Priest (4 page)

“Shit,” I said, yanking the earbuds out of my ears. “I’m so sorry! Are you okay?”

She nodded, tilting her head up and giving me a small smile that gave me chills; it was so perfectly imperfect with her two front teeth peeking behind her lips and a sheen of sweat covering her face. At the same time, we both realized how we were standing, with my arms wrapped around her and her only in a sports bra and me without a shirt. I dropped my arms, immediately missing the way she felt there. Missed the way her tits pushed against my naked chest.

In the future: only sideways hugs
, I told myself. I was already seeing another cold shower in my future.

She put her hand on my chest, casually, innocently, still giving me that small smile. “I would have fallen if it wasn’t for you.”

“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have been at risk of falling at all.”

“And yet I still wouldn’t change a thing.” Her touch, her words, that smile—was she
flirting
? But then her smile widened, and I saw that she was just teasing, in that safe, playful way that girls do with their gay friends. She saw me as safe, and why shouldn’t she? I was a man of the cloth, after all, bound by God to be a caregiver of his flock. Of course, she would assume that she could tease me, touch me, without bothering my priestly composure. How could she know what her words and voice did to me? How could she know that her hand was currently searing its outline onto my chest?

Her hazel eyes flickered up to mine, green and brown pools of curiosity and intelligent energy, green and brown pools that reflected grief and confusion if you cared to look long enough. I recognized it because I had worn such a look for years after Lizzy’s death, except in Poppy’s case, I suspected that the person she was grieving—the person she’d lost—was herself.

Let me help this woman
, I prayed silently.
Let me help her find her way.

“I’m glad I saw you,” I said, straightening up as her hand fell away from my skin. “You said earlier this week that you wanted to meet?”

She nodded enthusiastically. “I did. I mean, I do.”

“How about my office in, say, half an hour?”

She gave me a mock salute. “See you there, Father.”

I tried not to watch her run away, I really did, but I promise I only looked for a second, an infinitely long second, a second long enough to catalog the gleam of sweat and sunscreen on her toned shoulders, the taunting movements of her ass.

Definitely a cold shower then.

Half an hour later, I was back in my uniform: black slacks, Armani belt (a hand-me-down from one of the Business Brothers), long-sleeved black shirt with the cuffs rolled up to the elbows. And my collar, of course. St. Augustine gazed austerely out over the office, reminding me that I was here to help Poppy, not to daydream about sports bras and running shorts. And I wanted to be here to help her. I remembered her soft crying in the confessional and my chest tightened.

I would help her if it killed me.

Poppy was one minute early, and the easy but precise way she walked through the door told me that she was accustomed to being prompt, took pleasure in it, was the kind of person who could never understand why other people weren’t on time. Whereas three years of waking up at seven o’clock had still not transformed me into a morning person and more often than not, Mass started at 8:10 rather than 8:00.

“Hi,” she said as I indicated a chair next to me. I’d chosen the two upholstered chairs in the corner of the office, hating to talk to people from behind my desk like I was a middle school principal. And with Poppy, I wanted to be able to soothe her, touch her if I needed, show her a more personal church experience than the Ancient Booth of Death.

She sank into the chair in this elegant, graceful way that was fucking mesmerizing…like watching a ballerina lace up her slippers or a geisha pour tea. She had on that igniting shade of lipstick again, bright red, and was in a pair of high-waisted shorts and a blouse that tied at the neck, looking more ready for a Saturday yachting trip than a meeting in my dingy office. But her hair was still wet and her cheeks still had that post-run flush, and I felt a small swell of possessive pride that I got to see this polished women slightly unraveled, which was a bad impulse. I pushed it down.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” she said, crossing her legs as she set down her purse. Which was not a purse but a sleek laptop bag, filled with strata of brightly colored folders. “I’ve been thinking a lot about seeking something like this out, but I’ve never been religious before, and part of me still kind of balks at the idea…”

“Don’t think of it as being religious,” I advised. “I’m not here to convert you. Why don’t we just talk? And maybe there will be some activities or groups here that match what you need.”

“And if there’s not? Will you refer me to the Methodists?”

“I would never,” I said with mock gravity. “I always refer to the Lutherans first.”

That earned me another smile.

“So how did you end up in Kansas City?”

She hesitated. “It’s a long story.”

I leaned back in the chair, making a show of settling in. “I’ve got the time.”

“It’s boring,” she warned.

“My day is a praxis of liturgical laws that date from the Middle Ages. I can handle boring. Promise.”

“Okay, well, I’m not sure where to start, so I guess I should start at the beginning?” Her gaze slid over to the wall of books as she worried her lower lip with her teeth, as if she were trying to decide what the beginning really was. “I’m not your typical runaway,” she said after a minute. “I didn’t sneak out of a window when I was sixteen or steal my father’s car and drive to the nearest ocean. I was dutiful and obedient and my father’s favorite child right up until I walked across the stage at Dartmouth and officially received my MBA. I looked at my parents, and I finally really realized what they saw when they looked at me—another asset, another folder in the portfolio.

“
There she is, our youngest
, I could picture them saying to the family next to them.
Graduated magna cum laude, you know, and only the best schools growing up. Spent the last three summers volunteering in Haiti. She was a shoo-in for dance at Juilliard, but of course she chose to pursue business instead, our level-headed girl.
”

“You volunteered in Haiti?” I interrupted.

She nodded. “At a charity called Maison de Naissance. It’s a place for rural Haitian mothers to get free prenatal care, as well as a place for them to give birth. It’s the only place besides the summer house in Marseille that my boarding school French has come in remotely useful.”

Dartmouth. Marseille. Boarding school. I had sensed that Poppy was polished, had guessed from her mention of Newport that she had known privilege and wealth at some point in her life, but I could see now exactly how much privilege, how much wealth. I studied her face. There was a thriving confidence there, an old-fashioned bent toward etiquette and politeness, but there was also no pretentiousness, no elitism.

“Did you like working there?”

Her face lit up. “I did! It’s a beautiful place, filled with beautiful people. I got to help deliver seven babies my last summer there. Two of them were twins…they were so tiny, and the midwife told me later that if the mom hadn’t come to MN, she and the babies almost certainly would have died. The mother even let me help her pick out names for her sons.” Her expression turned almost shy, and I realized that this was the first time she’d gotten to share this pure form of joy with anyone. “I miss it there.”

I grinned at her. I couldn’t help it, I just rarely saw anyone so excited by the experience of helping people in need.

“My family’s idea of charity is hosting a political fundraiser,” she said, matching my grin with a wry one of her own. “Or donating enough to a pet cause so that they can take a picture with a giant check. And then they’ll step over homeless people in the city. It’s embarrassing.”

“It’s common.”

She shook her head vehemently. “It shouldn’t be. I, at least, refuse to live like that.”

Good for her. I refused as well, but I also had grown up in a household of religion, of volunteering. It had been easy for me; I didn’t think this conviction had come easily to her. I wanted to stop her right then, hear more about her time in Haiti, introduce her to all the ways she could help people here at St. Margaret’s. We
needed
people like her, people who cared, people who could volunteer and give their time and talents—not just their treasure. In fact, I almost blurted all this out. I almost fell to my knees and begged her to help us with the food pantry or the pancake breakfast that was so chronically short-staffed, because we needed her help, and (if I was being honest) I wanted her at everything, I wanted to see her everywhere.

But maybe that wasn’t the best way to feel. I steered us back to her earlier and safer topic of conversation. “So you were at your graduation…”

“Graduation. Right. And I realized, looking at my parents, that I was everything they had wanted. That they had groomed me for. I was the whole package, the manicured, sleekly highlighted, expensively dressed package.”

She was all those things. She was indeed the perfect package on the surface…but below it, I sensed she was so much more. Messy and passionate and raw and creative—a cyclone forced into an eggshell. Small wonder the shell had broken.

“I adorned the life that already had too many cars, too many rooms, too many luncheons and fundraiser galas. A life already filled with two other children who’d also graduated from Dartmouth and then proceeded to marry fellow rich people and have little rich babies. I was destined to work someplace with a glassed-in lobby and drive a Mercedes S-Class, at least until I got married, and then I would gradually scale back my work and scale up my involvement with charity, until, of course, I had the little rich babies to round out the family portraits.” She looked down at her hands. “This probably sounds ridiculous. Like a modern Edith Wharton novel or something.”

“It doesn’t sound ridiculous at all,” I assured her. “I know exactly the kind of people you’re talking about.” And I really did—I wasn’t just saying that. I’d grown up in a fairly nice neighborhood and—on a much smaller scale—the same attitudes had been at work. The families with their nice houses and their two point five children who were on the honor roll and also played varsity lacrosse, the families that made sure everyone else knew exactly how successful and delightfully American their healthy Midwestern offspring were.

“I rejected that entire reality,” she confessed. “The Wharton life. I didn’t want to do it. I
couldn’t
do it.”

Of course, she couldn’t.
She was so far above that life. Could she see that about herself? Could she sense it, even if she couldn’t see it? Because I barely knew her, and even I knew that she was the kind of woman who couldn’t live without meaning, powerful and real meaning, in her life. And she wouldn’t have found it on the other side of that Dartmouth stage.

“I was heartbroken over Sterling, yes,” she continued, still examining her hands, “but I was also heartbroken over my life…and it hadn’t even happened yet. I took the fake diploma they give you before they send you the real one, walked off that stage and then right off campus, not staying for the requisite hat-throwing or the pictures or the too-expensive dinner that my parents would insist on. And then I went to my apartment, left a definitive voicemail on my father’s phone, stuffed my things into my car and left. There would be no more internships for me. No more $10,000-a-plate fundraisers. No more dates with men who weren’t Sterling. I left that life behind—along with all of Daddy’s credit cards. I refused to touch my trust fund. I would stand on my own two feet or not at all.”

“That was brave,” I murmured. Who was this Sterling she kept mentioning? An ex-boyfriend? A former lover? He had to have been an idiot to let Poppy go, at any rate.

“Brave or foolish,” she laughed. “I threw away a lifetime of education—expensive education. I assume my parents were devastated.”

“You assume?”

She sighed. “I never spoke to them directly after I left. I still haven’t. It’s been three years, and I know they’d be furious…”

“You don’t know that.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” she said, her words chastising but her tone friendly. “You’re a
priest
, for crying out loud. I bet your parents were ecstatic when you told them.”

I looked down at my feet. “Actually, my mom cried when I told her, and my father didn’t speak to me for six months. They didn’t even come to my ordination.” It was not a memory I liked reliving.

When I looked up at her, her red lips were pressed in a line. “That’s awful. It sounds like something my parents would do.”

“My sister…” I stopped and cleared my throat. I’d talked about Lizzy countless times in homilies, in small groups, in counseling sessions. But somehow, explaining her death to Poppy was more intimate, more personal. “She was molested by our parish priest for years. We never knew, never suspected…”

Poppy put a hand over mine. The irony of
her
comforting
me
was keenly palpable, but at the same time, it felt nice. It felt good. There had been no one to comfort me when it had happened; we’d all been in our separate worlds of pain. There had been no one to just
listen
, like it mattered how I felt about it. Like it mattered that I
still
felt about it.

“She killed herself when she was nineteen,” I went on, as if Poppy’s touch had triggered a response to share that couldn’t be stopped. “She left a note, with the names of other children he’d hurt. We were able to stop him, and he was put on trial and sentenced to ten years in prison.”

I took a breath, pausing a moment, because it was impossible not to feel those twin dragons of rage and grief warring in my chest, heating my blood. I felt a fury so deep whenever I thought of that man that I honestly believed myself capable of murder, and no matter how many times I prayed for this hatred to be lifted from me, no matter how many times I forced myself to repeat
I forgive you I forgive you
as I pictured his face, it never truly went away, this anger. This pain.

Finally mastering myself again, I went on. “The other families in the parish—I don’t know if they didn’t want to believe it or were humiliated that they’d trusted him, but whatever it was, they were furious with us for calling for his arrest, furious with Lizzy for being the victim, for having the gall to leave a note outlining in sick detail what had happened and who else it was happening to. The deacons tried to block her having a Catholic funeral and burial, and even the new priest ignored us. The whole family stopped going to church then—my dad and brothers stopped believing in God altogether. Only my mom still believes, but she will never go back. Aside from visiting me up here, she hasn’t been inside a church since Lizzy’s funeral.”

“But you have,” Poppy pointed out. “You still believe.”

Her hand remained on mine, warm in the drafty air conditioning of the office. “I didn’t for a long time,” I admitted.

We sat in silence for a while, jostling shoulders with dead girls and disapproving parents and tragedies that lingered like the smell of old leaves in a forest. “So,” she said after a while, “I suppose you do know what it’s like to face your parents’ disapproval.”

I managed a smile, trying to keep it from faltering when she withdrew her hand. “What did you do after you left Dartmouth?” I asked, needing to talk about something else, anything other than Lizzy and those painful years after her death.