Where Wizards Stay Up Late

 “Forgive me Father. I have sinned.” Father Lorenzo feels every cell pull toward the wooden lattice when he hears Annie’s voice, his body yearning to be closer to her.

“Thank you, Annie. So glad you remembered what we spoke about. But I thought you were Mrs. Lander, you surprised me. Do you remember her?”

“That woman who moved into the old Lincoln school and turned it into a house. They had like a hundred kids.”

“Twelve,” Lorenzo answers patiently. “Some hers, but most were either adopted or foster children.”

 “Mom and the Bagel Club ladies love to gossip about her. Talk about her like she’s both Mother Theresa and Wonder Woman. Is she thinking about adopting another one?”

“No, no, nothing like that. She usually comes in around now and I was hoping to ask her about the story I heard yesterday from Cailtin O’Connell at our social action committee meeting,” he says with a touch of excitement in his voice. He leans closer to the lattice separating them and whispers, “Rumor has it that last Sunday after Mass she made her famous Sunday sauce and left it on the porch to cool while she set the table. When she sent one of the kids out to bring it back it, it was gone. Someone had taken it! But instead of getting angry she said, Just think sweetie, someone in need is having such a lovely dinner tonight.”

“Mmm,” Annie answers absently.

“Just wanted to ask if it was true, probably is. Just part of her legacy of kindness. Remarkable woman that Mrs. Lander.”

Annie can hear Lorenzo let out a  deep sigh as he settles back in his side of the confessional. “I was always more curious about Pauline-Mary Clark. She still around?”

“Always drawn to the scandalous,” Lorenzo answers, rolling his shoulders back to place more space between them.

“Mom said Pauline-Mary was lucky to be alive after all she lived through.”

“Three husbands.”

 “That last one was a bruiser, felt a bit sorry for her. Did you know that when she finally left that lazy bastard Charlie was the one to made sure he didn’t get the house. Charlie bought him out of McGrath-Clark Oil and  renamed it McGrath Energy,” Annie says feeling the guilt rise from a place deep inside.

“For the best, really. That’s when Dottie went back to school. I helped her fill out the application for community college classes. It was her idea to get into solar. Truth is, she took over that business long before Charlie gave up his title. I remember the night she showed me her final paper, the professor had written that Dottie exhibited  operational excellence and she asked me what it meant. I wasn’t sure but I knew it sounded good.” Lorenzo crosses his arms and takes a deep breath remembering how happy he was sharing in Dottie’s achievement when all of her girls were gone.

“I know what that means,” Annie blurts out, surprised by the force of her memory from so long ago. “It’s  something I learned at MIT when I was dating Carl, the one in business school my freshman year.” She feels her cheeks warm remembering how lonely she’d felt and how grateful she’d been for his dull company. “He wasn’t that much to look at and he talked so much! Honestly, it felt like he regurgitated his entire first year business school curriculum that year to me over endless dinners of pork lo-mien and pizza. And I never said a word. Such a bore.”

“What does it mean? Operational excellence?”

“It means you take care of shit.”

“Mmm,” Lorenzo murmurs, shifting slightly in his seat. “ I suppose that’s true. Probably because she always had to take care of herself, well, until Charlie.”

“But in the end, she had to take care of him too. Mom used to warn Maeve and me about loving a man too much.”

“Ha!” Lorenzo huffs.

 “I don’t believe two people on earth could be more different from me and Maeve” Annie says with a light behind her tired eyes. “Maeve, she was a perfect baby, and a pretty good kid who avoided being held down by a man’s dream.” Annie feels the tight grip of failed ambitions clutch her chest and looks down at her hands folded tightly on her lap, the outline of the missing ring still visible on her left hand. “ Maeve, she always resisted the pull to be ordinary. She never did anything like everyone else, she always wanted to see the world. Now we’re all worried the world may have broken her.”

Lorenzo thinks of their years together and all the things they shared. He feels the pain of their long separation and is sorry for his role in it. But what he says is, “Annie, I’m sorry you are all so far away from each other, I guess I never had much of a strategy for keeping us all together because I didn’t know this could happen, to us.” Lorenzo lips turn down and a slight quiver trembles the thick folds of skin under his wide chin.  His  eyes fill with tears remembering why he misses them and knowing he did nothing to stop what they did. He’s glad Annie cannot see him.

“I was realistic with you,” she looks at her hands, twisting her fingers so the line of the missing ring disappears from her sight. “I did my best to be truthful with you, and if things had been different I would be sorry. But you knew I couldn’t stay here. Once I left I wasn’t going to come back.”

“If only you hadn’t gone to Martha’s Vineyard.” Is all Lorenzo says before wishing he’d said nothing at all.

“That’s not the reason and you know that,” Annie says quietly.

They sit together quietly, anxiously, waiting for the moment to pass. Unable to sit for a second longer in the silence of the confessional, Annie says, “You’re my only friend, now. Well, I have Maeve, but does she  count. How pathetic is that?”

“Not true.”

“Yes true. I’ve known you longer than anyone. I’ve never had another friend like you. I know that much is true. But I followed the music because it felt like that’s where all roads led. Back to the  music. If JP hadn’t listened to what I had to say he couldn’t have convinced me his life couldn’t go on without me. And for that I gave up what I’d thought was me.” Annie takes a deep breath to calm her racing heart and wishes to take back all her words.

“Do you have anything to confess today, or just came by for a visit?” Lorenzo says to still the fear he feels is seeping through the lattice.

“Thought I’d try out new material for the Bagel Club meeting next week. Feeling like this might help move me forward. Get me out of the darkness. Therapy on the cheap, again.” She laughs and the sound sparkles in Lorenzo’s brain.

 “Ok,” he says, knowing he could be late for his lunch with Mrs. Fitzpatrick but not wanting the joyful feeling to end.

“I’m just going to tell stories, of my life. On the road, from the very beginning.” She says experiencing the energy shift as the edible she’d taken kicks in, feeling elevated and a little floaty. Annie breathes in deep, exhales through her nose and begins. “My life was changed on a hot summer night, when a priest, two sisters and a musician walked into a bar.”

Lorenzo touches the  stiff, white-collar protecting his neck as the heat begins to rise under it.  “Does it have to be that story, in a bar?”

“Actually,” Annie says, sitting up  straight on the hard-wooden bench. “It was the basement of the VFW on the Vineyard, Lorenzo. So technically it wasn’t a bar,” she pauses, “but I think the joke works better that way.”

Lorenzo looks down at the dusty floor on his side of the wall and shakes his head sharply before looking back up at Annie seated across from him in the tight confessional, her face shadowed by the wooden lattice between them. He lets a small laugh escape his pursed lips. “I understand. Go on. I should be grateful for a new storyteller, I’ve been a little tired of neighborhood gossip.”

“Can I start again?” Annie asks feeling her back stiffen and her voice rise. Wondering if sharing her stories with the church ladies is a good idea because the confessional is not big enough for all her sins. “I don’t want to sound loopy,” Annie says, “and I know it’s hard to understand what you haven’t experienced, but I want to share my stories with the ladies, I think it will help.” 

“Help how?” He feels it  again, the long-forgotten cocktail of intense desire and frustrated intent. He pulls away from the wooden lattice, surprised by the passion of her.

“Living on the road for so long and being in the show, I know how therapeutic it can be to share stories. And Mom and the ladies will be a great audience and that will help. It feels familiar here. I need to laugh and I can make what happened funny. Those are the stories the ladies will want to hear because they are about heartache and love and music and laughter. Right now, when I talk with you, it’s not funny. I need to start laughing or this sadness, it will kill me.” She’d stops speaking words but Lorenzo can feel her world turning inward, dimming to gray. 

“Of course, Annie,” he says. “I’m always here for you. Please begin again.”

“A priest, two sisters and a musician walk into a bar on Martha’s Vineyard, and as they descend into the basement of the empty hall the musician asks one sister a question that upended her world.”

 Annie wills her eyes to close slightly, her head slanted down at the worn wooden floor. She sits, stiffly, for just a moment before looking up, allowing her eyes to focus on the small holes in the lattice, the light from Lorenzo’s side seeping into her world. “How I got to this moment, I need to understand that to heal.” 

Lorenzo straightens his back and prepares to listen.

“Let me start again. I don’t want to start with the bar story. To understand I think we need to start at the very beginning. The first time I saw him, JP, Jean-Pierre Sarfati, I was with Father Lorenzo. We were twenty-one but JP was only sixteen. It was New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1997. We saw him, at almost exactly the same time, standing at the bottom the subway station escalator. He was holding that blue guitar.” Annie feels it again, surprised by its resurgence, the excitement of finding love as if it lived inside of her and not only with JP.  “We were taking the subway across Cambridge to ring in the New Year at a friend’s near MIT. I remember it, like a dream, as we descended down into the dimly lit station in Porter Square on the steep escalator, I heard the first slow strums of that guitar just as I stepped on. It was like I was floating toward him and could feel my infatuation before I’d even seen him. I was a goner. And I’m almost positive every person in that stations could see me blush when I passed by him, it felt like I was burning up.” She stops and laughs quietly to herself, remembering the oddly awkward girl she had been . 

Lorenzo thinks of how he had pulled her close, hoping to break the spell of JP’s seduction, but she couldn’t look away. “Maybe he can help me,” she’d said as they stood together on the crowded platform a few feet from where JP was playing his blue guitar.

“Maybe he can, but he seems very young,” Lorenzo had said as she pulled herself from his arms.

“Someone like him probably doesn’t need this kind of job.” She’d blushed and took a step closer to him.

“I remember how it felt when he first took my hand and looked into my eyes, it happened in an instant and all the chatter stopped and the shock, it exploded my soul. It was like an electric current running between me and him. I remember JP looked surprised too. He smiled, pulled me closer and I never wanted him to let go. Then I handed him the Musician Wanted Card from the lab at MIT where I was working, and as I let go of his hand so I could board  the waiting train with Lorenzo, I could still feel his touch as we all descended into the dark tunnel.”

Father Lorenzo laughs feeling a relief of tension, but knowing the truth of what happened next.

“And that was just two years before he whispered into my ear ‘It’s you, It’s always been you,’ and the world pulled away and it was just us, alone together.”

“But a lot happened between that fateful New Year’s eve and you becoming the scandalous wife of a rock star,”  Lorenzo says.

“True,” she laughs. “ As the story goes, a few months after I gave him the MIT card he called me. Turns out, he needed a summer job.” She pauses when she hears Lorenzo laugh. “That’s really how we got to know each other, when he was hired to play guitar for the sleep project. It was a pretty sad little gig, but the thing about JP, he just loved to play. Loves to play,”  she says quietly. Annie sits still in wooden bench and feels a small tear on the side of her face remembering JP’s favorite blue guitar. “If you asked him he would say it was because he  was always on the outside and that person he created on stage was the person he wanted to be. That person had a way of drawing people into his world. You could see the shift in him when he started to play, the subtle things he would do, the things he would say, the way he moved around you. Then he had you, ensnarled by his sounds. He drew me in too. Turns out that the mystery of JP is that he was the quiet one and didn’t like to be around too many people. But he liked playing in the lab with me as the only conscious person in his audience,” she laughs.

“That’s very hopeful,” Lorenzo says “It’s good to hear you laugh. Do you know that laughter is the manifestation of hope.”

“Maybe I’m a ‘hopeaholic’ like Mom, because  even in the darkest hours, even after I understood what JP and Khadijah had done, I could still find humor in the absurdity of it. I always thought that if I lost my ability to laugh at myself, I might die. And then, one day, I woke up and nothing seemed funny anymore. Hope is a dangerous thing, Lorenzo. That’s what I learned when I left. There is such a thing as cruel optimism.”

“Stay in Cambridge, help with Nona. She has the ladies from the church helping out  during the day and now we have a night nurse. And I can take good care of Nona’s house but I’m not much of a cook. I do what I can, but I could really use your help.”

“You would have made a good husband,” Annie says. “Maybe Mom was right, we should have gotten married.”

He laughs. “Sometimes, I think about that. But you know frustrated I get waiting for you.”

“And I know you think I make everything  more complicated than it has to be. Maybe JP really does love me, those things never bothered him.” Annie admits wishing the memory to fade.

“There are so many types of love, the Greek have names for them all. agápe, éros, philía, philautia, storgē, and xenia,” Lorenzo says, surprised he can still remember them all. “And of course the Church teaches us to put agápeabove all.  But I always understood each type of love can be a gateway to offering empathy to people who can’t see you,” he pauses, trying to connect back with her. “You always had love, Annie, you just couldn’t see it.”

They are quiet.

“That’s how éros was for us,” he says and Annie feels it again, that pull that she can’t control. Without expecting it, the question “Why did you leave?” escapes his lips, the truth of his confusion about that night burning his dark eyes. “Why did you leave me and Maeve?”

Annie sits back on the hard bench and twists her hands together, a dark memory crosses and descends into her mind. She needs to go. “I’ll stop by tomorrow and check-in with Nona,” she answers, already standing with a foot outside the tight box. But before escaping the dark halls of St. Catherine’s she whispers to herself, “Don’t be blinded again by love.”