Eva
I should have capitalized on the Black Friday deals and ventured out with the rest of the nutcases to snag a new coffee machine, but I wasn’t up for it. The two hours of sleep I had squeaked out last night was making me feel like a waste of space. But even if I didn’t have the motivation to stampede people for the latest kitchen gadgets, I was still in desperate need of my daily caffeine fix. Slowly, I got dressed in some comfy clothes and sneakers and made the trek to Saxby’s.
But like yesterday, St. Bede’s Church called to me, distracted me from getting my cup of joe, and I just stared at the building as if I was in some type of bizarre trance. The events of the past twenty-four hours replayed in my mind. I was struggling to make sense of it all. After ten years of silence, ten years of not having to be ridiculed or degraded on a daily basis, the woman I had written off as dead and buried was very much alive and infecting my thoughts once again. The church bells chimed, and though I knew that it was impossible, I thought I heard a voice whisper, “But for how long?”
It was my mind playing tricks on me. That Catholic guilt that still reared its ugly head once in a great while. But as much as I hated to admit it, I couldn’t ignore that voice or that question.
How long did my mother have? If the surgeons didn’t get all the cancer tomorrow, how long would she live? Weeks? Months? I didn’t want to care that she had been stricken by cancer or that she had seemed like a completely different person yesterday at dinner. Who was that woman? The woman who had looked at me like I was worthy enough, good enough to be in her presence. Someone who wasn’t tainting the world by just breathing.
Where was that rage, the rage that I had clung to for so long? Why hadn’t it taken over the second I had laid eyes on Marcia Burke? That was what I had expected to feel when I saw her again. Rage with a little bit of pity thrown in. But another emotion had bubbled to the surface. It very much resembled sadness and that I hadn’t expected.
Just like I hadn’t expected to find myself outside of St. Bede’s again.
Was he in there? Hearing confessions, being a good-doer all the while looking like he had just stepped off the cover of GQ? He had been partly to blame for my lousy night’s sleep. I had lain awake for hours thinking of Father Jamie Curran and that awkward, yet arousing ride home. I shouldn’t have read into it. Yes, he had pitched a tent, but because he was a priest he was most likely sexually deprived. The lingerie section in a JCPenney catalog could probably have elicited a similar response.
Why did he have to be a priest?
Why did he have to be my stepbrother?
Why did he seem to like . . . maybe even care about my mother?
I focused on the latter and my conflicting emotions over my mother’s diagnosis and out of character behavior last night. That anger I was well-acquainted with whenever my mother entered my mind had returned, but it held hands with confusion and frustration, putting me in a state I sorely detested. I needed answers. I needed to know what had happened to my mother.
I walked into the church and looked over at the two confessional booths lining the wall. A red light flashed over the one booth, signaling that it was occupied. I was about to take a seat in one of the pews when a woman around my mother’s age stepped out and made the sign of the cross. With her head bowed, she retreated to the display of candles on the far wall and knelt in prayer. I looked around and saw that with the exception of the reverent woman, the church was empty, and I was next in line. Before I could chicken out and leave without answers, I took a deep breath and entered the confessional.
There was no point in feigning anonymity at this point, so just as I was about to speak he surprised me by saying my name first. There was something dark, almost desperate in his tone, something that made me warm all over. I needed to get past this, to not react to just the sound of his voice.
Wait. How did he know it was me?
I couldn’t get tripped up in that. I came here for a reason. “Last night my mother told me I was beautiful.”
“And that surprised you?” he asked.
That voice.
Focus, Eva.
“Yes, because that was never a word she had used to describe me in the past. Her adjectives back then were a lot less flattering.”
“I see,” he said. His voice enveloped me, sewed itself to my soul somehow, and I started to unravel. Right there, while I knelt before him. I couldn’t let him see this. I couldn’t let anyone see me so vulnerable. “Are you embarrassed? Is that why you ran from my confessional yesterday? Because you were embarrassed over what you told me?” He sounded so sure of himself, and it pissed me off.
“That’s not why I cut my confession short.”
“No? Then why did you leave so abruptly?” he asked.
“This is already uncomfortable, I don’t think . . .”
“Uncomfortable for you or for me?” he asked, cutting me off, his voice demanding and dangerous.
My submissive side bloomed at the sound, and I forgot that the man on the other side of the screen was my stepbrother and confessor. “Yesterday, as I confessed just one of my dirty secrets, I became so wet that I couldn’t continue . . . or I would have made myself come.”