by Lacey Silks
“God, I hope so.” Lola’s eyes opened wide. “I will gladly pee my pants to see this.”
“Don’t say that. What he’s doing is dangerous and brave.”
But somehow the word ‘danger’ and Father Cameron belonged together. He double-checked his weight on the branch where he was standing and focused in on the one above. I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t stop staring.
No, no, no.
With a strong push off the supporting branch, he leapt forward and up, extending his arms toward the horizontal limb above before propelling himself onto an even higher branch. At that moment, even I was convinced that he was Spiderman.
I held my breath as he made the transition. Two more jumps and Father Cameron was beside Matt, slowly guiding him down, and I was sure that I held my breath for the full ten minutes it took them to reach the bottom. When both pairs of feet touched the ground, everyone applauded, and I ran to Matt to see whether he was hurt.
“Thank you, Father Cameron,” Matt said bashfully.
“Now, why would you climb up there? That could have ended much worse.”
“I’m sorry. I just wanted to be closer to God.”
“I think you need to have a chat with the kids to explain the rules of spirituality,” I whispered from the side.
“Thank you for helping me, Father Cameron. You’re a real hero.” Matt’s voice was still trembling, and his body began shaking from shock. Father Cameron picked up his cassock and draped it over his shoulders. He was much more than a hero. He was an angel.
“Why don’t you go to your cabin and rest? I’ll come see how you’re doing in a moment. Peter, would you help him out?”
“Yes, Father.”
The boys left, and Father Cameron looked up to the crowd of awaiting teenagers. “No more tree climbing for anyone. If you want to be closer to God, the chapel is right there,” he pointed. “And it’s empty.”
“Father John’s there,” I whispered from the side, though I suspected that wasn’t what Father Cameron meant.
With their heads bowed, a couple of seniors slowly walked toward the wooden structure and a few others followed.
“Now I really need to pee.” Lola turned to the outer field.
“Why are you going to the outhouse?” I asked.
“I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we have a working bathroom,” she yelled out, as she tried running backwards while holding her thighs locked. “The bad news is that it’s out there, at least until they fix the washrooms inside.”
Great!
I’d been in worse situations. If I could spend an evening at the Bistro with Lola and still come out alive, then I could surely survive an outhouse. Wanting to check on Father Cameron before he disappeared as well, I turned around quickly and bumped into his hard chest.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
We both laughed.
“Thank you, Father. I’m not sure what we would have done if you hadn’t been here.”
“I… I guess I just acted on instinct.”
A Spiderman instinct? Those biceps underneath his black shirt looked swollen. Black definitely suited him best.
“Well, wherever you got that strength to climb a hundred-foot tree, thank you. God truly does look out for the faithful.”
“God looks out for all of us, Kate.”
“Of course.” A faint red line crossed his cheek diagonally from the lip to his ear. It couldn’t have been deep, as it wasn’t bleeding. “You cut yourself, Father.”
I automatically reached out with my hand, wanting to touch the wound on his cheek, but stopped myself.
He drew his hand over the cheek, his smudged fingers pulling over the cut. “It’ll heal.”
“Well, now it could get infected. I have antibiotic ointment in my cabin.” I started walking, hoping he’d follow. He walked behind me massaging his left shoulder.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“I grabbed that last branch with my right hand first.”
It never ceased to amaze me how our conversation could so quickly switch from a formal one to one between old friends.
“I think I pulled a muscle. It’ll be fine.” He shook off the pain and caught up to me.
“Your father would have been proud of what you did today.”
“Thank you. But I think he would have been more proud if I could have prevented Matt, or anyone else for that matter, from climbing that tree in the first place.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself. Teenagers can be unpredictable.”
So can horny women.
Feeling sudden guilt, I bit my lip and pushed the door to my cabin open.
There goes my confession.
I’d just have to try harder to remind myself that Father Cameron was out of the question, but the thought of harder, all I could picture were his hard abs, twisting and tightening as he climbed up that spruce.
Thankfully he was behind me and couldn’t see my face.
Behind me.
Now that conjured a whole new image.
Stop it!
I went to my suitcase to get the ointment.
“I think we all have an ounce of unpredictability inside of us, don’t you?” He gave me a crooked smile, and it took all the strength I had not to swoon in front of him.
He’s a priest.
Why did he make it difficult to look at him as such? It was those tight shirts: black or white, the color was beginning to make less difference to me.
I pointed to the chair and he sat down. I pulled out an antiseptic wipe from a sealed pouch and gently cleaned around the wound on his cheek. I squeezed a drop of the ointment on my finger and drew it across the reddened mark. He sat completely still, without breathing or blinking, until I was done. Only then did he let out a long exhalation.
Our gazes connected, and it seemed like too long before I broke the stare.
I gasped on the inside, wondering what he was thinking. Was he wondering the same? And if so, why? This was wrong. I was crossing that line again, and while it felt good for a moment, afterward it felt wrong. But how could something that felt wrong also feel so right?
Before I pulled away he grasped my wrist with his hand. The hold was strong, too strong for him use as a priest; if I was reading him correctly, right now he was holding me like a man.
“Kate, I need to talk to you.” I waited, not wanting him to let go of my hand.
He didn’t.
“Sometimes when you work close with someone, you develop a relationship that can be somewhat confusing.”
Oh, boy.
I stepped uncomfortably from one foot to the other, and he gently let go of my hand. I didn’t like that part. I didn’t like not touching him.
But he’s a priest. You’re not supposed to like him touching you.
Desperate to pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about, I asked, “Was one of the kids you spoke to confused?”
“Kate, I’m talking about our friendship. I don’t want you to mistake it for something more.”
“Of course not.”
“Because that could easily happen, and I understand that, but I’m—”
“A priest. A very well-respected priest. I’m so sorry if I did anything to make you feel uncomfortable.”
If my mother knew the hole I had just dug and fallen into, she’d be ashamed of me.
“Believe me, I’m comfortable.”
I stilled. It was times like these, when he spoke as a man and smiled with that extra lift on his right cheek, when I became more confused. Despite all the alarms going off in my head, I wanted the challenge. I wanted to prove to myself that I was a good detective, and that was all. Whether I found Jack or not, I wanted to do so with pride. I wouldn’t cross that line, no matter how much my body wanted to.
“Is the shoulder still bothering you, Father?” I asked.
“Yes, I have a feeling I’ll need to take something for inflammation.” He mad
e a circular movement with the shoulder and winced in pain.
“Here, let me look at it.” I leaned forward and slowly pressed my fingers from the bridge down to the collar bone at the front, then up again to the top and slowly toward the back muscles. They felt firm and nice. I took my time pushing through the tissue, gently massaging the bundles of acidic areas, feeling the change underneath my fingertips.
“There,” I pressed gently around the swelling over his shoulder. “You should ice it.”
“That feels… good.”
I smiled. “Thanks. I hurt mine once in training, and the masseuse did this for me every second morning. I was healed in a week.”
“Training?” he asked.
“For work. And my father was into fitness”
“Well, that’s definitely something I’m grateful for, then. Your touch, I mean, your expert hands…”
Father Cameron’s eyes opened wide as he looked at me in that special way again. He gently removed my hand and stood up.
So here I was, once again testing the boundaries of our friendship and my own faith. Why was I so drawn to him, and why was it so difficult to stay away? Sometimes I found myself fantasizing what it’d be like if he wasn’t a priest, just a very handsome man who took my breath away, the way he had now. Maybe that was my first problem. I had to stop pretending that he wasn’t a priest.
He’s a priest.
“Ahm, if you have ibuprofen, you should take some. And if you don’t, then I have some. I usually come prepared to outings like these.”
What was happening to me? Why was I stuttering?
He gave me one last body-trembling and panty-melting smile before turning toward the door. I met his gaze as he pulled on the doorknob. “Thank you, Kate. For everything.”
I nodded.
As soon as the door closed I pressed my hand to my chest and held down my pounding heart.
This was bad. Very bad. Maybe Father Cameron had the right idea when it seemed like he started avoiding me last month. Maybe our friendship was truly testing its bounds. Perhaps my faith was crumbling. And if I had no faith, how could I hope for tomorrow?
Chapter 11
Cameron
The afternoon of tree climbing ended with Matt’s body in one piece. His mother would have died if anything had happened to the boy. I couldn’t count how many times I pictured him falling off that tree, breaking every branch on his way down until he hit the ground. Ascending that spruce had mentally drained me. Feeling a need to stretch my muscles, I asked Father John whether he wanted to take a walk through the woods. The kids were in their cabins, reflecting, which meant that we had an hour or so of free time.
“Can I ask you a personal question, Father?”
“Of course.”
“How did you do it? How did you fight thoughts about women? How did you fulfill your celibacy promise?”
Because honestly, I never thought keeping my hands to myself would be this difficult.
“Through prayer.”
“That’s it? Prayer is my answer?”
“Prayer should be the answer to most of your questions. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t make mistakes. I try to think of those moments as little tests. Sometimes we fail, but more times than not, we pass. With time, you will learn to find that ultimate fulfillment through prayer as well. It may not be today or tomorrow, but it will happen.”
“So, thinking about a woman is not necessarily wrong?”
He laughed as if I’d told him a joke.
“You’re not the first and not the last priest to have sinful thoughts about a woman. God created you as a man first, before you made the choice to serve Him, and to serve Him well means time and patience. It doesn’t mean a mistake-free life. It means learning from your mistakes to serve Him even better.”
“Yes, but how do I stop this need I feel inside me? It’s like she’s compelling me.”
“Believe me, son. I understand what it feels like to let go of a woman. But if we can fight evil through prayer, you can fight your desires though prayer as well. Remember, it’s no one’s choice but yours.”
I stopped and waited for him to turn and face me. I wasn’t sure that he was grasping the weight of the situation. If I let her do what I knew she wanted to do to me, and told her the feeling was reciprocated, I could place her in danger. She could fall prey to the Cortez brothers, because if they found me, anyone connected would also be in danger.
“Father, I want her to sin with me. I want her to want me the way I want her. It pleases me when I see her weakness, but at the same time, it angers me. I don’t want to be the reason her faith is tested.”
“This girl, is she a devout Catholic?”
“Yes, she is.”
“Those are the worst.” He chuckled and resumed our slow walk.
What? Did he actually think this conversation was funny? Because I didn’t.
“Catholic women are our biggest temptation.” He raised his finger as if he were thinking back to a specific time in the past. “Like I said before, you’re not the first and not the last. The question is, what do you do about it when prayer doesn’t seem like it’s enough?”
Yes, that’s what I want to know!
It was better to be direct, wasn’t it? It was better to ask him the question that had been on my mind since Kate told me about the photograph in his office. I’d seen it myself, and the look on their faces was one of love. Not only that, but I was beginning to realize that the possibility of Kate’s mother being closer to Father John was great.
“What did you do, Father?”
He stopped and then closed his eyes for a moment. Father John took a deep breath in before releasing it and resuming his walk. I followed his lead.
“You have a keen listening ear, Cameron. What did I do? What didn’t I do?” he snickered.
Oh, boy!
“Joanna was a beautiful woman. Her parents died in a house fire outside of town, but she remained very close to God. Her strength intrigued me. She had the ability to push me closer to God and closer to herself at the same time. For a while there, I believed that God had sent her to me and only me. I wanted her to sin with me just so that I could take a little trip to hell only to feel the high of God’s forgiveness on my way back to heaven, even when I knew that forgiveness could take the rest of my lifetime. Now that’s a true temptress.”
I could have sworn that Father John was reciting a passage from someone else’s life. It couldn’t be his. His life seemed so frail and tepid, but the lines on his forehead and wrinkles underneath his eyes were evidence of experience I had yet to reach.
“So, what happened?” I asked.
“I sinned. I confessed. I repented and was forgiven. And I will continue with my penance until the day I die, because I’ll never be perfect. It’s a circle every human endures, including a priest.”
Wow, I thought my father was deep, but this man had my mind spinning. He and my father would have gotten along well.
“What about Joanna?”
“Joanna – that sounds odd. I called her Anna, short for Joanna, but never Joanna. She got hurt and got into trouble with some people in town. Bad and crazy people. She feared for her life, so she had to leave. I stayed behind to cover her tracks. I stayed behind to bury our son. I had to ensure that they didn’t follow her, but two months later I was told she had died on her journey.”
“You had a son?”
He nodded. “He was dragged by a bull halfway across town. After that year, Pace never celebrated the Assumption Fiesta again, at least not in the same way, and the bull running was banned. Over the years, the fiesta became what we call our summer pot luck.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Years heal. Maybe not completely, but enough to survive. But Anna didn’t die.”
“What?”
Wait – of course she didn’t, because Kate’s mother had Kate.
“She didn’t die, but by the time I realized she was still alive, I was already
a priest. I chose the vocation as soon as I found out she was gone. There was nothing else left for me, and the only way I could ever find my fulfillment and make sense of my life was to serve God. I thought I’d lost a wife-to-be and a son.”
“And Anna? How did you find out that she lived?”
“She secretly returned to town, but it was already too late for the two of us. The Cortez brothers caught her. They caught both of us. Benjamin Cortez told me that he lied about Anna’s death as vengeance. He even went as far as stealing the postcards she’d sent me, in order to keep us apart.”
Cortez and Kate were connected; just as I’d suspected.
“Why vengeance?”
“Because he accused Anna of keeping his son away from him.”
“What? She had another son?”
“No, we only had Mikey. Benjamin was crazy. They were all crazy. I could never understand what good came from the torment they put us through.”
“What happened next?”
“We tried to escape, and Benjamin Cortez fell to his death down a canyon. Benjamin’s skeletal remains were collected years later, and his family went into hiding. My life was spared for his brother’s that day, but my hot-tempered Anna managed to anger the Cortez family while ensuring the safety of our little town. She might have been my temptress, but I think in a way she was God’s worker.”
“What did she do?”
“I remember the year clearly. It was 1984. Anna made sure the Cortez brothers had a big target on their backs. The rumors say it was a fifty-million-dollar target, and that was thirty-some years ago.”
Was he telling me that Kate’s mother knew what had happened to the money? Did Kate know? Had she played me? No, that wasn’t possible. Maybe that’s why her mother had mentioned Pace to her daughter. Did Jack from Pace know about the money? Had he hidden it? Was that why she was looking for him?
“You never saw her again after she left?”
“No, never. But I always prayed and hoped that she’d be happy. As far as I know, she’s led a happy and fulfilling life. Pace gave her the exact start she needed. It gave her the focus and inner peace she sought. It made her strong and determined to survive. I’ve prayed every day for her safety and a good life.”
