Lisa Scottoline - Everywhere That Mary Went

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been 3,492,972 weeks since my last confession. The Jurassic Period. When I did everything the nuns told me to, so I wouldn’t get my knuckles rapped, and memorized the Baltimore Catechism. I made my First Holy Communion at age seven, during which the priest put a wafer onto my tongue that he said was the body of Jesus Christ. I didn’t swallow it until right before they took my picture, and my baby face is beatific in the photo. I’d swallowed my slice of Our Savior and was overjoyed that this cannibalistic act had not sent lightning zigzagging to my head.

“Shit!” The cabbie bangs on the steering wheel, foiled in his attempt to run a traffic light. Sunlight blazes into the old cab, illuminating its dusty interior and heating its duct-taped seat covers. “You think they’d time these goddamn lights, like on Chestnut Street. But no, that would make too much sense.”

I nod, half listening. As soon as the light changes, the cabbie guns the motor and we leap forward into the tall shadow cast by the Fidelity Building. Its darkness comes as a relief and seems to quiet even the irritable driver.

As a child, I used to look at my communion picture on top of our boxy television. I wanted to be as good as the little girl in my picture, she of the praying hands and the lacquered corkscrews. But I wasn’t her. I knew it inside. The church told me so. They taught me that Jesus Christ suffered on the cross and died because of me. All because of me. Blood dripped from his crown of thorns and flowed in rivulets from rough bolts hammered clear through his wrists and insteps. His agony was all my fault. I felt so sorry, as a little girl, and so ashamed. Of myself.

“Hey, asshole!” shouts the cabbie, hanging out the window. “Move that shitwagon! I’m tryin’ to make a living here!” The cab bucks violently in the shade. I grab for the yellowed hand strap just as we burst free of the snarled traffic into the light.

And in my religious life, what happened next was calamitous. I grew up. It was Luke who said that whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it, and I stopped being a child. I stopped accepting on faith and started to doubt. Then I started to question, which brought the heavens, in the form of school administration, crashing down upon my head. I took biological issue with the Resurrection and was suspended for three days.

Light and dark, light and dark.

That’s when it started, the split between me and the church. And me and my twin. For as I began to turn away from the light, Angie began to embrace it. I resented the church, for making me feel so terrible about myself as a child and for dividing Angie and me. In time, I stopped going to mass altogether, and my parents didn’t force the issue. The three of them went every Sunday, while I stayed home with the Eagles pregame show. They prayed for my soul. I prayed for the Eagles.

“Do you remember Roman Gabriel?” I say to the cabbie. We’re almost there.

He looks into the rearview mirror with rheumy eyes. “Sure. Quarterback for the Birds. We got him from the Rams.”

“Do you remember when?”

He squints, in thought. “’Seventy-three, I think. Yeah, in ’seventy-three.”

So long ago. I can’t do the math in my head.

“What a fruit he was,” says the cabbie. “We shoulda kept Liske.”

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I can’t remember a thing about my last confession.

And I can’t forget a thing about my abortion.

It was so long ago.

I never told anyone, not even Mike. I intended to tell him, but changed my mind when we found out he couldn’t have kids. It would have made it worse. I know it did for me.

“This it?” says the cabbie, pulling up in front of the red-brick fortress on the corner of Ninth and Wolf. He ducks down to see it better. “It don’t look like a church. What’d you say it was? Our Lady of Perpetual-”

“Motion.” I get out of the cab and throw him a ten-dollar bill, with no tip. “Here. This is from a fruit I know.”

“Crazy broad,” he mutters. The cab lurches off.

I glance around to see if I’ve been followed, but the street is quiet. I turn and confront my church. From the outside, there is no way to tell what type of building it is. The windows are bricked in and the heavy oak doors are squared off at the top. But for the black sign that says the times of the masses in tiny white numbers, you would think that OLPH is a Mafia front. Except that the Mafia front is across the street.

In contrast to the bleakness of the church is the grassy lot beside it, a sheltered grotto for the statue of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Perpetual Help herself. I remember thinking that the grotto was a miraculous place, a baby’s blanket of perfect green grass tucked away from the city sidewalks. Gazing benignly over the grass, high above the electric trolley cars, was the slim, robed figure of the Virgin, tall as a spire in white marble, with her hands out-stretched in welcome. I felt peaceful there as a child.

I have the same feeling today. The statue looks the same, and so does the grass. It’s verdant and thick; it looks newly mown and raked. Tulips dip their heavy heads at the statue’s pedestal. No one’s around, so I sit on the bench in front of it, completing my Catholic impersonation. I’m eye level with the pedestal’s inscription, but don’t have to look at the Roman-carved letters to know what they say. I remember:

VIRGIN MARY

MARIAN YEAR1954

GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. RAFAELLO D. SABATINI

Mr. and Mrs. Rafaello D. Sabatini owned the Mafia front across the street, but who cared? They were good Catholics, they supported the church and the school. That was all that mattered.

At the statue’s feet are plastic bouquets of red roses, Mary’s flower, and along her hem are the lipsticked kisses of the insanely faithful. Rosaries dangle from her inanimate fingers, and she wears a crown made of glitter pasted onto cardboard, as if by a child. A little girl, no doubt, for little girls love the Virgin. Was I a little girl like that once? I feel a stab of pain. What does Mary think of Mary now, since her abortion?

I squint up at Mary’s eyes, there at the top of the tall statue. She doesn’t answer me but gazes straight ahead. She’s innocent, the Eternal Virgin. Her conception, unlike mine, was Immaculate. She knows nothing of couplings that happen to Catholic girls who are on the third date of their life, with Bobby Mancuso from Latin Club. Who, despite his braces, is terribly cute and plays varsity basketball. Who takes her to McDonald’s and then, in his Corvair, kisses her hotly, ignoring her protestations. Who doesn’t rape her exactly, but who complains that he’s in intense pain from something called blue balls, which means either that his balls are turning blue because the blood to them is cut off, or there’s too much blood getting to them. She’s confused about the physiology of the blue balls but understands clearly that his pain is all because of her.

His agony is all her fault.

Which makes her sorry, so sorry.

He says if she would just let him touch between her legs, just let him do what he wanted, his pain would be relieved and his balls wouldn’t be blue anymore. And before she knows it, her new plaid kilt is up and he is inside her. It’s over so fast, and the whole thing is so painful and strange, so impossiblystrange, that she’s really not sure she’s not a virgin Mary anymore. Until she gets home and finds the spots on her flowered Carter’s. Red splotches, shaped like infernal stars, among the delicate pink blossoms. Then she’s pregnant and decides to have an abortion.

No one knew. Not even Angie, and especially not Angie. I was terrified. I was ashamed. I had committed a mortal sin and would burn in eternal fire unless I repented. But the only way to repent was to confess my sin to God and to my parents, who would die from the shock. I felt trapped between commandments:THOU SHALT NOT KILL andHONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER.