Selena Kitt - Grace

“I asked if I could photograph her, and she agreed.” Rob squatted down, looking through the boxes at the bottom. “Here we go.”

He came over to the bed where Leah was standing, sitting down and patting the bed beside him. “Sit. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

She sank down, watching him open the box and pull out an envelope. It was sealed and unmarked. Just the sight of it made her feel weak. She remembered asking her mother for honesty and then regretting it. Careful what you wish for.

“When you said that, about Erica being fearless, it made me think of these. I took them on our third date. I thought of them as dates, but I don’t think Susan did. Not at first. But she was like that. Absolutely fearless. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know why.” Rob slid his finger along the envelope, breaking the seal and sliding the photographs out between them on the bed.

Leah squinted, picking up the first one in the set, holding it up to the light. She recognized the two of them instantly, although they were much younger than Leah ever remembered them. Patty Wendt was stretched out on a bed, head thrown over the side, her long dark hair hanging down almost to the floor. Rob’s camera had caught her moment of orgasm perfectly, her legs open, and Susan Nolan’s face between them, only her eyes showing, a sly, mischievous gleam in them.

“I saw some of these before,” Leah told him, picking up the photographs, not sure she wanted to see, but unable to stop herself. “I knew you’d all been together once. That’s why my mother thought that you were my father. I ran home that day, I don’t know if I was packing to leave, or packing to come live with you, I just knew I had to do something. I snuck in the house, and I heard you both, Rob. I heard my mother telling you that day in the kitchen, that I was your daughter, and after seeing these… why wouldn’t I believe it?”

“I didn’t know about the Mary Magdalenes when I took those.” Rob watched Leah’s face as she flipped through them, all explicit scenes of Patty and Susan, touching, kissing, embracing, spreading their thighs and rubbing their mounds together. Leah couldn’t look away, remembering what she and Erica had done, things so similar to this. Of course, Rob didn’t know about that, and he never would. It had been an experimentation Leah doubted they would repeat, spurred only by the titillating images and arousing films they’d discovered in this hidden darkroom.

“I didn’t know anything, I just knew that Susan was fearless and beautiful and that her best friend, Patty, loved and wanted her almost as much as I did.” Rob sighed, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Many of the girls they call ‘The Marys’ end up entering the convent. They’re sterilized, so they can never be mothers, and back then, there were even less options in the world for them than there are now. Without marriage and a man, who could they become?”

“Nuns?” Leah asked, incredulous.

“Yes.” He nodded. “Some of them, like Susan, defied convention. She was twenty-three when she married me, and an old maid by most standards. But until then, she’d never met a man who would tolerate her relationship with Patty.”

“Her… relationship?” Leah blinked at him, setting the pictures down between them.

“They were lovers.” Rob took a deep breath before continuing. “They remained lovers until the day Susan died.”

“But you were married?”

“Yes.” He smiled. “We were.”

“But my mother loved you , Rob. She said so. She told me, if it was the only way she could be with you, then she was willing to make that bargain…”

“No. She loved Susan, not me. She only tolerated me. Still does.” He gave a little, bitter laugh. “I was the one who made the bargain. I looked the other way. I loved Susan and she loved me. She just also happened to love Patty too. And Susan made it very clear, if I wanted her, I would have to accept her relationship with Patty.”

Leah tried to wrap her head around this new information, her brain spinning with it. She actually had to put her head in her hands to make it stop. Her mother had been in love with Susan Nolan?

Was it possible? Could it be true?

She lifted her head, looking at her future husband, trying to make sense of it.

“It happens, Leah. Some women… they just have a stronger affinity for their own gender than they do for the opposite sex. The world we live in calls this sexual deviancy. They label all of this-” Rob waved his arm around the room, at the photographs, the movie reels, all depicting some sort of sex act that society, the church or the government would consider deviant. “Offensive. Sinful. Criminal. But do you know what I see?”

She shook her head, not trusting her voice.

“Beauty.” He smiled, looking down at the pictures fanned out on the bed between them. “Truth and beauty. That’s all I see when I look at these.”

“Susan told you about this,” Leah nodded toward the photographs. “Her relationship with my mother…” She still was trying to process the fact. Saying it out loud made it more real somehow. It was slowly starting to make some kind of strange, surreal sense. “But they didn’t tell you about the Mary Magdalenes?”

“No.” Rob looked away, shaking his head, and she saw his jaw working again like it did whenever he got mad. “Not until the end. Not until she had to.”

“My mother said you made some kind of deal with Father Patrick, about keeping Erica out of it?”

Rob had a faraway look in his eyes. “Susan made me promise that I’d raise her to be a Mary. But once she was gone, well… at least Patty and I saw eye to eye on one thing. It was the only thing Patty and Susan ever fought about. Me and Patty didn’t want either of you involved in the Mary Magdalenes. Of course, Father Patrick had other ideas.”

Leah touched his cheek, feeling his jaw working, teeth grinding. He looked at her, his face softening, reaching over to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

“I would have done anything to keep you girls safe and out of this mess.” He shook his head, his mouth pressed into a thin line. “I failed you both. I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t understand why didn’t you just take Erica and disappear?” Leah wondered out loud. “I mean, you could have gone anywhere. Somewhere Father Patrick couldn’t find you.”

“I couldn’t do that to your mother.” He swallowed, taking Leah’s hand in his, looking at the ring on her finger. “I couldn’t take her daughter away from her. She’d already given up so much. It would have been like putting the final nail into her coffin.”

He looked up, expectant, searching her face, and Leah didn’t understand at first what he was looking for. She replayed his words in her head, searching for a clue, and when she found it, her jaw dropped, the information hitting her like a lightning bolt, straightening her spine, the hair on the back of her neck standing up.

“Her daughter…” Leah repeated the two words that had jolted her like an electrical current.

“Erica is your sister, Leah.” Rob took a deep breath, letting it out in a long, slow sigh. “Patty gave birth to twins. She kept you. Susan and I adopted Erica.”

“We look nothing alike…” Her voice shook, and she looked down at her hand, still resting in the cradle of Rob’s. It didn’t feel like hers anymore. She couldn’t feel her body at all, in fact. She was floating somewhere above it, hovering, the only barrier keeping her on earth the ceiling above their heads. “My birthday is in February, Rob. Erica’s is in January.”

“Fraternal twins don’t look identical. And you were the smaller baby. That happens with twins sometimes. One gets a little more nutrition than the other in the womb.” Rob stroked her hand, turning it over and lifting her palm to his mouth, planting a soft kiss there. “So we just fudged things a little on the birth certificates.”