“Why?”
“I had work to do, honey. I was going to work the weekend, but we spent it in bed, remember? I stopped by your office and found them on top of your desk with a note.”
“But why were you even on this floor? Your office is on-”
“I don’t know. I just was.”
“Why did you go in my office?”
“On impulse, I guess. I wanted to be around something of yours. Look at your handwriting, you know. It was goony.” He laughs nervously. “What’s with all the questions?”
Fear rises in my throat. He has no reason to be on my floor, no right to come into my office. I imagine him rooting through my desk in the glow of the clock. I hope Judy isn’t right about him, but I can’t take any more chances. I steel myself. “Ned, I can’t see you for a while.”
“What?” He looks shocked.
“I want you to bring the notes to the office as soon as you can. Maybe you should go home at lunch.”
“What are you saying? What about us?”
“I’m…not ready for us. Not yet. Not now.”
“Wait a minute, what’s happening?” His voice breaks. “Mary, I love you!”
He hadn’t said that, not once the whole weekend, though I wondered how deep his feelings went. Now I know, if he’s telling the truth.I love you. The words reach out and grab me by the heart. I want so much for it not to be him, but I’m afraid Judy’s right. And now I’m afraid of him. “I need time.”
“Time? Time for what?”
“To think. I want the notes back.”
He grabs my arms. “Mary, I love you. I’ll get you the notes. I was only trying to help. I didn’t think they should be left out like that, where anybody could pick them up.”
I can’t look at him. “Ned, please.”
He releases me suddenly. “I get it. You think it’s me, don’t you? You suspect me.” His tone is bitter.
“I don’t know what I think.”
“You think it’s me. You think I’m trying to kill you. I can’t believe this.” He throws up his hands in disgust. “We spent the weekend together, Mary. I told you things I never told anybody else in the world!”
He falls silent suddenly. I look at him, and his face is full of anger.
“That’s why, isn’t it?” he asks quietly. “Because of what I told you. I was depressed, so now you have me pegged for a psycho killer. Oh, this is beautiful. This is really beautiful. Tell me again how proud you are of me, Mary.”
“That’s not it. I just need time, Ned.”
“Fine. You just got it.” He stalks to the door but stops there, his back to me. “Whoever it is, they’ll still be after you. And I won’t be around to keep you safe.”
I feel sick inside. He hurts so much, and it hurts to see him go.
“Is this really what you want?” he asks, without turning around.
I close my eyes. “Yes.”
“So be it.” The next sound is the harshca-chunk of the door as it closes.
When I open my eyes, I’m alone. I cross my arms and try to keep it together, looking around my office at the books and the files and the diplomas. They’re so cold, fungible. They could belong to anybody, and they do. Every lawyer here has the same rust-colored accordion files, the same framed diplomas from the same handful of schools. My eyes fall on the roses, so out of place in this cold little office with the clock staring in.
10:36.
I feel like I have to regroup, to sort out everything that’s been happening. I need to think things out in a safe place, but I can’t remember the last time I felt safe. In Mike’s arms. Another time.
In church, as a child.
In church, what a thought. I haven’t been to church in ages and had lapsed way before that. But I always felt safe in church as a little girl. Protected, watched over. The idea grows on me as I stand, frozen, facing the clock.
I think of the church I grew up in, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I was a believer then. A believer in a God who watched over us all, the cyclists and the gay secretaries. A believer in the goodness of all men, even partners, and lovers too. A believer in our fraternity with animals, including cats who won’t rub against your leg no matter what.
I grab my blazer from behind the door and stop by Miss Pershing’s desk. “Miss Pershing, I’ll be out of the office for a couple of hours.”
“Oh?” She takes off her glasses and places them carefully on her shallow chest, where they dangle on a lorgnette. “Where shall I say you are, Miss DiNunzio?”
“You shouldn’t say, but the answer is, in church.”
For the first time, Miss Pershing smiles at me.
I hail a cab outside our building. The cabbie, an old man with greasy white hair, stabs out his cigarette and flips down the flag on the meter. “Where to?”
“Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Ninth and Wolf.”
“Lawyers go to church?” A final puff of smoke bursts from his mouth.
“Only when they have to.”
He chuckles thickly, and it ends in a coughing spasm. We take off in silence, except for the crackling of the radio. The cab swings onto Broad Street, which bisects the city at City Hall and runs straight to South Philly. Broad Street is congested, as usual. We stop in the cool shadow cast by a skyscraper and then lurch into the bright light of the sun. I crank open the window, watching us pass through light and dark, listening to the old cabbie swear at the traffic, and trying to remember the last time I was in church.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been 3,492,972 weeks since my last confession. The Jurassic Period. When I did everything the nuns told me to, so I wouldn’t get my knuckles rapped, and memorized the Baltimore Catechism. I made my First Holy Communion at age seven, during which the priest put a wafer onto my tongue that he said was the body of Jesus Christ. I didn’t swallow it until right before they took my picture, and my baby face is beatific in the photo. I’d swallowed my slice of Our Savior and was overjoyed that this cannibalistic act had not sent lightning zigzagging to my head.
“Shit!” The cabbie bangs on the steering wheel, foiled in his attempt to run a traffic light. Sunlight blazes into the old cab, illuminating its dusty interior and heating its duct-taped seat covers. “You think they’d time these goddamn lights, like on Chestnut Street. But no, that would make too much sense.”
I nod, half listening. As soon as the light changes, the cabbie guns the motor and we leap forward into the tall shadow cast by the Fidelity Building. Its darkness comes as a relief and seems to quiet even the irritable driver.
As a child, I used to look at my communion picture on top of our boxy television. I wanted to be as good as the little girl in my picture, she of the praying hands and the lacquered corkscrews. But I wasn’t her. I knew it inside. The church told me so. They taught me that Jesus Christ suffered on the cross and died because of me. All because of me. Blood dripped from his crown of thorns and flowed in rivulets from rough bolts hammered clear through his wrists and insteps. His agony was all my fault. I felt so sorry, as a little girl, and so ashamed. Of myself.
“Hey, asshole!” shouts the cabbie, hanging out the window. “Move that shitwagon! I’m tryin’ to make a living here!” The cab bucks violently in the shade. I grab for the yellowed hand strap just as we burst free of the snarled traffic into the light.
And in my religious life, what happened next was calamitous. I grew up. It was Luke who said that whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it, and I stopped being a child. I stopped accepting on faith and started to doubt. Then I started to question, which brought the heavens, in the form of school administration, crashing down upon my head. I took biological issue with the Resurrection and was suspended for three days.
Light and dark, light and dark.
That’s when it started, the split between me and the church. And me and my twin. For as I began to turn away from the light, Angie began to embrace it. I resented the church, for making me feel so terrible about myself
