“Come on,” I say. “Come inside.”
But it’s hopeless. The refusal to sleep in a bed is a common self-deprivation among priests, and healthier, at least, than cinching a rope around his thigh. Finally I give in and tell him I’ll come get him in the morning. He needs to be alone. I’ll say a prayer for my brother tonight.
LEO AND SOFIA ARE in bed when I return. This is their way of giving me the run of the apartment. I’d hoped to talk to Leo about what he heard at the cantina after we left, but it will have to wait. A set of sheets lies on my old companion, the sleeper sofa, veteran of ancient benders. Its former geography of stains is gone, victim of a woman’s touch. From beyond the distant bedroom door I make out faint sounds that can’t possibly be lovemaking; my friends are too considerate for that. But like most priests, I’m not one to gamble on human nature.
When I check on Peter in the nursery, he’s entwined in his sheets. His Greek cross, which he’s found some reason to remove from his neck, is slipping from his hand onto the floor. I scoop it up and place it in our travel bag, then kneel beside the window. There’s a Bible here, the Greek one I packed, which he and I use as he learns to decipher words. Placing it between my hands, I try to bury my emotion. To master the fear that lurks in this darkness and the rage that burns when I think of Peter threatened in his own home. Wrath runs deep in a Greek heart. It is the first word of our literature. But what I’m about to do, I’ve done hundreds of times for Mona.
Lord, as I pray forgiveness of my own sins, so I pray forgiveness of theirs. As I ask You to forgive me, so I forgive them. As they are sinners, so am I. Kyrie, eleison. Kyrie, eleison.
I repeat it twice, wanting it to stick. But my thoughts are a muddle. I know there’s a good reason why the Swiss Guards have posted more men outside the barracks. A reason why Lucio is calling us to his apartment. When I told Peter we were safe, I wasn’t even being hopeful. I was lying.
As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I look at the animals Sofia has painted on the nursery walls. Dangling from a hook on the door are hangers of baby clothes she’s sewn herself. Even more than usual, I feel the ache of Mona’s absence. Her family still lives here. A handful of cousins and uncles, most of them plumbers, used to brandish lengths of pipe at boyfriends they disapproved of. If I asked for their protection, they would probably take shifts watching over Peter and me. But I would sooner leave town with Peter than put us in their debt.
In the darkness, I unbutton my cassock and fold it. Lying down beside my son, I try to imagine how to distract him tomorrow. How to erase his memory of tonight. I rub his shoulder in the dark, wondering if he’s really asleep, hoping that he could use my reassurance right now. Since Mona left, there has been no diminishment in my number of lonely nights. Only a fading in their sharpness, which has a sadness all its own. I miss my wife.
I wait for sleep. I wait, and wait. But I feel I’ve been waiting all my life.
The gospels say Jesus prepared his followers for the Second Coming by speaking a parable. He compared himself to a master who leaves his estate in order to attend a marriage feast. We, his servants, don’t know when the master will return. So we have to wait by the door for him, with our lamps kept burning. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival. I remind myself that if I have to wait a lifetime for my wife to return, it’s no longer than any other Christian has waited these past two thousand years.
But the waiting, on nights like this, feels like an ache that rattles from an infinite emptiness. Mona was shy and coy and dark. She echoed some uncertainty within me about who I was and why I needed to exist after my parents already had Simon. I didn’t pay her much attention when we were kids because I was two years older than she was. But then, she was also too self-conscious to be noticed much. Growing up a girl inside these walls probably contributed to that. The pictures in her parents’ apartment show a cheerful, round-faced child who became more attractive each year. At ten she’s nondescript: dark shaggy hair, watery green eyes, thick cheeks. By thirteen that has changed; it’s clear that she’ll be something someday. By fifteen, just as I’m preparing to leave for college, the metamorphosis is beginning. And she knows it: for the next three years, there are new hairstyles and experiments with makeup. It’s as if she’s peered over the walls into Rome and has seen what a modern woman looks like. Her parents’ photographs are carefully cropped, but Mona herself once pointed out to me the low necklines and high skirts still visible in some of them. She told me about the secret excursions into Rome to buy high heels and jewelry, the excursions during which she discovered that the whistles and catcalls weren’t aimed at other women.