Tonight, there was only me and this old home, haunted by the ghosts of a hundred priests. We were all waiting for my uncle to heal, to recover.
“It was a massive heart attack, Ms. Nicola. We’ve made him comfortable, but we won’t know the extent of the damage until he wakes up.” The doctor had been kind and thorough, but his tone wasn’t hopeful. Until he wakes up felt a lot like if he wakes up.
“What can I do?” I’d asked, desperate for some occupation that kept me from pacing the ICU hallway, wondering how many hours I had left until I could sit next to my uncle’s bed to watch him breathing, lying there, looking lifeless and old. “Please,” I’d asked, not caring how pathetic I sounded. “Tell me what to do.”
“Rest,” the doctor suggested, and when that didn’t elicit more than a frown from me, the man lowered his shoulders and touched my arm. “Go to his home. Find a book you know he’ll enjoy, and bring it back here. Maybe reading to him will help you both.”
I knew busywork when I saw it, but at least there was something to do now that didn’t end with me aimlessly counting the watermarks on the hospital’s tile ceiling.
There was a nonfiction book about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on the coffee table. I glanced at the cover, frowning at the writer’s name across the center, then went into my uncle’s office, figuring he still kept his collection of John Donne poetry and sermons in the same place.
“Comfort and conscience,” he’d told me as a child, showing me the worn book, the edges rubbed down and pages dog-eared after years of use. “That is the message Donne delivers.”
The desk was small, modest, and very old. It had been handed down to him from an old bishop he’d studied under at monastery, and he’d brought it with him to every parish he’d served. It was solid and thick, with a bank of drawers on both sides and a small thin drawer in the center. I sat behind it, immediately opening the right-side center drawer, where I knew he kept his favorite Donne collection. The swivel chair squeaked as I turned, flicking on the desk lamp when I didn’t spot the book in the drawer. There were small journals and boxes of pens, a few bundles of stamps, and two stacks of index cards, but the Donne wasn’t in the drawer.
The bottom drawer was locked when I tried it, and the others gave me nothing but more of my uncle’s journals, a few random envelopes of pictures from his tenure at Trinity College, and several bookmarks from book readings I knew he’d attended, but still, no sign of the Donne.
Then, just as I decided to give up and I reached across the desk to turn off the lamp, I spotted a sliver of gold peeking out from underneath and moved it aside. The lamp had a heavy base with two small openings on either side, and beneath the opening closest to me, taped to the base, was a small key. I grabbed it, my heart beating double time, wondering what secrets my uncle had kept that seemed important enough to hide.
A thousand scenarios raced through my mind, none of them good. There had been surprises coming from gossiping mouths in every church—people you knew for years, doing despicable things, so you never quite knew who to trust. But my uncle had never given anyone any reason to gossip about him. He’d always been transparent. He’d always been open with his parishioners and bishops. There simply wasn’t anything to hide.
So why was that drawer locked tight?
I slipped the key into the lock, turning it with one twist, and I held my breath before I opened it, my heart somewhere near my throat by now, my breathing coming in wild, uneven pants.
At first, there seemed to be only the brown leather book with gold lettering. It was familiar, like the one I’d seen my uncle hold for years as he read through each poem and sermon penned by the English poet. There was nothing suspicious about the book, nothing that would warrant being locked inside this drawer. So I grabbed it, not bothering to look at it, more focused on what else was hidden—a manila envelope with a typed name and date, NICOLA, AVA R. 10/01/1991.
My mother’s name and my birthdate? He’d never let me see my birth certificate. Said it had been lost years ago. I’d always suspected he worried I’d ask about my father and he never wanted me to know.
Funny how history repeated itself.
Not funny at all how I allowed my uncle to convince me to do the same thing to Betta.
The certificate itself held no surprises other than to note that my mother had been thirty-five when she’d had me. I’d always assumed she’d been younger. Uncle Pat had told me very little about their family. I’d never met cousins or grandparents; all, he’d said, had abandoned my mother for having a baby with no husband to speak of and him, for supporting her. No father was listed, but the time and place of birth were odd. My uncle promised our people had all been born and reared in New York. Generations, he said, of Italian Nicolas went back decades in the city.
So why was my mother’s birthplace listed as New Orleans?
The only other things in the folder were two pictures. One was of my mother and me in the delivery room. It was a typical early-nineties image, the pigmentation was bright, the scrubs colorful, but the smile on my mother’s face was wide, and her green eyes shone like wet glass as she smiled at the camera. She was beautiful, and a lump caught in my throat as I touched her face. I stared at that picture a long time, willing all that light and ink to come to life, just for a second, so I could know all her secrets, to find out everything I could about her.
After a while, with my eyes blurring, I put the picture away, picking up the second photo, confused when I spotted another delivery room image, this one of my mother and me again, but joined now by my uncle, decked out in blue scrubs. It struck me as weird somehow that my modest uncle, who’d had to ask Sister Dominique to discuss tampons and menstrual cycles with me when I was eleven, would be a man comfortable enough to be in the delivery room when his sister gave birth.
The picture was striking and…oddly intimate. The way he leaned close to her, his arms around her shoulders, him cradling both of us, looking fierce, like only he could protect us. A mix of consuming thoughts worked inside me—confusion, curiosity, and a real sense of wonder that there was something I was missing. Something significant enough that my uncle thought it should be locked away in his desk.
The Donne book felt heavier when I picked it up, though it had been years since I’d held it. It was the same book I’d seen my uncle read a dozen or more times; it had the same binding, the same red-tinted edges on the pages from the time I’d spilled Kool-Aid over it at nine and didn’t clean it properly.
Inside, though, a new world opened to me that had nothing to do with Donne or the sweet words he’d penned about love and sin or the sermons promising repentance for his misdeeds.
The first letter was old. There was no address, no stamp at all, and the envelope was folded, the looping handwriting across the front carrying what looked like the carefully constructed letters that made up my uncle’s name. No “Father,” no “brother.” The envelope and the letter inside simply stated “Patrick.”
She loved him.
He loved her.
One letter became two, then five, then ten, and as I sat there for hours, reading these impossible, unbelievable words, the story of my parents’ life unfolded.
She’d been a parishioner in his church. A shy, timid woman with a strict father eager for her to marry. When she’d worked up the courage to refuse, he’d sent her to the new priest, hoping someone closer to her age could make her see reason, could convince her of the importance of obedience.
It had backfired.
I think of you, my mother wrote in the first letter, and my heart broke for her. My hands shook as I imagined what it had been like for her, remembering what it felt like to love someone so much…but be made to keep it deep inside yourself. I think of you always, with every waking breath and every blissful dream. I pray that God takes this love I feel for you from me. I pray not to want you. I pray that I will hate you. I pray for freedom from all the thoughts I have of you. It’s the same prayer I’ve said for two year
s now. Will He ever answer me? Will He ever let me be free of you?
Patrick’s letters were stronger, but his patience didn’t falter. He started them with Donne.
I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so.
He let the poet say more in two lines than he could in one.
My sweet Ava, God has my promise, but you own my soul.
I read the last letter, dated just eight months before I was born. They had a plan, put into action before any of my mother’s family knew she was pregnant. In the end, she would not let him leave the Church. She would not let him sacrifice his calling for her.
Who am I to ask you to choose between your devotion to God and your love for me? Instead, I only ask that you stand by me, that you give what you can to me and our child, whatever that may be. God would not be so cruel as to damn a perfect soul made from the love He has borne between us.
Patrick had done exactly what she wanted. He had never married her, but she had his name. So did I. Had he lied to his bishop? Had someone forged documents for them? They left New Orleans when he was transferred, which, from the last letter I read, came in time that no one would know of my mother’s condition. They’d hidden from her family and moved to New York, posing as brother and sister. My entire life, I’d been told that my mother had married a man on a whim, some local she’d met while on vacation in Rome. But he left her after a month, and she returned home to New York, already pregnant, with no idea where her husband had gone.
But it had been a lie.
All of it.
Everything I knew.
Everything I believed my entire life had been constructed to protect a man from the same sin he’d never forgiven me for making.
I dropped the book, the letters and pictures falling to the floor around me, and I threw back the chair. The air in the room had become too thick, the staleness of this old place suffocating me until I thought I might pass out.
I needed to get out, away from the rectory, from my uncle’s secrets, from anything that reminded me of the lies told to keep me under someone else’s control. The street was crowded when I hit the sidewalk, but I managed to hail a cab immediately, slipping inside before I could get my heartbeat to slow.
“Where to?” the driver asked, and I called out the address, thinking of the only place in the city with the only person who’d ever made me feel any real freedom. I’d go to him and try to forget for just one more night that my world was falling apart.
16
Johnny
She was a drug I needed out of my system.
The smell of her hair, the warmth of her skin, the feel of her nails against my back when I moved inside of her—it was all better than any drink, than the sweetest bump I’d ever taken.
Sammy was addictive, and I was going on day five without a single fix.
Angelo watched her, made damn sure no one, especially not Liam Shane, touched a hair on her head. Last he’d reported, she’d been with her uncle at the rectory.
No harm, no foul, and I told him to call it a night.
My apartment was too quiet. The empty rooms, the vacant noise of nothingness… I just couldn’t be there. So, I told myself work would give me something to do. It would fill the monotony. It would distract me from the withdrawals I had from not seeing Sammy, not hearing her voice, not tasting her mouth.
But an hour in and I was already listless. The projections were done. The figures figured. No meetings could be had on a Friday night at eleven p.m. Garcia had been called and handled. I exaggerated about the trip to the Hamptons with Sammy, let him think we’d extended it so he wouldn’t get suspicious.
Everyone else had a family.
Everyone else had a life.
Mine had passed me by.
I shot tequila straight, not bothering with a glass. No need for propriety when there was just me and my damn internal whining as I watched New York below me, moving along, going forward, while I waited for Samantha to leave my system.
Then, as if I summoned her with some spell, the elevator chimed. Angelo ushered her in, knocking once on my door before he opened it, holding it ajar long enough for Sammy to march inside. One look at her face and I knew shit had tumbled for her.
“What happened?” I said, moving away from the window to meet her in the middle of the room.
She was mad; that much I could see—eyes wide and wild, bloodshot and red. Her normally smooth, wavy hair was in disarray, and her clothes were wrinkled, like she’d slept in them. Sammy opened her mouth to speak, then glanced over her shoulder, eyebrow cocked as she looked at Angelo.
“It’s okay, man. I got it,” I told him, nodding for him to close the door.
She barely let the latch close before she rounded on me. “Your father, did he know? Did he tell you?”
“Tell me what?” I set the bottle on my desk, touching her shoulders, hoping that would calm her. It only seemed to make her angrier.
“About my… About Father Patrick? Did your father know about him and my mother?”
“What about them?”
The frown she gave me was severe and misplaced.
I’d done a lot to deserve her anger but nothing in the past few days. If she was pissed at me, I wanted it to be for something I knew I did. “Bella, is this about me exaggerating what he and I…”
“What I’m asking you, Johnny Carelli, is if your father ever told you that he knew Patrick Nicola wasn’t my uncle? Did he tell you that Patrick and my mother were not brother and sister?” She walked to my desk, pulling out of my reach to grab the bottle. In all the time I’d known her, I’d never seen Sammy drink tequila. Wine, often, sometimes whiskey, but never tequila and never straight from the bottle.
“Sammy…”
“What I want to know—” she chugged, squeezing her features as she shook off the taste “—is if you knew that Patrick is my…father.”
“I…” My head swam, and I couldn’t do much more than watch her, trying to make sense of whatever nonsense had just left her mouth. “What?”
“Yeah…” Another swig, this one deeper.
It made sense now—her shock, her appearance, her loss of calm and control, and the immediate need to dull whatever pain must be riddling her. I couldn’t even imagine what that would feel like…being lied to by the one person you thought could never hurt you.
“Sammy…” She silenced me with a headshake, and I moved to her, still only able to stare, still too shocked to do anything but watch her and only because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I grabbed the tequila from her and took one long pull, wiping my mouth dry with the back of my hand.
“Come on,” I told her, grabbing her hand to bring her to the sofa next to my desk. “Tell me what happened.”
“He had a heart attack after we…” She went quiet, and I knew there was something she didn’t want to share. Something I wouldn’t push her to tell me. Sammy had always kept her secrets. That likely would never change. I respected that. Being who I was, in the family I was in, I understood the value of a secret, so I let it lie and just listened. “He got upset when I told him that I wouldn’t…cut you out of my life.” She seemed calmer now, but the tears began to surface. She didn’t lean on me when I moved closer to her side, and I figured she was still angry about the mess I’d made of Liam at her center.
“I went to the rectory to find a book for him… He likes Donne. And I found…” Sammy rubbed her face, wiping it dry quickly, as though she couldn’t stomach the tears and how quickly they came. “The letters between them. My mother and him. He was her priest, and she loved him. He loved her back and she wouldn’t let him leave the Church and I’m a bastard… All this time…” She stiffened before she stood up, pacing around my office. Whatever she kept to herself seemed to buzz around her head like an insect keeping her quiet but distracted, like she was trying to work out her own shit and didn’t need me to help her.
I couldn’t help myself. I just couldn’t see her like
that.
“Sammy, please…” I tried, stopping her with my hands on her arms. “You’re pissed off, and you have every right to be.” She let me smooth the hair off her face, but she wouldn’t look at me directly. “He lied to you and it hurts. But I think part of this is you being scared that he’s sick.”
“Of course I’m scared…” She closed her eyes as a new torrent of tears started down her face. Then, as if something had just occurred to her, Sammy smacked my arm, pushing me away from her. “Where the hell have you been all week? You just disappear on me? I needed you, and you just leave me alone?”
Scrubbing my face, I took a minute, not real sure how to play this. I didn’t want to hand her a line of bullshit and I didn’t want her mad, but she needed me. She needed someone, even if she’d never ask for help. “I…thought it would be better if I gave you some space. Liam Shane is…”
“I swear to God, Johnny Carelli, if you hand me some bullshit line about protecting me…”
“It’s not a line,” I said, my own anger mounting. “Besides, I heard you and Indra talking. You were miserable. I was making you miserable. I just want you to be happy.”
“You know what would make me happy?” She pushed me again, her cheeks flaming red. “If all the damn men in my life would give me credit enough to protect myself!”
She started to walk away, taking quick steps backward, but I held her, taking her arm, desperate not to let her leave. Not like this. Not if I could help her. “Please,” I told her, curling my arms around her shoulders, twisting my fingers in her hair. “I just want to make sure you’re safe and happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“That’s not your job, Johnny,” she said, her voice flat, still angry.
She let me dry her face, holding her still with my thumb against her cheek, my mouth on her forehead. “I want it to be. Still. Always, bella. That’s all I’ll ever want.”
Nailed Down: The Complete Series Page 63
