I need to clear my head before I can’t remember what I’m doing.
My eyes lift to his and hold there. When he blinks, a drop of water rolls off his eyelashes. My hand slides lower until my thumb is touching the corner of his mouth.
“Torrin?” I whisper, my mouth lowering.
“Yeah?” His voice is rough, coming from low in his throat.
I move my mouth just outside his ear. “This . . . is . . .”—I burst free of his hold and slide his legs out from beneath him with my foot—“payback!”
He goes down with a surprised shout and an explosive splash. I’m laughing again, and so is he when he pops his head above the water.
“Well played, Childs.”
“Thank you very much,” I say with a bow, hoping he can’t see right through me the way I feel he can sometimes.
If he does, he’ll know. He’ll know I would have rather kissed him. I would rather still be kissing him. He’ll know that while I’m content to put most of the past behind me, there’s one part I want to pack and bring with me to the future.
Him.
I think he might see it though because I think I might see it in him too.
The sun catches his eyes just right when he looks at me. “You always had a way of taking the ground right out from beneath me.”
I GO OUT on my own the next day. I’m hoping that courage is like a muscle—the more you work it, the stronger it becomes. Yesterday, the beach. Today, the library.
Mom drops me off, but her car stays parked at the library, engine running, for five minutes after I go inside. I’ve been watching. I asked her to bring me to the library because it seems unthreatening and, other than a potential paper cut, safe. What I really want to do is go on a walk. For hours. For miles. I want to walk until my legs can’t go any farther.
I don’t just want to walk though. I want to walk alone. To think. To process. To clear my head and try to figure out some stuff. I knew there was no way she would agree to just drop me off at some corner and let me weave around the city though, so an afternoon at the library it is.
I’m wearing a ball cap, and I’ve braided my hair back so hopefully no one will recognize me. If they do and the reporters find out . . . I’m stuck. I can only escape as fast as my legs will take me.
The risk is worth the reward though.
When I realize Mom isn’t going to pull away the moment after I enter the library, I kill some time wandering around the lobby. Once Mom’s car finally leaves the parking lot, I decide to wait another minute just in case.
I take a last spin around the lobby, and an elderly man walks in, reading a paper. It catches my attention because of the big headline and photos taking up the whole front page. As the man rounds into the library, he drops the paper in the recycle bin and keeps going. I rush over and snatch it out of the bin. I shake the front page open, and I feel something pull a plug in my stomach as everything inside seems to drain away.
Father Torrin’s Torrid Love Affair
There’s one photo of us, and it’s from yesterday. How someone found us or recognized us or whatever ill fate had a hand in it, I don’t know, but somehow they managed to get just the right shot of us in the water where it looks like our lips are almost touching. We’re in the ocean up to our thighs; my legs are wound around him; his arms are tied below my backside.
My eyes are open. His are closed.
He thought I was going to kiss him. He really believed I was. But that’s not what makes me have to lean into the wall to hold myself up—it’s that he was ready to kiss me back. He would have if I’d moved just a little closer.
What am I supposed to make out of that? A moment of weakness? He’d never seemed so sure of himself as he did yesterday.
I slide the cell phone Mom picked up for me a few days ago from my pocket, find the last number in my memory, and hit Call.
He answers in the middle of the second ring. “Jade?”
I should have taken a minute to catch my breath before calling him because I can’t reply for a minute.
“What’s wrong?”
I lean my head into the wall and suck in a deep breath. “Where are you?”
“At St. Al’s Hospital.”
I don’t know where it is, but I know how to find it on my phone. “Wait there.”
“I’m about to perform a last rites in twenty minutes.”
I shove off the wall, clutching the paper in my other hand as I hurry for the door. “I’ll wait. Just stay there, okay?”
He’s quiet for a second. “Okay.”
I hit End and shove through the doors, trying to pull up the location of St. Al’s Hospital on my phone. I’m catching up on technology—slowly. It shows St. Al’s is a mile away. Driving distance is ten minutes thanks to traffic. Walking distance is fifteen.
I take the walking option since I set out to walk anyway and there isn’t a taxi or bus stop in sight. Following the directions, I clip off turn after turn, cruising along at almost but not quite a jog. My body still gets tired from exertion, but it’s adapting to everyday life again. It’s getting stronger.
When an ambulance flies by me, I know I’m getting close, and I follow its sirens to the top of the hill. The climb feels like it’s going to make my heart explode even though I’m barely walking. By the time I make it to the top and am in front of the hospital, I’ve almost been reduced to a crawl.
Taking a second to let my lungs relax, I follow the signs to the main entrance and brake to a stop when I realize I have no idea where in this megaplex of a hospital Torrin is.
“Can I help you, miss?” a woman at the reception desk asks when I stay frozen just inside the doors.
“Torrin Costigan?” I say, guessing it’s a long shot she’d know where one person is in this place.
“Patient?” she replies, typing something into her computer. Her eyes squint at the screen, and she shakes her head.
“No, he’s a visitor . . .” Then I realize I’m probably one of the few people who still calls him Torrin. “Father Costigan?” I tuck the paper tighter into my armpit.
“Oh, sure.” She pushes back from her computer and slides off her reader glasses. “He’s up on the fifth floor with Mrs. Delaney.”
When she waves toward the elevators, I start moving. “Thank you.”
I’m antsy waiting for one of them to open, and when one finally does, I jump inside before anyone has a chance to climb off. I punch the five button a dozen times, but it doesn’t make the doors close any faster.
What am I in such a hurry to find out? Why do I need to see him so badly?
Is it to let him know about the article . . . the picture? Or is to confront him about the kiss that could have been?
I’m not sure, and I guess I won’t be until I’m standing in front of him. It makes me want to get there even sooner. I run—run—off of the elevator before the doors finish opening. A nurse at a pill cart twists around when she hears my sneakers squeak across the tile.
“Mrs. Delaney’s room?” I ask.
She lifts her tablet to check.
“Father Costigan?”
Her eyes lift away from the tablet. “Room 542.”
I hurry down the hall, feeling like it’s the last room in this never-ending tunnel. Actually, it is. I skid to a stop when I come to the end of the hall. The door to 542 is partly closed, but I hear him inside. I can see him too.
I can’t see Mrs. Delaney because he’s blocking her, but I can see her weathered hand swimming in his. The skin looks thin, frail . . . cold. I’m not Catholic, but I know enough from the times I went with Torrin to his church. I know what the last rites are. I know the woman whose hand he’s holding is dying. Soon.
He finishes his recitation, crosses himself, and then he’s quiet. He doesn’t say good-bye and turn to leave now that it’s done. He doesn’t pat her hand before setting it on the bed. He stays. He keeps holding her hand.
I know the woman’s crying. I can hear her, and I can tell by the way T
orrin’s jaw grinds together. He’s never been able to handle a woman crying well. But he lets her cry, staying still beside her the entire time. Her hand stays solidly in his the whole time.
Mrs. Delaney sniffs, and her thin fingers curl around Torrin’s hand. “You’re a bright light in this dark world, Father.” Her voice carries out of the room, then she slips her hand from his. “Thank you.”
He moves for the door, but before he goes, he rests his hand on the foot of her bed. “Be at peace.”
“Now”—she exhales like all of the pain and fear has been emptied from her—“I am.”
He smiles, but his jaw’s still straining, then he heads for the door. I creep back a ways because I don’t want him to know I was listening in. I don’t want him to know that what I just witnessed might have been the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
He doesn’t look surprised to see me when he steps into the hall, but he doesn’t say anything until he closes the door.
“What’s the matter?” he asks in a hushed voice. I can tell sound carries up and down these halls like the scent of disinfectant.
For a minute, I’d forgotten. I’d been too hypnotized by what just happened in that room. “Have you seen the paper today?”
I begin to pull it out from under my arm when he stops me. His fingers curl into my arm, and I think about the kiss that could have been.
He takes in a breath through his nose. “I’ve seen it.”
I hadn’t been expecting that answer. “You have?”
“The one with a picture the size of a soccer ball of the two of us? Yeah, I have.”
“And you’re not concerned?” I let the paper fall open in front of him.
He doesn’t look at it. “About ‘Father Torrin’s Torrid Love Affair’? No, considering it’s a lie, I’m not concerned.”
I turn the paper around to make sure I didn’t see the picture wrong the first time. Nope, still looks like if things aren’t, they’re about to get plenty ‘torrid.’ And why the hell are they referring to him as Father Torrin when even I know you call a priest by his last name? I know why though—torrid and Costigan don’t pack the same punch. “And what about the picture? This doesn’t worry you?”
I shake the paper in his face, but he still won’t look. “It’s a picture. It doesn’t tell the whole story. It can’t show what came before and what came after. If people are going to let a perfectly timed photo and a fancy headline form their opinions for them, that’s not my problem.” His forehead creases when he looks at me. “Are you worried?”
“Very.”
Now his removed expression shifts. Concern takes its place. “This is going to make things worse for you, isn’t it? They’re going to send more reporters to your front door. You won’t be able to sneak out without them following you . . . speaking of . . .” He motions at me. “What are you doing here? By yourself?” He scans the hall, probably looking for my parents.
“Forget about that right now. I’m here—we don’t need to talk about how I got here.” I drop the paper at my side. “I’m not worried about how this affects me. I’m worried about how this affects you.”
“How will this possibly affect me when it’s trash and lies?”
“Because you were about to kiss me”—I wave at him like that explains it all—“and you’re a priest.”
I notice one of the nurses down the hall turn her head toward us. Torrin does too. Taking my arm, he leads me into an empty waiting room.
“You were about to kiss me too,” he says, moving in front of me, “knowing exactly what I am.”
I could deny it. I could argue. I don’t because he’s right. “I shouldn’t have. You’re right, I do know what you are.” My eyes lower to his neck. “I shouldn’t have.”
“Want to try that again? With a little conviction this time maybe?”
The way he says it, the way he closes the space between us, makes me back up because there it is—the urge. The longing. The pull. The attraction. It’s still there. A decade later, and it hasn’t diminished. It hasn’t stayed the same.
It’s grown.
“Why are you doing this, Torrin? What are you even saying right now?” I squeeze my eyes shut because I can’t look away from him when he’s looking at me like that. “You are a goddamn priest. You made your choice.”
“You were gone, Jade. I made the only choice I had left.” His voice rolls over me. He’s upset.
I don’t want him to be upset because of me anymore. I don’t want to be that in his life.
“You’re not just a priest. You’re a good one. A really good one.” I think of the woman in that room and how he made her last moments on this planet better. “You’re doing this for a reason. Don’t throw it all away.”
“And what if I’m willing to? Give it all up? Throw it all away?”
My eyes flash open. “Then I’d tell you you’re a damn fool.”
He moves toward me, matching my every step as I back away. “And what if I don’t care what you say because when you look at me, you’re telling me something different every time?”
“I wouldn’t let you. I won’t let you do it.”
His phone vibrates in his pocket. He exhales when he pulls it out and checks the screen.
“They’re calling about us, aren’t they?”
He pockets the phone. “‘They’ being my governing bishop and the church elders? Probably.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
“The truth.”
“And what is that?” I say, glad we’re in the privacy of the waiting room because my voice is getting louder. “The truth?”
Torrin’s eyes narrow. “You know it. You’re just not ready to admit it.”
I hear the phone vibrate in his pocket again. He can only ignore them for so long. I feel desperate, trying to think of anything I can say to him to get him to change his mind.
Though I’m not sure I want him to change his mind, because he’s right—I do know the truth. But he’s also right about me not being ready to admit it.
“Why did you become a priest?”
He tips his head. “I already told you why.”
“Yeah, because I was gone and maybe never coming back and you wanted to help people. You could have done a hundred different things if you wanted to help people. Why else?”
His jawbone pops through his skin. He glares out the window for a minute, then he falls into the chair behind him. He leans forward and glares at the floor. “After you went missing, I changed. A lot. I was consumed with trying to find you, and that led me down a lot of roads I never should have wandered down. One of those roads took me to a serious beating that almost killed me.” His shoulder lifts. “I wanted to die. That night under the Ship Canal Bridge, when I confronted some bad people who I’d heard might know something about your disappearance, I wanted to just leave this world for good. I thought that if nothing else, maybe you’d be waiting for me on the other side.”
I hadn’t been expecting this story. I hadn’t been expecting to hear about the time he almost died because he hadn’t been able to let me go. I drop into the chair across from him.
“Someone found me though. Someone who’d been out delivering sandwiches to the homeless. He helped me up, drove me home, and listened to my story. The whole drive, he didn’t say anything. He just listened. He was the first person to do that, you know? Listen. Everyone else had been throwing so much ‘you’ll be okay with a little time’ or ‘she’s in a better place’ at me I was ready to break the nose of the next person who said it.” Torrin clasps his hands in front of him, popping his knuckles as he rolls them together. “After he dropped me off back at home, he told me that if I wanted to ever talk again, I could find him at St. Mark’s. He was the priest there.”
That’s when he glances at me. The look on his face makes me want to crawl into the chair beside him and hold him.
“I went back. A bunch of times. I talked. He listened. Until finally one day, I was done talkin
g. It was the same day he finally offered me some kind of advice or reassurance.” His phone buzzes in his pocket again, but I don’t think he hears it. “He told me that I wouldn’t be any help to you if I got myself killed. He told me that as long as there was still hope, not to give up on it. He told me that when I felt like an absolute failure and that I was getting nowhere, to repeat a certain quote to myself.”
I tip my head and wait.
Torrin exhales, his face bound by emotions I’m not sure I know the names of. “‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’”
I repeat the words to myself. I imagine a young, desperate Torrin repeating them to himself. I wonder if those words could help get me through my dark period, if they could pull me up when the weight of a thousand failures was holding me down. “Who said that?”
“I don’t know. Someone brilliant.” Torrin stares at his hands, his brows drawn together. “Because it worked. It’s what got me through a decade of dead-ends and cold trails. I just kept failing better until I ultimately remembered something that would lead the police to the man who took you.”
I have this priest and those words to thank for my freedom. It kind of knocks the wind out of me, and I sink deeper into the chair. “If you never gave up hope, why did you go to seminary? If you still felt like I’d be found, why did you become this?” I gently motion at him, my eyes lingering on his collar.
He takes a moment to answer. He’s still studying his hands like they’re not his but someone else’s. “Because holding on to that kind of hope—that there was still a chance for you and me?—made me too desperate. It was counterproductive. The tighter I held on to you, the further away you seemed to slip.” His hands curl into fists before he looks at me. “Once I committed to this, I was able to approach your case from an unbiased, almost objective perspective. Once I gave up that selfish part of wanting you back, I could think clearly. If I hadn’t become this . . . I’m not sure you’d be sitting across from me now.”
“So you sacrificed your whole life for me?” I work my tongue into my cheek, overwhelmed. With guilt, appreciation, and unworthiness.