True Believers(19)

“That’s awful,” she managed to say. “That’s terrible.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Father Healy was at the far door. He propped it open and shooed her through. “It isn’t unusual, with that type of diabetes. It’s a strange disease. Sometimes it can be controlled, and sometimes it can’t.”

“If it’s that bad, Bernadette’s never going to get to have children, is she? And she wanted six.”

“I don’t know how it affects having children. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t really thought about it. But you’re right. She said the same thing to me. She wanted six.”

The hall was dark. Father Healy flicked a switch and it was suddenly light. Mary went down to the first of the classroom doors and waited while Father opened up. In some odd way, what was happening to Bernadette and the Reverend Roy Phipps went together in her mind. They were both things that defied expectation—except, of course, that Reverend Phipps wasn’t a thing, even if he did move like a robot. Bernadette should not be in danger of losing a leg. She and Marty should be putting money in the bank every month until they could send Marty back to school. Then Marty would get a better job with health insurance and they could start putting money away again to buy a house. The Reverend Roy Phipps shouldn’t sound like a preppie in some ancient college campus movie. He should have a twang, and buy his suits at JC Penney.

There was nothing in the first Sunday school room. They tried the next one. There was nothing there, either.

“Well,” Father Healy said. “I guess you’ll have to try over at the school.”

“Right,” Mary said. She put her hands in the pockets of her jeans. The jeans were too warm. Her hands started to sweat almost immediately. “Look,” she said. “Do you think he’s wrong? Reverend Phipps, I mean, the one who—”

“I know Roy Phipps.”

Father Healy seemed to have gone rigid as a board. It made Mary feel a little queasy again. She took her hands out of her jeans and rubbed them against the sides of her legs.

“I just wanted to know. He says they all burn in hell as soon as they die. Just because they’re gay and they, you know, they do things—”

“We can’t ever know if somebody is in hell.”

“Yes, I know, but with these people particular, I mean like Scott Boardman who died, you know, I was just wondering—”

“We can’t ever know who is in hell,” Father Healy said firmly. “We can hope that every soul finds a way, even if only at the very end, to reconcile himself to God.”

“Yes,” Mary said again. It was exactly what she had been telling herself a few moments before, but for some reason it was now completely unsatisfying. She wished she liked Father Healy better, if only because he gave such a strong pro-life witness. Besides, she thought inanely, there had to be something wrong with taking so strong a dislike to her own parish priest.

“Well,” she said. “Thank you for all your help. I’ll run over to the school and see if they left them there.”

“Good idea,” Father said.

“I won’t be at Mass this morning. I’ve got to do the transport, you know, so that they all get to eat.”

“I’ll see you on Sunday, then.”

“Yes,” Mary said. She was backing away. It was true enough. She would be at Mass on Sunday. She was at Mass on every Sunday, just the way she said a third part of the rosary every day and the Stations of the Cross every Good Friday. She had been doing these things all her life. She couldn’t imagine not doing them. It was just that, just like Father Healy’s explanation about how people did and did not go to hell, they suddenly seemed to be nowhere near enough.

She got to the door of the cafeteria and went through it. She went through the cafeteria and out into the hall she’d come in through. There was still no sign of light outside, although she could hear the bells ring out quarter to six. She went through the hall and out the back door and looked around the parking lot. After she had the food in the back of the van and the homeless people who wanted to come with her rounded up and organized, maybe she’d go look for Marty and Bernadette.

She was halfway across the parking lot to the back door of the school when the door to the convent burst open and Sister Peter Rose came running out, her long veil flapping, her long habit getting tangled in her legs.

“Oh, Mary,” she said. “Mary, I’m so sorry. I just remembered. You don’t know where the food is.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in chapel?”

“Scholastica will forgive me. It’s one of the great good things that came out of Vatican II. Follow your common sense instead of the schedule sometimes. Although of course I don’t like a lot of the other things that came out of Vatican II. Oh, never mind me. The food is in the convent pantry, out back, it’s right inside the door. I should have told you.”