “No.” Erica held it up to the light. “What does this mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Clay shrugged. “But if Nazis are involved, it can’t be anything good.”

  “I’ll just keep it.” Erica folded up the clipping, putting it into her pocket with the information she was supposed to find out for Donald Highbrow.

  “Are you going to ask him about it?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Well while you’re chatting, you might want to ask him about these,” Clay said, holding up a stack of pictures.

  Erica took them, flipping through, her mind doubling back on itself as she looked at the pictures of her mother—mothers, plural, her real mother, Patty, and her adopted mother, Susan, in various sexual positions together in the photographs.

  “I’m guessing from the look on your face that you didn’t know about those?”

  Erica tossed them into the box, shaking her head. She was so tired of the lies, the pretending and hiding and keeping up appearances. But she was keeping secrets too, not telling Clay about his mother, about the fact he was adopted, so how could she possibly judge?

  Clay stood, putting his arms around her, pulling her close. He didn’t say anything, he just held her, and when Erica lifted her head to look into his eyes, she realized the words she’d repeated to him were true. She did love him. She had come to love him very much in a short amount of time. She knew it sounded impossible, but it had happened and it was true. Just like everything she had told him today, the post-coital horror story hidden in a fairy tale, had also happened and was also true.

  There were some secrets you kept for a lifetime, and some stories you wished had never happened, and some people you never, ever wanted to leave, and some people you wished you’d never, ever met. But in the end, Erica realized, thinking about her mother, her first mother—the one who had been the daughter of a monster, who grew into a sort of monster herself, because that was the story she had been told was true about her—in the end, you lost everyone you loved, and all the secrets you kept and all the stories you believed died too.

  The only thing you could hold onto in the world, the only thing that made any sense, was the feeling she had when Clay put his arms around her and told her he loved her. That was worth having, worth holding, worth its precious weight in gold. The rest of it was just a fairy tale, a made-up story with characters who walked around and talked and did all the things the storyteller told them to until people forgot about them and then they too, were nothing more than dust.

  Nothing stayed, nothing ever changed. But love, only love, that was the true part of the story, no matter what the beginning, middle or end.

  Things had returned to some semblance of normal when it happened. Erica and Leah had gone to Hudson’s the Saturday after they’d returned from their honeymoon to take back some of the duplicate items Leah and Rob had received as wedding gifts. They were meeting Leah’s mother for lunch on the thirteenth floor and Erica was looking forward to her Maurice salad, but it never even made it to the table.

  They had just sat down when Leah excused herself to use the bathroom. Erica didn’t think anything of it. Their mother—still so strange to think of her that way, but she was slowly growing used to it—was showing them a new hat she’d purchased and Erica sipped her water and listened, watching Leah disappear around the corner.

  Her sister had come home happy and tanned from the Caribbean, talking about blue water and white sand. Her father couldn’t wait to get to his darkroom to develop the photographs he’d taken, and Leah and Erica had curled up on the couch together and played catch up.

  Of course, Erica didn’t tell her everything she’d done while they were gone. Her father would find out, soon enough, she gathered, when he went into his darkroom. She didn’t know how often he used that hidden darkroom, to be honest. He had another darkroom. There was a red light over the door that meant keep “out.” That was the darkroom he went to when they’d returned from their honeymoon, coming out with photographs so beautiful they took Erica’s breath away.

  “So I hear they’re talking about New York,” Patty said, sipping her tea.

  “That’s what Leah said.” Erica raised her eyebrows. She didn’t know Leah had told their mother already that they were making plans, looking for a new house.

  “Well, that’ll be good if you go to Wellesley or Brown.”

  Erica shrugged, tracing her finger over the round, wet ring left by her water glass on the tablecloth. She didn’t want to advertise it too much, but she was really hoping to get into USC. Going to Berkley with Clay was the most exciting thing she could imagine. They’d spent all week talking about it, planning for it. Things were moving fast, so fast, but for Erica, they couldn’t be fast enough. She’d spent the whole week with him, playing house, and she discovered there was nothing in the world she wanted more than to play house with him for real.

  She’d fallen in love with him so fast
it scared her, but in spite of it, she wasn’t going to shy away from the fact. She loved him, and more than anything, she wanted what Leah had with Rob, what she saw in their eyes when they danced their first wedding dance—only with a smattering less sappy and a dash more sarcasm. That was Clay, and that was what she wanted.

  They both heard the raised voices at the same time, their eyes meeting in surprise. Someone was having quite a heated argument at the front of the restaurant. That’s when Erica clearly heard Leah’s voice, pitched at a near scream, loud enough for every head around them to turn in that direction.

  “Where is she?” Leah screamed, and that’s all Erica needed to hear. She bolted from the table, Patty close on her heels. “I want my baby back! Where is my baby? Where is she?”