Contrition

by Maura Weiler

  “The employee handbook says I can take up to sixty days of unpaid leave per year.”

  Phil scrunched up his features in disbelief and then released them with a laugh.

  “Not even going to try to understand why you would do such a silly thing but not going to get upset either, considering what you’ve done for this paper in the past couple of days.” He picked up one of my notebooks from his desk and flipped through the pages. “Heck, I’ll pay you while you’re gone. Got enough material here for two months anyway. Besides, you’ll need the time to give interviews.”

  “Interviews?”

  “People want to interview the journalist for a change. Booked you on Good Day, LA for Thursday.”

  “Without asking me?”

  “Like you’d turn it down. What kind of journalist doesn’t love good press?”

  “This thing doesn’t need to get any bigger than it is.” I snapped the rubber band I still wore on my wrist.

  “Sure it does. But if you want to be Miss Prima Donna Garbo about it, go ahead and cancel. Just adds to the mystery, since the word is your sister’s not giving interviews either.”

  “Oh no. Have people been bugging her?”

  “Been referring all the interview requests for her to the cloister, so my guess would be yes.”

  “I’ve created a monster.”

  “A very lucrative one.” Phil took a cigar from the box in his desk.

  I gave him the letter and turned to leave.

  “Enjoy your time off.” He scanned the letter. “Think about what you want to write for your next series.”

  I raised my hand in acknowledgment and left.

  • • •

  Graciela sat on the corner of my desk and watched me gather my things.

  “I envy you. What I wouldn’t give for two months off from this place.”

  “Compromise your journalistic ethics and you too can feel guilty enough to chuck the whole thing for a while.” I stuffed a framed picture of my parents and my Slinky into my computer bag.

  “Madre mia, I do that every day. It doesn’t seem to have the same effect on me.”

  “You’re lucky.” I struggled to extricate my laptop’s power cord out of the socket under my desk. “This job would be a whole lot easier if I didn’t have a conscience.”

  “No, you’re lucky.” Graciela reached down and effortlessly removed the cord from the socket for me. “Because you have the nerve to follow yours. I would’ve quit or changed my m.o. a long time ago if I weren’t such a coward.”

  “It’s easy to be brave when you don’t have a daughter to support,” I said.

  As word got around the newsroom about my planned absence, the same coworkers who had congratulated me an hour before now stopped by to say goodbye and wish me well. Few understood why I was going. When they pushed for an explanation, I found I didn’t have one.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Don’t worry, Buckaroo,” my Aunt Martha said the moment she saw my agitated expression in the airport waiting area. “Whatever it is, it will work out.”

  I smiled and relaxed. So much had happened since Martha left for Japan that I didn’t know where to begin when she returned.

  We spoke very little during her five-hour layover. Martha seemed to sense my inability to articulate what I was going through. We went for a drive and a short walk on the beach and then returned to the airport.

  “Love ya, Toots.” Martha hugged me as her Phoenix flight was called.

  • • •

  Back at home, I erased five phone messages from Trish lobbying for a gallery show and fixed myself a cup of peppermint tea, only to fall asleep before it finished steeping. Ravenous when I woke up that evening, I ordered a pizza and ate half of it before a glance at the clock reminded me that the sisters had just finished what was no doubt a far more meager meal. I had another slice for them as I pictured the nuns preparing for Compline, the last chapel prayer before they went to bed.

  I said a short Compline of my own, examining my conscience and imagining Mother Benedicta blessing me with holy water along with the sisters. I appreciated how the predictability of the monastery routine enabled me to share in the nuns’ ritual without physically being among them. There was a sense of closeness and comfort in it that I’d rarely felt before.

  Post-pizza, I padded across the hall in my socks to see if Matt wanted to go to a 9:30 movie. Then I remembered he was in North Carolina, and that, even if he were home, he’d probably prefer me to leave him alone. Stopping mid-knock, I placed my forehead and the flat of my hand on his door and let myself miss him.

  It was almost midnight when I passed a church on my way home from the movie and thought about the cloistered nuns rising again for Vigils in Big Sur. I pictured them in chapel and sang what scraps of chant I could remember, letting the connection I felt with their midnight prayer envelop me.

  • • •

  Within a week of leaving The Comet, I had accomplished ninety percent of all the things I’d been meaning to get around to forever. My apartment was spotless, late birthday gifts were mailed, groceries were bought and eaten before they spoiled. Potted pansies splashed the patio with color while the winged visitors to my new birdfeeder filled it with song. I discovered I now preferred bare feet on the beach and in the house because I wanted to feel rooted to the ground, even if it was the somewhat shaky ground of earthquake-prone California. Daily Mass slipped into my routine almost imperceptibly, as if I’d never stopped going to church in the first place.

  I was reacquainting myself with the guitar I hadn’t picked up since college when the doorbell rang. I set down the pick I’d managed to pinch between my working right index and middle fingers and rose to answer the bell.

  “Hey, Graciela, hi Sophie.” I opened the door for Graciela and her shy six-year-old. “What brings you ladies to the neighborhood?”

  “You do. ¿Qué pasa? I’ve been calling and calling all week, imagining the worst.” Graciela fanned herself and dropped onto my couch. “Sophie, would you please get Mommy something to drink? I’ve been worried sick about you, Dorie.”

  “I’m fine.” I helped Sophie pour sodas in the kitchen. “I got tired of carrying my phone around. But you could’ve called me here.” I pointed to my landline.

  “Like I ever bothered to learn that number when you always had your cell glued to your hand. How are you suddenly able to part with it?”

  “I discovered that it’s kind of nice to be unreachable once in a while.”

  “Nice for you, maybe. Frustrating as all get out for those of us trying to do the reaching.” Graciela took a soda from her daughter. “Gracias, mi amor.”

  “Sorry about that. Would you like a cookie, Sophie?” I held out a plate to the pig-tailed girl behind the long eyelashes. “I just made some.”

  “You made cookies?” Graciela held a hand to her heart. “With flour and sugar and everything?”

  “Sort of. I bought that pre-made dough you slice up.”

  “Even so...”

  “Can I, Mom?” Sophie appeared less concerned with the source of the cookies than with their ultimate destination.

  “Yes, but just one.” Graciela sighed. “You don’t want to turn into an addict like your mother.”

  Sophie grinned and scampered out to the patio with her sugar fix. The birds at the feeder chattered in greeting.

  “Amazing.” Graciela bit into a cookie. “Next you’re going to tell me you’ve learned how to knit.”

  “They tried to teach me during the cloister recreation hour, but I was hopeless without enough functioning fingers. I have been playing guitar again.” I held up the blistered fingertips on my left hand to prove it.

  “That’s more like it. The Dorie Homemaker role doesn’t suit you. I’m relieved to see you’re doing well. You were so unnerved when you left, I thought we’d find you in your bathrobe surrounded by Chinese take-out cartons.”

  “Only for the first couple of days. Then I switched to Tha
i.”

  “Ha, ha.” Graciela looked around the uncharacteristically neat apartment. “Did you get a new carpet?”

  “No. Why?”

  “This one’s white. I thought yours was gray.”

  “That’s because it’s usually covered with newspapers.”

  “Oh, right. Have you read your articles? El Jefe’s showing some class in his selections and editing.”

  “I haven’t looked at a paper for days.” I picked up my guitar again. “But I’m glad Phil’s controlling his flashier editorial urges.”

  “Have you heard from him?”

  “He called yesterday to tell me how it was going.” I strummed a few bad chords. Out on the patio, I saw Sophie put her hands over her ears. “Ad revenue is way up.”

  “So is your salary and title if you play this one right, chica. This thing’s got Feature Editor written all over it.” Graciela reached for another cookie. “Do you miss work?”

  I shook my head. “It’s weird. There was a time when I couldn’t imagine life without journalism. It was my whole world. I wondered how people who weren’t in the business got along without it—not that I had any time or patience for those people. Now I’m discovering that those people probably had it right all along.”

  “I’m not going to say our jobs aren’t warped, but we do some good, too,” Graciela said through a mouthful of chocolate. “Look at all the people you’re reaching with this series.”

  “But look who, and what, got burned in the process.” Graciela, Trish, and Matt were the only people I’d told about the burned painting.

  “You apologized, right?” Graciela reached for another cookie. “Though I don’t know why, considering the good publicity you’re giving her.”

  “Yes, I did.” I struck a dissonant chord. The guitar twanged as if in pain.

  “And she accepted?”

  “Under duress, but yes.” I stopped strumming. Graciela looked relieved and I saw Sophie unplug her ears outside.

  “As long as you apologized, you’ve done your part.”

  “I suppose.” I set the guitar down. “I’m definitely going to miss her. I’ll miss all of them.”

  “Who says you can’t go back and visit?” Graciela asked.

  “After what happened?”

  “Because of what happened. You told me yourself how happy the prioress was that you got Catherine to speak.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Yeah, but nothing. This is a good thing, Dorie, no matter how much you want to believe it’s not. It’s bringing your writing to a new level. Hell, it’s bringing The Comet to a new level. It’s bringing out your sister, whether she admits it or not. And I bet you dollars to donuts it’s going to generate the money that cloister needs in the long run.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” I hugged my knees. “What does dollars to donuts mean, anyway?”

  “Yo no sé. But don’t donuts sound good right now?”

  “Graciela, you’re eating a cookie,” I said.

  “And your point is?”

  • • •

  Forty-five minutes later, Graciela, Sophie, and I stood in line at Krispy Kreme.

  “Thanks for making the pilgrimage with us.” Graciela sniffed the sweetly scented air.

  “If you’re going to eat donuts, you may as well do it right. Matt loves this place.” I reached the counter. “A dozen glazed, please.”

  “How is that muchacho? I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “We haven’t talked much since he proposed,” I said without thinking. I nearly swallowed my tongue.

  “Since he WHAT?” Graciela yelled and flapped her arms like a spooked chicken. Sophie covered her ears again.

  “Please don’t mention it to him or anyone else.” I took the green, polka-dotted box of sugared salvation from the cashier.

  “Don’t mention it?” Graciela flapped some more. A red-faced Sophie placed her mother’s arms at her sides and held them there.

  I shook my head, paid for the donuts, and steered Graciela outside where fewer eardrums were at stake. “I’m serious, Graciela.”

  “To anyone? I take it that means you said no.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, you said ‘yes’ or yes, you said ‘no’?”

  “Yes I said ‘no’.”

  “No comprendo.” Graciela waggled a manicured finger at me. “First, you get all this recognition at work only to take a leave of absence. Then, your best friend in the world proposes and you turn him down. Worse, you keep it a secret from your other best friend in the world.”

  “I didn’t say it made any sense.” I took a bite of my donut and let the glaze melt in my mouth. “But you have to admit his proposal came out of left field.”

  “Left field? It came from outer space.” Graciela finished her second donut and reached for a third. “I don’t blame you for turning Mr. Married-To-His-Job down. You two make better friends than anything else. But I do blame you for not telling me.”

  “I’m sorry. The whole thing was so bizarre that I needed some time to let it sink in. And I don’t think we are friends anymore. He was pretty upset.”

  “Maybe, but better to be honest now than marry him and be sorry later.” Graciela wiped some icing off of Sophie’s chin.

  “The thing is, I don’t think I would be sorry. Of all the guys I’ve known, he’s the one I’d most want to marry, at least if he were around more. I’m just not sure about the wife part.”

  “Don’t ask me to recommend it. My particular stint as a wife was not fun. The mom part, on the other hand...” Graciela reached out and waggled her fingers like she was going to tickle Sophie, who burst into giggles and darted out of reach.

  As Graciela chased her, I laughed and enjoyed mother and daughter at play, no longer sure wife or mother were roles I’d choose for myself. I was even less sure of what roles I’d choose instead.

  • • •

  I decided to get Sister Barbara’s opinion on whether she thought my revisiting the cloister was appropriate.

  “Of course you should return if you want to,” Sister Barbara said as we sorted through donated clothing in her South Central convent house. The potter had a smudge of dried clay in her hair. “The nuns won’t hold a grudge. The real question is, why did you leave in the first place?”

  “My aspirancy visit ended and—”

  “No, not the cloister.” Barbara folded a pair of jeans and added them to the pile earmarked for distribution at the soup kitchen. “Why did you leave the Catholic Church? Didn’t you tell me you lost your faith at eighteen?”

  “I wouldn’t call it losing my faith, per se.” I held up an infant undershirt with a small stain on the front for the sister’s inspection. Barbara sized up the garment and shook her head “no.” I tossed the tee into the discard heap. “I stopped going to church and calling myself Catholic, but I’ve always believed in God and still agree with most Catholic theology.”

  “Why did you stop going to church if you still believed?” Sister Barbara sniffed a donated pair of socks, scowled, and threw them into the laundry basket.

  “Long story.” I explained that I’d always had a hard time on my birthdays and never wanted to celebrate them because of my biological mother’s death in childbirth. My eighteenth had been especially bad because my adoptive mom had cancer.

  “After we’d had cake in her hospital room, I left my dad there and went to Saturday evening Mass,” I said. “I didn’t want to go home afterwards, so I laid down in the pew and eventually fell asleep. I guess nobody noticed me when they locked up for the night. I must have had some good dreams, because when I walked outside in the morning and saw the church fountain shimmering in the sunlight, everything felt right and perfect in the world. I had hope for my mom and felt spiritually alive. I froze, so happy and at peace that I almost couldn’t bear it.”

  Sister Barbara smiled but didn’t say anything.

  “When I got home, I found out that my mom had died an hour after I’d l
eft her. So now I have two mothers to grieve every birthday.”

  “You poor thing.” Sister Barbara paused in her sorting. “That’s a lot to bear.”

  “I was pretty furious with God after that and stopped going to services,” I said. “Before long, I couldn’t stand anything about the church, especially priests and nuns—no offense.”

  “None taken.” The potter put a frayed pair of shorts in the discard pile.

  “All through school I’d been shy around the sisters, but once I left the church I couldn’t even look them in the eye. I had to force myself to overcome my fear to meet my twin. It was as if I knew religious people like her would look right though me.”

  “And see what?” Sister Barbara tied together the laces of a pair of men’s dress shoes and tossed them in a pile with several other pairs. “Something you didn’t want to recognize yourself?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It was my first taste of good old-fashioned Catholic guilt. It wasn’t a sense that I’d done something wrong—more like I’d avoided doing something right. Nothing has gone quite right since. I look for fulfillment in secular things and sometimes I get a flicker of true serenity when I write, but it’s never as strong as it was that morning after Mass before I learned about my adoptive mom’s death. Until...”

  “Until what?”

  “Until I saw my birth father’s and sister’s paintings, especially my sister’s. Somehow Catherine has distilled that tranquility into color on canvas, where it could last forever if she’d only let it.” I stopped sorting. “That’s what I don’t understand. How could she capture the peace and completeness I’ve been chasing for years and then fail to cherish it?”

  “Maybe they’ve got a surplus of those emotions at the cloister.”

  “If that’s the case, then they should share the wealth.”

  “Looks to me like they already have,” Sister Barbara said. “I’m surprised you never thought of returning to the church. It’s a shame you turned away from religion right when it might have given you some comfort.”

  “I thought about it, but it seemed too overwhelming, not to mention disrespectful to my adoptive mother, the agnostic.” I picked the lint off of a wool sweater on the table. “Going to church was my mini-rebellion as a kid. After my mom died, the last thing I wanted was to do something she’d disapprove of. If I hadn’t been in church feeling sorry for myself, I would have been there for her last moments. Maybe I could have comforted her, which is more than I was able to do as a newborn when my birth mother died.”