Father Patrick plunked a few cubes into the glass and poured the liquor halfway up. He swirled it and handed it to Maureen.
She tried not to frown at the stingy pour and took a small sip. “Smooth,” she said, giving the priest her best smile.
Father Patrick fixed himself his own drink, a gin martini by the looks of it, and set it on the table next to one of the plates.
“I have to excuse myself for a few minutes,” he said to her. “The main course is ready to go whenever, but I decided I wanted to make some lumpia for an appetizer, and it’s best served hot, right out of the oil. I’ll be back shortly, and then we can eat. In the meantime, make yourself at home.” The old man retreated out of the den and around the corner.
Maureen could hear him humming in the kitchen, along with the periodic sound of hissing and sizzling. She resisted the urge to walk over to the door and watch him work. She’d never heard of lumpia before and wondered what it was and if she would even like it. Instead, however, she grabbed a piece of bread from the table, filled her glass up, went over to the bookshelf, and began to stare at the titles, wondering what kind of books a Catholic priest kept in his home. She expected nothing but religious and Christian titles to fill the shelves. There were some of these, of course, gathered together on the very corner of the top shelf, almost out of eyeline. The more accessible shelves were filled with history books and even some works of fiction. Maureen traced her finger over the titles. A Comprehensive History of French Indochina. 1968: The Year the War Was Lost. Kamikaze: The Divine Wind. The Tao Te Ching. Miyamoto Musashi and the Book of Five Rings. The Art of Happiness.
It struck Maureen as an oddity that a man like Father Patrick had shelves full of books on Eastern thought and history. The Catholic religion, as she understood it, was supposed to look down on things like that. But then again, she could see from the start that the priest was in no way like most of the other men of God that she had known. It was probably for that reason that she had even agreed to this dinner with him. She had a feeling in the pit of her stomach that the evening would eventually turn into another one of his attempted therapy sessions.
She was staring at the section of the bookshelf that contained Father Patrick’s fantasy novel collection, many written by novelists that she actually recognized, when the priest returned, carrying a platter of golden brown rolls. They looked to Maureen like the egg rolls that she was familiar with from Chinese takeout, only thinner. The smell of their fried shells filled her nose.
Father Patrick set the platter on the table and motioned to Maureen that she should sit down. She eased herself into the leather chair opposite him. He smiled, folded his hands, and closed his eyes. Maureen placed her hands in her lap and tried to be polite. She kept her eyes on the priest as he intoned the blessing.
“We thank you, O merciful Father, for the gifts of food we are about to receive. May it nourish our bodies as your Holy Spirit nourishes our souls. In the name of Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.”
Father Patrick crossed himself and opened his eyes. He picked up the platter of food and held it out to Maureen. She gingerly picked one of the rolls from the top of the pile. The priest nodded and kept the food in front of her, encouraging her to take more. Maureen obliged and took three more. Father Patrick placed three rolls on his own plate, put down the platter, and picked up his martini. He held it out to her for a toast.
“I want to thank you for having dinner with me,” he said. “I know it’s something that’s a bit outside your comfort zone.”
Maureen raised her glass in a toast, took a sip, and took a bite of one of the rolls. It really did taste like an egg roll, only the vegetables inside were crisper, the meat—whatever it was—was juicier, and the shell was thinner. She took another big bite and looked up at Father Patrick. The old man was looking at her with an amused look on his face, holding a knife and fork, having cut his own roll into bite-size pieces. Maureen covered her mouth in embarrassment, but the priest let out a short chuckle, put down his silverware, picked up a roll, and stuffed it into his mouth.
“I appreciate the trouble you went through to make dinner,” she said, swallowing her food, “but I’m not sure where you’re expecting this night to end.”
“Oh, my dear,” he replied, shaking his head, “I’ve been celibate for nearly thirty years.”
“Have you ever had sex?”
“I wasn’t always a priest.”
“So that’s a yes?”
“That’s a yes,” he said and took another sip of his drink, casting his eyes to the side.
“I hope she was special,” she said, trying to cut the tension.
“Oh, she was,” he said warmly. “But that was another life.”
Maureen knew she shouldn’t pry any further. She reached out, grabbed two more rolls from the platter, and took a bite of one before setting them on her plate.
“So what were you before?” she asked, trying to appear casual.
She swallowed her food and took another sip of her drink. The scotch was getting low in her glass again, and she began to wonder how appropriate it might be to get up and pour herself more so early in the meal. There was no need, it turned out. Father Patrick seemed to sense her thoughts. He wiped his face with his napkin and went to the drink cart, retrieved the decanter of scotch, and filled her glass. Maureen couldn’t tell if he was being polite or didn’t want to answer her question.
“You said you weren’t always a priest,” she said, deciding that she really wanted to know, “so what were you before?”
Father Patrick sat down in his chair and sighed. “To tell the whole story would take a very long time, so I’ll give you the short version. After high school, I was in the military, serving my country in Vietnam. It was those experiences that woke me to the evils of this world and made me decide that becoming a priest and serving God and my fellow man would be my life’s work from then on.”
Maureen hadn’t expected that to be the answer. She had pictured him as a college-educated man, maybe the president of a fraternity at a high-end university. There was little about the old priest that said soldier to her eyes. Father Patrick took a sip of his drink, shook off whatever malaise had come over him, and smiled.
“I think I’ll grab the main course,” he said. “Please excuse me for a moment.”
He left the room and returned shortly with another tray with two steaming bowls filled with a fragrant broth, noodles, an assortment of vegetables, and what looked to Maureen like beef. Father Patrick set one bowl in front of her, along with a large ceramic spoon and a pair of chopsticks. He sat back down in his own place and gestured to her.
“Please eat,” he said.
“What is it?” Maureen eyed the dish.
“Ah, one of my favorite dishes. It’s called pho. A Vietnamese noodle soup. Very good, very comforting.”
Father Patrick picked up his chopsticks and deftly scooped some of the noodles into his mouth, slurping them down. Then he picked up the ceramic spoon, filled it with the broth, and sipped it, smiling with contentment as he swallowed. Maureen tried to copy him, but she had never been good with chopsticks, and so she abandoned them for her fork. The dish was tasty, just as the priest had promised, with hints of ginger and garlic. They sat in relative silence as they finished the meal.
As Father Patrick cleared away the dishes, Maureen sat at the table, staring into her glass. She wasn’t keeping count of her drinks, but she was feeling warm in the face. She promised herself that she would keep on her guard, though, being determined that no amount of drink would allow her to reveal anything to the priest that she didn’t want to.
“Can I pour you another scotch?” Father Patrick’s voice startled her. He was standing at her elbow, holding the half empty decanter and a glass of scotch and ice of his own.
“I don’t want you to think I’m a drunk,” she said, though she knew she could go
on drinking all night. Manny wouldn’t come get her until she called, though, knowing him, he was probably sitting in a parking lot around the corner.
“I don’t begrudge anyone their vices,” he said, settling down opposite her. “I believe that we manifest our broken nature into certain behaviors. It’s only natural. Facing the truth about oneself is exceedingly difficult without a crutch. No matter who you are.”
At this, he raised his glass to her and took a sip. Maureen thought for a moment he looked as broken as she felt all the time. She shrugged her shoulders and decided that if the remainder of the night was going to be spent wallowing in a bottle, she wasn’t going to let him outdo her.
“Well then, fill me up,” she said, sliding her glass to the middle of the table.
He did, and they sat in uncomfortable silence for another few moments. Finally, Father Patrick leaned back in his chair and looked intently at her. “Maureen, I’m aware that you know that my reason for asking you to have dinner with me is to learn more of your story. I want you to know that it’s okay if you don’t want to speak to me about these things, but I believe it will help you. And that’s all I want to do, I promise you.”
“I believe you. I just don’t know if I agree that it will help me. What more do you want to know? You already know me better than anyone else. Except for—”
“Detective Benitez,” he finished for her. “Yes, he seems like a good man. Maybe too good?”
“I can’t give him what he really needs,” she said, echoing the thought that she had repeated to herself for days. She pushed the thought away and took an aggressive sip of scotch. “Can we just talk about something else?”
“As you wish,” Father Patrick said. “Tell me something. You seem to have a certain discomfort with religion and God in general. Your abilities to see, at least to me, seem to suggest something that should be embraced as a gift from the Lord. Why don’t you?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“I really do,” he said.
Maureen pressed her lips together hard and debated about how much to tell him.
“You can trust me,” he prodded.
“Fine,” she sighed and took a long sip of her drink. “It started when my brother died. I was eight, he was five. He disappeared from our house one afternoon. My mother went insane, looked everywhere for him. The cops were in and out of the house for days. No one was coming up with anything.
“A few nights later, I had the first dream that I can remember. I was driving along the road, and I stopped at a mile marker. I can still see it as clearly today as I did then. Highway 3, mile marker twenty-five. Facing north. I went to the back of the car, opened the trunk, and pulled Braden out. His body was limp and cold, and I was carrying him from the side of the road into the woods. The whole time, even though I was young, I could tell it wasn’t really me. The hands were covered with gloves, but I could tell they were too big to be mine. And Braden felt light in my arms. I knew I could never carry him like that. The arms dug out a little grave off a pine-needle-covered path, put Braden in, and covered him with leaves. It was fall so there were plenty of leaves to hide the body.
“I’m told that I sleepwalked downstairs that night. I remember waking up standing next to my mother in the living room and trying to tell her where Braden was. She told me that I just had a nightmare, that it meant nothing, and that I should go back to bed. I knew from school that to talk to the police you needed to dial 9-1-1. So I snuck into my mother’s room to use her phone, and I called them and told them about the mile marker, and that Braden was buried off a path in the leaves.
“I know they found him quickly the next day, and they took my mother out to the crime scene. I was left behind. I found out soon enough that it was because I was to talk to an FBI psychologist. I didn’t know any better at the time, so I told her everything that I had dreamed—seeing the mile marker, the arms and hands carrying Braden into the woods, everything. I really thought that they believed me, but a few days later, I was sent to the hospital with a bunch of other children. Apparently, they concluded that I had an emotional instability or something like that, and they said they wanted to remove me from the environment that caused me to make up these stories. What they were really doing was trying to observe me to find out if I had something to do with killing my brother.
“While I was there, I had more dreams. As I look back on it now, I’m fairly certain that one of the orderlies, I still don’t know which one, was a kid fucker. The sicko would sneak into the other kids’ rooms at night and touch them under the sheets. And I watched it all through his eyes. I tried to tell someone in charge, but they just said I was making it up for attention and did nothing. When we were in the common room, I would go find the kids that I had seen him abusing and tell them that I knew what was happening. One girl denied it, another boy yelled at me for telling, and we got into a fistfight and were put in isolation for a day. I had weekly therapy sessions with a shrink. They told me that if I accepted that I wasn’t seeing the things I was, that the dreams didn’t mean what I said they did, and that I was lying about the things I was saying, then I could go home. To this day, I don’t know why I stuck so hard to my guns. Childish willfulness, I suppose.”
Maureen paused for a sip of her drink and looked up at Father Patrick. The old man hadn’t taken his eyes off her and sat as still as a statue.
“I was there for about three weeks before my mother bothered to come and see me. I hadn’t even been allowed out to go to my brother’s funeral. When she came to the hospital, she was accompanied by a very stern priest, and I was told that I would be going away to a special school where they would help purge me of the evil that was inside me. I was to stay there until I was clean. And that’s how I ended up in Maine at Saint Dymphna’s.”
At the mention of the name of the school, the priest blinked.
“You’ve heard the name,” Maureen said and Father Patrick nodded. “Then you know its reputation.”
“I do,” he confirmed.
Maureen polished off the rest of her scotch and filled her glass again before continuing. “All that stuff that came out in the press after it was closed down, it’s not even a tenth of the story. The first thing they make you do when you get there is strip naked, put on a cotton robe, and kneel in this little chapel, praying to their statue of the patron saint. You have to stay like that for twelve hours, and if they come in and find you’ve fallen asleep or gotten up or done anything rather than kneel, they hit you with a rod and make you start over. I had to start over twice and was in there for something like twenty hours when it was all said and done. After you finish with that, you get sent to an isolation room with nothing in it but a picture of Jesus for you to reflect over. You have to stay in there for two days with no food, only holy water. They call it ‘the purification period’ and it was supposed to make you receptive to their interventions.
“I was one of the youngest there when I arrived. In all, I would say there were around one hundred girls at any one time. The older girls who had been there longer and were indoctrinated into the way things were done formed a kind of self-policing coalition and sometimes even helped the priests and nuns in dispensing punishments. Most of the girls paired up or collected in little groups to look after each other. The exceptions were the girls who had devils or demons in them like I did. There were only a few of us and, because of the severity of our conditions, we were the outcasts. Our education was also more specialized. We were placed on a regimen of regular exorcisms along with the usual Catholic education curriculum. I lost count of how many exorcisms I went through over the years, but it’s probably somewhere in the mid-hundreds. The methods they used escalated until I’d grown big enough to be whipped.”
Maureen stood up and turned around, lifting up her shirt a little so that the priest could see what she meant. “Ugly, isn’t it?” she said, hoping he’d be shocked.
“Maureen,” she heard him say gently, “I have to look very hard to see the physical marks on your body. But I do mourn for the toll they’ve taken on your soul. The people who did this were not working in the name of God. Please continue, if you can.”
Maureen felt a tear begin to form in her eye as she listened to his words. She angrily brushed it aside and yanked her shirt back down, turning back and flopping down in her chair.
“I still had the dreams there,” she went on. “You have no idea how true what you just said is. At least one of the priests was a predator. The school was like a hunting ground for him. For years, in my sleep, I was forced to watch him rape countless girls. I tried to do something about it once when I was fourteen. There was a sixteen-year-old girl named Stephanie who had been sent there by her parents because she’d gotten pregnant. She was maybe four or five months along when she got there. Despite their willingness to beat the shit out of people like me, the priests and nuns wouldn’t do anything to hurt a pregnant girl physically. They’d emotionally abuse her, for sure, telling her that she was a whore and that she should repent. They were going to make her go through with childbirth—with no doctors—and if the baby lived, it was going to be taken and she would never see it again.
“Stephanie was the first person in five years who I had some sort of friendship with. She was really scared and confused as to why she was there, and I guess I just felt like I needed to protect her. I couldn’t, though. She had a daughter, and after she’d recovered from childbirth, one of the priests started to visit her at night. I had to look through his eyes as she was raped and told that this was what whores deserved. She fought back at first, but after a couple of times, she began to simply accept it. She’d repeat the things he’d say, that this was how whores were baptized, and when he came on her face, she’d thank him for the blessing. It made me sick to watch her shrink and get brainwashed like that, so I went to the headmaster and told him what my dreams were telling me. He summoned the other three priests to his office, and the four of them began to berate me for making false accusations. They gave me a chance to take back what I had said and admit that I was lying. I refused. They broke both of my big toes before I told them what they wanted to hear. After they had finished with me, one of them, Father Michael, leaned over and told me that I was fortunate that a good fucking wasn’t the method necessary to cure me.
Unholy Shepherd Page 21
