Precious Blood(2)

The tired female voice broke in on her thoughts, faintly annoyed. “Is there somebody there?” it said. “If there’s somebody there, you ought to speak up.”

Cheryl spoke up. She said, “Excuse me.” Then she took another drag on her cigarette.

“Can I help you with something?” Mrs. Donovan said.

Cheryl nodded, oblivious to the fact that Mrs. Donovan could not see her. “I’d like to speak to Father Andrew Walsh.”

“Father Andrew Walsh,” Mrs. Donovan repeated. “Are you a parishioner?”

Cheryl knew the right answer to this. It was one of the few things she did know. “I’m not a parishioner of anything right now,” she said. “I think I’d like to be.”

Mrs. Donovan hesitated. “Do you mean you’re thinking of becoming a Catholic?”

“I mean I’m thinking of becoming a Catholic again.”

“Ah.” Mrs. Donovan sighed. “Would it have to be Father Walsh in particular? We have two priests here now. There’s Father Declan Boyd.”

“I’d rather talk to Father Walsh.”

“All right.” Mrs. Donovan didn’t sound happy about it. “Hold on for a minute. I’ll go see if I can find him. It is Ash Wednesday, you know.”

Ash Wednesday. She hadn’t known. She was still stuck back in December somewhere, with the doctors telling her nothing in words of one syllable she couldn’t understand. She looked out the window again and wondered what had happened to them all: Judy Eagan, Peg Morrissey, Kathleen Burke, Tom Dolan, Barry Field, the Charmed Circle of Cathedral CYO. Andy Walsh, of course, was pastor of St. Agnes’s, the parish where they’d all gone to parochial school. She’d found that out from an article in The American Catholic. It was one of the magazines they kept in the waiting room at nuclear medicine.

She was just beginning to worry that the wait would be longer than the three minutes she was allowed, when she heard sounds from the other end of the line. Somebody picked up the phone and dropped it. Somebody else said not to be so clumsy, there was a soufflé in the oven and if he went bashing the phone into the wall it would fall. Then there was breathing on the line and a voice said,

“Yes? This is Father Walsh.”

“Oh,” Cheryl said. She couldn’t have been more relieved if the doctors had told her it had all been a mistake. “Andy.”

“Andy? Who is this, anyway?”

“It’s me. I can’t believe it. I read about you in The American Catholic and I thought I’d come see you, but then I got here and I couldn’t believe I wasn’t wrong. I mean, here I am in Colchester, New York, and I thought I’d mixed it all up and you’d really be in Rome. Or not a priest at all.”

“I’m a priest, all right. But I’m sorry. I can’t seem to place—”

“You don’t know who I am?”

“Maybe if you gave me your name.”

Cheryl giggled. She was suddenly dizzy as hell. If she hadn’t stopped taking the stuff, she would have thought it was her medication.

“Never mind the name,” she told him. “Let me give you a place. Black Rock Park. June 19. I don’t remember nineteen what. It was a long time ago, more than twenty years. Do you remember that?”

The pause on the other end of the line went on and on, on and on, long enough for Cheryl to panic. Maybe this was a different Andrew Walsh, and he didn’t remember. Maybe this was the right Andrew Walsh, and he didn’t want to remember. But Cheryl couldn’t understand that. That day in Black Rock Park had been one of the happiest in her life, topped only by the day that followed it, when she had been married. It was funny how she’d been so happy at her wedding, when she’d known even while she was making her vows that the marriage wasn’t going to last a month.

“Andy?” she said.

“I’m here. Jesus Christ. Black Rock Park.”

“That’s what I said.”

“I can’t believe it. I really can’t believe it. After all this time.”

“Do you remember who I am?”

“I’d have a hard time not.”

“Who am I?”

Cheryl thought she heard Andy Walsh take a long breath of his own. “You,” he said, “are Cheryl Theresa Cass.”





[2]


At 7:45, just as the cathedral bells were doing their dance for the three-quarters hour, Judy Eagan pulled her silver gray Mercedes 200 SEL into the parking lot of the State Street Diner. She killed the motor, pocketed her keys, and checked out her face in the rearview mirror. The smudge of ash on her forehead was enormous: Andy Walsh had been having his fun with her. But then, Andy had been having his fun with everyone at St. Agnes’s six o’clock Mass. He liked, he said, to wake up the old ladies. And he did. His homily this morning had been a long diatribe on the particularly nasty form of anal-retentive psychosis he thought was afflicting the Pope.