Priest (8 page)

And the worst thing was that I knew He wasn’t angry with me. He’d forgiven me before it had even happened, and I didn’t deserve it. I deserved to be punished, a hail of fire from above, bitter waters, an IRS audit, something, anything dammit, because I was a miserable, loathsome, lustful man who’d taken advantage of an emotionally vulnerable woman.

What a wretched man I am.

We wrapped up Bible study, and I cleaned up the coffee and chips robotically, my mind still dazed by this newest wave of shame. This feeling of being too small, too awful, for anything less than hell.

I could hardly bear walking past the crucifix on my way back to the rectory.

I slept perhaps three hours total that night. I stayed up late reading the Bible, perusing every passage about sin that I knew of until my tired eyes refused to focus on the words any longer, sliding over them like two magnets with the same charge. Finally, I crawled into my bed with my rosary, mumbling prayers until I drifted off into a restless sleep.

A strange kind of numbness settled over me as I said Mass that morning, as I laced up my running shoes afterwards. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, maybe it was emotional exhaustion, maybe it was simply the shock of yesterday carrying over into today. But I didn’t want numb—I wanted peace. I wanted strength.

Taking the country road out of town to avoid Poppy, I ran farther than I normally did, pushing myself harder and faster, moving until my legs cramped and my breath screamed in and out of my chest. And instead of going straight to my shower, I staggered inside of the church, my hands laced above my head, my ribs slicing themselves apart with pain. It was dark and empty inside the church, and I didn’t know what I was doing there instead of my rectory, didn’t know until I stumbled into the sanctuary and collapsed onto my knees in front of the tabernacle.

My head was hanging, my chin touching my chest, sweat everywhere, but I didn’t care, couldn’t care, and I couldn’t pinpoint the moment my ragged breathing turned into crying, but it was not long after I went to my knees, and the tears mingled with the sweat until I wasn’t sure which was which.

The sunlight poured through the thick stained glass, jewel bright patterns spilling and tumbling over the pews and my body and the tabernacle, and the gold doors glinted in darker shades, somber and sacred, forbidding and holy.

I leaned forward until my head pressed against the floor, until I could feel my eyelashes blinking against the worn, industrial carpet. Saint Paul says we don’t have to put words to our prayers, that the Holy Spirit will interpret for us, but interpreting wasn’t needed this time, not when I was whispering
sorry sorry sorry
like a chant, like mantra, like a hymn without music.

I knew the moment I was no longer alone. My naked back prickled with awareness and I sat up, flushed with embarrassment that a parishioner or a staff member had seen me crying like this, but there was no one there. The sanctuary was empty.

But still I felt the presence of someone else like a weight, like static along my skin, and I peered into every dim corner, certain I’d see someone standing there.

The air conditioning powered on with thump and a whoosh, the change in air pressure slamming the doors to the sanctuary closed. I jumped.

It’s just the air conditioning
, I told myself.

But when I looked back up at the tabernacle, golden and stained with color, I suddenly wasn’t so sure. There was something anticipatory and sentient about the silence and emptiness. It suddenly felt as if God were listening very intently to what I was saying, listening and waiting, and I lowered my eyes back to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered one last time, the word hanging in the air like a star hangs in the sky—glimmering, precious, illuminating. And then it winked out of existence, at the same moment I felt my burden of sorrow and shame wink out of existence.

There was a beat of perfect completeness, a moment where I felt as if I could pluck each and every atom out of the air, where magic and God and something sweetly beyond complete understanding was real, completely real.

And then it was all gone, all of it, replaced by a deep feeling of peace.

I exhaled at the same time the building seemed to exhale, the prickling on my skin disappearing, the air vacant once again. I knew a thousand explanations for what I had just felt, but I also knew that I really believed only one.

Moses got a burning bush, and I get the air conditioning
, I thought ruefully as I got to my feet, rising as slowly and unsteadily as a small child. But I wasn’t complaining. I had been forgiven, renewed, released from guilt. Like Saint Peter, I’d been tested and found wanting and forgiven anyway.

I could do this. There was life after fucking up, after all, even for those who lived without fucking.

The next two days passed without event. I spent Thursday lounging on my couch while watching
The Walking Dead
episodes on Netflix and eating Cup of Noodles that I’d made by using hot water from my Keurig.

Sophisticated, I know.

And then Friday. I got up and prepared myself for the morning Mass as I always did, a few minutes late, reminding myself for the thousandth time to rearrange the sacristy, and then readied myself to walk into the sanctuary. Weekdays Masses are short—no music, no second reading, no homily—sort of a like drive-thru Eucharist for the extremely faithful. Like Rowan and the two grandmothers and—

Jesus help me.

Poppy Danforth.

She was sitting in the second row, in a demure dress of ice blue silk with a Peter Pan collar and flats, her hair in a loose bun. She looked prim, composed, modest…except for that fucking lipstick, fire engine red and begging to be smeared. I looked away as soon as I saw her, trying to recapture that holy sense of peace I’d been given on Tuesday, that sense that I could master any temptation as long as I had God on my side.

She needed something from this place, from me, something way more important than what we had done on Monday. I needed to honor my office and give it to her. I focused on the Mass, on the words and on the prayers, pleased to see Poppy doing her best to follow along, praying especially for her as I performed the ancient rites.

Please help her find guidance and peace.

Please help her heal from her past.

And please please please help us behave.

When it was time for Eucharist, she lined up behind the grandmas and Rowan, looking a little uncertain.

“What do I do?” she whispered when she got to the front of the line.

“Cross your hands over your chest,” I whispered back.

She did, her eyes still on mine, her long fingers resting on her shoulders. She cast her eyes back down, looking so lovely and yet so frail, and I wanted to hug her. Not even sexually, just a regular
hug
. I wanted to wrap my arms around her and feel her breathe into my chest, and I wanted to tuck her face into my neck as I kept her safe and protected from her past, from her ambiguous future. I wanted to tell her and have her know—really know—that it would be all right, because there was love and because someone like her was meant to be out in the world sharing that love, like she had done in Haiti. All that joy she had felt there—she could feel it anywhere, if only she’d open herself to it.

I placed my hand on her head, about to murmur a standard blessing, and then her eyes lifted to mine and everything shifted. The floor and the ceiling and the cincture tight around my waist to encourage pure thoughts and her hair feather-soft under my fingertips and my skin on her skin. Electricity skimmed down my spine, and every sense memory of her—her taste and her feel and her sounds—shocked through me.

Her mouth parted. She felt it too.

I could barely get the blessing out, my throat was so dry. And when she turned to walk back to her pew, she also looked stunned, as if she’d been blinded.

After Mass, I practically bolted back to the sacristy, not looking at anyone or anything as I did. I took my time removing my vestments, hanging the way-too-expensive embroidered chasuble on its hanger and folding my alb into a precise, neat square. My hands were shaking. My thoughts were incomplete fragments. Things had been so good this week. And things were going so well during the Mass, even with her all adorable and devout and so fucking close, and then I touched her…

I stood for a minute in my slacks and shirt and stared at the processional cross, (feeling a bit betrayed, if I was being honest.) If I was forgiven, why hadn’t God also removed this temptation from me? Or given me more strength to bear it? To resist it? I knew it wasn’t fair to hope that Poppy would move away or become a Baptist or something, but why couldn’t God eliminate my attraction to her? Deaden my senses to the way she’d felt under my blessing…deaden my eyes to those red lips and bright hazel eyes?

Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me.
Even Jesus had said those words. Not that they had worked out so well for him…why was God so willing to leave bad cups all over the place?

I left the sacristy in a strange mood, trying to summon that ethereal, distinctly nonphysical tranquility I’d felt earlier, and then I turned the corner and saw Poppy standing in the center aisle, the sole parishioner remaining.

I honestly didn’t know what to do. We were urged to flee temptation, but what if my job was helping the temptress? Was it more wrong to sneak away, to leave her without help, and avoid the lust and desire? Because of course, the lust was my own problem, not hers, and no excuse to be cold to her.

But if I did go to her, what else was I risking?

More importantly, was I risking it because I
wanted
to risk it? Was I only telling myself I cared about her spiritual development, so that I could be near her?

No, I decided. That for sure wasn’t true. It was just that the actual truth was so much worse. I cared about her as a person, as a soul,
and
I wanted to fuck her, and that was the recipe for something much worse than carnal sin.

It was a recipe for falling in love.

I would go to her. But I would put her in contact with the leader of the women’s group, direct Poppy to seek guidance from her instead of me, and hopefully the occasional Mass would be the extent of our interactions.

Poppy stared at the altar as I approached.

“Aren’t there bones inside there?”

“We prefer the term
relic
.” My voice had that unintentionally deep timbre again. I cleared my throat.

“Seems a little macabre.”

I gestured towards the crucifix, which depicted Jesus at his most bloody, broken, and tortured. “Catholicism is a macabre religion.”

Poppy turned toward me, face thoughtful. “I think that’s what I like about it. It’s gritty. It’s real. It doesn’t gloss over pain or sorrow or guilt—it highlights them. Where I grew up, you never dealt with anything. You took pills, drank, repressed it all until you were an expensive shell. I like this way better. I like confronting things.”

“It’s an active religion,” I agreed. “It’s a religion of
doing
—rituals, prayers, motions.”

“And that’s what you like about it.”

“That it’s active? Yes. But I like the rituals themselves too.” I looked around the sanctuary. “I like the incense and the wine and the chants. It feels ancient and holy. And there’s something about the rituals that brings me back to God every time, no matter how foul my mood is, no matter how badly I’ve sinned. Once I start, it all sort of fades away, like it’s not important. Which it isn’t. Because while Catholicism can be macabre, it’s also a religion of joy and connection, of remembering that sorrow and sin can’t hold on to us any longer.”

She shifted, her flat bumping against my shoe. “Connection,” she said. “Right.”

In fact, I was feeling connection right now. I liked talking religion with her; I liked that she got it, got it in a way that a lot of lifetime churchgoers didn’t. I wanted to talk to her all day, listen to her all day, have her breathy words whisper me to sleep at night…

Noooooo, Tyler. Bad.

I cleared my throat. “What can I help you with, Poppy?”

She held up the church newsletter. “I saw that there was a pancake breakfast tomorrow and I wanted to help.”

“Of course.” The breakfast was one of the first things I’d started doing after coming to St. Margaret’s, and the response had been overwhelming. There was enough rural poverty and poverty in nearby Platte City and Leavenworth to guarantee a steady need for the service, but there were never enough volunteers and we were slammed the two times a month we hosted it. “That would be so much appreciated.”

“Good.” She smiled, the hint of a dimple appearing in her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”