Once, in Lourdes by Sharon Solwitz

Author:Sharon Solwitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

16

Vera

The following morning, she arrives at the Haight in a pair of her mother’s old Bermuda shorts and an extra-large T-shirt from a package her father hasn’t opened yet. The shirt swallows her hips, the shorts hang past her knees; she’s done with looking good. In seven days her thinking will stop once and for all, and the point now is for time to pass. She has brought the blanket from her bed for people to sit on. She will babble and riff with her friends and play contract bridge with them on the blanket. She plays well when she puts her mind to it. Partnerships rotate, and they are keeping personal scores; she is close behind Kay.

Today she is Kay’s partner, and CJ and Saint have just bid an unmakeable slam. With four trumps headed by the queen/jack, and seated behind the declarer, Vera has resisted doubling for penalty, though she’s not sure whether it’s from care for Saint, who made the wild bid, or fear of alerting CJ, about to play the hand, to a situation he might be able to handle if he expected it. CJ eyes the dummy and openly glowers at Saint. “You talk about the Clear Light—what all you Buddhists are questing for!—but right now you’re lost in the fog. Are you high by chance?”

Saint flushes easily; his freckled face is bright pink in the shade of the tree they are seated under. Kay is laughing, and even Saint joins in. Vera puts her hands under her big shirt and hugs her midriff. Who said truth will set you free? Even when her sins were venial—a creepier word than “mortal”—confession was a joke, since in pure and simple truth she hated the sin less than the sound of the priest’s absolving voice, not to mention her own voice in false acquiescence. She remembers a hideous gap in the flow of Father Guston’s words, in which he was no doubt picturing exactly what it meant when she said she had touched herself under the covers. After which she bypassed that particular sin, along with others so subtle or complicated they were hard to describe. She would tell him she had disobeyed her mother but not that she hated her mother for being someone she was supposed to love but in truth despised and, worse, was afraid she’d turn into, which felt like the real sin. All of this she has kept to herself until yesterday, when she made the mistake of telling Saint a few seamy truths. Oh God. She could have blabbed on till everything came gushing out.

She casts a glance out of the corner of her eye at Saint, handsome and awkward amid people’s laughter, trying to be a good sport. Her heart squeezes. He loves her, or so he said, tempting her to confess what could never be told, as if he could grant absolution.

Is he looking at her? She’s afraid to lift her head.

Yesterday was so…“uncomfortable” doesn’t hit it. Freakish. His “I love you” offered absolution without penance.

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