If Only - (April 2017)

Khadijah walks toward the church rising above the busy avenue and feels her legs shaking in her four-inch heels as they click on the cement staircase. Her pounding heart feels like it’s lifting the rhinestones on the clingy pink-top and her anxiety is begging her to flee, but Khadijah knows this is exactly where she needs to be. She takes a deep breath as she lifts her bosom and pulls her shoulders back, puckers her peony-pink lips and straightens her silky black hair set as a tubular crown framing her ebony skin and hazel-brown eyes shadowed with glittery purple eyeshadow and exaggerated black lashes.

Before pushing through the oversized wooden doors of St. Catherine she sees a glint from the side of her eye. With the elegance of a dancer she folds to picks up two shiny coins and rises holding them in her palm, a motion that calms her nerves. She blesses the coins, thanks them for giving her good energy and drops the two silver quarters into the basket perched outside the sanctuary before walking toward Jesus and her hopes for forgiveness.

As she looks around, admiring the colored glass and the golden statues, she is reminded of the life that could have been hers, just before hearing his voice call her name.

“Are you Khadijah Adams in the flesh?” Father Lorenzo asks as he steps out of the confessional, his eyes alit at the site of her in his sanctuary. A smile brightens his face as he takes exaggerated steps toward her.

 “This is not like Daddy’s church,” she says with a smile and an outstretched arm. “Yes, I am, so nice to finally meet you Father Lorenzo.”

Khadijah sits in the confessional feeling both unfamiliar in experience but imbued with the energy from her childhood. She’d asked to look around and when she’d seen the space where her sins could be forgiven had inquired if they could sit in one.

  “I’m grateful for the quiet, thank you for talking with me here,” she says settling herself against in the tight space as she peers across at Father Lorenzo on his side of the latticed divider. There’s a calm in her gut with her heart beating normal, the darkness and the silence soothe her. “It’s funny, I’m not really a believer, anymore, but I still feel at home in most churches.”

“You’re not a fan either?” he asks losing the hope of solidarity in his voice.

“I’m pretty sure I’m going to hell, I’ve heard it said to me enough. But I’m a good mom and I do the best that I can. And I don’t use drugs, except pot. I don’t like to smoke too much because I’m a singer, not good for my lungs. But I don’t think it’s the Devil’s lettuce.”

Father Lorenzo allows a small sound of amusement to escape his lips, and then sits on his side of the lattice and waits for her to speak her words to him, the silence allowing him to hear her small exhales as she decides where to begin.

“I’m  begging her to forgive me that’s why I’m here,” she exhales without taking a breath and sits back with her head tilted against the wall supporting her back.

Father Lorenzo waits for a moment deciding where to begin and what Khadijah thinks he can do to help her.

She sits herself forward, allowing the top of her silky crown to touch the space above the lattice divider.  “I was raised  in the church, my daddy was the preacher. My church wasn’t anything like this, it was plain but everything about it felt sacred.” She shakes her head with the memories of the white wooden structure and the pews filled every Sunday with the people she loved, but who judged her and cast her out. “It’s funny, you know, it’s because of church that I knew I’d be a singer since I was eight.” She relaxes, remembering how she’d felt as an eleven-year old girl when she’d finally gotten to do what she wanted.

 “I’ll never forget the look on Daddy’s face when I stood at the front of the choir on that Sunday morning on my eleventh birthday. I’d begged him for months. Every time Mama or anyone asked what I wanted, I said I wanted to sing. But I was such a quiet little thing, they weren’t sure I could do it. But Daddy let me. I sang Amazing Grace in front of everyone I knew. That may have been his proudest moment of me.”

They allow the silence to sit with them, Lorenzo absorbing her pain and Khadijah deciding how much of it to share, until he asks what he really wants to know.  “How did a nice church girl end ups as a rock icon?”

Khadijah’s laugh, a girlish giggle with a sinister edge, fills the small space. “I have what they call a musical spirit, I was born an icon.” She stops but Lorenzo can see she is rocking slightly in her seat, laughing softly to herself. “The truth is I don’t need an audience, I just like to sing. But when a girl got bills to pay that girl gotta get money,” she laughs again but Lorenzo resists its infectious pull.

“How did you meet the band?”

“Annie never told you?” She waits but he holds his tongue. “Fine, well that first night I sang with the band was a fluke, really. I was still living in Nashville after I graduated from Vanderbilt, flailing, really. I had lost hope and was pretty depressed. I was supposed to be married and starting a family back in Kentucky, instead I was bar tending with my fancy college degree. I’d been dumped and I had no real skills so it wasn’t the best place to work. It was a hard job, and I will admit to being humbled by actual work.” Khadijah smiles at the memory of herself twenty-years ago and feels a wave of bittersweet nostalgia fill her gut remembering how she found a new dream.

Lorenzo thinks for a moment before wondering aloud, “Why didn’t you go back to the people who loved you?”

“I had too much pride. I was crushed by the break-up and couldn’t face going back home, so I stayed in Nashville to start over again. And that’s when I had to decide if I was prepared for change to get what I needed to get, of just become what was expected.”

Lorenzo wants to cry out that he needed that too twenty years ago, but pushes that feeling back where it belongs and sits in quiet resignation. Instead he asks, “How did you change to get what you needed?”

“I invented Cassandra,” Khadijah answers without missing a beat as Lorenzo sits forward in his space to hear her. “She was my stage personality.” She laughs again with her girlish giggle and Lorenzo feels grateful to be caught up in her world. “Cassandra will bite your head off if you step on her foot, don’t play. But Khadijah, she’s a good girl. She’s organized and even tempered. On stage, when I let Cassandra fly, I got to be someone different. Before joining the band I would spend night after night watching those girls on stage be seen while I was running around in that skanky bar feeling invisible. And I knew I was better than all of them!”

Lorenzo’s laugh from the other side of the divider lifts Khadijah’s heart knowing he is really listening to her.

 “It was my night off but I still went to hear who was playing,” Khadijah continues, lost in the fuzzy memories of 2001, the excitement of that moment awakening her senses. “It was the beginning of me opening up and figuring out who I wanted to be. And the truth is, I like feeling all the emotions. I need to feel them, then I can give that back to my audience,” she says letting out a deep breath. “If you ask me, being on stage is better than sex.” She pauses deciding if it is either Khadijah or Cassandra sharing with him and knows when the words fly quickly from her mouth.  “Feels like an orgasm without the trappings of a man.” She feels that truth deep between her legs, moving up into the plump folds of her vagina as she wriggles slightly forward and backward on the cushioned seat and thinks she’s definitely going to hell.

“Some people are born for the spotlight,” Lorenzo answers understanding the intoxication of a stage.

“I’m also good at faking, I know how to fit in. That night JP, Todd and Byron were the house band and were taking tips from anyone who wanted to sing with them, so I had a couple of drinks and let Cassandra have some fun. That’s when the band was just the three of them.”

Lorenzo nods slowly listening to the story unfold remembering what Annie had told him about JP’s neighbors on the Vineyard, the twin brothers Byron and Todd, who were going to college in Nashville, making their decision on where to go when they ran away together.

 “Everyone thought JP and I were in love because of the way we spoke to each other on stage, there’s a ballad we do, he’s playing guitar and I’m on the piano, it’s called Angels Got In The Way – it’s about Annie – but the tabloids won’t believe us. Me and JP, it was a type of love, but not what I needed in my man.”

Khadijah touches the crown on her head and takes a deep breath trying not to feel the loss of Todd again, thinking that sharing her darkest secrets in a Catholic church might have been her best idea. She places her manicured hands onto her thighs and takes one more inhale of the lemon-polish scented space.

“JP, he was never my type. Todd –was always my man, tall and brawny with those pouty lips and so smart. We were both at Vanderbilt but he never looked my way until that night I sang with them at the bar. And he was chill in a way I never could be. He was born to play bass. And we were perfect, until we weren’t. And of course, Daddy loved Todd and blamed that mess on me too.” Khadijah pouts her lips with yet another thought of if only she’d been someone different.

“But the thing with JP is that he saw me, he saw Khadijah that night and I didn’t expect that. As soon as  I sang that very first song with him I knew he could hear me because it effected his phrasing and when we got to the end of that first song it was like wow!  Singing with him that first song, it was really something, he said. I sang the rest of that night and they asked me to join again the next – I had to get permission from my manager. And then they asked me to join the band and after a few months I quit the bar.”

 “A miracle.”

“Yes, it was, it was the first time I felt like I had a place. Like church.” She smiles and exhales feeling the pride and excitement of that time so long ago. “We were like soulmates, musical soulmates if you know what I mean. That first night on stage, it was like a call and response. Felt like I was in Daddy‘s church. JP’s guitar connected with my soul.”

They sit quietly, feeling the nostalgia of a time before her soul needed forgiveness.

“Tell me about Colette,”  he says, allowing her name to hang in the air like a bubble waiting to float away, before Khadijah finds the words to begin.

 “The day Colette was born was a beautiful day in May. The sun was high and the light on Martha’s Vineyard felt like a Renaissance painting. I remember hearing the sound of an ice-cream truck in the distance as I was walking toward the hospital entrance and thinking it would be nice to name her for one of the flowers I’d seen on my walk, but I already knew her name would be Colette.” Khadijah feels the waves on anxiety move through her body causing her hands to shake. She clasps them together on her lap before speaking.

 “I was on the island with Mama because JP had convinced Todd and Byron to let me stay in their house, and when Mama arrived to open her house in April she knew I was next door and she assumed the baby was Todd’s. Because that would make sense.” She stops and thinks of what could have been and knows that wasn’t her journey. Her quiet invites Father Lorenzo’s curiosity.

“But how did it happen if you were Todd’s girlfriend? Were you broken up?”  he asks carefully.

“If only it were that easy. It was end of our summer tour in 2006 and we had just played a late set at a street fair in Chicago. Todd and I were fighting about the same thing we always fought about, why I couldn’t just do what he wanted,” she laughs. “I was angry and I decided it would be a good idea to go out drinking with JP after the show. For the most part I had given up Cassandra, but that night she came out. And Cassandra knows how to create drama! But Khadijah don’t hold her liquor good so JP and I had what is called drunk-revenge-sex.”

 If only I weren’t such a fuck up, none of this would be happening. She thinks to herself as the feelings of shame and pity flood her body, but fights herself to hold control so she can remember what she thinks a priest should know.  “We were back in the hotel and he’d walked me to my room, but instead of a fist bump or a kiss on the cheek, I leaned in with all my pain and kissed him. I really kissed him and JP is French  - and he was drunk -  so I don’t think he had a chance. He pulled back but I could feel him, he wanted me and that gave me a jolt of something I’d been yearning for,” she pauses, “control. He wanted me and was tempted by me and that was what I wanted or needed or both.”

She stops again, tapping her nails on her thighs as she spins through the emotions she is feeling about the night that changed everything.

“It was over almost before we got to the bed. We fumbled into the room but I couldn’t stop the seduction. I pulled at him and whispered into his ear until he couldn’t resist. He entered me without protection and that was how we got Colette.”  She laughs without smiling and waits for Father Lorenzo to respond, but his silence feels like an invitation to keep confessing

“Truth is, the weight of what we’d done came crashing down on us before he’d pulled out. Then we said good night and didn’t talk about it again until I realized the pregnancy had to be his.”

“Where was Annie?”

“She didn’t tour with us that summer and that weekend she’d gone home for Maeve’s 21st birthday. And the thing is, I told her the next day I’d cheated on Todd with a guy I’d met at the bar. She didn’t know until she saw the birth certificate.” Khadijah tilts her head back against the wall allowing her eyes to focus on the small yellowed bulb above her and wonders if Daddy was right that she wasn’t worthy of God’s love.

 “That winter Todd didn’t know the baby wasn’t his – but I knew. He let me stay at his house on the Vineyard and I was afraid what he would do when he found out so I lied for a long time. The truth is I was desperate. Daddy had cut me off and I needed money because I couldn’t tour. That’s what I needed – a patch until I could get back on the road.” 

“How did Mama find out?”

“I was sick, a lot, and she found me in the bathroom on Thanksgiving. We had all gone out the Vineyard to celebrate because Daddy had kicked me out for good by then. The thing about JP’s Mama is that she has this way of talking and talking and talking and twisting words until she makes you feel crazy if you don’t completely agree with her. Annie says she manipulates but JP says she’s she cares too much, but whatever her intentions, she cornered me. I was helpless, on the floor over a toilet. I knew the rules, JP had been very clear, just smile and nod but never engage. But I was off guard and she was so nice to me and once she knew I was pregnant she wouldn’t leave me alone.”

“How did she know JP is Colette’s dad?”

“She claims she heard us, me and JP, talking about adoption. And she saw something in my eyes when she confronted me and she knew. That’s when she started bargaining.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mama insisted we not put the baby up for adoption.”

“How?”

 “She said she would pay for everything, I didn’t have insurance. And she said she’d set up an account for Colette, to help us while I was getting used to being a mom. But she wouldn’t let up, she wanted total control, and then insisted the name was her choice. That’s when I knew I’d been conned because she said if I didn’t agree that she would tell Annie. I panicked and I let her take control.”

Father Lorenzo absorbs her words and feels the pieces of Annie’s life that he missed fit like a puzzle coming together

“I’m beholden to Mama, she talked to me when no one else would. I was stuck on that island and I didn’t know how to ride a bike and I didn’t have a car, so I walked everywhere. It was difficult and lonely.”

She thinks of that last Christmas the band was together, before Todd broke up with her and Byron left to get his MBA. That spring she was so alone. JP and Annie were touring in Europe and Asia – he’d been hired to play with another band while they figured out what would happen to them. “I was jealous that JP and Annie were off touring to keep the money coming in and I was stuck on an island with nothing to do. But I was stupid, because Annie was lonely too. She told me that every night she would open the windows of her hotel rooms just to hear strangers talking to each other. So I should have resisted Mama, but I couldn’t.”

Khadijah forces the words to stop leaving her lips as she settles herself back into the confessional. She folds her hands tightly together and stares at the colored jewels on her fingers.

 “Is Colette with you?”

“She’s in California with my mom, she moved in when Daddy died last year. I told them I was out here for a few weeks for a ‘work thing’ and they didn’t bat an eyelash. That girl definitely loves being with her grandma more than me, hah!” Khadijah smiles at the thought of her beautiful girl with her dark curly hair and cinnamon complexion and remembers why she is sitting in the confessional.  “Father Lorenzo, you need to help me. I need Annie back. She won’t answer my texts and she only talks to Colette. She forgave you Father Lorenzo, teach me. Help me. And the truth is, I may have birthed Colette but Annie raised her. Cared for her in a way I couldn’t. She took care of her when I was working, and I was always working. Colette is hers too.”

Khadijah waits for her answer with a breathless focus on the space between them. The rhinestones on her blouse begin to itch her skin and she knows she has to switch the focus from her to him if she’s going to get what she wants. “Now that you know all about me, you tell me something. How did you become a priest?”

Father Lorenzo waits for a moment before deciding how he should answer. “No one ever asks, Khadijah.” He sits forward and tilts his head closer to the lattice divider and wonders what his answer should be. “ I suppose it’s because I’ve always loved church so much, even when I was very young I knew all the saints and felt it was a punishment not to go on Sunday morning.” He pauses for a moment trying to remember who that young person was and when he came to be, having no memories before his life with Nona.  “But as an adult, I discovered I loved the ritual. It’s universal, really, it’s called ritualistic prayer – I’ve learned this from my interfaith friends.” He pauses again and thinks more about his words “In ritual we have control and agency, something I lacked, I guess.” He trails off quietly and Khadijah feels her heart reach out to him.  “The predictability and the order calmed my anxiety, I can see that now, and by the time Nona enrolled me in St. Peter’s in eighth grade I could imagine my future. It no longer felt like a threat.”

“What didn’t feel like a threat?” She asks intrigued by the direction of his confession.

“My future in the church, becoming a priest became a challenge and it started to feel like the decision was really mine.”

“Mmm,” is all Khadijah says.

“And I love preaching.” He laughs hoping the lighten the emotion in their small space.

She laughs too, but then allows the silence to sit between them until he decides how he can help her.

“You took quite a chance coming out here and talking with me, but I know you can do this. Having her back has given me happiness I didn’t expect. When I watch her cooking for Nona and having her feed me feels like love. Honestly, it takes my breath away.” Lorenzo feels it again, that stirring inside of him that knows he’s lucky to be in love with Annie even if he can’t say it out loud.  “I’m going to help you,” he says pulling his phone from his pocket and texting Annie to confirm she still wants to meet him across the street at noon.  

   “I’ve done it, it’s out there. No taking it back now,” he says placing his phone in his pocket and feeling uneasy if he’s really able to help. “We just need to wait for her answer, and then pray she forgives you.”

  “OK,” she answers, gathering herself in the small space and feeling ready to flee. But before she reaches for the latch to the outside world she hears Lorenzo speak.

“But first,” he says, “you must forgive yourself. Let us pray, Khadijah. Lord, let us go forth in peace and in kindness. Remember to see that the stranger you meet is a reflection of yourself. She will forgive you, Khadijah.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because,” he pauses at the sound of the bells of St. Catherine ringing eleven times. “Because,” he begins again, the sound echoing in the distance outside, “she forgave me.”