I’d begun to resent the cold Sunday mornings, expecting only shitty tidings for the rest of the day.
Unfortunately, Philadelphia was afflicted with about 100 freezing-cold mornings a year, which made the odds almostneverin my favor.
I dug a little deeper each morning, one foot in front of the other as I took the bus downtown to one of the jobs I’d applied for that morning months ago, before everythingelsehad happened.
That’d been the one stellar silver lining in the catastrophe of my life.
I’d landed just about the greatest job I could have imagined, coordinating the corporate giving department of a major local bank with hundreds of branches situated around the area. I was expected to research charities and different locations around the globe that the bank could organize donations and giving events for. It was the best part of my day, every day.
I took my work home most days because I loved it. My life seemed to sharpen into focus in a way it never had before, my purpose to help those around me in any way I could. Corporate giving maybe wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but it was certainly something I loved in the moment.
Plus, it offered a great distraction from all things St. Mike’s.
I hadn’t let myself think about that time much. One of the detectives left Lucy with a card for a family counselor if we needed to “work through anything.”I’d had to hold back a wry chuckle then, and I still did now.
Who the hell had time to work through anything? We were barely feeding ourselves.
But thankfully, there’d been no fatalities in the tragedy at St. Michael’s that day.
Ms. Watson had suffered an abdominal wound and lost a lot of blood, but after a transfusion, she teased that she felt as young as the eighteen-year-old whose blood coursed through her old veins.
Even the older gentleman who’d been shaken off his feet whom Bastien had been tending to the last I saw him had recovered, according to Ms. Watson, and was now attending Mass twice a week alongside her. Cruz had gone back to the city the following morning—only psychological scars left to work through. We’d kept in touch a little over the months, but every time his name popped up on my phone, an ache bloomed in my chest, his connection to the only man that’d made me feel bigger than myself too much to think about.
The only long-lasting fallout in all of this was Bastien and me.
It didn’t matter how many hours I worked a day, how much overtime I burned through each week. Every night when I collapsed into the tiny twin bed I grew up in, he haunted me.
Father Bastien Castaneda.
The holy man who touched my heart and then disappeared from my life like he’d been an apparition.
I’d spent three days at Lucy’s side in the hospital after the explosions as they monitored her and the baby for any issues. While we were there, they also sent in a caseworker to assist in finding affordable housing for Lucy to go home to. They knew she was living with me next to the church right now, but they also knew that was a temporary solution.
By the time Lucy and I went back to the tiny house next to St. Michael’s to clear out our few things, Father Bastien was gone. A new priest had been installed in his place, one who came with a younger seminarian sidekick who looked down on both of us with disapproval in his eyes as we gathered our things before hustling back to the bus stop to head across town to meet the landlord to get the keys for our new one-bedroom.
Now we had a little more breathing room living in Mom’s house, the roof over our head paid for in full, only insurance and living expenses to pay every month. Lucy started working at a coffee shop a few blocks away, and it wasn’t long before we were actually managing to save up a little money and buy some things to spruce up the place.
We threw away the old couch and replaced it with something brand-new and bright from Ikea.
The first new couch for both of us.
I’d be lying if I said we both didn’t tear up a little bit.
It wasn’t that it cost much at all—in fact, we’d lucked out and found it on sale—but both of us had grown up surrounded by such darkness.
That new couch felt like a breath of fresh air.
We even picked up a few things for the nursery, a tiny room off of Luce’s that was just big enough for a crib and changing table. It didn’t have a window, but it looked pretty cute after we put a soft shade of yellow paint on the walls and freshened up the old white trim and door.
But even on the nights I collapsed into bed, exhausted and painted with every color under the rainbow, still, the memory of his hands discovering the contours of my body clung to the edges of my thoughts.
Some nights, I woke breathing in the aroma of incense and leather, convinced he was in the room with me. I hated that I was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it’d been this way for months.
I spun myself into a frenzy, resenting him and lusting after him, chasing his memory and then running from it. Coming to terms with letting him go, though that’d been my plan all along, even if the tragedy at St. Mike’s hadn’t happened.
Still, I’d become so desperate to escape the memories of our time in this place that I’d begun fantasizing about leaving. More than a few times I’d Googled organizations that accepted volunteers in faraway places—worlds with struggling economies or recovering from war or famine. Determined to aim high, for a few weeks I even floated the idea of working at a school for girls in Africa. Surely, they needed teachers at those schools Oprah was opening. I wasn’t exactly a teacher by trade, but I’d be the best damn teaching assistant they’d ever seen.
I only had to get myself there.
