Uncross My Heart (20 page)

“She’s a writer and a public speaker.” My tone was flat but civil as my heart pounded and my gut turned.

“The woman who attacked the school—that’s her. What on earth was she doing here?”

“Seeing me.” The defiance was just barely surfacing.

“What do you mean ‘seeing’?” His tone was accusatory.

“As in—spending time with me.”

“Oh, good God, not that again. I thought we got through that years ago—”

“Don’t discuss this, Father. It’s not your affair.”

“And it’s not going to be your affair either. You’re a susceptible person because you have a difficult profession—”

“Please, don’t do this again, stay out of my—”

“This woman could ruin your chances of advancement—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“But you
will
hear it.”

“I won’t and if you’re going to—”

“You’re a priest.”

“I
know
what I am.”

“Then act like one.”

“Don’t tell me how to act, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t you think I could tell what was going on here? The air was full of it. Don’t you think I know what that woman wanted with you?”

“I’m asking you to leave now.” I had clamped my jaw shut and spoke through clenched teeth.

“I will not leave until we settle this.”

“We are not settling anything about my personal life. Either you leave or I will.”

“The floors of hell are lined with the heads of gay priests. Take care that you don’t join them.” His words slammed into my chest like a lead volley, killing any feelings I had left for him.

“You can only know about the floors of hell, Father, if you’ve been there.”

Like giant scissors slicing through a ribbon, my words signaled a groundbreaking for both of us. My father, unable to bear it, executed an about-face and left—his heavy shoes hurriedly stumbling down the stairs. As I turned to go back inside, I felt as if a great dark hand had clutched my chest and stopped my breathing.

Then I heard the crash. I turned to discover he’d collapsed and fallen the remaining four feet to the ground. I rushed to his side and saw blood coming from his head where he’d hit it on the porch rail. As I took his pulse he struggled to pull his hand away and place it on his chest.
Heart attack,
I thought.
Good Lord, help us.

I ran back inside and retrieved my cell phone and rang 911. We were a good twenty minutes from anyone who might help. The operator took the information far too slowly and assured me an ambulance had been deployed. I told her he was too heavy for me to lift, and she insisted they didn’t want me to move him, but instructed me on having him cough deeply. Then she asked me to check his breathing and monitor his pulse and watch his color. If he started to go into shock or his heart stopped, they would instruct me over the phone about my next move.

I asked him every few moments if he was okay and if I could make him more comfortable, all the while knowing I was the source of his discomfort.

Relief flooded over me as the ambulance pulled into the driveway, lights flashing, and paramedics jumped out and took over. Vital signs checked, oxygen hooked up, an IV started, they stabilized him before loading him into the back of the white truck.

I grabbed car keys and my wallet and locked the house in time to see the ambulance lumber off and pick up speed. Then I rang Madeleine Montgomery, the doctor who had saved Angela’s baby. She answered my call and assured me she’d page the hospital and find out who was on duty in cardiac and give them a heads-up that we were on the way.

That was the extent of what I could do, other than pray, and I did the latter as I followed the white van bearing my father into the emergency entrance of the hospital and put my car in ER parking.

As they prepared to wheel him away for assessment I kissed him good-bye on the forehead and he clutched my hand, his speech slurred.

“Don’t kill me again.” For a moment he didn’t look like my father at all, but like an ancient ruler of some distant land reaching across time to connect with me.
Does he mean
don’t break his heart by getting
involved with Vivienne, or don’t let the hospital staff harm him, or does
he really believe I killed him in a former lifetime?

“It’s not uncommon for them to be disoriented,” the kindly nurse said as I stood at check-in filling in the details of his life—birth date, social security number, widowed or divorced, religious preference, insurance coverage. The list was endless. The woman behind the counter assured me that once they had his information in their system it would be easy, the next time, to get checked in—reminding me that, best case, my father could have an endless number of next times.

She pointed down a long corridor and instructed me to wait outside ICU. I took the elevator to the eleventh floor where the waiting room was empty and the temperature was as cold as if it had been set to cool fifty people at noon and now had only me to chill. I tried to read a magazine, then roamed and paced, staying close to intercept the doctor.

About an hour later, a tall, thin man in green surgical scrubs, with an overly haggard face for fortysomething, appeared and said,

“Ms. Westbrooke? I’m Dr. Achison, the attending on your father’s case. We don’t know much. His heart rhythm is unstable and his blood pressure is elevated. He’s not bleeding internally or showing signs of thrombosis—long way of saying we have him fairly stable at the moment but we don’t know what’s going on yet. So we’re going to keep him in ICU.”

I thanked him and told him I’d stay until the next round of tests came back. Energy drained from me as if someone had unplugged me from a generator. I was hungry but too nauseous to eat, tired but too wired to sleep, wanting Vivienne but too afraid to call
. I have totally, totally,
totally screwed any chance with her.
The sadness of that realization was unbearable, and I walked down one endless corridor and into the next, witnessing people in various stages of grief and fatigue. A man in gray sweatpants seated in a metal folding chair, slumped over, his head in his hands. A thin woman pacing and checking the clock, streaks in her makeup the result of dried rivulets of tears.
Prayers rising, in a
cacophonous conversation with God.

The sign above the door ahead of me denoted the chapel, and almost involuntarily I went inside. A small room, with all the requisite iconography, thick pale blue carpet, and a large cross elevated above an altar at the end of the room.

I knelt at the altar rail and prayed.
Dear God, what do you want
from me? How miserable must I be to serve you? I have caused the
woman I care so much about to hate me. I have caused my father such
pain that he’s now in grave danger. Please care for him, give him
strength and heal him. And heal me, Lord. I am so confused. Heal me.

Amen.

I knelt there in the stillness with nothing left to say to God.
If God
knows everything, then my conversation is redundant.
I rose from the altar rail and moved back into a third-row pew and stared ahead at the dais, waiting for an answer. A young woman wearing the black-and-white habit of a nun entered the chapel from a side door and sat down beside me. “Are you all right?” I nodded that I was. “Is there anything troubling you that we might pray about?”

I looked into the innocent face and something in me rebelled.

What could she know of life, of temptation, of pain, of any damned thing—spewing out her pious-by-rote phrases? She had no idea I was a priest. She most likely would not approve if she did.

“Yes, actually, there is a question troubling me. What do you think God thinks of homosexuals?” I asked archly, almost to season her unfairly.

“God and His church love the sinner but hate the sin,” she said softly and kindly.

“Isn’t that the most sanctimonious, holier-than-thou pile of crap we could possibly say to our parishioners? Think about it. Do we really freaking know what God loves, since His presumed Word was translated into six different languages before we ever got it and there was no Office Depot to get ourselves a handy tape recorder to be sure we got it right? I am personally going to stop passing out those platitudes to my parishioners or students or whoever in hell they are…”

She had already slid away from me on the pew and scampered out, leaving me muttering to myself about who I would and wouldn’t proselytize. Having run out of rants, I stared at the stained-glass mosaic behind the wooden cross, letting the cranberry shards of glass reflect light that scattered like blood.

Another form replaced the first on the seat next to me, and I glanced over to see an immaculate white habit covering a tiny, somewhat withered body, the silver hair, gnarled hands, and dancing blue eyes the only visible sign of life peering out of the pressed and starched robes, an onyx cross hanging around her neck. She introduced herself in a charming accent as visiting from London where she’d served as a mother superior in the convent of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

“The young sister thought you might want to speak with someone else.”

I said nothing, afraid my emotions would tumble out in a torrent of tears and screams. She said nothing more but simply knelt and prayed.

Something about her presence felt familiar and calmed me. After a minute or so I sighed out loud as she crossed herself, then sat back in the pew.

“You’re sure there’s nothing I can do to help you?” She paused, never taking her attention from the stained-glass Christ figure.

“What do we do if everything we’ve built our lives on is a lie?

What if God doesn’t know, or want to know, or care if we’re Christian or Buddhist, much less if we’re Episcopalian or Baptist? What if God doesn’t care whether we’re straight or gay? What if He’s not even a He?

What if Christ died for no reason other than man’s insanity, and God is a derivation of the sun god Ra and—what do you do then? What do you do if heaven and hell are nowhere but inside you?”

“If you’d asked that as a child, what would your mother have said to you?”

I laughed for the first time. “You think I’ve so trashed the Father that you’re completely relying on my mother?” I paused and listened for the sound of my mother’s voice. Suddenly it came back to me so clearly. “All I can remember hearing her say was ‘Be happy, my darling.’ She said that all the time to me.”

“She sounds like a wonderful woman.” She was silent for a time.

“You can be against religion, but don’t be against God.”

“I’m not against God, but I
am
thinking, after all these years, I might just be against
organized
religion.”

“Well, then you definitely need to become a Catholic. We’re not all that organized.” Her blue eyes twinkled, and for a second I thought she might not be of this world but perhaps an angel, someone sent from another dimension to help me.

“I was just wondering, Mother, if we know the truth, are we obligated to share it—to help people break free of the oppression of the church and embrace the love of God?”

“I would say we are obligated to be true to ourselves, to tell ourselves the truth. Only then do we have any truth to share with others.”

She patted my leg, giving me a little grin, and slid out of the pew and disappeared. I felt momentarily lighter, relieved, relaxed as if a burden had been lifted.

My mood broke as I realized I needed to get back to ICU. I said a prayer of thanks to God, then left the chapel, rounding the corner just in time to see Dr. Achison head my way. He said my father was resting. They were leaning toward high blood pressure and anxiety as a diagnosis and would be adjusting his medication, and I could visit him.

A darker side of me wondered if my father had intentionally brought this on himself. The more elevated side of me forced the darkness back and was merely grateful he was alive. I pushed the drape aside on ICU Unit 4 and found him lying under blankets with tubes down his nose and needles in his arm.

“Father,” I whispered. “You’re going to be okay. They’ll keep you here overnight and then put you in a room in the morning.” He grunted a reply. “I have to go back and feed the animals. But I’ll return in a few hours.”

This time he merely looked asleep so I patted his arm and left.

By the time I got out to the hospital parking lot, the sun was coming up and I phoned Dennis and headed for the farm, telling him of my father’s accident. He wanted the full download but I was too beat and despondent to oblige, promising to fill him in later.

I got home, quickly fed the horses, and got a few hours’ sleep.

Upon awakening, I prepared to drive back to the hospital to maintain my vigil. I didn’t think my father really cared if I sat in a waiting room and checked on him or followed him to a room and watched him. It was simply something women in the Midwest did—we went to the hospital to guard the sick. I was doing that, I supposed, out of tradition and duty.

Just as I’d ruined my relationship with Vivienne out of the ingrained duty to obey my father.
When he told me to turn on the radio
so he could dance with her, why in the world did I actually start to do
it?
Have I never progressed beyond age thirteen? What in hell is wrong
with me? Why am I still worried what my father thinks about me or my
work or my sex life?

And then as if in response to my questioning the void, intense feelings overwhelmed me as if I were five years old again—isolation, loneliness, fear, the sense that I’d been ostracized and could never get back into the warming gaze of my father. Punishment was banishment that felt like it went on for eons. As an only child, I had no one to balance those feelings for me. My mother wasn’t there to offer another perspective. The safety and comfort of my world rested with whether or not my father was happy with me.

The clarity with which I mapped that out surprised me in its simplicity. For someone of my education, it seemed incomprehensible that I hadn’t figured this out before—that I had patterned my life on pleasing my father. The groundwork laid by ancient theologians regarding male superiority and deference to the gender had certainly prevailed, wedging itself into my DNA. My father’s desires trumped mine even today.