Chapter 12 #2
Caleb tore the collar from his throat and tossed it on the bed beside him. He lowered his voice. “I fucked up.” But that wasn’t quite right… “I made a mess of things.” Try again. “I—”
His voice broke and he glanced away, eyes zeroing in on that simple collar against the blue and yellow quilt. The truth will set you free.
“I think I’m falling in love with Molly.”
“I mean…yeah, Caleb. Are you just figuring that out now?”
Caleb snapped his eyes back to his brother’s sympathetic face on the screen, his own surprise at Gavin’s reaction staring back at him.
“It’s been pretty damn obvious for a while. But you’re…you know,” Gavin said, gesturing towards Caleb.
“I know,” he said miserably.
“Is this the first time you’ve had feelings for someone since becoming a priest?”
“Yes! It’s not exactly something we’re encouraged to do.”
“Right, but it’s just a feeling. You can’t control how you feel.” Caleb’s face heated as his cheeks turned bright red on the screen. Gavin’s eyes grew wide. “Unless, it’s more than just a feeling?”
“I slept with her.” Gavin’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “I mean, I didn’t—technically, yes, we slept together but we didn’t sleep together, and then this morning, that wasn’t sleeping but—”
Gavin held up a hand to stop Caleb’s ramblings. “I’m sorry. I’m having trouble following here. Did you share a bed with her, or did you have sex?”
“Yes? I mean, I’m not sure exactly what qualifies as sex in this particular circumstance—”
“Did either one of you come?” Caleb glared at his brother, as if there was any world in which he was answering that question. Gavin blew out a breath. “Okay, so you had sex with her. Didn’t you…I mean, isn’t that against the rules?”
“Yes!” Caleb leapt to his feet and paced the length of the small room, his bare toes digging into the low pile of the carpet. “This whole thing is against the rules. This is exactly why I should let the Bishop transfer me.”
“You what?”
“It’s not important.”
“I think it is fucking important, thank you very much,” Gavin snapped. “Since when do you not tell me things like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like major life things! Like you’re thinking about leaving Aster Bay again. Like falling in love with my wife’s best friend. Like breaking your vows—”
“I just told you!”
Caleb ran a hand through his hair, adjusted his glasses, and sank back down onto the bed.
The weight of his decisions over the last twenty-four hours slammed into him like a wrecking ball, shattering bone and bruising skin.
It was painful and awful and yet somehow also liberating, like he’d been encased in amber and had finally broken free.
“And so you took off your collar because—”
“Actually, she took it off.”
The brothers stared at each other for a moment in stunned silence before they both chuckled, Caleb’s need to correct Gavin on that particular detail only serving to highlight the absurdity of the entire situation.
“Merry Christmas, Father West,” Gavin teased as only a little brother could. “She’s one step away from jingling your bells.”
“Don’t be gross,” Caleb chided.
“So what are you going to do now?”
Caleb cast his eyes around the room as though the solution to his existential crisis somehow lay within the four walls of his rented bedroom. “I don’t know.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to be with her,” he admitted, then just as quickly he wrote over the confession. “I want to go back in time twenty-four hours and never have gotten into this mess. I want to go back twenty-five years— I took a vow.”
On the screen, Gavin frowned. “Did I ever tell you what Mom said to me the night you told us you were going to become a priest?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You’d just come home from college for summer break and we went out for burgers at the Dockside Diner.”
“I remember.”
“And then you dropped this bomb on us. Mom asked you why. Do you remember what you told her?”
“I told her I wanted to help people.”
Gavin nodded. “And she said you could help people by becoming a therapist or a guidance counselor or a social worker.”
He frowned as he tried to remember that part of the conversation. “I don’t remember that.”
“You kept rattling on about how you’d met this priest in school and it was a sign from God or Dad or whoever and now you were going to be a priest too.
You barely heard a word she said and then you left dinner early to go to evening Mass at St. Anthony’s.
As soon as you left the diner, Mom turned to me and said you were lost.”
“Lost?”
“She said you’d been lost for years, searching for something or someone to tell you which way to go and what to do, and she supposed if you had to find someone to listen to, there were worse people than a priest. But she hoped you weren’t going to end up even more lost than before.”
Caleb swallowed hard, recalling a similar conversation with his mother on the night before he took his vows. “Meeting Father Raymond, the life he offered me, it was a sign,” he said slowly, resolutely. “I believe that.”
“Maybe it was. But, Caleb, what about all the other signs you’ve been getting?”
“What signs?” he scoffed. “God doesn’t send me signs anymore. He doesn’t—” He broke off, shaking his head. “What kind of priest am I when He doesn’t even talk to me anymore?”
“Maybe that’s your sign.”
“The absence of a sign isn’t a sign.”
“There’s no such thing as signs!” Gavin’s frustration bubbled over, his free hand gesticulating as he spoke.
“There have never been any signs. It’s all just choices!
God didn’t tell you to become a priest, just like Dad didn’t tell you to become a priest. You told yourself that because it was the choice that felt right. ”
“But that feeling is the sign,” he argued.
“Then what about the feelings you’re having now?
Why are they any less of a sign than the one you had in college?
” Caleb didn’t have an answer for that. “Call it whatever you want—signs, intuition, whatever. It’s all the same thing at the end of the day.
It’s the information available to you at the time and the choices you make.
Right now, the information in front of you is you have feelings for Molly—big feelings.
Big enough feelings to give in to your pants feelings.
And she feels the same way about you. So what are you going to do about it? ”
He dragged his knuckles over his eyes behind his glasses. “I don’t know how to make that choice, Gav. I’m not free to make it.”
“Then get yourself free. But if you’re waiting for some sign to give you permission to be happy…” Gavin shook his head. “My wife was literally cast opposite me on a dating show and I still tried to tell myself I wasn’t supposed to love her.”
“Look how well that worked out,” Caleb said with a half-hearted smile.
“She’s my wife now, isn’t she? I’d say it worked out fan-fucking-tastically.
What’s that story about God sending help to the man in the flood?
From what I can tell from your texts, you and Molly were literally sent a star to follow, a stable to sleep in, and a snowstorm to force you to face how you feel. ”
“I want to.” Caleb’s voice was small, almost as though he was afraid to admit the truth even to himself. “I love her.” The words grew in his chest, warm and glowing as they took root behind his rib cage and made themselves a part of him.
“It’s not too late to choose a different life, Caleb.”