Page 52 of Priest (Priest 1)
She tried to hand it back to me, but I caught her hand with my own, curling her fingers around it.
“After Lizzy died, no one wanted anything of hers that reminded them of what she had gone through at church. Her bible and holy cards and saint’s candles—my dad threw them all away.” I flinched, remembering his white-hot rage when he’d found out that I’d dug her rosary out of the trash. “But I wanted something of hers. I wanted to keep all the parts of her alive in my memory.”
“Don’t you still?”
“Of course, but after we talked the other night…I realized that I also need to let parts of her go too. And when I think about her—well, I know she would have lov
ed you.” I met her eyes. “She would have loved you like I do.”
Poppy’s lips parted, her eyes wide and hopeful and scared, but before she could respond to what I said, I took her fingers in mine and said, “Let me teach you how to use this.”
Yes, I was a coward. I was afraid of her not telling me that she loved me, and I was afraid of her telling me that she did love me. I was afraid of the palpable tie between us, afraid of the ribbon that laced through my ribs and around my heart that was also laced and tied around hers.
Her eyes never left mine as I moved her hand from her forehead to her heart and then to each shoulder. “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” I said for her. And then I put her fingers on the crucifix. “Now we pray the Apostle’s Creed…”
We prayed the entire thing together with her on my lap, her echoing faintly after me, our fingers moving together through the beads, and it was somewhere near the last decade that I became aware of how hard I was, of how her nipples showed through her soft flowing tank top. Aware of those big hazel eyes and that long wavy hair and the watchful intelligence that peered through each and every expression of hers.
This is love, I thought dizzily, wondrously. This is what laying down a cross feels like. This is what taking up a new life feels like…it feels like Poppy Danforth. And as I intoned the final words of the rosary, I almost forgot whom I was praying to.
Hail holy queen…our sweetness and our hope.
Later that night, when I was moving over her and into her, those words tumbled around in my mind, words that were so indelibly Poppy, so indelibly attached to the brightness of her mind and the paradise of her body.
Holy. Queen. Sweetness.
Hope.
“Jordan.”
The priest kneeling in front of me didn’t stop praying or even turn to face me. Instead, he kept murmuring to himself in the same measured voice with the same measured pace, and I knew Jordan well enough to know that this was a polite way of telling me to fuck off until he was done.
I sat in the pew behind him.
Jordan was the only priest I personally knew who still prayed the Liturgy of the Hours, a practice that was so monastic as to be almost obsolete, which was probably part of the reason it appealed to him. Like me, he loved old things, but his fascination went beyond mere books and the occasional spiritual encounter. He lived like a medieval monk, a life almost completely and totally devoted to prayer and ritual. It was this mystical, unearthly nature that had brought so many young people into his parish; over the past three years, it had been his presence that had revitalized this old, inner city church that had been so close to closing when he’d taken it over into something thriving and alive.
Jordan finished his prayers and made the sign of the cross, standing with a purposeful slowness to face me.
“Father Bell,” he said formally.
I refrained from rolling my eyes. He’d always been like this—aloof and intense. Even the one time he’d accidentally drank too much at the seminary barbecue and I’d had to babysit him as he puked all night. But what appeared to be haughtiness or coldness was actually just a symptom of his vibrant inner life, the constant atmosphere of holiness and inspiration that he lived in, an atmosphere so palpable to him that he didn’t understand why other people didn’t sense it as he did.
“Father Brady,” I said.
“I imagine you are here for a confession?”
“Yes.” I stood and he looked me up and down. There was a long pause, a long moment where his face went from confused to sad to unreadable.
“Not today,” he finally said and then turned and started walking toward his office.
I was confused. “Not today? Like no confession today? Are you busy or something?”
“No, I’m not busy,” he said, still walking away.
My brows knit together. Was denying someone confession even legal according to ecclesiastical law? Pretty sure it wasn’t.
“Hey, wait up,” I said.
He didn’t. He didn’t even turn around to acknowledge that I had said something or that I was jogging after him.
