by Ann McMan
Julia was silent for a moment. “You both got Stevie out of that particular error in judgment, so I’d say it wasn’t a total write-off.”
“That’s true.”
“It’s his life, Evan. Back off and let him live it. Without judgment or prognostication.”
“Prognostication?”
“It seemed like a Catholic-enough term to apply here.”
Evan laughed. “I never want to face you in a boardroom.”
“Good instinct. I can promise it wouldn’t work out for you.”
Evan huffed in frustration. “It just makes me crazy when people do stupid shit.”
“What makes you so certain that marrying Kayla qualifies as stupid?”
“Oh, come on. I know him, Julia.”
“And I know you. This isn’t about Dan.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then illuminate me,” Evan demanded. “What is it about?”
“Boundaries. And more specifically, where they should usually be found.”
Evan knitted her brows. “I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.”
“That would be my point.”
Evan dropped her head back and stared at the coffered ceiling of the huge bedroom. Julia followed her gaze. The bedside lamp was casting ominous shadows that made the wells of the grids look as deep as caverns.
“Do you plan to illuminate me?” Evan asked, after a few seconds of contemplation.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Why not?”
“Oh,” Julia clarified, “it isn’t that I don’t want to. It’s just that for you, boundaries are abstract concepts that have to be stumbled over before they become recognizable.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, a parent can tell a child not to touch the top of a stove because it’s hot and can burn them. The child then has two choices. She can accept the warning without question, or she can test the theory herself by actually touching the top of the stove, and probably getting burned in the process. So, for many children, until there is some empirical evidence to support a warning, the concept lacks integrity or a basis in fact.”
“That sounds more like a trust issue than a boundary issue.”
“What’s sauce for the goose . . .”
Evan drummed her fingers on the rumpled bedspread. She shot Julia a sidelong glance. “How do you know all this shit about child rearing?”
Julia shrugged. “We published Piaget.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?” Evan said with wonder. “Yeah. Well. Sheila wasn’t much for issuing warnings. I grew up with a lot of burns.”
Julia took hold of her hand. “I know.”
“I’ll try to change.”
“You don’t need to change. Just learn to pay attention to your impulses—especially when they relate to Dan and Kayla. If you do, I promise that what you see will begin to resemble something that can burn you if you keep testing it. And that’s not good for you, or for Stevie.”
“Okay.” Evan lifted Julia’s hand and kissed it. “I’ll try.”
“Wanna try and get some sleep now?”
“Nuh uh.” Evan tugged Julia closer.
“Nuh uh? Got something else in mind?”
Evan kissed her. “You might say that.”
“Am I going to like it?”
“I sure as hell hope so.” Evan dropped back against the pillows and pulled Julia down on top of her. “I thought we could practice.”
“Practice?” Julia began to lose focus as Evan kissed along her bare collarbone.
“Yeah. Suddenly, I feel the need to touch a few hot objects to see if they’ll burn me.”
They engaged in some creative experimentation before dropping off to sleep—blissfully burn-free, and wrapped around each other in a soft, snug cocoon.
As delightful as that had been, Julia knew they’d both pay for it today. Evan had been bleary-eyed when she’d left in the morning. They promised to connect with each other later that night, after Julia got settled in her Boston hotel room.
But now that trip wasn’t happening.
She yawned.
At least she could get that meeting with her father’s estate attorney out of the way. She sent a quick message off to the firm to say she’d be available today, after all. With luck, she could get that errand taken care of—and get the necessary paperwork started to secure her mother’s agreement to sell the residential properties. If her mother balked, Julia would suggest handing the management of the high-end locations off to a leasing agent. If Donne & Hale would be forced to retain the assets, then at least the properties could begin to earn some revenue to justify their presence on the company’s ledger books.
That was her hope, anyway. With her mother, nothing was ever predictable.
◊ ◊ ◊
The flashback was always the same.
Water. Running water.
He was freezing. Shivering. The water was cold.The water was always cold.
One naked bulb hung from the high ceiling. It kept flickering off and on like a strobe light. When it went out, broad, dark shadows covered the cracked tile walls. When it came back on, the sudden burst of light would blind his eyes and make it hard to see anything.
It smelled like Pine-Sol.He hated that.
He tried to hurry. He didn’t want to be there. Not that night. And not alone.
The water was like sharp pellets of ice stinging his skin.
He flattened his hands against the slippery wall and gritted his teeth before ducking his head beneath the frigid spray to rinse.
Nearly finished.
The bulb went out again. Then came back on. In the sudden blaze of light, he blinked down at the iridescent pond of soap suds covering his feet. Then the darkness returned.
He waited, but this time, the light didn’t come back on.
“I’ll wash your back for you.”
The low voice came from behind him. He recognized it right away.
He closed his eyes. He knew this would happen. He knew it.
The man moved closer.
He recognized the cologne. The sickly-sweet scent of it mixing with the Pine-Sol was enough to make his stomach seize up. He thought he might get sick.
Then he felt hands on his shoulders. The man’s touch was hot. The hands traveled down his arms as a body leaned into him.
He lurched away from the intruder in the small space—but he didn’t turn around. He was glad it was dark because he didn’t want to see the man’s naked body—didn’t want to see the erection he’d felt nudging his back.
“No,” he said. He knew he sounded panicked. “No. I’m finished.”
“It’s okay, Tim,” the man coaxed. “It’ll help you relax. I do it for the other boys all the time.”
The other boys? He didn’t want to ask what that meant. He already knew.
“I’m finished, Father.” He felt his way along the slick, darkened walls and stumbled out of the small shower, nearly tripping over its low threshold. He grabbed his pile of clothes off the bench without drying off, and tried to pull them on as he hurried out of the locker room.
Father Szymanski never called out to him, and he didn’t look back as he ran.
Another endless night of wrestling with demons was enough inducement to persuade Tim that he wasn’t finished with this. The third time he woke up from a nightmare, wound up in sheets as tight as a burial shroud, he knew he’d never find peace if he didn’t try to make things right.
Sadly, that didn’t seem like a possibility with Joey Mazzetta. No. Joey was too angry and too polarized—against him, and against the Church. Tim couldn’t summon the energy or the moral authority to fault him for that. Joey was right to suspect Tim’s motivation for showing up at his house unannounced—especially after his revelation that someone had approached him in a flimsy attempt to buy his silence.
That disclosure was a mystery for Tim. Who would do such a thing? Even considering all of the gross neglige
nce and abrogation of responsibility the Church had demonstrated throughout its handling of these abuse scandals, Tim found it impossible to believe they would be behind something so—nefarious.
Who was he kidding?
Everything he thought he knew about the Church had been chipped away bit by bit. It reminded him of that Stephen King novella Stevie had lent him—the one about how a prison inmate, Andy Dufresne, managed to tunnel his way out of Shawshank prison using only a pocket-sized rock hammer. It took the unjustly convicted man twenty-eight years to chip out a hole large enough to allow him to escape to freedom.
But in this instance, the Church was the institution holding the truth hostage—and Tim was the one trying to claw his way out.
He knew he should tell Evan about his plan to seek out other members of the youth basketball team. But he wasn’t going to. He knew she’d try to stop him. She’d tell him that sorting through this was not his path to salvation. That he couldn’t change the past, and that the State had now set up an independent reparations commission to make it possible for victims of abuse to come forward.
If only it were that simple . . .
He knew it wasn’t. And how many others had already tried, like Joey, and failed to get a hearing?
Besides. This wasn’t about the Church. Not anymore. This was his rite of passage.
He’d already done a bit of innocuous research in the parish office. Four of the guys who’d played on the team at St. Rita’s during his tenure still lived in the Philadelphia area. He had found current addresses for two of them, and he planned to reach out to them over the weekend.
But this time, there would be a big difference in his approach. This time, he wasn’t going to show up unannounced. That knee-jerk idea had backfired miserably with Joey Mazzetta. Given the gravity of what Tim wanted to discuss, he resolved that it was better to make an initial contact with his former teammates by phone. That way, if the prospect of talking about Father Szymanski and their recollections of any unseemly behavior that may have occurred all those years ago was too painful or too much of a trigger, they could tell Tim so, up front, and be spared the spectacle of an unpleasant encounter.
Tim stared at their names and addresses. He’d written them hastily on a sheet of notepaper he’d borrowed from Sister Ida. It was cream-colored, and had an embossed St. Margherita crest above the inscription, Domus Dei et Porta Coeli. “House of God, Door to Heaven.”
The records didn’t reveal much information about the lives of the two boys after they’d left St. Rita’s. He knew anecdotally that one of them—Mark Atwood—was now openly gay and running a bar on South Camac Street in Philly’s Gayborhood district.
The other, Brian Christensen, managed a Chevy dealership in Gloucester City. Brian had been one of the high school students on the Wildcats team during the years Tim played basketball at St. Rita’s. He was the team captain and most of the middle school boys, like Tim and Joey, looked up to him. When the rumors and whispering started about all the “special” perks that went to players who were favorites of Father Szymanski, Brian was the one they asked about it.
“There’s nothing going on,” he once told them, during the long bus ride home from their weeklong basketball camp at Trout Lake in Stroudsburg. Tim thought back about Brian’s demeanor when they questioned him. He’d been defensive—nervous, even. It was clear he wanted to kill any suggestion that he was involved in anything with their priest. “I just worked hard—always showed up for practice, and never missed a game. Because of that, I got a scholarship to Temple.”
Brian wasn’t alone in his good fortune. Other players on the team were also singled out to attend fancy dinners at expensive restaurants in town, where they got to rub elbows with politicians and business leaders in the community. And, sometimes, like Brian, they got a better shot at access to scholarship assistance from wealthy team sponsors.
That inducement was the one that led Tim to spend so many extra hours at the school gym, practicing free throws and trying to improve his field goal percentages. The Donovans weren’t a wealthy family—not by a long shot. And before he got his calling, Tim aspired to graduate from St. Rita’s and study engineering at a good school with a respected program. Someplace like Columbia or Carnegie Mellon. But being able to afford to do that meant he’d have to earn the tuition money himself.
Or get a scholarship.
Tim came home from camp that summer determined to follow Brian’s example. And when Father Szymanski began to pay special attention to him and suggested that he start staying late after practice to work on improving his skills, he was only too eager to agree. For a while, it seemed to be working.
Until that incident in the shower . . .
“I do it for the other boys all the time.”
Father Szymanski uttered the words so softly and matter-of-factly, it seemed like he assumed Tim would know what they meant.
He hadn’t gone home that night. Not at first. Not for a long while. He did what he always did when he was afraid: he went to Evan’s. She wasn’t at home when he got there—and her mother was never around that early in the evening—so the house was locked up tight. But he hung around there anyway, sitting on the top step of their front porch in the fading light, doing his best not to shake. Not to cry. It was near freezing outside and he was still soaked from fleeing the shower. His damp clothes were plastered against his thin body. They felt stiff and seemed to weigh five times more than normal. He couldn’t stop his teeth from chattering as he hugged himself to try and get warm.
Evan finally showed up after he’d been huddled there for the better part of an hour.
“What the hell are you doing sitting out here?” she demanded. Then she noticed his hair. “Why are you wet?”
“I came here after practice. They didn’t have any more clean towels after I showered,” he lied.
“That’s fucked up.” Evan unlocked the front door. “Come on. I’ll give you something dry to wear.”
Tim struggled to his feet and followed her inside.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“Would you believe me if I said the library?”
“No.”
She smirked at him. “Too bad. That’s all I’m telling you.”
She smelled like cigarettes. Tim could guess the rest. “Where’s your mom?”
“Out.” Evan gestured toward the street. “Who cares? Are you hungry?”
He nodded.
“Me, too.” She led him up the narrow stairs to her bedroom and fished a pair of flannel pants and an oversized Eagles sweatshirt out of the broken bottom drawer of her old dresser. “Put these on and meet me in the kitchen. We’ll make some pizza rolls and watch Night Court.”
She handed him the clothes and left him standing in the middle of her small bedroom. He listened to her footsteps as she retreated back down the stairs.
That was it.
He never told her about what had happened that night—and he assumed he never would.
All of that changed for him on August 14, 2018, with the public release of findings from a grand jury investigation into broad patterns of sexual abuse by Catholic priests across six dioceses in Pennsylvania. Tim had already been aware that specific cases of sexual misconduct by priests in Philadelphia had been under investigation for more than a decade. But the breadth and scope of the 2018 report was devastating to him—and impossible to ignore.
How many thousands of innocent children had been victimized by his fellow priests—servants of Christ who had chosen to betray their solemn vows? And what extreme measures had the Church—his Church—undertaken to protect the abusers, and to conceal the truth?
The public no longer had to guess at the answers to questions like those.
It was horrible. Unconscionable. Impossible to comprehend.
And in how many ways had he unwittingly aided and abetted them all by keeping his own voice silent? He could never forgive himself for that. His selfish determination to ignore what was too diffi
cult—too frightening—for him to confront and make public left him every bit as complicit in the commission of this tragedy as the perpetrators and their powerful protectors.
But now? Now he could try to make restitution for his sins. He could speak up about what he suspected and tell the truth about what he’d experienced firsthand. He could make a public acknowledgment of his personal culpability by admitting to his own refusal to recognize what had been happening all around him. Signs he’d ignored, odd comings and goings, the looks on some of the altar boys’ faces on Sunday mornings . . .
And he could reach out to his former teammates, too. Do what he’d never been courageous enough to do before: listen to them. Offer them support and a promise to bear witness to their experiences—all the things Joey said he didn’t get when he tried to tell his truth to the reparations panel.
And he could make a public acknowledgment of his own complicity, and openly confess his refusal to recognize what had been happening all around him.
Would it make a difference?
He had no idea.
Mark Atwood and Brian Christensen might just do what Joey did: tell him to fuck off and burn in hell.
He wouldn’t blame them one bit.
And he knew he’d probably fail—but he’d be damned if he wouldn’t at least try.
◊ ◊ ◊
It was nearly 5 p.m. when Ben Rush called from North Warren.
“What the hell are you still doing up there?” Evan checked her watch. “The last flight back here leaves Erie in less than an hour.”
“I thought I’d stay on a little longer,” he said.
“I guess I was right about those tits.”
Ben sniggered. “She’s nice.”
“Nice? So, you’re planning to start a book club with her?”
“Hey—back the fuck off. You’re the one who sent me up here to this shithole town.”
“To get information, Ben. Not as an opportunity to get your wick dipped.”
“Don’t get your panties in a wad. I’m off the clock. You want this report or not?”
“Yeah.” Evan said. “I want the report. But, Ben?”
“What?”
