True Believers(128)

Him from their hearts. It didn’t matter that Mr. Morelli wouldn’t be the way he was if he had only been able to stop drinking. It didn’t matter that Miss Janns had never had a chance at anything, because she was born with the schizophrenia she had never been able to shake. Nothing mattered except that they were human, and they deserved to be treated as human, and if nobody else would do that, then she would have to.

You need two different documents, a voice in her head said, when you’ve got two different files.

She came to, startled, and realized that she had zoned out completely, she had no idea how long. Father was talking about the philosophy of the Scholastics and the importance of the Aristotelian synthesis to the medieval construction of reality. Some of the students around her were taking notes. Others were only doodling, the way you could often in this class, because Father repeated everything four or five times. Mary wondered what his parishioners had thought about it, all those years ago, when he had been assigned to a parish and expected to preach. She suspected that he hadn’t lasted at that parish very long, much the way she expected Father Healy wouldn’t last long at St. Anselm’s.

You need two different documents when you’ve got two different files, the voice in her head said again, and then she looked up, past Father’s shoulder, and saw the crucifix on the wall above the chalkboard. It was an odd moment. Like most other Catholics she knew, Mary had devotions she felt comfortable with and devotions she couldn’t make meaningful at all. For her, Christ Crucified had always been an uncomfortable image. Even Christ Triumphant, in the Resurrection, had made her feel oddly out of place. Christ on the cross had sometimes made her cringe. She liked mangers, and Virgins, and the star floating over the cold desert night in Bethlehem far more than she would ever be able to like the Stations of the Cross.

“Aristotle,” Father was saying, “could never have been accepted as a source of Christian philosophy if St. Thomas hadn’t found a way to disguise his religious skepticism, but once that skepticism had been disguised—”

Mary blinked, and the Crucifix on the wall seemed to waver. She felt a wave of dizziness roll over her, as if she were about to faint, except that she didn’t feel faint. She felt as if she were floating. The floor had dropped out from under her feet. The air had become tactile and electric. The light no longer seemed to be the light from the fluorescent lamps above her head, but another kind of light entirely, coming from nowhere, going to nowhere, purely white.

A second later it was over, except for the slight feeling of nausea that presented itself as a rush of acid to her throat. Mary swallowed as hard as she was able. Then she closed her notebook and put her pen in her pocket, deliberately and carefully. She was afraid that if she moved too quickly, she would find that she had forgotten how to walk.

“Miss McAllister?”

“Sorry, Father,” Mary said. “Don’t feel well.”

This was not exactly true. She didn’t feel unwell as much as she felt claustrophobic. She had to be out of this room, and after that she had to be out of this building, in the air, in the cold, anywhere where she couldn’t be confined. She put her notebook into her backpack and stood up. Father had come down the row to her, a half-panicked frown on his face. She could hear him breathing.

“You don’t look well,” he said. “Are you sure you’ll be all right? Would you like to have somebody come with you?”

“I just want air,” Mary said, and then blushed a little, because that was rude, and she was never rude to priests. She got one of the straps on her backpack over one of her shoulders and headed out of the room, into the long corridor that went the entire length of this wing of the building. It was a beautiful building, picture-perfect college Gothic, made of marble and almost brand-new. It must have cost the earth, and it occurred to her that it was strange she’d never thought of it. At the end of the corridor there was a fire door. She went through it and out into the quad.

Out there, there was a statue of St. Francis, in habit, holding out his hands to the birds. St. Francis was one of the saints Sister Harriet Garrity had actually been able to like, although, of course, she had disapproved of his relationship with St. Clare. She liked St. Teresa of Avila, but disapproved of her relationship with John of the Cross. She positively hated The Little Flower, who had seemed to her to be the worst sort of male-identified woman. Mary rubbed her eyes and walked past the statue, farther into the quad. There were statues everywhere. She had, she thought, liked Edith Lawton more than she had liked Sister Harriet Garrity. Edith might be annoying, but at least she didn’t pretend to be a Catholic.