Midnight Mass (Priest #2)

by Sierra Simone

I wrote by hand, which was something I’d never done in my adult life, writing her my first letter on some Post-It notes I’d found in my laptop bag. I delivered it the next day on my way to Mass, sliding the paper-clipped Post-Its through the mail slot in the door. Her little Fiat was nowhere in sight and I hoped that meant she’d be at Mass, that I could at least fill some of this void with a glimpse of her face.

  She wasn’t there. Poppy never missed Mass unless she was traveling or sick, but that day, she was absent, and I knew it was because of me. Because she was avoiding me.

  I wrote her another letter during the service, this time on the back of the church newsletter. I delivered that and I went to the library to work the day away and lose my mind in ancient theology. (It didn’t work. I couldn’t stop thinking about Poppy and our fight.)

  I fell into the kind of miserable routine that stretches hours into years. At night, I lay between thin, foreign sheets and stared at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to come. During the day, I sunk myself into the final pages of my dissertation, trying to push down the oppressive torment of missing my wife.

  We’d never fought like this, never, not in three years of marriage, and I had no idea how to fix things. I had no idea how to prove to her that I would be better, that I would be worthy, because I was still reeling from it all. Poppy had seemed so understanding, so patiently calm, all this year, but had it been a front all along? Had she been gathering this pain and anger under the surface for the last twelve months? Or had something changed just in the last week to ignite her pain?

  And how could I possibly ever find out if she wouldn’t speak to me?

  On Tuesday, I went to the soup kitchen and worked silently, a zombie. And I was a zombie on the phone with Millie on the way back home, which was fine, because she was quiet too. She didn’t even complain about the food at Pinewoods Village.

  “How is Poppy?” she finally asked after an exceptionally long pause.

  There was no point in lying. “We’re…we’re having some difficulties.”

  “Are those difficulties your fault or hers?”

  Snow flurried around me as I parked the truck in the faculty lot and trudged to my office. “Mostly mine.”

  Millie didn’t say anything for a moment, but she did let out a few of those strange coughs that made me cringe to listen to.

  “Millie, have you told a nurse that you haven’t been feeling well?”

  “They know,” she said dismissively. “It’s just a cold. Everyone gets them this time of year. Besides, I’m so sick of having them fuss over me. I miss being in my own home.”

  “I know you do.”

  More silence. A cough. “Sometimes I think it’s not worth it to be here.”

  Her words sank through the murk of my depression and began pinging soft alarms in my mind. I stopped at the door to the building, my hand on the handle, snow drifting around me. “Millie, what do you mean by that?”

  “Oh nothing. Just an old lady’s rambles, that’s all. I’ll keep you and Poppy in my prayers this week.”

  “Okay, Millie. And I’ll be praying for your cough.”

  After we exchanged goodbyes, I stepped inside the building and typed out a couple quick texts to Mom and Jordan, asking if they could check on Millie this week. Mom always did, but I wanted Jordan there too. He could tell right away if someone was soul-sick, and that’s what I worried about with Millie. More than a cough, soul-sickness could kill someone like her, someone who needed a sense of purpose and independence to live.

  Both Jordan and Mom responded with assurances that they would check on my old friend, and so I headed to my office to meet with a couple students and then I spent the rest of my day in the library, writing Poppy letters that she would probably never read and plodding through the last several thousand words of my conclusion.

  And so the week went on, each day worse than the last, each day that Poppy didn’t call or text like a fresh version of hell, and I became a shadow of myself. Not eating, barely sleeping, my focus so intent on Poppy and what she was doing at each moment that I couldn’t attend to anything else.

  It was a miracle that I made it to my dissertation.

  It was an even bigger miracle that I could force myself to speak words, sentences, coherent thoughts. I was glad Professor Morales was on maternity leave, because I didn’t want her to see me like this. Fucked up and clumsy, and lackluster in my defense, even as the board members raved about my conclusion and how practical and visionary it was. Morales would have been proud of that part, at least.

  And then the biggest miracle of all: I made it through. As Jesus said, it is finished, and so I walked out of that building with my doctorate in theology, four years of my life finally sealed shut and packed away. I was supposed to be happy now, I knew. I was supposed to be giddy with my accomplishment and the chance for a new phase in my life.

  But I was also supposed to be celebrating with my wife right now. I was supposed to be kissing her, holding her, whispering wild promises in her ear.

  Instead, I ate a greasy dinner alone in a mostly-empty restaurant, watching Christmas shoppers pass by the window, listening to holiday songs so familiar and overplayed that they’d become meaningless background noise peculiar to this one time of year—no more notable than cicadas chirruping in the summer heat or raindrops pattering against the window in the springtime. Just the noise that goes along with cold wet weather and the smell of gingerbread.

  I went back to my hotel, turned on the shower and stripped down slowly, climbing in and sitting on the floor of the tub. I didn’t cry, though. I just sat, empty and worthless, feeling the water sluicing across my skin like so much rain, and trying not to remember all the showers that Poppy and I had shared. All the wet kisses. All the skin and steam and breathy moans echoing off the tile.

  Did I make a mistake leaving the clergy?

  The thought surfaced out of nowhere, fractured and shifting like a reflection on the sea. But once it appeared, it couldn’t be unthought, no matter how fleeting or ephemeral it had been.

  When I’d left, I’d felt so certain, so confident that I was following God’s plan for my life. That I was setting my feet to the path that would lead to self-actualizaton and modern-day sainthood and a full, rich life. I was so certain that it didn’t matter what happened between me and Poppy, it didn’t matter where the road took me, it only mattered that I step outside the safe bubble I’d made for myself and start taking real risks again.

  There was no whisper of that confidence now, no lingering scent of that certainty. Because if all of my pain and effort meant that I was a PhD sitting alone in a shower, then what had all of it been for? What had the world gained by me leaving the clergy?

  Poppy was right—I liked to hide behind vocations, behind callings—and scholar was so much worse than priest because at least priests helped people. At least they brought people closer to the Lord. Everything I’d gained as a student, I’d gained for myself. It hadn’t even netted anything positive for my marriage.

  And if Poppy left me, actually left me and filed for divorce, I would break. Not just my heart, and not just my mind, but my soul and my body—it would splinter into brittle dead shards and I would be finished.

  Lord, where are you? I asked the ceiling numbly. Why do I feel so alone?

  And that was when the phone rang.

  I scrambled out of the tub, grabbing a towel and running into the hotel room. My phone was lit up and buzzing its way across the end table.

  Please let this be the answer to my prayer.

  Please let this be Poppy.

  Please, Lord. Please please please.

  But the moment I saw the 816 area code, I knew it wasn’t Poppy. My heart—which had been pounding like mad, full of hope and energy and nervousness—flopped down to somewhere in my stomach.

  Even though it was an unfamiliar number, I still made myself answer.

  “Hello?”

  A pause. “Is this Tyler Bell?”

  I scru
bbed my face with the towel while I answered. “Yes. How can I help?”

  “I’m Sarah Russell, Mildred Gustaferson’s daughter.”

  I let the towel fall away from my face. “Millie? Is everything okay?”

  Sarah didn’t answer right away, but when she did, she was obviously fighting back tears. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this. My mother died this morning.”

  I flew to Kansas City alone.

  I’d broken my self-enforced phone fast and called Poppy. She hadn’t answered. I’d left a voicemail and sent a text, and then I’d driven to our house before I went to the airport, hoping to catch her there, knowing that she would want to know about Millie.

  She hadn’t been home.

  And so I was alone on the plane, my eyes pressed tightly shut, as if I could keep the tears from falling that way. But they still managed to leak out, slowly and ceaselessly, hot tracks of grief and isolation against my cheeks. I felt so hollow and yet so full, so blank and yet so scrawled upon by events outside my control. My good friend dying, my wife’s absence, this ridiculous distance between me and all the people I cared about. Nothing felt real, nothing felt intimate or close or true—it all seemed like a terrible movie of my life that I was being forced to watch from hundreds of feet away.

  When I stared out the airplane window, my reflection superimposed against the velvet night outside, I barely recognized the unshaven man there. Who was he? Where was he going? And why was he going there alone?

  The questions were too painful. I shut the shade for the window and leaned back, closing my eyes again, hoping to keep back a fresh wave of tears.

  The priest in me wanted to meditate right now. He wanted to pray. He wanted to think of the right things to say to Millie’s children when he went to the funeral, and he wanted to have the right verses ready in his mind in case they were needed.

  But the other me—the guy who was Just Tyler—wanted to do nothing at all, except maybe flag the stewardess for a drink. He wanted to think about nothing, feel nothing, say nothing, and do you know what?

  That’s exactly what he did.

  “Your tie is crooked.”

  I turned back to my brother’s bedroom mirror. “It is not!”

  Sean huffed impatiently. “The knot is crooked. Hang on.”

  I let him fiddle with my tie some more, my thoughts elsewhere. Well, on one thing in particular. Poppy still hadn’t called me back. She wasn’t here and she hadn’t called or texted and I had no idea still if she even knew about Millie. And since it was the day of the funeral, I’d given up on the faint but unflagging hope that she’d fly out here to be with me.

  “There,” Sean said, stepping back and gazing at the Windsor knot he’d just made with a critical eye. “Better.”

  Sean himself looked every inch the impeccable mourner, his tailored black suit and his Charvet tie screaming money and power. Since I’d left the clergy four years ago, he’d risen to the top of his investment firm, which had in turn become one of the biggest Midwestern firms in America, handling massive agricultural and livestock accounts, along with the private accounts of several Midwestern professional athletes. We were probably as different as two brothers could be—me, the priest-turned-scholar, and him, the millionaire playboy who only went to Mass when someone died—but we looked like a matching set in our black suits. His hair was a dark blond to my brown and his eyes were a blue to my green, but we shared the same high cheekbones and square jaw, the same mouth that maybe smiled a little too widely, the same dimples that dug into our cheeks when that wide smile did appear.

  And for all that he was a shallow, self-obsessed asshole, he had genuinely cared about Millie. She’d sent him cookies every month since I’d moved to her parish, and he’d adopted her as a sort-of grandma slash financial advisor, bringing his iPad full of business proposals for her to run through whenever he’d visited her. Aiden, our younger brother, had cared about her too, but he was on a business trip in Brussels and couldn’t make it back for her funeral.

  “So,” Sean said as we walked into the elevator down to where his Audi waited. “Where’s your fucking wife, TinkerBell?”

  It was like simultaneous shots of rubbing alcohol and laughing gas. For a moment, irritation and raw hurt blinded me…and then I couldn’t help but laugh. Mom and Dad, and even my teenaged brother Ryan, sensed it was a delicate subject for me and so had danced around Poppy’s absence like one would dance around a live grenade. But Sean—Sean gave no fucks about anybody else’s feelings, and hadn’t since our sister had hung herself in our parents’ garage all those years ago. It was the best and worst thing about him, and right now, it was exactly what I needed.

  “I think she is really angry with me,” I said. The elevator got to the parking garage level and we walked towards Sean’s car. “I think…I think we might not be together any more.”

  Sean looked at me. It wasn’t a look of pity or concern, necessarily, but a look of understanding. A look of even if we don’t talk, even if we don’t share our adult lives together, I’m still here for you. I guess that was the thing about brothers. We shared something that couldn’t be artificially minted or molted away, a bond that would stick for as long as we were both alive.

  “You know,” Sean said slowly, looking at me over the hood of the car, “if you need anything or—like—to talk, I’m here.”

  Gratitude and affection for my asshole brother flooded me. I knew those words didn’t come naturally or easily to him. “Thanks, Sean. I’ll let you know if I need anything.”

  He nodded and then got in the Audi. The matter was settled, and it was time to hit the road. Millie had wanted her last rites at St. Margaret’s, the parish she’d given so much of her life to, and that meant a drive to Weston from Kansas City, which was about an hour long.

  When we got to St. Margaret’s, we parked the car and Sean went inside to find Mom. I made the excuse that I wanted to walk around and see the new rectory, but really I just needed a moment alone. I poked and prodded at the empty hole in my chest, the place where my wife had lived and then slid out of, like a snake sliding out of its old skin. And I also prodded the thick cloud of grief hovering in my mind, the cloud made of homemade casseroles and long phone calls and hours of working the soup kitchen together.

  I’ve heard people say that losing someone as old as Millie is easier. That all the time they lived and the time you’ve shared makes the loss not such a burden, not so weighted with what ifs. But I didn’t feel like that today. Five hundred years wouldn’t be enough to contain all the potential of a woman like Millie Gustaferson, much less ninety-two. And without her, I was without one of my strongest links to the man I used to be.

  The worst thing was that I knew something was off when I talked to her last Tuesday. I should have done more—called the Pinewoods Village director or found the number for one of her children. Mom and Jordan had both visited, and while Jordan told me that she’d been listless and obviously depressed, neither felt like she was in any real danger.

  Pneumonia was the official cause of death. But unofficially, her kids told me, there was another element. She’d hidden how severe the illness was from her nurses and her visitors, and by the time Thursday morning dawned, she was gasping and blue and it was too late for the antibiotics to have any real effect.

  Sometimes I think it’s not worth it to be here, she’d said. Had she indirectly tried to kill herself by hiding how sick she was?

  And how depressed was I that I completely understood how she felt?

  I rubbed my cheeks with my hands and took a deep breath. I was too familiar with death from my days as a priest to succumb to the need for explanations and narratives about the deceased’s last days. Death has no narrative.

  It just is.

  With that cheerful thought, I finally got out of the car and walked into the church that I’d walked into a thousand times before. Everywhere there were signs of change. The new priest’s picture in the foyer next to a list of office hours.
Christmas lights and trees a week earlier than I would have put them up. The smell of bread wafting from the kitchen downstairs, when I’d always preferred the evocative smell of incense, and kept some burning almost at all times.

  And then there was the building itself. When I’d worked here, the walls had been paneled with fake wood and the carpet had been a dull red—holdovers from a gruesome mid-century renovation. But now the building was exactly what I’d always hoped it would become—modern and light and clean. The walls had been stripped to their original 19th Century brick and stone and the carpet had vanished, replaced by wide planks of blond wood. Pendant lamps of brushed aluminum hung from the ceiling, accented by the old stained glass that had been restored to its original glory. And in the far corner, a glass and concrete baptismal font sat shimmering in the dim December light, water spilling over the inside edges like an infinity pool, filling the church with the gentle music of running water.

  St. Margaret’s finally had a building to match her beautiful, passionate congregation. A building a world apart from the scandal that had rocked the town the year before I came, apart from the old, closed-in mindset of the 20th Century church. Light and modernity and openness—Pope Francis’s church. Father Bell’s church.

  Except it wasn’t Father Bell’s. It was Father McCoy’s now.

  But that was the beauty of the church, really. The priests may change, the congregants may pass away, but the church was still there. The church endured, a steadfast house of solace and refuge for all that come seeking.

  The church kept its doors open. Even when its priests left. Knock and the door shall be opened to you, Jesus had promised. Although it felt like I’d been knocking all week and the door to Poppy’s heart had remained as tightly shut and intransigent as ever.

  I bit down my urge to criticize Father McCoy during the service. Of course, I would always feel like I could do better, like St. Margaret’s was mine and mine alone, and so I didn’t need to inwardly groan every time he stumbled over a word or lost pitch while chanting the call and response songs. It was fine. Even if it was the funeral of one of the smartest and best women in the world, it was still fine that he was mediocre.