Page 79 of Priest (Priest 1)
“And no razors apparently,” Sean said, reaching over and giving my beard a fierce yank.
I punched him in the bicep. He yelped like a girl.
It was true that I had a fairly extensive beard, along with a deep tan and dramatically leaner body. “No more pretty boy muscles,” Dad had remarked after I’d walked in the door and he’d hugged me. “Those are real-work muscles.”
Mom had just pursed her lips. “You look like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments.”
I felt a bit like Moses, a stranger both in Egypt and in Midian, a stranger everywhere. Later that night, after the longest shower I could ever remember taking (months of one-minute, tepid showers had instilled a deep love of running hot water in me,) I laid down on my bed and thought about everything. The faces of the people—workers and villagers alike—that I’d come to know on such an intimate level. I knew why their children were named what they were, and I knew that they loved soccer and Top Gear, and I knew which of the boys I’d wanted on my team when we played impromptu rugby games in the evening. The work had been hard—they were building a high school along with better water infrastructure—and the days were long, and there had been times when I’d felt unwanted or wanted too much or like the work was pointless, bailing out the Titanic with a coffee tin, as Dad would have said. And then I would go to sleep with prayers circling in my head and wake up the next day, refreshed and determined to do better.
I wouldn’t have left, honestly, if during my monthly satellite call, Mom hadn’t told me about the pile of acceptance letters waiting for me at home. I could literally have my pick of universities, and after a lot of thought, I’d decided to come home and pursue my PhD at Princeton—not a Catholic seminary, but I was okay with that. Presbyterians weren’t so bad.
I pulled Lizzy’s rosary out of my pocket and watched the cross spin in the low city lights filtering in through the window. I’d taken it with me to Pokot, and there’d been many nights when I’d fallen asleep with it clutched in my hand, like by holding on to it, I could hold on to someone, except I didn’t know who I was trying to feel close to. Lizzy maybe, or God. Or Poppy.
The dreams had started my second night there, slow, predictable dreams at first. Dreams of sighs and flesh, dreams so real that I would wake up with her scent in my nostrils and her taste lingering on my tongue. And then they’d changed into strange ciphered visions of tabernacles and chuppahs, dancing shoes and tumbling stacks of books. Hazel eyes brigh
t with tears, red lips curved downward in perpetual unhappiness.
Old Testament dreams, Jordan had said when I called him one month. Your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions, he’d quoted.
(“Which kind of man am I?” I’d wondered aloud.)
No amount of prayer, no amount of hard, exhausting work during the day, made the dreams go away. And I had no idea what they meant, except that Poppy was still very much inside my heart, no matter how much I distracted myself during my waking hours.
I wanted to see her again. And it was no longer the wounded lover who wanted it, no longer the anger and the lust both demanding to be satisfied. I just wanted to know she was doing okay, and I wanted to give her the rosary back. It had been a gift, she should keep it.
Even if she was with—fuck—Sterling.
Once I had that thought, it was impossible to shake, and so the idea became completely embedded into my plans. I was moving to New Jersey, and New York City wasn’t far away. I would find Poppy and I would give her the rosary.
Along with your forgiveness, came a quiet thought out of nowhere. A God-thought. She needs to know that you’ve forgiven her.
Have I? Forgiven her? I nudged one arm of the crucifix to set it spinning again. I suppose I had. It hurt—deeply—to think of her and Sterling together, but my anger had been poured into the African dust—poured away and sprinkled down, sprinkled as sweat and tears and blood onto the soil.
Yes. It would be good for both of us. Closure. And maybe once I handed off the rosary, the dreams would stop and I could move on with the rest of my life.
The next day, my last day home, Mom took scissors to my beard with an almost creepy glee.
“It didn’t look that bad,” I mumbled as she worked.
Ryan was hitched up on the counter, for once without his phone. He had a bag of Cheetos in his hand instead. “No, dude, it really did. Unless you were trying to look like Rick Grimes.”
“Why wouldn’t I? He’s my hero.”
Mom clucked. “Princeton students don’t look like Paul Bunyan, Tyler. Hold still—no, Ryan, he can’t have Cheetos while I’m doing this.”
Ryan had shoved the bag in my outstretched hand after hopping down to find his phone (“This is so sick. I have to Periscope it.”)
I sighed and set the Cheetos down.
“I’m going to miss you,” Mom said, out of nowhere.
“It’s just school. I’ll be back to visit all the time.”
She finished with the scissors and set them down. “I know. It’s just, all you boys have stayed so close to home. I’ve been spoiled by having you all here.”
And then she burst into tears, because we weren’t all here, hadn’t been all here since Lizzy.
“Mom…” I stood up and hugged her tightly. “I love you. And this isn’t permanent. It’s just for a few years.”
