door, casserole in hand, shaking. He caught me before I could get through my own front door.
“Come here,” he said calmly, his heavy-lidded eyes downcast.
I couldn’t disobey a priest, but I wanted to. I was going to cry and didn’t want him to know. When I looked at his face I saw my mother’s lips pressing on him, the same lips that she would blot thick with “kissing-red” lipstick, as a joke, because I loved the name, and smack my cheeks. He took the casserole out of my hands, had to give a forceful tug on it if I remember correctly, and laid it on the bottom stair like a loose brick. I had already started to cry, turning away from him, wrapping my arms around my stomach.
“It’s all right. Don’t worry.”
He was reaching out his hand for me to hold, but I put mine behind my back, even though I wanted to wipe my face free of the tears.
“You saw us, didn’t you, dear.”
I nodded.
“Me and your mom.”
I nodded again and kicked at the stone stairs.
“It’s natural for your mom and I to kiss. We love each other, you see.”
I knew priests were supposed to love everyone, but the thought of my mother’s arms wrapped around him, touching his body. His body.
“I didn’t know priests had lips!” I yelped and slid around his legs on the steps, heaving, trying to take in enough air to keep listening.
“Priests have a lot of things,” he said. “We’re just like other people.”
“No you’re not.” That I was sure of.
“Not entirely … we cook better.”
I pressed my face against his chest for a moment and he went in to get me a washcloth.
That night I ran straight up to my room and faked a stomach ache so as not to eat dinner with my mom and dad. My dad just accepted it and didn’t come up to check on me, his spoon already dug deep into another casserole. My mother did. I don’t think Father Marcus told her what I saw, but she came to tell me that in a couple days we would be leaving when my father left for work. We were going to fly in a plane and have a vacation. I started to cry again. She brought me ginger ale for my tummy, and told me we would all be happy, and not to tell Dad. That wasn’t difficult.
On the Tuesday we packed quickly, just as she said we would, right after Dad left for work. We took only “necessities,” as she called them, and “favourites.” For me this included a few clothes, a red-haired beanbag doll I’d had since I was a baby, and a toothbrush. My mother also took very little, her purse and some clothes, saying we would buy new things, but that night she had been up late typing her last letter for the church bulletin and I figured she didn’t pack because she was pretty tired. On a yellow piece of paper I wrote “I’ll miss you” and shoved it in my father’s sock drawer at the bottom. He never really liked to travel.
Father Marcus arrived with two suitcases and passports for all of us. A week earlier, as a surprise, my mom had taken me to a photo booth and the same black-and-white picture was staring at me in the tiny book. We took a taxi to the airport and Mom bought me a teen magazine to read on the trip. I asked her if Dad was sad and she gave me a pill that she said would soothe my stomach. I asked Father Marcus why he wasn’t wearing his collar, and he said it was easier to get through Customs that way. I don’t remember much else. I was fast asleep before we even boarded.
When we got off the plane, Mom told me we were in Brazil, the land of spices I pointed to on a map. It was so dry and hot that I asked if there was a pool. She said there was an ocean. We arrived in a town called Biguaçu, and a man with a thick-tongued accent took our few bags up a walkway, and we entered a brick house, the side toward the sun a shade lighter than the rest, at the end of a solitary street with a white swing outside. I loved the place as soon as we walked in. It smelled of Father Marcus’s cooking.
It took my dad three days to discover we were gone. Sometimes my mother would leave dishes on the stove for my father to heat up, or he would order takeout if she was busy at church. With the upcoming first confessions, he thought she would be spending most of her time there. He only noticed on the Sunday when he went to Resurrection and didn’t see her or me in the choir. My mom told me this after she talked to him for the first time. He had called the police.
On the fridge was the church bulletin, held up with alphabet magnets like one of my pictures or report cards. He found it on the Sunday and searched it for a mother-daughter retreat or other function he hadn’t heard about. He read the whole thing three times and handed it to the officers as possible places to look for us. They asked him some questions, told him that Father Marcus had also disappeared, and that maybe finding one would help them to find the others. My father offered them some beer and they read the bulletin together. Under “Obituaries and Announcements” was my mother’s short and sweet article: “Rebecca Creely has moved on to greener pastures. She leaves behind her husband and asks him not to worry.” One of the policemen pointed it out. My father hadn’t noticed. She had used her maiden name.
Apparently he continued on fairly normally. Except for the chuckles when he walked by, my father’s routine didn’t change at all. He called me after a couple weeks, or I should say I did, and I told him that we were happy here. He said he was happy. I asked him if he was eating okay. He answered that the church was sending him food for the next while; he was well taken care of and had so many casseroles and cookies he would probably have to throw some to the birds. I told him I loved him. He said he was going to read the paper.
One of the women who baked for my father was a widow. Her husband had died in a car accident or something. They don’t talk about it much. She and my father were married within two years and the chuckles lessened. They were joined together by Father Brown one year before he retired. They replaced the other priest with a Canadian. My father calls and asks me the same questions he did six years ago. I tell him I skip rope and love to sing. I tell him I go to church.
None of us do. We still pray, but don’t go to church. I have a stepbrother from a previous marriage of Father Marcus’s. His name is Brio and he has the room beside me. We are learning how to cook together and go to the same school. I have let him touch my breasts the way we are taught to hold tomatoes under the tap. I know I should stop this, I’m only fifteen, but I don’t know if I can stop myself, and here, I don’t have to go to confession.
Wind Chimes
My father, my uncle and I, and two cousins who still lived in town, one nephew barely a man, carried the coffin down the main road to the Anglican graveyard. The plain oak casket, void of wreaths save a white rosebud cluster on each end, seemed too light on my shoulders. Though she wasn’t a heavy woman, she trod on the ground as if she were, and I fought back the urge to check inside the closed hatch to make sure she was actually dead. That night I woke my wife in tears and told her my mother was trapped, suffocating with stray cats and little boys twisted in car crashes — all buried alive, and I was supposed to be among them. A fever of 102 degrees, my wife informed me later. I shook as if caught in a bitter wind.
Though my mother wasn’t an Anglican, she’d remarked frequently on the beauty of the dark iron gate and the white oaks sheltering the local Anglican church’s graveyard, so my father thought it would be the best resting place for her. But she belonged to a different religion and was a congregation of one before I was born and became her disciple. She collected wind chimes. Dozens of wind chimes hung along the eavestroughs of our roof, clanging against each
