The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [133]
The knowledge hit her then, hard: someday he would be gone. His inscrutable quoting, his missives by mail, his old-fashioned fashions, the protective web he and our mother had spun around themselves, would evaporate, and leaving us only with the memories of his thoughtful smile, his distance, and a lifetime of work that would have mattered most to a man dead four centuries ago. She let the door shut, placed her head against the cool glass, and prayed.
TWENTY-TWO
There had been no response from New York, but they had cashed the check. Bean didn’t know what she had expected. A thank-you for the return of something that had been theirs to begin with? A reprimand for the money still owed?
She had thought an installment would make it easier, but it had only intensified the disgust she felt with herself. At night, she ran. She waited until the heat of the day had cooled, until it was dark and she could weave in and out between the streetlights, running for blocks beside darkened houses. Occasionally she would pass children playing on a lawn, chasing fireflies, playing hide-and-go-seek, aided by the shadows of trees, and she would cut to the other side of the street. People passed by, walking their dogs, and Bean nodded, breathing hard as though she were a force of nature, constantly propelled forward, incapable of stopping to chat. She ran until she was drenched with sweat, until squeezing her braid released a trickle of cold liquid down her back, until her legs screamed with every step, and only then would she turn around and go home.
Running was the only place she could forget. New York had always held distractions. Other people, new places. It was the best place to hide whatever was dark inside her. But here there was no escape. She ran and she ran, desperate to put distance between her heart and her head, memories of Edward, of Lila, of the thousand ways she’d been ready to make a fool of herself for Aidan, when he hadn’t cared for her, when she hadn’t known him at all.
Tears mingled with the sweat on her face. Every pounding beat was a recrimination, a tom-tom reminding her of what she had lost—her life in New York, her self-respect, her job, her ability to see her future. Now she saw nothing. Before it had seemed like there were a million possibilities in front of her, a thousand paths not taken stretching out into the years ahead, and now one path led straight ahead, and she was terrified to take it because it meant she could no longer hide from the fact that she was terrifyingly, completely normal.
One night, pounding her way back home, feet crying out for relief, she ran smack into Aidan. Of all the people to see at that moment, he would have been her last choice.
They were only a few blocks from the church, and he was heading in that direction, hands in his pockets, strolling slowly along the darkened streets. Her head hit his chest, her ankle twisted, and he grabbed her shoulders to steady himself as much as her.
“Bianca?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
She looked up at him. They stood, as the great movie director of our lives would have it, in the pool of a streetlight, and she knew her face was swollen from crying and beaded with sweat. She was soaked; her shirt clung to her back, her shorts plastered to her thighs with sweat. Her breathing was quick and raspy.
“Bianca?” he said again, and she noticed that he always seemed to use her full name. It sounded so strange coming from his mouth, hearing it in this town, where everyone knew who she was, everyone knew she was just Bean Andreas, trouble with a capital T. “What’s wrong?”
She looked up at him, at the gold in his hair and the light in his eyes, and she said, “I need to make a confession.” And then she burst into tears, and he pulled her close and held her as her tears and her sweat soaked his shirt and it didn’t even occur to her that after all this time, she was in his arms.
Confession in our faith is not like the cinematic Catholic version, with tiny boxes and screens. It is not even required,