Priest: A Love Story
: Chapter 24

I’d love to say that I walked out the club and used this newfound closure to get my life together. I’d love to tell you that a white dove came fluttering down and the heavens opened and God told me exactly where to go and what to do.

Most of all, I’d love to tell you that the rosary—and the implicit message it sent—healed my broken heart, and I spent no more nights thinking of Poppy, no more days scouring the internet for mentions of her name.

But it took longer than that. I spent the next two weeks much like I’d spent the two weeks before I got the rosary back: listening to the Garden State soundtrack and apathetically filling out applications for different degree programs, imagining in vivid detail what Poppy was doing right then (and whom she was doing it with.) I went to Jordan’s church and mumbled my way through Masses, I exercised constantly, and I immediately undid all that exercise once I finished by eating shitty food and drinking even more than my Irish bachelor brothers.

Christmas came. At our big family meal, we had this Bell family tradition of saying what our perfect present would be—a promotion, a new car, a vacation, that sort of thing. And when we went around the table, I realized what I wanted the most.

“I want to be doing something,” I said, remembering laying on Jordan’s pew and fantasizing about distant shores and dusty hills.

“So do it,” Aiden said. “You can do anything you want. You’ve got, like, a million college degrees.”

Two. I had two.

“I am going to do it,” I decided.

“And what is it?” Mom asked.

“I have no idea. But it’s not here.”

And two weeks later, I was on a plane to Kenya on an open-ended mission trip to dig wells in Pokot, for the first time running to something, rather than away.

Seven Months Later

“So you’re a lumbersexual now?”

“Fuck you.” I shoved my bag into Sean’s chest so I could dig out some money for the airport vending machine. Dr. Pepper, the Fountain of Youth. I almost wept after taking the first sip, the first cold, sweet, carbonated thing I’d had since the Nairobi airport.

“So no pop in Africa, eh?” Aiden asked as I took my bag back and we started walking out of the airport.

“And no razors apparently,” Sean said, reaching over and giving my beard a fierce yank.

I punched him in the bicep. He yelped like a girl.

It was true that I had a fairly extensive beard, along with a deep tan and dramatically leaner body. “No more pretty boy muscles,” Dad had remarked after I’d walked in the door and he’d hugged me. “Those are real-work muscles.”

Mom had just pursed her lips. “You look like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments.”

I felt a bit like Moses, a stranger both in Egypt and in Midian, a stranger everywhere. Later that night, after the longest shower I could ever remember taking (months of one-minute, tepid showers had instilled a deep love of running hot water in me,) I laid down on my bed and thought about everything. The faces of the people—workers and villagers alike—that I’d come to know on such an intimate level. I knew why their children were named what they were, and I knew that they loved soccer and Top Gear, and I knew which of the boys I’d wanted on my team when we played impromptu rugby games in the evening. The work had been hard—they were building a high school along with better water infrastructure—and the days were long, and there had been times when I’d felt unwanted or wanted too much or like the work was pointless, bailing out the Titanic with a coffee tin, as Dad would have said. And then I would go to sleep with prayers circling in my head and wake up the next day, refreshed and determined to do better.

I wouldn’t have left, honestly, if during my monthly satellite call, Mom hadn’t told me about the pile of acceptance letters waiting for me at home. I could literally have my pick of universities, and after a lot of thought, I’d decided to come home and pursue my PhD at Princeton—not a Catholic seminary, but I was okay with that. Presbyterians weren’t so bad.

I pulled Lizzy’s rosary out of my pocket and watched the cross spin in the low city lights filtering in through the window. I’d taken it with me to Pokot, and there’d been many nights when I’d fallen asleep with it clutched in my hand, like by holding on to it, I could hold on to someone, except I didn’t know who I was trying to feel close to. Lizzy maybe, or God. Or Poppy.

The dreams had started my second night there, slow, predictable dreams at first. Dreams of sighs and flesh, dreams so real that I would wake up with her scent in my nostrils and her taste lingering on my tongue. And then they’d changed into strange ciphered visions of tabernacles and chuppahs, dancing shoes and tumbling stacks of books. Hazel eyes bright with tears, red lips curved downward in perpetual unhappiness.

Old Testament dreams, Jordan had said when I called him one month. Your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions, he’d quoted.

(“Which kind of man am I?” I’d wondered aloud.)

No amount of prayer, no amount of hard, exhausting work during the day, made the dreams go away. And I had no idea what they meant, except that Poppy was still very much inside my heart, no matter how much I distracted myself during my waking hours.

I wanted to see her again. And it was no longer the wounded lover who wanted it, no longer the anger and the lust both demanding to be satisfied. I just wanted to know she was doing okay, and I wanted to give her the rosary back. It had been a gift, she should keep it.

Even if she was with—fuck—Sterling.

Once I had that thought, it was impossible to shake, and so the idea became completely embedded into my plans. I was moving to New Jersey, and New York City wasn’t far away. I would replace Poppy and I would give her the rosary.

Along with your forgiveness, came a quiet thought out of nowhere. A God-thought. She needs to know that you’ve forgiven her.

Have I? Forgiven her? I nudged one arm of the crucifix to set it spinning again. I suppose I had. It hurt—deeply—to think of her and Sterling together, but my anger had been poured into the African dust—poured away and sprinkled down, sprinkled as sweat and tears and blood onto the soil.

Yes. It would be good for both of us. Closure. And maybe once I handed off the rosary, the dreams would stop and I could move on with the rest of my life.

The next day, my last day home, Mom took scissors to my beard with an almost creepy glee.

“It didn’t look that bad,” I mumbled as she worked.

Ryan was hitched up on the counter, for once without his phone. He had a bag of Cheetos in his hand instead. “No, dude, it really did. Unless you were trying to look like Rick Grimes.”

“Why wouldn’t I? He’s my hero.”

Mom clucked. “Princeton students don’t look like Paul Bunyan, Tyler. Hold still—no, Ryan, he can’t have Cheetos while I’m doing this.”

Ryan had shoved the bag in my outstretched hand after hopping down to replace his phone (“This is so sick. I have to Periscope it.”)

I sighed and set the Cheetos down.

“I’m going to miss you,” Mom said, out of nowhere.

“It’s just school. I’ll be back to visit all the time.”

She finished with the scissors and set them down. “I know. It’s just, all you boys have stayed so close to home. I’ve been spoiled by having you all here.”

And then she burst into tears, because we weren’t all here, hadn’t been all here since Lizzy.

“Mom…” I stood up and hugged her tightly. “I love you. And this isn’t permanent. It’s just for a few years.”

She nodded into my chest, and then sniffed and pulled away. “I’m sad because I’ll miss you, but I’m not crying because I want you to stay.” She met my eyes with her matching green ones. “You boys need to live your lives without being chained down by obligation or grief. I’m glad you’re doing something scary, something new. Go and make new memories, and don’t worry about your silly mother here in Kansas City. I’m going to be just fine, plus, I still have Sean and Aiden and Ryan.”

As much as I wanted to scoff, I couldn’t. Sean and Aiden were attentive in their own ways, never missing a family dinner, carving out time to call and text during the rest of the week, and Dad was here. Still, though. I worried. “Okay.”

“Sit down, so I can finish up on this monstrosity of a beard.”

I sat, thinking about leaving home behind. I’d seen enough grief as a priest to know that people never really moved on, at least not in the linear, segmented way our culture expected people to. Instead, Mom was going to have good days and bad days, days where she circled back to her pain and days were she was able to smile and fuss over things like beards and the cost of Ryan’s car insurance.

Mostly, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to carry her pain for her, even if I stayed here. We’d each have to replace our own ways of living with Lizzy’s ghost, and we’d have to replace them in our own time. I felt like I’d already started, and maybe Mom had too.

“Now, go shave,” she ordered me now, brushing at my face with a dry towel and dropping a light kiss on my forehead. “Unless you’ve forgotten how.”

Moving wasn’t so hard. I found an inexpensive apartment not too far away from campus and used my dwindling savings to put in a deposit. I’d be a teaching assistant as well as a student, and the stipend was enough to cover room and board, even if I would have to take out a few loans for tuition. I didn’t have much to move, really, all of my furniture having belonged to the rectory and my weights being left in Kansas City. Clothes and books, and then a futon and a table I scrounged from Craigslist.

After settling in, I spent a long day or two trying to hunt down a new address for Poppy on the internet, even just a place of work, but there was nothing. She was either very careful or very quiet or both—the last mentions of her that I could replace were around the time of her graduation from Dartmouth, and a handful of campus dance performances from her time at the University of Kansas a few years ago.

I could replace no trace of her, and I even went as far as calling her parents, using numbers I found online for her father’s company and for her mother’s non-profit. But they were well-guarded by rings of assistants and receptionists, none of whom seemed inclined to give up any information about Poppy or forward me on to her parents. Not that I could blame them; I probably wouldn’t give out information to a strange man either, but it was still frustrating as hell.

Why did she have to leave Weston? Why did she have to leave the rosary? Maybe if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be consumed with the idea of giving it back…

There was one person who I knew would almost certainly be willing to talk to me about Poppy, and the thought of seeing him again filled me with immense distaste, but I was running out of options. The semester would start soon and I wouldn’t have time to gallivant about the eastern seaboard looking for my ex…girlfriend? Ex-lover? And I couldn’t imagine having this kind of idealistic, ultimately hopeless quest on my plate until Christmas.

After two hours on buses and trains in various states of over-crowdedness, I was in Manhattan’s Financial District, staring up at the large steel and glass structure that belonged to the Haverford family. I wandered inside, surrounded immediately by marble and busy-looking people and an overall air of industry, and this persisted even when an elevator took me to the central office sixty floors up. No wonder Poppy chose Sterling. I’d never be able to offer her anything like this. I didn’t have fleets of black cars and portfolios of investments, I didn’t have a marble-floored empire. All I’d had was a collar and a home that didn’t legally belong to me—and now I no longer even had those.

God, I’d been such a fool to think I could have kept Poppy Danforth for my own. This was the world she’d come from—of course this was where she would return.

The receptionist inside was a pretty blonde girl, and asshole that I was, I wondered if Sterling had slept with her too, if his life was just a parade of money and infidelity, a parade without any consequences, a parade without a single concern other than how to get what he wanted.

“Um, hi,” I said as I approached her desk. “I was wondering if I could see Mr. Haverford?”

She didn’t even look up from her computer screen. “Do you have an appointment?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“No one without an appointment can get in…” her voice trailed off as she looked up at me and then her eyes widened. “Oh my God! You’re the guy from the Hot Priest meme!”

Sigh. “Yeah, that’s me.”

She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I follow a bunch of the Tylerette tumblrs. Is it true you went to go live in Africa? Were you hiding? Entertainment Tonight said you were hiding.”

“I was on a mission trip,” I said. “Digging wells.” Although the lack of internet in Pokot had definitely been its own perk.

She made a high-pitched aww noise, peering up at me with her big brown eyes, suddenly looking very young. “You went to go help people? That’s so sweet!”

She bit her lip and glanced around the empty waiting room. “You know, Mr. Haverford never keeps track of his own appointments. He wouldn’t know if you were on the books or not.” A few keystrokes. “And now you’re officially on the books.”

“Wow, thank you,” I said, feeling grateful—that is, until she handed me a business card with a number scrawled on the back.

“That’s my phone number,” she said a bit coyly. “In case you ever feel like breaking your vows again.”

Sigh. “Thank you,” I said as politely as I could manage. There didn’t seem to be much point in explaining my current non-clerical position to her, or that there was only one reason I’d ever broken my vows, and that reason was why I was here in my enemy’s stronghold in the first place.

“Can we take a selfie?” And before I could answer, she was up and on the other side of her desk, standing next to me with her phone extended in front of us.

“Smile,” she said, pressing herself against me, her blonde head against my shoulder, and I dutifully smiled, at the same time realizing how deep Poppy remained in my system. I had a slender blonde smashed against me, warm and willing, and all I wanted was to peel myself away. I’d rather be in the next room fighting with Sterling than enduring this girl’s flirtatious advances. Sean would be ashamed of me.

“You can go in now if you’d like—he’s between appointments,” the receptionist said, still conspiratorially, thumbs working fast and nimble over her screen as she posted her selfie everywhere on the internet.

Sterling’s office was as impressive as the rest of the building—dizzying views, a massive desk, a low bar filled with expensive Scotch. And then Sterling himself, sitting like a king on his throne, signing reams of paper covered with dense type.

He glanced up, clearly expecting one of his employees, and then seeing me instead, his mouth fell open. I expected him to be angry or triumphant—ask me to leave, maybe—but I didn’t expect him to stand up, walk over to me and then extend his hand for a shake, like we were old business partners.

I ignored the proffered hand. I may have been a priest, but even I have my limits.

However, my rudeness didn’t seem to bother him in the least. “Tyler Bell—sorry, Father Bell,” he exclaimed, pulling back to look me in the face. “How the fuck are you?”

I rubbed the back of my neck, uncomfortable. I’d prepared for every possible shade of Sterling’s assholery on the train ride here, but not once had I considered the possibility that he could be, well, friendly. “It’s actually not Father anymore. I left the clergy.”

Sterling grinned. “I hope it wasn’t because of those pictures. I did feel a bit bad after I released them, I’ll be honest. Do you want something to drink? I’ve got this amazing Lagavulin 21.”

Um… “Sure.”

Sterling went over to the bar, and I hated to admit it to myself, but right now, now that he no longer considered me his enemy, I could see what Poppy once saw in him. There was a specific kind of charisma in his manner, coupled with the kind of sophistication that made you feel like you were sophisticated too, just by being around it.

“So I imagine you came to gloat, which I deserve, I admit. I’ll be a man about it.” He unstoppered the Lagavulin and poured us both a healthy glass. He walked over and handed it to me. “I’m surprised you didn’t come sooner.”

I literally had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I took a sip of the Scotch to hide my confusion.

Sterling leaned against the edge of his desk, swirling the Scotch with a practiced hand. “How is she?”

Was he talking about Poppy? He couldn’t be, he was with Poppy, but yet she was the only she that we both shared. “I came here to ask you the same question, actually.”

Sterling raised his eyebrows. “So you two…” he used his glass to gesture at me. “…You guys aren’t together?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I thought you were together with her.”

A shot of pain—real pain, not disappointment or anger—flashed through his face. “No. We aren’t…we weren’t. We weren’t what I thought.”

I found myself—ridiculously—feeling sorry for him. And then his words began to really sink in, and a small flower of hope bloomed in my chest…

“But I saw you two kiss.”

His brow crinkled. “You did? Oh, that must have been in her house.”

“The day you released those pictures.”

“I am sorry about that, you know.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn’t water under the bridge exactly, but I was much more interested in how they’d gone from kissing in her bedroom to not being together. I should tamp down this hope now, before it truly blossomed, but I couldn’t bring myself to—although if she wasn’t with Sterling, then why hadn’t she tried to contact me?

One question at a time, I coached myself.

Sterling must have read the meaning behind my expression, because he took a sip and then set his glass down and explained. “That day, I had finally gotten tired of waiting, so I drove up to that craphole town—no offense—and told her I’d release those pictures if she didn’t promise to be with me. She was standing by the window, and then all of a sudden she shuffled me into her bedroom and tore my jacket off. I kissed her, thinking that’s what she wanted. But no. After one kiss, she shoved me away and kicked me out.” The way he rubbed his jaw just then made me wonder if kicked me out had involved a punch to his jaw. I really hoped it had. “I went ahead and released the pictures because I was pissed—understandably, I think, given the circumstances.”

I sat down in the nearest chair, staring at the whisky in my hand, trying to sort out what this all meant. “You only kissed that once? She didn’t leave Missouri to be with you?”

“Obviously not,” he said. “I assumed she’d gone running back to you.”

“No. No, she didn’t.”

“Oh, rough luck, old sport,” he said sympathetically.

I digested this. Poppy had kissed Sterling once and then demanded that he leave. Sterling was either a terrible kisser or she didn’t want to be with him at all—but if she didn’t want to be with him, then why hadn’t she stayed with me? And after those pictures, after I’d left the clergy, she hadn’t once reached out. I’d assumed it was because she was with Sterling, but now that I knew differently, that stung a bit more. She could have at least said goodbye or sorry or something, anything.

My heart twisted some more, a tired washcloth still being wrung out. Rosary, I reminded myself. This is about returning the rosary and giving her your forgiveness. And you can’t forgive her if you’re bitter about what happened.

Besides, at least she wasn’t with Sterling. And that was some small comfort.

“Do you know where she is now?” I asked. “I want to talk to her.”

Of course he did. He went back around his desk, found his phone, and within a few seconds, I was holding a scrap of paper with his neat block handwriting. An address.

“I stopped keeping track of her last year, but this was a property that the Danforth Foundation for the Arts purchased not long after I came back home. It’s a dance studio here in New York.”

I studied the address, then looked up at him. “Thank you.” I meant it.

He shrugged and then drained the last of his glass. “No problem.”

For some reason, I extended my hand, feeling a bit bad about ignoring his gesture earlier. He took it, and we had a brief but courteous handshake. Here was the man who’d ruined my career, who I thought had taken my Poppy away from me, but I was able to walk away without any hatred or ill will, and it wasn’t just because of the $1500 Scotch.

It was because I forgave him. And because I was going to walk out of this door and replace Poppy and return this rosary and finally, finally move on with my life.