Priest

by Sierra Simone

  I had been about to kiss her again when she’d said that, so I settled for sliding a hand under the sheets and finding her breasts instead.

  “I like things to be clean.”

  “I think that’s admirable. You just don’t see it very often in men like you.”

  “Men like me? Priests?”

  “No,” she shifted toward me, smiling. “Young. Charming. Good-looking. You would have been a fantastic businessman, you know.”

  “My brothers are businessmen,” I said. “But I was never interested in that stuff; I never wanted money or success or power. I loved old things—old languages and old rituals. Old gods.”

  “I think I can picture you as a teenager,” she mused. “I bet you drove the girls crazy—hot, athletic, and bookish. And also really clean.”

  “No, I wasn’t always clean.” I debated for a moment about explaining, but we had just shared something so intimate, why would I hold this back from her? Just because it was depressing? Suddenly, I wanted to share. I wanted her to know every dark thing that I’d dragged around by myself, I wanted to show her all of my burdens and have her lift them from me with her clever mind and her elegant compassion.

  I moved my hand from her breast and glided my fingers under her ribs, tucking her close against me.

  “The day I found my sister,” I said, “was a Saturday in May. There was a strong thunderstorm going on, and even though it was daylight, it was dim all around, like nighttime. Lizzy had taken Sean’s car home from college—they were both at KU then—and so she was home for the weekend.

  “My parents had taken Aiden and Ryan out for lunch, and I thought they’d taken Lizzy too. I’d slept in late, and I woke up to an empty house.”

  Poppy didn’t say anything, but she nestled in closer, giving me courage.

  “There was a bright flash of light and a huge noise, like a transformer had blown, and the power cut out. I went for the flashlight, but the stupid batteries were dead, so I had to go out into the garage to get more. We lived in Brookside, in an older house, so the garage was detached. I had to walk through the rain, and then when I got in there, it was so dark at first, I didn’t see her…”

  She found my hand and squeezed.

  “I got the batteries, and it was only luck that the lightning flashed right as I was turning away, or I wouldn’t have seen her. She was suspended there, like she was frozen in time. In the movies, they’re always swaying, and there’s a creaking noise, but it was so still. Just. Still.

  “I remember running to her and tripping over a milk crate stuffed with cords, and then a tower of paint cans went rolling everywhere, and I picked myself up off the ground. There was a stepladder that she’d used—” I couldn’t say the words, couldn’t say the stepladder that she’d used to hang herself.

  I swallowed and went on.

  “I set it back upright and climbed it. It wasn’t until I’d gotten her down and had her in my arms that I realized my hands were dirty from when I’d tripped. Wet from the rain, and then they’d rubbed against the dirt and oil and grime, and I’d left smudges all over her face—”

  I took a deep breath, reliving the panic, the rushed 911 call, the choked conversation with my parents. They’d rushed home, and my parents and Aiden had run into the garage only steps ahead of the police, and no one had thought to keep Ryan out. He’d only been eight or nine when he saw his sister dead on the garage floor. And then the red and blue lights, and the paramedics, and the confirmation of what the cold skin and vacant eyes had already told us.

  Lizzy Bell—animal shelter volunteer, lover of Britney Spears, and all of the other thousands of things that made up a nineteen-year-old girl—was dead.

  For several moments, it was just the sound of us breathing, the slight rustle of the sheets as Poppy rubbed her foot against mine, and then the memories slowly bled back into the ground of my mind.

  “My mom kept trying to wipe the smudges away,” I said finally. “While we waited for the coroner’s men to come get the body. The whole time. But you can’t wipe off oil that easily, and so Lizzy had that smudge right up until we had to say goodbye. I hated that. I hated that so much. I made it my mission to scrub that fucking garage from top to bottom, and I did. And ever since then, I’ve kept everything in my life clean.”

  “Why?” Poppy asked, moving so she could prop herself on one elbow. “Does it make you feel better? Are you worried about something like that happening again?”

  “No, it’s not that. I don’t know why I still do it. It’s a compulsion, I guess.”

  “It sounds like penance.”

  I didn’t respond to this, turning it over in my head. When she phrased it like that, it made it seem like I hadn’t really let Lizzy go, that I was still grappling with her death, grappling with the guilt of sleeping in that day and not being awake to stop her. But it had been ten years and I wasn’t holding on to it that much, was I?

  “What was she like?” Poppy asked. “When she was alive?”

  I thought for a minute. “She was my older sister. So, sometimes she was mothering, sometimes she was mean. But when I was scared of the dark as a kid, she always let me sleep in her room, and she always covered for me when I broke curfew when I was older.”

  I traced the backlit lines of the blinds on the comforter with my gaze. “She really, really loved terrible pop music. She used to leave her music in Sean’s CD player when she borrowed his car, and he’d get so irritated when his friends would hop in the car and then some boy band or Britney Spears would start playing when he turned it on.”

  Poppy cocked her head. “Lizzy is the reason you listen to Britney Spears,” she guessed.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “It reminds me of her. She used to sing so loudly in her room that you could hear it anywhere in the house.”

  “I think I would have liked her.”

  I smiled. “I think you would have.” But then my smile slipped away. “The weekend of the funeral, Sean and I decided we were going to escape the relatives at the house for a few minutes and go out for Taco Bell. I’d wanted to drive, but we didn’t think—we didn’t remember that she’d been the last person to drive the car. Her music came on and Sean was…he was upset.”

  Upset wasn’t the right word for what my older brother had been. He’d just turned twenty-one and so he was mourning Lizzy’s death the Irish way, with too much whiskey and too little sleep. I’d turned the key in the ignition and the opening bars of “Oops, I Did It Again” came on, obnoxiously loud because Lizzy’d had the volume cranked all the way up, and we’d both frozen, staring at the radio as if a demon had just crawled out of the CD slot, and then he’d started yelling and swearing, kicking the dash so hard that the old plastic cracked, the whole car shaking with his fury and raw grief. They’d been the closest in age, Lizzy and Sean, and accordingly, they’d been best friends and bitter enemies. They’d shared cars and friends and teachers and finally a college, being only a year apart, and of all of us Bell siblings, her death ripped the biggest hole in his daily life.

  So he ripped a hole in his car that day, and then we went and got Taco Bell and we never spoke of it. We still haven’t.

  “I’ve never told anyone this story before,” I said. “It’s easier to talk about Lizzy like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like naked and snuggling. Just…with you. It’s all easier with you.”

  She rested her head on my shoulder. We laid there for a while, and just when I thought she’d fallen asleep, she said in the darkness, “Is Lizzy why you are afraid to let go with me?”

  “No,” I said, baffled. “Why would she be?”

  “It just seems like she’s the motivation behind a lot of what you do. And she was hurt, sexually. I wonder if that makes you afraid of doing that—of making what happened to her happen to someone else.”

  “I…I guess I never thought of it that way.” I found her hair again and played with it. “That might be why, I don’t know. It was in college tha
t I discovered how I liked it, but it was difficult. If I found a girl who was confident and smart and full of self-respect, then she didn’t want the sex to be rough. If I found a girl who liked it rough, then the reason she liked it rough was because of some emotional issue, and yes, whenever I saw a girl like that, I thought of Lizzy. How many signs we’d missed. And if I ever found out that a guy had taken advantage of her when she’d felt like that…”

  “It sounds like you had a lot of bad luck with women.”

  “Not necessarily. I had a few really great girlfriends in college. But it was easier to lock that part of me away, to have the healthy, confident girlfriends and the vanilla sex. It was safer.”

  “Then you became a priest.”

  “And that was much safer.”

  She sat up and looked at me, lines of shadow and streetlight across her face. “Well, you aren’t hurting me. I mean it. Look at me, Tyler.”

  I did.

  “I don’t like it rough because I’m emotionally damaged. I’ve been treated like a princess my entire life, coddled and praised and protected from every single thing that could ever harm me. Sterling was the first person who didn’t treat me like that.”

  Sterling.

  My jaw flexed. I didn’t like that he was so many of her firsts (which, I know, was totally unreasonable, but still. Maybe what I didn’t like was that she remembered so many of her firsts with him so intently.)

  “Part of it is probably that it’s taboo and therefore dirty, so it turns me on. But part of it is that it makes me feel unbreakable. Strong. Like the man I’m with respects me enough to see that. And I’m strong enough to have that experience in the bedroom and also have a perfectly healthy life outside of it.”

  “It’s too bad it didn’t work out with Sterling then.”

  Whoa, Tyler. Low blow. But I was agitated and jealous and feeling like I was being told off for something that wasn’t my fault.

  She stiffened. “It didn’t work out with Sterling because he can’t differentiate between the two, the bedroom and real life. He thinks because I liked the way he treated me during sex that was how I wanted to be treated all the time. That I only wanted to be a whore, when really, I wanted to be a whore for him only when we were alone. Which is why I walked away from him at the club.”

  Not before you let him fuck you.

  As if she could read my thoughts, she narrowed her eyes. “Are you jealous of him?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “You aren’t even supposed to be laying here with me,” she said. “We can’t hold hands in public, we can’t do anything together without it being a sin. You could lose your job and essentially be exiled from the one thing that gives your life meaning, and you’re worried about my ex-boyfriend?”

  “Okay, fine. Yes. Yes, I’m jealous of him. I’m jealous that he gets to come back here for you, and I’m jealous that he can do that. He can pursue you. And I can’t.”

  My words hung in the air for a long moment.

  She dropped her head down. “Tyler…what have we done? What are we doing?”

  She was there again. At that thing I didn’t want to think about.

  I reached for her and pulled her over me, laying down so that she knelt over my face.

  “We should talk about this,” she said, but then I flicked my tongue up and over her clit and she moaned, and I knew that I’d managed to freeze this moment again, push the conversation and all its decisions forward to another time.

  Jesus said that what is done in the darkness will be brought into the light. And when I woke up alone in my bed that morning, I knew exactly what He meant. Because everything that I had managed to push away last night crowded back, front and center, and not only did I have to face it, but I had to face it alone.

  Where was she? There was no note, no text, no coffee mug in the sink. She’d left without saying goodbye, and that twisted sharp and splintery in my chest.

  She’s a layperson, I reminded myself. That was what laypeople did—they met, they fucked, and they moved on. They didn’t fall in love at the drop of a fucking hat.

  Last night, she had been about to say it, though. She’d been ready to profess it to me…or had I imagined that? Maybe I had imagined that this spark between us was something mutual, something shared. Maybe I’d been a curiosity to her—the handsome priest—and now that she’d satisfied her curiosity, she was ready to move on.

  I had broken my vow for a woman who didn’t even care enough to stick around for breakfast.

  I shuffled into the bathroom, and when I looked up in the mirror, I saw two days worth of stubble and hair that had been tugged on and the unmistakable stain of a hickey on my collarbone.

  I hated the man in that reflection, and I almost punched the glass, wanting to hear it shatter, wanting to feel the bright pain of a thousand deep cuts. And then I sat down on the edge of the tub and gave in to the urge to cry.

  I was a good man. I had worked very hard to be a good man, devoted myself to living my life the way God wanted. I counseled, I comforted, I spent hours upon hours in contemplative prayer and meditation.

  I was a good man.

  So why had I done this?

  Poppy wasn’t at morning Mass and I didn’t hear from her all day, even though I walked by the window more often than necessary to double-check that her light blue Fiat was still in her driveway.

  It was.

  I checked my phone for a text about once every three minutes, typed several aborted messages, and then berated myself for doing so. I had just cried—like a baby—in my bathroom this morning. Stupid, echoing-off-the-tile, hiccuping cries. It was for the better if we had space from one another. I couldn’t keep my focus when I was around her. I couldn’t keep control. She made me feel like every sin and punishment was worth it just to hear one of her husky little laughs, and what I needed to do right now was triage this mess that I called my life and figure things out. Embracing this distance was prudence and sexual continence and the first scrap of wisdom I’d exhibited since I met her.

  My hurt pride over her leaving without saying goodbye had nothing to do with it.

  That night was the back-to-school party for the youth group, so I spent it eating pizza and playing Xbox One and trying to keep the boys from making total asses of themselves as they tried to impress the girls. After the last teen left the church, I cleaned the basement and went home, undressing and pulling on a pair of sweats. I stared out my bedroom window at Poppy’s driveway, lost in thought.

  The Church said everything about her and me was wrong. It was lust and fornication. It was lying. It was betrayal.

  But the Church also talked about the kind of love that transcended any and all boundaries, and the Bible was filled with stories of people who carried out God’s will and had very human desires. I mean, what even was sin? Who was being hurt by Poppy and me loving each other?

  It’s a matter of trust, I reminded myself. Because while I wrestled with the epistemological nature of sin like the trained theologian I was, I was also a shepherd and shepherds had to be practical. The issue was that I had come here to build up trust in the church, to undo another man’s wrongs. And no matter how consensual and otherwise unremarkable my relationship was with Poppy, it would still ruin that. My work, my goals, my memorial to Lizzy’s death.

  Lizzy.

  It had felt so good to talk about her. We didn’t talk about her much in my family. In fact, not at all, unless I was alone with my mother. And talking about it hadn’t taken the pain away, necessarily, but it had made it different. Easier. I moved from the window and went to the bedside table to get the rosary I liked to use, an array of silver and jade beads.

  It had been Lizzy’s.

  I didn’t pray, but I ran the beads through my fingers as I sat, thinking and fretting and eventually letting my mind collapse into the worn runnels of worry and guilt.

  Into the new thorny pain of her absence and all the fears that inspired. All of this to wrestle with, and the thing
that haunted me most as I fell asleep was the possibility that Poppy was done with me.

  The next day was the pancake breakfast, and Poppy did show up for that, although she avoided me, talking only to Millie and leaving as soon as the last guest walked up the stairs.

  “She came to the Come and See meeting yesterday afternoon,” Millie said. “She seems quite interested in joining. I explained to her how the catechism would work, and I think she’s amenable, although she did ask if she could do it at another church.” Millie looked hard at me. “You two didn’t have a falling out, did you?”

  “No,” I mumbled. “Everything is fine.”

  “So that’s why the both of you looked like you were in physical pain this morning?”

  I winced. Millie was sharper than most people, but I didn’t want anyone to notice the dynamic between Poppy and me, whether it be strained or friendly. We’d only had sex once, and already it was seeping through every possible crack in the dam.

  “St. Margaret’s needs her, Father Bell. I certainly hope you don’t plan on fucking that up.”

  “Millie!”

  “What?” she asked, picking up her quilted handbag. “An old lady can’t swear? Catch up with the times, Father.”

  And she left.

  She was right. St. Margaret’s needed Poppy. And I needed Poppy. And St. Margaret’s needed me, and Poppy needed me. Too many people needed too many other people, and there was no way I could keep all the balls in the air; I would drop one and there would be catastrophic consequences.

  It wasn’t until Sunday evening that my angst got the better of me and I sent her a text.

  Thinking of you.

  My chest and throat felt like they’d been stitched together, and I nearly jumped to my feet when I saw the three rotating dots on the screen, meaning that she was typing a response. And then they went away.

  I let out a long breath. She’d stopped typing. She wasn’t going to answer.

  I didn’t even want to think about what that meant. So instead I treated myself to a warmed-up Millie casserole, three episodes of House of Cards and a healthy slug of Scotch.