Be aware. Be conscious. Be present. Absorb everything. And, specifically, Be with James as he leads you through the woods to a high place where you open your heart and he hears you.
What did James think of me now?
I dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and walked down the hallway to the kitchen, where soft lights shone on golden oak.
James was at the stove.
He turned, smiled, said to me, “I hope this is at least palatable.”
He dished up an aromatic stew and even put a small bowl of it down for Birdie. I was so hungry that my awkwardness with James fell away. The stew, the bread, the wine, it was all delicious, and after dinner, we played with Birdie, who couldn’t stop looking at James.
“She remembers you,” I said.
“But of course. I took her out of a garbage can. Didn’t I, Birdie? Fetch,” he said, throwing a ball of paper, and she brought it right back.
James said, “Brigid, the dishes can wait. Let’s go outside. Put on your jacket.”
We sat together on the rectory steps watching the light traffic. A couple walking by waved to James.
I was conscious of all that, but my mind was on James. I had told him that I had feelings for him. He was a priest and had taken vows of celibacy. Clearly, he cared about me, but not in the same way I was feeling. He cared about me as a shepherd cared about a lamb in his flock.
I leaned away from him and said, “James, if I leave now, I can be in Cambridge by midnight.”
He said, “No way, Brigid. What’s the point of driving two hours at night when I have a perfectly good second bedroom with a semidecent bed? Will you stay? I’m not ready to say good-bye to you again. Okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
He said, “Brigid, I’m not a priest as defined by Rome. Not anymore. I’m just James.”
“What does that mean?”
He reached his arm around me, pulled me close, and then he kissed me. As I marveled at the feeling of that kiss, he kissed me again, and I kissed him back and I stopped thinking.
James said, “You’re always in my thoughts, you know.”
I blinked up at him. He was so familiar to me, and at the same time, I had never spent time like this with him before.
“Do you think you could love me?” he asked.
I blinked some more. Could I love him?
“Could I love you? Do you not see me staring at you with big moony eyes?”
He grinned. “How do my eyes look to you?”
“Moony,” we said together. We laughed and then James released me.
He closed his eyes and folded his hands. And after a moment, he stood up, reached his hand down to me, and helped me to my feet. I didn’t want to ever stop holding his hand.
When we walked through the door to his bedroom, I heard the words in my head.
Be with James.
With the help of God, that was what I would do.
Part Four
Chapter 87
SIX MONTHS had passed since the morning I drove into a church parking lot expecting to return home that night.
Since then, I had rented out my brick house in Cambridge, resigned from my job at Prism, and taken a new job at the Spring Street Women’s Clinic, and I was living my new life to the fullest extent in JMJ’s rectory with James.
His church was flourishing. There were overflow crowds that included people from other faiths, and clergy from other churches, who came to JMJ because they wanted to replicate what James had done in their own parishes.
On that high-summer morning, James wore plaid and denim. He held Sunday Mass on the wide deck he and other men and women in town who also knew how to use hammers and saws had built behind the church.
Rows of folding chairs were set up on the lawn. Daisies encroached from the field, and James and the choir had to compete with birdsong.
James spoke to the congregation about changes he saw happening in pockets of church communities across the country. Priests were getting married, women were becoming priests, and more liberal views on same-sex marriage and abortion were shifting people’s view of what it meant to be Catholic.
“These changes will feel radical and worse to some, but those who believe that God is love will have an easier time understanding that anything that gets between a person and his love of God is wrong.”
James was a soft-spoken but powerful orator. People nodded as he spoke to his ever-expanding flock. But he didn’t tell them what I knew.
Cardinal Cooney had called James several times, making serious threats: excommunication for one, and a civil trial on the grounds that James was defiling the brand of the Roman Catholic Church by advancing “seditious ideas” and, in so doing, “undermining the Word of God.”
How could Cardinal Cooney hope to succeed with these charges? James was doing God’s work, not just in JMJ but in the community that surrounded Millbrook. He was helping the poor, finding jobs for the unemployed, visiting the jail in Springfield, and generally bringing out the best in people. Three other JMJ churches had sprung up in Massachusetts, and I thought that was what had inflamed the archdiocese.
JMJ was spreading.
The choir of young girls was singing when my phone buzzed from my skirt pocket.
It was Kyle Richardson.
“Brigid,” he said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but G.S.F. is in Mass General. He’s been diagnosed with lung cancer. Stage four. He’s asking for you.”
“What?” I said stupidly.
Kyle said, “He wants to see you before he dies.”
Chapter 88
MY FATHER wanted to see me before he died, but I didn’t want to see him. I’d filed G.S.F. away in a box the size of a small bean in the back of my mind and almost never thought of him at all. But I remembered what he said when I’d seen him last: that he had put food on the table, pulled strings to get me into Harvard, and put up with my so-called crappy attitude.
True enough.
So it came down to duty. He asked for me, and I owed him for all the things he’d given his wife’s bastard child.
The Clinton Family Home was a nursing home near the town of Westbrook, in an agricultural plain thirty-five miles north of Boston. The sprawling facility had roofs topped with cupolas, walls of windows and balconies looking over a western view of endless meadows and pasture land.
I entered G.S.F.’s private room as a nurse was leaving with his lunch tray. He was sitting up in bed, looking pale and thin and just as forbidding as ever.
“Dad,” I said.
The word just jumped out of my mouth. I went to his bedside and kissed his cheek, and he said, “Take a seat.”
“Sure.” I dragged a hard-backed chair to his bedside, sat down, and asked, “How are you feeling?”
“They won’t give me my drugs, Brigid. Why not? What’s the difference at this point if it’s heroin or methadone?”
“Heroin is illegal,” I said.
“I think you can get me out of here,” he said, plucking at the tape holding an IV in place in his arm.
The veins in his arm looked like major highways on a map of the Midwest. Must’ve been a nightmare to find a good one.
“Leave that alone,” I said.
He sighed and looked at me with a question in his eyes.
I wondered if he was going to apologize to me for twenty years of tough love without the love. I wondered if he was going to ask for forgiveness.
But he said, “This is it, Brigid. I don’t mind. Take it from the great Franz Kafka: ‘The meaning of life is that it stops.’”
He went into a coughing fit that lasted three or four minutes and must have hurt like hell.
I stood and put my hand on his back, keeping my eyes on the IV line, making sure that he didn’t yank it out, and finally he pulled himself together.
He sipped water, then launched another lofty quote from the dead writers’ and philosophers’ society. “As Socrates so wisely said, ‘The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.’”