“Though one might have wished for you to have been stronger and to have resisted this man, his is by far the graver sin. You were a child. You are a child still.”
To Linda’s horror, tears come unbidden into her eyes. They well up over the lower lids.
“It was wrong of your aunt to send you away. I can’t imagine what it was like for you.”
She shakes her head back and forth. The kindness, the kindness! It is almost more painful to her than a harsh word. No one has ever spoken to her like this before.
“This is not a sin you need to confess, because you did not commit a sin,” the priest says. “Do you understand what I am saying?”
She doesn’t. Not exactly. It contradicts all she has ever been told.
“Some might think so,” the priest says. He sneezes once quickly and says, “Excuse me.” He takes out a handkerchief and blows his nose. “I’ve got a cold coming on,” he says, explaining. “Would you like to speak to someone about this? Someone who might be able to help you?”
She shakes her head quickly. “No,” she says.
“I’m thinking of someone such as a doctor, who could talk to you about how you might be feeling about all of this.”
“No,” she says. “I don’t think so.”
“I could arrange, I think, for you to speak to a woman.”
“Not really,” she says.
“It’s too hard to carry such a burden alone.”
A great childish sob escapes her. A gulp, a hiccup of air. She turns away from the priest.
She hears the priest stand and then leave the room. She thinks that he has left her to cry alone without anyone to watch, but then he returns with a box of tissues. He stops in front of her, but she is unwilling to raise her eyes past his knees. She takes a tissue from the box and blows her nose. All these functions of the body, she thinks.
“Perhaps you would like some time to be alone,” he says.
She shakes her head again. “I have to get back to class,” she says, wanting more than anything to leave the rectory.
“I understand,” he says. “Linda.”
She looks up at him. She was wrong. He doesn’t look a thing like Eddie Garrity. “Can you forgive the man?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I try not to think about it.”
“Can you forgive your aunt?”
She shakes her head. “She hates,” Linda says. “Which seems worse.”
“It is not for us to decide which is the worse sin.”
“No,” she says.
“You’ll work on forgiving them. You’ll try.”
“Yes,” she says, knowing this might not be true.
“Do you have friends?” he asks. “Anyone you can talk to?”
“I have a friend,” she says.
“Someone you trust?” he asks.
“Yes. Very much.”
“Is this person a boy or a girl?”
“A boy.”
“Is he a Catholic?”
“No.”
“Well, never mind.”
“He is my life,” Linda says.
“Now, now,” the priest says gently. “God is your life. Your life is in God.”
“Yes,” she says.
“But now is perhaps not the time to get into that. I assume you have had quite a religious training.”
She nods.
“More than you ever wanted.”
She glances up at him and sees that he is smiling. No, he does not resemble Eddie Garrity at all, she thinks.
The priest holds out his hand. She takes it, and he helps her up.
“I’ll see you to the door,” he says. “If you ever want to talk, about this or about anything else, you have only to call.”
“Thank you,” she says. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Father Meaghan,” he says. “Don’t forget your pocketbook there.”
______
Linda walks out to the sidewalk, knowing that the priest is watching her from behind a window. The light outside is so bright and so harsh she immediately has to take her sunglasses from her purse. She puts them on gratefully, makes the turn toward the bus stop, and when she knows she is out of sight of the rectory, she begins to cry.
______
She waits outside the
Nantasket
room, leaning against the wall. She marvels at the architect who can have created such a monstrosity as the school and have thought the building conducive to learning. Perhaps it
was
a prison after all. Yellow brick rises high over her head, allowing for only narrow transom windows. Years of student scratchings have turned the metal doors a muted blue or worn orange. Wire mesh is encased in the narrow slits of the glass in the doors, guarding, she supposes, against an errant fist. From time to time, she peers through the slit to see what Thomas is doing. He sits at the head of a long table with eight other students, and they seem to be deeply engaged in discussion. Stacks of the
Nantasket
have recently been delivered to the room from the printer and are in piles on student desks.
She shouldn’t be here at all. She should, she knows, have taken the late bus home and closed the door to the bedroom and done her homework. She has a calculus test in the morning and a paper due on a book she hasn’t yet read. With the job at the diner and the hockey games (two a week) and her hours with Thomas (utterly necessary), she has less and less time for studying. Her discussion with Mr. K. in his classroom just now will be moot if she doesn’t keep up her grades. Before, school always seemed effortless, but effortlessness is only possible, she is learning, if you give it time.
At the end of the corridor, the vice principal, who, months ago, was her introduction to the school, is berating a sullen student with long hair and a denim jacket. She can’t hear what he is saying, but she can guess.
Get rid of the jacket. Cut the hair.
She thinks about her meeting with the priest, an utterly astonishing event. So strange and so unreal, it might never have happened at all.
But it did, she thinks. It did.
______
The door opens, and Thomas emerges, carrying a copy of the
Nantasket.
He is reading as he walks.
“Hey,” she calls.
“Linda,” he says, turning. “Hi. I didn’t expect to see you.”
“What have you got there?”
“Look,” he says.
He has the literary magazine opened to a page on which is printed a short poem by Thomas Janes. She reads the poem. “It’s very good, Thomas.” And it is good. It really is. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you. Thank you.” He bows. “What are you doing here?”
“Well,” she says. “I’ve been talking to Mr. K., and I think I’m going to apply to college.”
“Yes?” Thomas asks, smiling. “Yes?” He backs her into the wall. “Where?”
“Middlebury, for one.”
“Fucking Mr. K.,” Thomas says.
“And Tufts and B.C., maybe.”
“No kidding.”
“I’ve passed the deadline, but he’s made some calls and explained what he calls ‘my situation’ and they say they’re willing to consider my application. Well, Middlebury has so far.”
“He’s a miracle,” Thomas says and kisses her.
A voice calls to them from down the hall. “No fraternization between the sexes during school hours.” Thomas, with his back to the vice principal, raises an eyebrow. The man stands with his hands on his hips. Any minute, Linda thinks, he will stamp his foot.
“Something funny going on down there?” he asks.
______
The parking lot is a sea of slush. The soles of Linda’s boots are soaked.
“Now I’ve got the chains on,” Thomas says, “we’ll probably never have another day below freezing.” He unlocks the door of the Skylark. The temperature is so freakishly warm that Linda takes off her coat at once. Thomas turns on the radio.
“It’s the same with an umbrella,” she says.
“What is?”
“If you remember it, it won’t rain.”
“Let’s celebrate,” he says.
“OK,” she says. “Where?”
He drums his fingers on the steering wheel and thinks. “There’s a nice seafood restaurant called the Lobster Pot not too far from here,” he says. “We could go have dinner.”
“Really? It’s a Wednesday.”
“So?”
“I have a test tomorrow.”
“You can study later.”
“I have to work.”
“Not now you don’t,” he says, putting the car in reverse.
______
They drive along a twisting, narrow coastal route. Linda sits so close to Thomas that he has to borrow his arm back occasionally to steer. When he can, he puts his hand on her knee. Once, he hitches up her skirt so that he can see her thigh. Then he snakes his hand under the skirt. She doesn’t push him away.
Thomas stops at a gas station so that she can call the diner. She holds her nose and pretends to have a cold, while Thomas stands outside the booth, banging on the glass and singing.
Help me, Rhonda. Help, help me, Rhonda.
When they get back in the car, Linda kisses him so hard and for so long, she leaves him gasping for breath.
As they drive, the setting sun lights up the trees and the old houses beside the road so that, for a time, the world seems happily on fire.
“This is the best day of my life,” she says.
“Really?”
The water in the marshes turns a brilliant pink. Thomas reaches below his seat and pulls out a bottle of what looks to be scotch or whiskey. A shadow passes across the road.
“What’s this about?” she asks.
“You want a drink? We’re celebrating.”
The bottle is only half full. Perhaps there are things about Thomas she doesn’t know.
“You’ve never had a drink,” he says.
“Thomas, can we stop somewhere? There’s something I want to tell you.”
______
“He used to have sex with me,” she says, letting her breath out in a rush.
She waits for the car to buckle in, for the air to billow out. Thomas has parked the Skylark on a dirt lane in the marshes. They are partially hidden from the road by a grove of trees, glittering and melting in the setting sun.
“He raped you,” Thomas says.
“It wasn’t rape,” she says.
This will be the moment, Linda thinks, when Thomas will have to open the door of the car and get out, letting in a cool gust of air. He will have to take a walk, get his bearings, and when he gets back in, she knows, everything will be different between them.
“Often?” Thomas asks.
“Five times,” she says.
He lays his head back against the seat. Linda feels light-headed. She needs to eat.
“I knew it was something like that,” Thomas says quietly.
“You did?” She is only a little surprised. And perhaps a bit deflated. One’s terrible secret guessed after all.
“I didn’t know for sure,” Thomas says. “Actually, for a while, I thought it might have been your father.”
“My father left when I was five,” she says. “I told you that.”
“I thought you might be lying about when he left,” Thomas says. No judgment implied about the lying. It is understood she’d have had to do that.
“Was it awful?” he asks.
“It wasn’t awful or not awful,” she says carefully. And after a minute adds, “I don’t think we should talk about this particular thing anymore.”
He nods. What good can come of details? Of pictures that can never be erased?
“I love you,” Thomas says.
She shakes her head. The words should not have been offered now. She might always have to think they had been said partly out of pity.
“I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you walk into that class,” he says.
Yet words are momentous, she knows, and her heart lifts all the same.
“I sometimes think,” he says, “that we were meant to be together.”
“I agree,” she says quickly. And it is true. She does very much agree.
Elation makes him turn to her.
______
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“I’m sure,” she says.
He draws back and studies her. “This isn’t something he made you do, is it?” he asks. “Take all your clothes off?”
She shakes her head and realizes that Thomas has images too
—
his worse for being the worst he can imagine. What’s imagined always worse than what is.
She crosses her arms and removes her sweater, feeling more naked than she ever has before. She hitches her hips up so that she can take off her skirt. She hears Thomas’s breath catch.
“Linda,” he says.
Lightly, as you might touch a sculpture in a gallery, Thomas runs the tips of his fingers from her neck to her thighs. She sucks in her own breath as well.