The Passion of Mary-Margaret (8 page)

“Exactly.”

Exactly, indeed.

You see, I've lived my life like the puzzle it is, pieces fitting in here and there, one at a time. Some portions are finished and I can look behind me and say, “Yes, there's the young bit.There's the Jude bit. There's the John bit. And now finally, here I am as I thought I'd be.” But some segments are tinier, made up of only one day, a week, or perhaps a month. And today was a major portion, one I'll not forget for a long time even though I don't know where it will lead.

Remember the father issues? Well, read on, sisters. Today was certainly a little crazy in that department.

We sidled through the kitchen and onto the patio where the residents dine during the mellow days of spring and autumn. Hurried as best we could down the brick pathway that leads to the water and from there we slipped behind the snowball bushes and rounded our way toward Bray's Cottage—our little home. We call it Mercy House these days because Blanca brings in at least one stray cat a month we have to fatten up and send on its way. Oh, the yowling some of those creatures do during the night!

Halfway to the dock, Gerald took hold of my arm with his other hand. “Stop just a minute, Mary-Margaret. I'm getting a little breathless.”

We stood in front of a span of eelgrass, the ribbon leaves swirling in the gentle ebb of the water.

“I'm sorry.”

He rested his hand atop his head, then rubbed. “Used to be I could drag you along.”

“You still want to. Surely that counts for something.”

Farther out, the last skipjack from our island sailed toward deeper waters for the day's catch. I sighed. I don't know why Elmore keeps trying. He's old and the crabs are low. Even Phillips Seafood is importing their crabmeat from the Philippines sometimes. And I don't think Mr. Phillips, when he started the restaurant all those years ago, meant there to be that obvious connection with his name. But the bay just isn't what it used to be.

“It's all changing, isn't it, Gerald?”

He unzipped his jacket, grimacing at either the heat or the tulips. I couldn't tell you which. “Every last darn thing. Remember how big those blue crabs used to be? The size they call larges these days we'd have thrown right back in.”

He started forward and we continued toward the dock behind Mercy House. As promised, the boat awaited. Shrubby had probably gone home to his sorting shed where a bunch of hard crabs in large trays were losing their shells. Shrubby's always bringing us soft crabs. He's not Catholic, but he believes it can't hurt to bring food to nuns. That's what he says. “You gals seem nice enough,” he says.

The tai chi class convened outside in the courtyard. Blanca, who teaches them before heading to St. Francis's where she heads up the CCD and the general doings of Christian education, waved as if I spirited away patients in rowboats every day. I waved back and helped Gerald into the boat.

The boat kept slipping away from the dock. In my exasperation I cried out, “Will somebody help us?” and looked up toward the heavens.

The boat stood still and I'm not sure who decided to lend a hand, a guardian angel perhaps? I do believe in those. Or Jesus himself? It didn't matter.

“How long do you think it'll be before they find the note?” I pictured the look on Angie's face when the nurse asked if she knew anything. Her perfected deer-in-the-headlights expression, along with her reputation for crying at dog stories, would aid her silence and keep her from telling falsehoods, direct or indirect. I don't have the same skill and I've been to confession many a time for many a lie. Never large, scheming, overblown ones. Just lies to keep me out of basic trouble.

After we settled on the wooden benches, Gerald in Spark's place near the front and facing out, me by the motor, I grabbed the handle of the pull cord and gave a fierce yank.

As if I thought it would fire up the first time.

Again, I tried. Again, I failed.

Gerald looked over his shoulder with a sly grin, and in that flash I saw Jude so clearly I felt as if my heart would stop.

“You want to give it a go?” I asked.

“You're doing just fine, MM.”

We were both too old for this.

I pulled again, ready to demand heavenly help if it went amiss one more time, but the propeller stirred up the murky waters and I lifted the loop of rope off the piling. We puttered toward the light.

“No sense in hurrying unduly, Gerald. There's nothing they can do about us now.”

“No. No, that's very true.” He raised his chin and breathed in deeply. He turned and winked, his eyes jumping with a mellow joy. He surely did remind me of Jude's dog, Spark. “Here we go, MM. An adventure. Never thought I'd be having another adventure.”

Indeed.

I pictured Jude and Spark on the waters. Rowing, rowing. Always rowing.

It took us about fifteen minutes, silence accompanying us because we never thought we'd ever do this again. I pulled up to the dock beneath the lighthouse and fixed the boat.

Climbing up the ladder to the decking, the green smell of the bay water and blue scent of the wind that made its way across oceans and grasses and trees enfolded me. It was the smell of Jude who spent much of his time on his stepfather's oyster boat. It was the smell that would touch me when he'd call to me from beneath my window in the middle of the night, and yes, I'd sneak out of the dormitory, my bare white feet glowing against the stone floor of the corridor, my breath scraping the holy stillness. It was the smell of lonesomeness and feeling trapped. It was the smell of trying to find your way.

Sometimes, however, when Jude wasn't thinking about it, it was the smell of contentment. But not often. And only when we were alone together and I forgot who I was, who he was, and we sat cross-legged facing each other and I held his hands as I told him about what happened that day. If it was something exciting, that is. We had our times. When the bishop would visit, when the seniors graduated, when I made breakthroughs with my art. Jude soaked in every word. Sometimes he'd lay a hand just above my knee and I'd let him. He had well-developed hands, strong and already like a man's at seventeen. It did something to me to see it there on my leg.

And somehow I saw a kite flying off the railing of a lighthouse, brightly colored and winging against the clouds.

Gerald waited in the boat. “Do you think it's locked?” he asked.

“No.”

Of course it could have been locked, but if it was, Jesus had provided another way. Jesus always provided what I needed to do what he sent me for. Even if it wasn't always apparent at first glance. Sometimes Jesus is sneaky that way. He doesn't always just hold it out there for us on a silver platter like tea sweets in front of the queen. He gave us brains for a reason.

My hand curved around the knob. “Yes, it's locked!”

“Look in the light next to the door. Always kept a spare there.”

I opened the glass door of the brass light and felt inside. Metal moved beneath my fingertips. “I think I've found it.” I pulled it toward the opening, tipped it up, and grasped it fully between finger and thumb. “Yes. It's a key.”

He chuckled, shaking his head. “Hattie told me to leave it there.”

“I'm telling you, Gerald. She knows a lot more than she's letting on.” Oh boy, did she.

I slid the key into the lock and pushed in on the red door. Oh my. Oh my.

Quick note before I continue on:

I simply must remember to plant those bulbs tomorrow! It'll be a miracle if they grow, but I'm missing Jude and it would be nice to give God the chance to do something tiny and spectacular and maybe even a bit miraculous.

The lighthouse sitting room, empty now, brought back so many memories. The first time I came to the light I was fifteen; the walls were papered in a bluish floral print and Mr. Keller was reading a book in the comfortable chair near the kitchen door. Jude blew in, relieved in spirit yet despising his surroundings. I remember thinking,
Well, there are no girls out here.
He rowed me out himself and I admired his arms, his smile, the sun on his hair the entire time. He chattered away. Most people thought Jude a sullen youth. Not me. And it was summertime.

“Dad,” he said. “I wanted you to meet Mary-Margaret.”

Mr. Keller peeled off his wire-rimmed spectacles, stood up with a smile, and offered his hand. Men didn't shake the hands of young women much in those days. I felt grown up. I took it, we shook, and I realized why Jude left. This was a holy man of the sea, a man who enjoyed silence and contemplation, a man completely unlike his son. His blue uniform was perfectly pressed, his beard trimmed close to his jaw. In
some ways I was right; in other ways I was completely wrong. But who could have known what Jude was really going through?

“Nice to meet you.”

He made me a cup of tea and we chatted about his books and I told him I wanted to be a teacher, a School Sister of St. Mary, and he thought it a fine idea.

“So, I take it you're not one of J.G.'s paramours?”

Jude George Keller.

“No, sir. For some reason, Jude just likes to talk to me.” Thankfully Jude didn't mention our kisses. And I didn't think I was truly lying. Not if he meant “paramour” like I did.

He sighed. “I'm relieved to hear he's talking to someone.”

And the sadness of a father-son relationship that could never find that place where the similarities gather together like foam at the edges of the sea clung to us.

“Why do you stay here, Mr. Keller?” I asked.

“I don't know how to do anything else.” He laid aside his book. “And I like the quiet.”

His father before him had kept the light and he supposed he could go back to the fishing he did as a teen, but when the opportunity to succeed his father opened, he snatched it up. He already knew the job; there'd be little training on the part of the Coast Guard. “It was equally good for both parties. Only Petra didn't think so in the long run, I guess.”

“Jude's mother?”

“Yes.” And the matter of the ugly divorce predicated by Petra's hopping aboard her lover's skiff and puttering away permanently laid a hand at the back of Mr. Keller's head and pushed his chin to meet his chest.

And there he saw the floor. The pine flooring he'd run over as a lighthouse child, in a desert of water, removed but happy.

“She couldn't take the desolation. Kept begging me to take her to town all the time. But I couldn't leave the light. Finally, I got her a little boat of her own, little Elgin outboard, and she'd go every day, hair flying in the wind.”

I pictured Petra in one of her bright floral dresses with loose angel wing sleeves of chiffon fluttering just above her slender elbow as she controlled that little motor, maybe the only thing she felt she could control. You might picture her a bleached blonde, but she wasn't. The same hair as Jude's grew out of her head in a heavy mass of curl that she clipped near the nape of her neck. And her lips, such sweet lips, she'd cover with pink. I thought her a free spirit, yet sweet. Not coarse or rough. Untamed, really, like periwinkle gone wild. The few times I saw her with Jude when we were young, she was just crazy about him.