Backcast (35 page)

“Not ‘pew' like church pew. Pew like Sun Oil Company Pew.”

Kate's eyes grew wide. “You mean like Sunoco gas stations?”

“Yeah.” Shawn smiled sheepishly. “They're my people.”

“Good god.”

Shawn took hold of Kate's elbow. “Are you okay?”

Kate sank down onto one of the built-in benches that lined the deck railing. “I just need a moment.”

“Come on, Kate. It's not that big of a deal.” Shawn sat down beside her. “You can't tell me that this never occurred to you. How do you think I afforded to live in Japan for a year?”

Kate gave her a blank look. “Loans?”

“Well. Okay. I guess that would've made sense.”

“So.” Kate spread her hands to take in the house. “You paid cash for this?”

Shawn shrugged.

Kate slowly shook her head. “I guess I don't have to worry about paying for Patrick's braces.”

Shawn was confused. “Patrick needs braces?”

Kate looked at her like she had just taken complete leave of her senses.

“Oh. You're
joking
. I get it.”

Kate was still staring at her with wonder. “I just can't believe this.”

“Why? It doesn't change anything.”

“It changes everything.”

Shawn was crestfallen. “It doesn't have to.”

“You're crazy.”

“I know.” Shawn bumped her shoulder. “But I've always been crazy.”

Kate took in a deep breath and held it for a moment before letting it out. She shifted her position on the bench so she was facing Shawn. “I was going to tell you this later, but now seems like a good time.”

“Tell me what?”

“I accepted Linda's offer.”

“You did?”

Kate nodded.

Shawn was elated. She threw her arms around Kate and hugged her. “Oh, my god. That's
fabulous
.”

She could feel Kate nod against her shoulder. “I know.”

“I was afraid to ask.”

Kate gave Shawn a quick squeeze and sat back so they could see each other.

Shawn kissed her on the forehead. “I'm so happy for you.”

Kate smiled. “It was a no-brainer, really. I just needed a little time to sort things out.”

“I guess. When will you go back to Atlanta?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

Kate reached into her jacket pocket and fished out a small,
tissue-wrapped package. It was tied up with a piece of string. “On what you think about this.”

She handed it to Shawn.

“What is it?” Shawn turned the small package over in her hands.

Kate sighed. “It was supposed to be a down payment—but now you don't seem to need that.”

Shawn untied the string and began to unroll the small wad of bright blue paper. “Down payment on what?”

“On us.”

“Us?”

Shawn finished unrolling the tissue and was stunned to see that it contained a beautiful, hammered-copper ring.

“Kate.”

“Please don't tell me you hate copper. My choices were limited. It was either this or an indifferent alloy.”

“I love copper.” Shawn was practically speechless. “It's beautiful.”

Kate smiled. “Barb made it for me.”

“I don't know what to say.”

Kate took hold of her hands. “Yes would be good.”

Yes?
Shawn felt her insides lurch.

“I'm . . . Are you . . .?”

Kate squeezed her hands. “I'm told there's no waiting period in Vermont.”

Shawn's head was spinning. “You're asking me to marry you?”

Kate nodded. Shawn had never seen such an expression of vulnerability on her face. It made her look shy and adorable.

“Now?”

Kate sighed and nodded again. Shawn could sense that some of her normal resiliency was creeping back in. “Contrary to popular opinion, I
can
be nearly as impulsive as you are.”

“You want to marry me?” Shawn was still having trouble letting it sink in. “I never saw this coming.”

“Didn't you? I did. Of course, initially, I was going to offer to share the house. But since you've already taken care of that, I'll just offer to share your life.” Kate tugged her closer. “I promise to make a good return on your investment.”

Shawn closed her eyes and leaned forward until their foreheads were touching.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Kate kissed her. “So I'm guessing this is a yes?”

“Oh, it's a yes, all right.”

Kate gave her a shy-looking smile. “I'm happy.”

“Me, too.”

“We sound like idiots.”

Shawn kissed her again. “Who cares?”

“I suppose you're right.”

Kate held up the ring. “Want to try it on?”

Shawn beamed at her and held out her hand. The ring fit perfectly. The metal felt warm and solid. Just like Kate always felt whenever Shawn held her close.

She wrapped an arm around her.

She couldn't remember ever feeling this content. Sunlight was glinting off the lake. Patrick and Allie were rolling in the tall, lush grass behind them. They were sitting together on the deck of their new house. And the air around them was thick with the sweet smell of cloves.

“We're getting married.” She couldn't stop thinking it, so why not say it aloud?

“We are,” Kate agreed.

Shawn hugged her closer. “When do you wanna do it?”

“Sunday?”

Sunday?
Shawn drew back and looked at her. “You mean, the day after tomorrow?”

“Yes. I told you—there's no waiting in Vermont.”

“But, how do we make that happen? Aren't there things we have to do?”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Like get a license?”

“That's easy.” Kate snuggled back in and rested her head on Shawn's shoulder. “We just need to stop in at the town hall on our way back to the inn and do the paperwork.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Shawn couldn't believe it. They'd gone from what she thought was zero to Mach 1 in the blink of an eye. But that was life with Kate.

She held her tighter. She hoped it would always be that way.

But something else occurred to her.

“Won't we need someone to do the ceremony? A justice of the peace or somebody?”

“Oh.” Kate chuckled. Shawn could feel the soft vibration of it against her collarbone. “I've already taken care of that.”

“You have?”

“Um hmm.”

“Who'd you get?”

“You'll never guess.” Kate was playing with a button on the front of Shawn's shirt.

As happy as she was, Shawn knew enough to be suspicious.

“Oh, god. Who is it?”

“Have you ever heard of the Esoteric Theological Seminary?”

“No.”

“Well. It turns out that Viv is a Teutonic Chaplain.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Beats me. But all that matters is she's legally ordained.”

“
Viv
is an ordained minister?”

“Teutonic Chaplain.”

“Whatever.”

Kate kissed her on the neck. Shawn felt it tingle all the way down to her toes.

“So whattaya say, Harris?” Her voice had taken on that low and sexy timbre it got when she really wanted something. Shawn called it her ‘come hither' voice. “Got any plans for Sunday?”

Oh yeah. Kate really wanted this. And Shawn was not at all inclined to deny her.

She smiled and hugged her closer.

“You betcha.”

Essay 12

The first time she appeared to me, I thought it was some kind of paranoid delusion. That's what they call it when you've grown so afraid of reality that you create another place to go where you can feel safe. I knew a lot about that. And I knew a lot about delusions, too. I had a lot of them growing up, and they only got worse after my sister died.
That
she died was hard enough to deal with—but
how
she died was the part that nearly pushed me over the edge.

It's like that when you're a twin. I know that people say things like this all the time, but unless you've been a twin, you can't really understand how true it is. You go through life with this weird feeling that you're half of something—that there's always some big part of you that's missing. I think that comes from the fact that you both came from one egg. Once that first split occurred, way down inside your mother's womb, you both just kept right on dividing into smaller and smaller pieces until there were so many millions of fragments that you stopped being able to tell what belonged to you and what belonged to her.

It was always that way for us—even though we led completely separate lives. Felice was the serious one—the one who was good in school, always did her homework, always practiced her clarinet, never got in trouble, and won perfect attendance pins at catechism class.

I was the misfit. I played sports, cut class, got kicked
out of band, made D's in math, and frequently got caught smoking out behind the church when I was supposed to be inside—learning about sacramental preparations for my first confession.

People called us Frick and Frack. We looked exactly alike, but we weren't. She did everything right, and I did everything wrong. We were behavioral opposites on the outside—but on the inside, we were identical.

Of course, I never learned the truth of that until many years later—and by the time I found out, I had already been firmly established as the black sheep in our family. That was because the only pre-teen passion I enjoyed more than smoking was “experimenting” with other girls. I got pretty good at it, too. So good that when it was time for us to go off to college, my sister got a scholarship to Loyola and I got enrolled in tech classes at the local community college so I could learn a “trade.” I guess my parents thought that being queer meant I was destined to have a career rebuilding transmissions or welding pipe.

My sister was always the quiet one, the thoughtful one—the one who kept to herself. She never shared much about her internal life, but it was plain that she spent a lot of time contemplating it. That became clear to us when she announced that she was leaving school to begin “a new life in the church.” I wasn't exactly sure what all that entailed—like I said, I missed a lot of those catechism classes. But my parents were pretty distressed about it. I think they had high hopes that she would eventually serve them up with a big brood of grandchildren. It was pretty obvious that I wasn't ever going to deliver on that promise.

They ended up being wrong on both counts.

It was less than a year later that she showed up on our doorstep. I was shocked when I saw the change in her. She was thin and drawn—like the camp survivors I had seen in a TV documentary about Auschwitz. She
wouldn't eat, she barely talked, and she kept herself isolated in her room. She never told any of us about whatever had happened or why she left the place she had been living. She was more withdrawn than I had ever seen her. My parents tried to get her to go to church with them, but she refused. I knew she was in trouble. I could feel it in my bones. But even I couldn't reach her. She just retreated further and further into herself. At night, I would hear her through the thin wall that separated our bedrooms—crying. Praying. Begging for forgiveness. I felt her weakness and pain like they were part of me. But I couldn't reach her. None of us could reach her. I knew that one day, she would just disappear from sight—like boiling water vaporizing from a pot on the back of the stove.

I was the one who found her, hanging from a rafter in our basement. I'd gone down there to get a jar of tomatoes for a casserole our mother was cooking for a church supper. The laundry room was down there, and when I first saw her, I thought she was a piece of hand washing my mother had left behind to line dry.

Then I saw her shoes—the shoes on those small, drooping feet that were the same size as mine. And I noticed the overturned chair.

I couldn't speak. I couldn't cry out. I couldn't make any sound at all. I dropped down and collapsed against the stairs with my hands pressed to my mouth. Then I vomited on the floor.

She didn't leave a note. She didn't leave anything. None of us ever knew what happened to cause her to inhabit such a dark and desolate place. But on the night after her wake and burial, she came to me and told me everything.

I was lying awake in my bed that night, as I had every night since finding her body. At first, when I heard her soft voice, my sick and tired mind told me it was just
the normal, nighttime sounds I had grown used to overhearing through the wall of my room. Then I remembered that she was gone—and that the room next to me was as empty as my spirit. I sat up in bed, anxious and terrified. What was happening? Was I losing my mind?

That's when I saw her, standing near the foot of my bed. When I recognized her shape, I felt my heart rate slow, my breathing settle. I knew her as well as I knew myself—and seeing her again, even in this strange, half-light, I felt whole. Complete. And unafraid.

She told me that she had died unredeemed. That she had committed a mortal sin and would never attain peace or salvation. That her purpose was to warn me—to save me from making the same misguided mistake that had ruined her life and condemned her to an eternity of regret.

I asked her what that meant. In a voice choked with whispered desperation, I begged her to tell me what I must do—how I should change. But she didn't. She blessed me and dissolved into the darkness.

Night after night, I waited for her to return. Days, weeks, months passed. But she never came back. Not until years later, on the eve of my marriage.

By then, I had heeded her advice. I had changed my life. Mended my ways. Turned away from my perverted and self-indulgent path. My parents were ecstatic that their prodigal daughter had returned to the fold. I was to be married in our hometown, and had returned there to spend my last night at home in my old room. It was as I lay awake, marveling at how far I had come, that I heard her voice—just as soft and strong as it had been on the night after her funeral.

I was thrilled that at last she had reappeared. That I would be able to share with her how far I had come, and how much I had taken her warnings to heart. That I
could reveal to her how truly united we were at last—on the inside as well as the outside.

But she stopped me. She told me that I had misunderstood her charge. That the mortal sin she referred to was not the act of taking her life—but rather the choice she had made to ignore the love in her heart. She said that in her arrogance and piety she had turned away from the happiness that God had offered her, and exchanged it for a path of loneliness and misery. That she came to warn me against making the same mistaken choice—to reveal to me that the path to fulfillment came through love and self-acceptance—not sacrifice and self-flagellation.

When I railed against her claims and demanded that she explain what she meant, she simply blessed me, told me to follow my heart, and faded from my sight.

I knew I would never see her again.

I was sick and distraught. I didn't understand what any of it meant. And I knew that there would be no simple answers for me. I had to choose whether I would go forward with the new life I had carved out for myself, or return to the path I had rejected and left behind. The only thing I was certain about was that I had become a misfit once again. I was half a person, and I knew I would never be whole again.

I had a foot in each world, and I didn't believe I belonged in either of them.

Sadly, I still don't.