Road to Paradise (24 page)

“Shelby,” said Estevan, “I’m going to tell you a story. Because you look like you need to hear it.”

I wanted to ask if I looked like I needed money, too. Aunt Betty had thought so.

“How come you’re not telling
me
a story, Brother Estevan?” said Gina.

Estevan smiled. “You don’t look like
you
want to hear it. But
all right, I’ll tell you something. You know why I joined the Cistercian Order? Because I was in revolt. I rebelled against my meaningless life. I was confused and needed refuge. Until I found my way in here, I simply could not remember who I was. Here, songs grew up around me like a jungle. And every day since, the Psalms have pierced my heart. We all yearn for meaning, don’t you agree? For the revelation of the divine mystery. That’s the single-minded quest of all our existence, especially when we are young.”

“But
I
know who I am,” said Gina.

“That’s very good.” He nodded. “I commend you. Most of us are not as lucky.” He turned his solemn face to me. “Now, Shelby,” he began, “the evening after Jesus died and was buried, the chief priests and the Pharisees came to Pontius Pilate and asked for help. They were afraid the apostles might steal Jesus’ body from the tomb and proclaim that he had risen. They asked Pilate’s permission to put armed guards at the stone, ‘Lest the disciples come by night and steal him away.’” Estevan paused. “Shelby, do you know what Pilate said?”

He waited. I was mummified. “Well—uh—no,” I stammered.

“Do you know what he didn’t say? Oh, you fools. Or, don’t worry. It’ll be fine. That’s what he
didn’t
say. What he said was, ‘You have your watch. Go.
Make it as secure as you can
.’”

I waited for him. He waited for me, for my face to understand, for my dumb mouth to close. Was it a riddle I was supposed to figure out? I wasn’t going to Harvard for my brains! I wanted to shout to him. Gina told you—track scholarship. Estevan smiled. “Just remember this. That Friday evening, Pilate was telling them that their fears were not unfounded. They had reason to be afraid. And perhaps he wasn’t talking about a mid-evening kidnapping. There was terror on the Pharisees’ faces as they left him. This was not at all what they had hoped to hear.”

Stammer again. “Brother Estevan, forgive me, is it, um, something, that, um,
I
want to hear?”

Estevan nearly laughed. Soundlessly, like his daughter. “I don’t
know. Only you know.” Reaching across and patting me gently on the top of my confused head, he got up. “Listen to the Psalms. They’re the songs of mankind. Well, goodnight. I hope you have everything you need.”

“We don’t,” exclaimed Gina. “We don’t have a room. Or meat. Or, most important, a telephone. Is it any wonder we’re not in the mood for parables?”

“You have a room,” Estevan said. “Everything else will wait. And that was not actually a parable. A parable is a simple story told by Jesus to illustrate a spiritual or moral lesson. And in my story, Jesus was no longer telling stories. He was dead.” He blessed Candy’s head before he left, he kissed her, and made a sign of the cross in the air in our direction, which I was grateful for, while Gina scraped the bottom of her stew bowl like a raven and didn’t look up.

Candy pushed her own bowl toward Gina after her father left.

“You guys are lucky,” said Candy. “He must like you. My father is usually a man of few words. He probably spoke more to you than he has spoken in five years. The Trappist monks live a life of contemplative prayer. They say they can’t hear God when they speak.”

“Why?”

“Why what? There are many things that God wants to give us,” said Candy, “but can’t, because our heads and souls are filled with too much noise, and our hands are full. The monks here are silent so they can hear. And as for the rest of us …” Candy smiled, raising her arched brows and opening her hands. “Every once in a while, God empties our hands.”

My heart drummed in my chest.
Empties our hands
. Why did that sound so ominous? The room faced north, was silent and dusky. There was no light save the small decorative fixture shining down on the long table. Suddenly the room began to remind me of the room Judas had crawled into, crawled into thinking he was finally saved and was told that no, his real sorrows were just beginning. It made me hurt for him, and scared for myself, and unhappy
at eighteen to be thinking of such things. What was the point of your father’s story, Candy, I wanted to ask again, but didn’t dare in this room. What if she told me something that might relate to me? I didn’t want anything in that story to relate to me.

“Why’d you leave this place?” I mouthed.

“It was time for me to go,” said Candy. “I was getting too old. And I knew—my father could never enter the order until I left him. Besides, I did have a mother, after all. I wanted to meet her.”

“God, Candy, don’t say that,” I whispered, my arms stretched out on the wooden table, like on a tree.

We fell quiet. Gina loudly gulped her water. “What did he do with you when they went to pray? They pray every five seconds around here.”

“Seven prayer services, not including Mass. Ten hours a day in prayer during Lent. Holy Week, twelve to fifteen.”

“Now I know,” said Gina. “You lost your mind back then.”

Candy shrugged. “I dunno. When I was little, I stayed in the tabernacle. They’d sing the Psalms. I’d draw or sleep.”

“It’s true,” said Gina, “those Psalms would put anyone to sleep.”

Why did it seem like joy to be serenaded to sleep by those mystical lullabies? Maybe I had lost my mind, too.

“What did they teach you here?”

“How to make caskets. I have one actual skill,” said Candy, grinning. “I can go to work anywhere, making caskets. And you say I don’t know how to do anything. Bet you don’t know how to make caskets.”

“Bet you’re right,” Gina agreed. “I’m not sure I know how to do some of the other things you do either.”

There was a pointed silence. “Come on, Gina,” I said in a low voice. “I’m pretty sure you know how to do some of those things.” I turned my face to Candy. It was getting dark, I could barely make her out in shadows. “Why didn’t you and your dad both leave?” I asked. “Get a place in Dubuque, finish school? Have you ever been to an actual school?”

“Stop teasing. And about the other thing: my father didn’t
know how to live on the outside anymore. His days here were hard but after compline, he fell into bed and was asleep before he could finish his prayers. That’s how he knew he was all right. Because when he had been in college, he couldn’t get to sleep until the monks got up for lauds. His whole life had been inverted.”

“So what did he do, put you on a bus?”

“Yes!” Candy exclaimed, but not too loud. “He gave me money, put me on a bus in Dubuque.” She sighed wistfully. “I went looking for my life, and by God, I found it. Another girl would’ve run and not got off in Huntington city ’cuz it looked so pretty, but I did, and found her on the banks of the Ohio.”

“What was her name?”

“Dana,” she replied. “Dana Cane.”

“Was she … happy to see you?” I asked, my voice almost breaking, not looking at her.

“She was surprised,” Candy replied dully. “She said she had always liked surprises.”

We had long stopped eating in the dimly lit wood and stone room. The food was cold, as were the bare limestone walls. It was dark and preternaturally quiet, so quiet, you could hear the rumblings in my heart, and in Gina’s stomach. Everything was heard. There was no cover. Candy was right. It
was
terrifying and I was not prepared for how it made me feel.
I
wanted to turn away. I did turn away. From Candy, from Gina, from these walls.

“So you lived with your mother,” I said, “and were with her until this summer, when you left.”

“Something like that.” She sounded dubious. “We moved around a lot. From place to place, state to state, town to town. Like vagabonds. Finally settled back on the Ohio.” She stood from the table and took her plate. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “When I’m here, my body remembers thousands of days waking up at three in the morning for vigil, and lauds and Mass, and all the little hours. By compline I’m falling down myself. What time is it? It
must be past nine.” She smiled. “When I’m not here, I’m not asleep before nine in the morning. Right, Gina?”

“Hallelujah,” said Gina, finally animated about something. “Now that was some fun.”

Candy nodded. “Everything was inverted,” she said. “Come with me. Wash your plates and I’ll show you your room.” She said she was going to sleep in her old room, next to her father’s. “He left it empty all this time. Even my old blanket is still on the bed. He said he washes it every two weeks because he never knows when I might drop by to visit.”

She left us then, this shadow Candy of the real Grace, a girl who colored in the tabernacle and read the Bible and Merton and Martin and e.e. cummings her whole life, a girl who walked by her father’s side, her father the Trappist monk, who lived in silence for hours in a mute sanctuary. She left me thinking of her here, and also in De Soto, her head lowered between the legs of the husband of the woman who took her in and gave her food. It occurred to me then how much there was in this world I did not know, did not understand, and could not hope to understand. I must have muttered something to this effect, something to express my bewilderment at the things I was discovering here, but Gina, hostile and alert, getting ready for bed, said, “You don’t understand
her?
Why look so far, Shelby? Let me ask you, do you understand how a girl could sleep with her best friend’s boyfriend, knowing that he is the love of her life?”

Ah. I sank to my bed, my hands consigned to my knees. Here it was. Where do you go from here? Where do you turn? There is no Andy Gibb coming between us telling me that love is thicker than water, no Rod Stewart telling me that if loving you was wrong I didn’t want to be right. The Bee Gees were not staying alive, Mary McCormack was not torn between two lovers, Gloria Gaynor did not survive, and Molly was not between us, no Molly, no Aunt
Flo, or Aunt Betty, no dogs, no Candy. There was just me and Gina on opposite sides of our own little tabernacle, in our gray wooden stalls, and between us Eddie, that fire-brand hobo, that scarred, jumpy, black magic artist, unworthy, undeserving, unjust, disloyal, so disloyal—oh, the fickleness of his Eddie heart!—and how do I tell Gina that, unbelievably even to me—mostly to me—Eddie is also the love of
my
life.

The stone floor beneath my feet was cold.

How do I say to her that he told me things that no other boy ever said to me, that he made me feel like no other boy made me feel. Granted, my experience has been more limited than Gina’s. I don’t have her sexy name and frame. I looked almost like a boy, but was a girl who ran track and field faster than most boys. They had to catch me first. I didn’t strut my stuff in tight jeans. Still, Eddie saw something in me. Maybe just that I was so open. But I don’t like to believe that; I want to believe he saw something more. I thought we had had something more.

Hard to call it love, I thought, as I bent my head in a guest room at the abbey. I was grateful it was so dim, and Gina couldn’t see my face, but surely, she could see me in front of her with my head bowed, as if I were praying or asking for forgiveness, except I was doing neither. I bent my head so she wouldn’t see the truth of things in my eyes, ashamed only of how I felt about him, and wishing fervently to this day and at this hour that I had not felt that way.

But I had.

I still did.

He was hot, and he knew it.

Gina had been going out with a high school superstar, the basketball player all the girls swooned over. John Neal. He was lanky and lovely to look at with his black hair and blue eyes. And what’s more, he was crazy about Gina. She went with him, and then met Eddie at the beach, just like she always tells it. Eddie was eighteen, by his own account a genius, and in Larchmont because his mother, a gypsy like him, moved there with her new boyfriend. So Gina, admired like a queen for snagging the basketball hunk’s intensely
sought-after affections, took up with Eddie, who was the direct complement to John on the color scale. Where John was tall, Eddie was—how shall I say it kindly—not tall. Where John was lean, Eddie was squat, with blunt hands and a bull neck, bow legs and thick feet. Where John’s face could’ve been that of an Irish king, Eddie was small-eyed and Brillo-haired, more like the Irish king’s servant. And yet …

Gina continued with John, and with Eddie, keeping their hearts in her pocket—and then Agnes got grounded.

Gina asked me instead to come out to the Hobbit Hole with her and Eddie. “You’ll love him. He’s so funny!” When we were barely seventeen, we went to a local bar that looked the other way at all the young girls and boys coming in. Eddie parallel-parked the truck in a spot no girl could have gotten into, he swaggered, pulled out a chair for me; he ordered us drinks and clinked with me, he drank only Melon balls, and became giddy. I’d never had Melon balls. I drank three, and became giddy myself. I want to say it was the Melon balls. He talked Morrison’s poetry and Spinosa’s philosophy—how could I know he was full of shit, he sounded so worldly. So otherworldly. At the end of the night, he drove us home, dropped me off first, and like a gentleman said he would walk me to my front door. While Gina waited in his truck, Eddie in one second, in the dark, just inside the front door, had me pressed against the wall, flat against it, kissing me so feverishly, I thought we would wake Emma two flights up with our agonized breathing. It was five minutes of unconsummated rapture, and he kept whispering he had to go or “Gina would get suspicious,” and so he went, closing the door behind him. I was open like a door ripped off its hinges by a tornado.

In school the next day I carried the glazed look of someone who’d been hypnotized. After I got home, the phone rang.

He was at my door in thirty minutes. I told Emma I was going out for a little while. He took me to his mother’s house (his mother was not home), where we spent an ecstatic and perspiring hour.

God, I long to feel again with another human being how
Eddie made me feel that afternoon. Afterward, while stroking my trembling body, he called Gina to say he’d be a little late picking her up and told her he loved her. “I have to say it,” he said to me, “otherwise she’d get suspicious.” I nodded as if I understood. On the way home, I sat next to him on the bench seat, his arm around me, while Irene Cara’s “Fame” played on the radio. He said that’s how he felt. Like he was going to live forever. He sang along to it, and I gazed up at him transfixed, thinking he had the most beautiful out-of-tune voice. It was summer and warm outside, and Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” played while we drove down the hills of Route 1 from Mamaroneck back to my house. We too sang a toast to innocence—mine—there and gone.

Things I did not understand then. Eddie was a player. But you know what? That was okay, because I wasn’t going cross country to marry him, Gina was, and she
still
didn’t understand he was a player. Eddie hadn’t wanted Gina to be going out with John. And when Gina suspected the worst, she broke it off with John, and Eddie backed away from me. We needed to cool it, he said, see what else was out there. Gina, too, backed
far
away from me. I was the casualty between Eddie and Gina. She took him on any terms, and
that
I understood because I would’ve taken him on any terms, too. Had he said to me he was going to continue to see Gina, and Meg on the side, and Casey in California, I would have said, do you want me to be ready for you at midnight?

I had confessed to nothing; Gina never asked me. We just quietly and without fanfare stopped being friends. I blamed it, as I blamed all things happening in the world, on vile Agnes. For the entire senior year we did not speak, until the afternoon she accosted me unclothed in the girls’ locker room and asked to join forces in our fight against loneliness across the prairies.

Bottom line: it was here in New Melleray Abbey that Gina felt impelled to confront me with this for the first time, and it was in New Melleray Abbey that I, who had been thinking up tomes in response to that question, suddenly had nothing to say.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.
You’re imagining things.” Truth was, I didn’t want to talk about it. There was nothing to talk about. She clearly did
not
feel that there was nothing to talk about, developing a keen sense of right and wrong, of personal ethics, of certain things one did and did not do. For me to pretend was fatuous.

“How could you do it?” she said. “That’s what I want to know. How
could
you do it? I thought we were best friends. I thought you were the only one I could trust.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t have done it. Knowing what I know now, I would never do it again.” Knowing it was all for a heartless pilgrim.

And there I stood, with my bestest friend, my sister, on the cold stone floor of the abbey, while the pierced hitchhiker we’d picked up near Valparaiso—who not long ago had given head to a married man in De Soto, two states away—was in compline praying for the benevolence and intercession of the Holy Mother for the forgiveness of her sins. Mealy-mouthed, I said casually, “I didn’t know it would upset you.” That’s what I said. I didn’t know it would upset you, me sleeping with your boyfriend. After all, you had two, and I had none. How was that fair? You’re the one who keeps talking to me about freedom. “Gina, you’re the one who’s always saying, you gotta be free, gotta act free, gotta live without guilt because guilt weighs you down. You only have one life, live it, take it, make yourself happy, you’ve got only one chance at this, have fun. So I did.”

“I didn’t know you were going to take my advice so much to heart, Sloane,” Gina said bitterly. “Didn’t you know I was full of shit?”

I did know. I just didn’t want to think about it. I wanted what I wanted. “You had John, Gina.”

“But you knew I loved Eddie!” she cried.

“Yes, but you said you loved John, too!” I cried back.

“We were best friends,” she said. “You don’t do that to your best friend.”

“We weren’t best friends. You were best friends with Agnes.

You replaced me. I was a stand-in friend, a substitute. You knew I didn’t like her, yet you dragged her into our friendship and didn’t care how I felt about it.”

“I thought we could all be friends!”

“I hated her guts! How could I be friends with someone I hate?” I got scared and lowered my voice. I didn’t want Estevan Rio to come knocking on the door asking why we were shouting in the abbey and why Gina was so upset.

“So you betrayed me because you didn’t think we were friends anymore?”

“That’s right,” I said in a tiny voice.

“But, Shelby,” she said intensely, “you know that I still thought we were best friends.”

My head so low, I said, “I’m sorry, Gina.”

She turned away. “Too late for sorrys,” she said, lying down on a bed that was hard as a tombstone.

And I didn’t say what was a hot brick in my throat, in my heart. Gina! I didn’t say, I know you’re upset with me. But for a second, think about me, and how I feel, knowing that the boy I thought was the love of my life, chose
you
, not me, to be with, to love. He had a choice. Stay with me, or go with you. And he did not stay with me. I know you might say it’s my just punishment, but think how this makes me feel—about you, about him, about myself.

I lay down on my own bed. We didn’t speak after that. There was nothing to say. Elton John was wrong. Sorry wasn’t the hardest word. I said it aplenty. I sang it from the rooftops.
Love
was the hardest word. What could I do, Gina? was what was hardest to say. Forgive me. I loved the bum. I don’t want to tell you because I don’t want you to ask me the follow-up: do you still love him? On top of all my other sins I don’t want to lie to you in an abbey.

A restless night passed and a silent, restless morning. We had slept turned to the wall in all our clothes. Possibly I cried. Or dreamt
about crying. A monk brought us our Spartan breakfast—a piece of bread and some black tea. I asked him when the next service was, and he looked at me like I was asking when his next breath was. “Terce at 9:15,” he said brusquely and vanished. We ate, I took a shower, and while Gina was taking hers, I sneaked out and meandered my way out of the maze through the cloisters back to the front of the abbey, where I tiptoed into the tabernacle. The men in white and black were chanting. I sat and closed my eyes to the morning.
Open my eyes that I may see
… they chanted.
I
am a stranger in the earth … My soul breaks with longing
…

Lauds, Mass, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline, Opus Dei …

Gina and Candy pulled me out. The monks were still chanting. “Terce is long,” Candy said.

“Ironic, that.”

“Did you want to get going?” she asked. “We’ve been here two days.”

“Have we? Oh, what’s the rush? You haven’t seen your father in years. I don’t want to cut short your visit. I know how hard it must be. I understand. Take all the time you need.” I glared at Gina’s glaring. “
All
the time you need. Never mind us. We’ll be fine. Right, Gina?” I turned to go back inside, to listen to them finish.

“No,” Gina hissed. “Not right. We won’t be fine. We’ve got two thousand miles to go!”

“Oooh.” I waved my dismissing hand at her. “Look at you, always rush, rush. A couple of days isn’t going to kill us.”

Candy took me by the arms. “Sloane, you are too funny. But here, I have to agree with Gina. We have to go.” She shook me lightly. “Come on, snap out of it. You’ve sat through all the hours. Twice. Besides,” she added, her voice teasing, “Gina will have no hair left soon.”