Chapter 8. Maggie #2
“What’d she do?” Isabel asked. “After she found you?”
“When she opened the door, we jumped up, but I guess she’d seen enough,” Maggie said. “After Julia left, I tried to tell my mom that we were just taking a nap or something, but she knew. Probably even before then.”
“That sucks you had to lie.”
“I guess. But I was right to at least try. Everything went downhill from there. My mom called Julia’s parents and told them—”
“She didn’t!”
“She sure did. Julia and I weren’t allowed to see each other, and my parents removed the private phone line in my bedroom. They figured out that our zine was for fans of Jeanette Winterson—”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah, so they put an end to that, too. And I guess the final insult was my mom sending me to talk to Father Kelly to—”
“Ungay you?”
Maggie laughed. “I think the term they used was spiritual counseling .” Then: “Though the point was definitely to guide me back to the flock.”
Isabel held her closer and pressed her lips to her forehead. “I’m glad it didn’t work,” she said.
“I am, too.”
When Maggie’s mother picked her up from school that day, Maggie knew something was different, but it wasn’t until they rounded the corner and pulled into the parking lot of Saint Mary’s rectory that she realized what was happening.
Nora clutched the station wagon steering wheel and kept her eyes straight ahead. “I’ll wait here,” she said.
Maggie sank into the seat. “I’m not going in,” she said. As natural as it had felt to kiss Julia, it felt equally unnatural to disobey her mother. It was futile anyway. Nora’s power of persuasion had never been in a raised voice or threat of punishment. It was in her sadness, her disappointment.
Nora didn’t say anything, and they sat in the car for several minutes, until Maggie couldn’t take the silence anymore. She opened the door and slammed it closed behind her.
The smell of incense and coffee followed her as she and Father Kelly made their way through the quiet rectory hallways and into the kitchen, where he arranged a plate of Nilla wafers and poured her a glass of milk as though she were in kindergarten.
He gestured for her to sit, sit. When she did, she expected him to launch into one of his stories, but instead he sat across from her and got straight to the point.
“You understand your mother’s concern, yes?”
Maggie nodded and stared at a basket of palm branches waiting to be braided into crosses. She did not dare say a word. Silence was the only way to contain the tears. Besides, what could she possibly say?
“You know,” he continued, “you are a very bright girl and you have a lot of curiosity about the world.”
And that’s when she noticed it. His delicate hands and soft voice.
The way he crossed his legs. She’d known Father Kelly her whole life.
He’d baptized her and all her siblings, had taught her religion class the past year, and was at nearly all her family holidays.
And yet, she’d never detected. Or—that wasn’t it.
She had detected. She’d just never had a word to explain it all.
Now she did. The same unspoken word—she hadn’t even said it to Julia—that applied to her as well.
But instead of connecting her to Father Kelly, a sort of kinship, she felt the opposite. The hypocrite. How dare he?
“The sin is in the act, but before we act, we think.” He tapped his forehead as though she didn’t know where one had thoughts. “Right?”
Something within Maggie collapsed. She wished she could talk to someone honestly.
To tell them what was happening. To get advice that was actually helpful.
To hear that it was all going to be okay.
She did not want to upset her parents, but the moment she’d kissed Julia, she’d understood that this need, this drive, was an essential part of herself that would never go away. Even if she wanted it to.
She watched two finches fight for a spot on a bird feeder hanging from a bare tree outside the window. All she wanted was for the conversation to end. To leave and go to her room to be alone.
Father Kelly sat back in his chair and placed his hands behind his head. “Perhaps you’re being called to fulfill God’s will,” he said.
This caught Maggie’s attention—mostly because she didn’t know what he was talking about—and she looked up at him. As a kid, she would pray every Sunday that she got the piece of communion broken from Father Kelly’s host. She’d adored him. Maybe he did have something to offer her now.
“In facing difficulties,” he continued, “we are given a chance to reevaluate the role faith plays in our lives and in determining our life choices.” He sat up and leaned forward. “That is the point. Not desire.”
Fuck off , Maggie thought. Desire is the point! Desire makes everything clear. She was too angry to cry, and when Father Kelly reached his hands across the table, she just looked at him.
“You are a child of God and you have His mercy,” he said.
He had it all wrong. It wasn’t the grace of God she had lost; it was her mother’s. She was no longer the precocious little girl in her communion dress, white patent-leather shoes, and lace-frilled socks.
On her way out, Father Kelly said, “Sure, with everything your parents have been through the last few years, I know you won’t be giving them any more grief.” He came from the same area of West Cork as her mother, and they shared the same gentle lilt that made won’t sound like want .
How’s that fair? Maggie thought. Because my brother was involved in an accident that killed a boy and nearly bankrupted my parents, I can’t live my own life? Like her parents had a finite amount of forgiveness and empathy to offer, and Topher had cleaned them out? Maybe he had.
Maggie slumped back into the car. She strapped the seat belt across her chest and stared out the window.
She wanted to tell her mother what she’d discovered about Father Kelly.
Nora had met him shortly after moving to Port Haven, and, as she told it, he soon became her “spiritual father.” Well , Maggie thought, your spiritual father is a first-class homo .
But she didn’t say this, because she didn’t want to hurt her mother, and because as much as she had lost all respect for Father Kelly, she now knew what it meant to be yanked out of the closet against her will. She didn’t want to be the one to do that to anybody else.
After a moment, her mother, clutching her rosary beads, said, “I trust that was helpful.”
It was not a question, but Maggie didn’t want to give her mother the impression there was anything remotely helpful in the conversation.
To offer that felt like a complete denial of herself.
A denial her mother would insist upon. It hadn’t always been this way between them, but so much had changed in the past few days, it was disorienting.
“Sure,” she said, and her mother started the engine.
Maggie lay her head on Isabel’s belly. “The crazy thing is that when I finally came out in college, my mom acted shocked. It wasn’t a big deal for anyone else, but for her—I mean, she definitely believes my soul is at risk.”
“How did you tell her?” Isabel asked.
“I sent a letter apologizing,” Maggie said. “I regret doing that, apologizing.”
“Why did you?”
“Because I really was sorry.”
Isabel played with Maggie’s hair. “You shouldn’t have been,” she said.
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
It was hard for Maggie to explain it all, but she tried. “Topher died a few months after,” she said. “The church had always been a life raft for my mom, but at that point it became everything.”
“Have you guys talked about it since?”
“Not really. In our last conversation, she told me, ‘If I don’t have my beliefs, what do I have?’ And I was like, ‘Um, me ? You have me!’”
Even in the most chaotic times of her mother’s childhood, Nora had always found order and safety in her faith. It was the one thing, Maggie understood, that her mother could rely on. How could she ever compete with that?
Isabel was quiet for a long moment, then said, “Maybe she’s changed? I’m here, after all. She’s welcomed me. That must be a good sign.”
“You are here.” Maggie held Isabel’s hand and studied the surprisingly decent manicure James had given her the night before with the neon-green nail polish from his Shrek Halloween costume. She loved that Isabel hadn’t removed it. “And I don’t want you to sleep in the cottage,” she said.
Isabel lifted Maggie’s face to hers. “I’m sorry about last night,” she said.
“Don’t be,” Maggie said. Isabel’s contrition only made her feel worse.
Outside the cottage door, a flurry of footsteps and squeals emerged from the driveway; then they heard Augustus yell, “The raccoon got the garbage! Mummy!”
Maggie turned her attention back to Isabel. “So you won’t go to your cousin’s?”
Isabel sat up on her elbow. Her braid was messy from sleep, her olive skin dark against her white V-neck. Maggie was sure she was the most beautiful woman she’d ever known and would ever know, and she had to stop herself from pulling her closer and begging her to stay.
Isabel stretched and yawned. “I don’t think I could leave even if I wanted to,” she said, and faced the window.
“It’s like we’re in a snow globe.” Then she turned back, and her brown eyes glowed as she lowered her face to kiss Maggie on the lips and said the thing Maggie was waiting for her to say.
“But, anyway, I want to be here. I want to be with you.”
“Same,” Maggie said.
“And I’m glad you shared all that with me,” Isabel said. “It helps me understand more. I wish you’d told me earlier.”
A queasiness surfaced in Maggie’s stomach when she thought of everything she still had not shared with Isabel.
About Sarah. The impending meeting with Cunningham.
At least they were back on solid ground, she told herself.
At least there was that. She hoped the snow globe would hold, and that she hadn’t already cracked the glass.