Erica jumped up. “I’m going with you!”
“No you’re not,” her father countered, not letting go of Leah. Solie appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishrag and looking at them all like they were crazy. Erica thought she was probably correct in her assessment.
“You can’t tell me what to do anymore.” Erica sneered at him, catching up with Clay and following him down the hall. She ignored her father calling after her, insisting she come back. She ignored the sound of her best friend’s screams. They were like the howls of a dying animal.
“Merry fucking Christmas,” Erica whispered in the hallway as she and Clay pulled on their coats. “Well you’ve met my crazy family.”
Clay grabbed her hand as they walked out the door. “That’s okay, you haven’t met mine yet.”
“It can’t be as bad as that,” Erica shivered as they stood on the sidewalk in the snow. She saw Father Michael helping Father Patrick into the car, saw the hurt on his face, the concern in his eyes, and turned away from it.
Clay was there, holding her hand and smiling a big, goofy smile.
“Sure you want to sign up for this?” Erica jerked her head toward the warehouse. “They’re all a couple bananas short of a bunch.”
“Girl, I’m already bananas for you.” He took her into his arms and kissed her right there on the street. And she let him.
Chapter Five
Leah wouldn’t let Rob come with her to pick a wedding dress, insisting on tradition, even though they wouldn’t be married in the church after all. She should have expected something like it from Father Patrick, but somehow it still came as a shock to be ostracized from the church. She’d discovered so much about the hypocrisy of the church in the past year, so many shameful, scandalous secrets, she knew it should be she who rejected them, not the other way around, but somehow the seeds of faith that had been planted when she was young had wound themselves through her life and had taken root. She could no longer throw over her belief in God and the Catholic Church than she could have cut out her own heart.
Hudson’s bridal section took up the entire, magical sixth floor of the twenty-something story building. She and Erica used to sneak up there when they were little and play hide and seek in the sea of white satin dresses on the rack while their mothers lunched on the thirteenth floor. They thought the girls were playing in the toys section of the store. Both girls had cut out pictures of wedding dresses from magazines, putting them into the hope chests at the foot of their beds. They had compared notes on cuts, color (white, of course, but bridesmaid dresses could be any color) and style for years, changing their minds a hundred times over, dreaming of prince charming all the while.
She couldn’t believe she was entering Hudson’s bridal department as a bride, and she never could have fathomed she would be marrying her best friend’s father, a man she’d called “Mr. Nolan,” most of her life and had always thought of as sort of her replacement father. Things had changed so drastically in the past year, her life now was unrecognizable to the one she’d lived until falling in love with Rob. Things felt flipped, upside down even. Here she was shopping for a wedding dress, but she’d already given birth to her future husband’s child, had already been transformed from the young girl she’d been into a woman and a mother.
So when the elevator operator stopped it at the sixth, calling out, “Bridal shop!” it was with some trepidation that she stepped off. The entire floor smelled like floral perfume from the sachets hanging amidst the rows of dresses, the carpet a thick, bridal white, the mass of dresses, literally hundreds of them to choose from, an overwhelming sea of virginal satin and lace. It took a girl’s breath away in an instant and made Leah’s pulse race. If Pavlov had studied the shopping habits of females, he would have discovered that bridal shops had the same effect on the feminine population as potential nourishment did on canines.
“Can I help you?” One of the saleswomen came around the other side of the counter where she had been flipping through a magazine. She was a blonde, her long hair falling in careful waves over her shoulders, wearing a smart, cream-colored pinstriped suit coat and matching skirt, the blouse underneath decorated with pink ruffles. “Do you have an appointment?”
“Oh, yes.” Leah glanced around, glimpsing another young bride in the back standing on a pedestal in a white dress and veil, surrounded by girls ohhhing and ahhhhhing over her choice. “Leah Wendt. Er, Nolan. Leah Nolan.”
Leah blinked at the name change. They had registered for gifts at Hudson’s too, under the Nolan name, but she’d never put her first name and Rob’s last name together out loud before.
“Oh good. You’re a little early.” The saleswoman went back behind the counter and Leah followed, watching her flip open a big book, her pink lacquered nail tracing its way down loopy, scrawled handwritten entries to Leah’s name. She looked older than Leah, but not by that much. Five or six years maybe.
“Is your bridal party coming?” the saleswoman asked, glancing behind Leah as if a gaggle of girls might appear out of thin air.
“Yes. Well, my maid of honor. And… my mother. That’s it.”
Leah had never been one to collect a bunch of friends, and considering her current circumstances, she was no longer in contact with the girls she might have asked from Mary Magdalene’s, either her former high school or their two-year preparatory college.
The only girls she would have asked were now scattered to the wind. She felt closer to the girls she’d met at the maternity home, all of them hidden away at Magdalene House, who she’d only known for six short months, than she did to any of the girls she’d gone to school with.
There was little Lizzie, with the face of a china doll, whose baby had been shockingly fathered by her own father. Slow Jean, poor dim-witted Jean, who had shadowed Lizzie like an adoring puppy dog, who had missed her friend so much when Lizzie had to leave Magdalene House, she’d thrown herself down a flight of stairs in an attempt to miscarry. And Frannie, whose belly had grown so big because she was carrying twins, whose babies had been separated and given to two different adoptive couples to maximize the donation to the church from the parents. And then there was Marty. Leah missed her most of all. Spunky redheaded Marty, who had first introduced her to the Mary Magdalenes, the secret society Erica had somehow gotten herself involved with.
Leah still hadn’t told Erica she knew about the Mary Magdalenes, about the sex rituals and the literal Madonna/whore complex being played out by the Catholic priests and nuns who participated. Marty had explained how they split the girls into two categories, Marys and Magdalenes-Madonnas and whores-and while they had sex with all of them, only the Magdalenes bore Eve’s burden of sin, becoming pregnant with the seed of man, while the Marys remained pure, perpetual virgins, although Leah was still unclear on how they managed that last feat.
It was so shocking and horrific when you heard it expressed in black and white, it seemed too impossible to be true, and Leah probably wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, hadn’t witnessed her best friend’s nude body painted and strapped to a giant cross, if she hadn’t walked the secret tunnels under the church to its center where the Mary girls were on the virginal white side and the Magdalenes on the sinful red, and everywhere there was the smell of sex hanging in the air, the one thing that served to join them both.
Marty had tried to explain it, Leah remembered, how they became slowly indoctrinated-brainwashed was more like it, Leah thought-becoming connected as sisters, unwilling to tell their shocking, outlandish secret to the world, not only out of fear of retaliation from the church, but out of fear of compromising their sisters as well. And of course, there was incentive to stay. The virginal Marys were special and “taken care of” for the rest of their lives by the church. They and their families would want for nothing. The Magdalenes received a one-time payment of ten thousand dollars when they gave up their baby for adoption.
And of course, that worked out well for the maternity homes like Leah had been forced into. There were hundreds, if not thousands of places like Magdalene House all over the world, where Magdalene babies were born and then adopted out to infertile but rich Catholic couples who were willing to give a large donation to the church in exchange for a healthy newborn.
Marty had managed to cut ties with the Magdalenes. She’d found a way out, giving up the money she would have received from the church, initiating a secret correspondence and eventually going halfway across the world to
