Work Text:
It’s his first year out of seminary when Jed sees Leo again, the transitional year. He’s still adjusting to the stiff way people tend to treat him in public, afraid of getting too close to the man in the collar: even old friends seem nervous, unsure with what title to address him. Not Leo. “Jed!” he calls brightly across the grass, and when they hug it’s bone-crushing, arms locked, not an inch of space between them.
“You look great,” Jed says, when they pull back, and it’s true. Leo’s face is bright, and he’s holding his head up high, like he belongs here and he knows it.
“Hey, thanks,” he says. “You don’t look too bad yourself, Father.” His tone is teasing. “Can’t believe they assigned you a place out here in Cambridge. What are the odds?”
“I couldn’t believe it when you said you were out here,” Jed returns. “I thought you’d given up Boston for Chicago. Why the change of heart?”
“That’s what I’m planning to show you,” Leo says, as he leads him through the green. “Someone I want you to meet.”
“Someone special?” Jed asks, with a familiar twinge in his chest.
“Yeah.” Leo grins his same old grin. It’s so good to see that Jed almost can’t look at him. “Met her out there, at the hospital when I got shot down, you know.”
His tone’s casual, so Jed mirrors it back to him, though the image of Leo in a hospital bed sends another stab of pain through him. “Won her over by moaning and groaning?”
Leo shoves him lightly. “With my charm and good graces, thanks very much, but she wouldn’t go out with me until I wasn’t her patient anymore. She’s principled like that. You’ll like her. We’re meeting her after her class.”
“She goes to Harvard?”
“Their medical school.” Leo sounds proud. “She’s smart. Way smarter than me.”
“Low bar.”
“Ha, ha.”
Leo seems to know his way around Harvard’s campus like the back of his hand, winding his way past the brick-red buildings without hesitation. Cambridge is beautiful, something Jed is grateful for: he would have gone anywhere without complaint, but it’s nice to know that the six months facing him will be easy on the eye, surrounded by intellect and history. They walk until they reach a building with a stream of students coming down the steps, and Jed watches as Leo’s eyes fix on a dark-haired woman.
“There’s my girl,” he says, face breaking into a beaming smile, and speeds up so that he can catch her around the waist, lifting her off her feet in a spin. She rolls her eyes as he sets her back down, but her hand has already found its way into his, belaying the expression. Jed’s stomach twists. He wants to look away, but finds he can’t. “Jed, this is Abbey,” Leo says, turning back to him. “Abbey, my old friend Jed.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” says Abbey, extending her free hand. Her eyes are green and piercing, and when they meet Jed’s, they seem to punch a hole right through him, like a sudden strike of lightning. His chest constricts; for a moment he cannot even breathe. Automatically he reaches out to return her gesture, though part of him wants to run and hide, to never look at her again.
In the half-second before their hands meet, he thinks only this—Kyrie eleison.
Lord, have mercy.
Right up until he had shipped off to seminary, Jed’s father had not believed he was serious about becoming a priest. Even now, he talks like it’s a lark that Jed is pursuing: “My older son is still finding his way,” John heard him say once, at a dinner, which, to be fair, has some truth to it. His brother is happy for him, at least. “Best thing you ever could have done for me,” he tells Jed over the phone. “Agriculture never looked so good to him.” His voice softens. “And Mom would have been proud.”
It’s something Jed often told himself at seminary, especially during the first year, when he was constantly surrounded by his peers and constantly lonely. He had not expected how different from him the other discerners would be, how inflexible in their understanding of the Word, some even outright hateful. Eventually, Jed had found more like-minded fellows to spend his time with, and began to enjoy the experience, but in that first year he’d wondered constantly whether he’d made a mistake. His letters to Leo, then away at the front, had been one of the only bright spots in his life; them, and his prayers to his mother.
Five years is such a little time. Still, Jed catches himself forgetting things about his mother even as he thinks of her for each Hail Mary he recites. In church, when he looks up at the stained glass, he remembers her with him as a child, naming saints in her soft voice. He remembers the drive home with her and John after the service, the one place his father was guaranteed to never be. She would ask them about Sunday school, about what they’d learned and what they’d thought of it. How is it he can picture that with such clarity, but not the color of her eyes unless he concentrates?
(Green, he thinks. Green and piercing.)
In the last months before she passed away, before he’d told anyone he was considering the priesthood, Jed had made a habit of reading scripture to her at her bedside. Sometimes he had come with the entire passage memorized, hoping to impress her. She would always smile as she listened to him, but once, close to the end, she had taken his hand and held it with all the strength left in her. “You have such a mind, Josiah," she had said. “But remember this above all else: ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ ”
Had she said it to him more than once? Had it always been her favorite verse? Jed isn’t sure, just as he isn’t sure of which hymn she had liked the most, or how she and his father had met and why she had married him, or if she really would be proud of his choices.
He tells himself these are things he has forgotten, because it is better than the alternative: that he did not know his mother at all. That now, he never will.
It turns out Abbey knows a cafe nearby, where they take seats outside and Jed watches the sun light up the red strands in her hair. “Tell me how you two met,” she says. “Leo didn’t say.”
“It was when Michigan cheated us out of a win,” says Jed, at the same time Leo says, “The day we crushed Notre Dame into the ground.” They both laugh. Abbey smiles at them, and stirs her drink with her straw.
“We were both having a smoke, around halftime,” Jed says. “This one was in Michigan gear from head to toe, on our soil, and we started arguing.”
“Over the game?” Abbey asks.
“At first—but then, somehow, over philosophy.”
“Right,” Leo says, laughing. “Descartes. Is the mind distinct from the body?”
“And did you solve it?” says Abbey. She and Leo are still holding hands, in an absentminded way, as though they’ve forgotten they’re doing it. Jed’s eyes keep flitting over to their linked fingers, and then away again. “Is the mind distinct?”
“Of course not,” says Leo, at the same time Jed says, “Of course it is.”
They grin at each other, equally charmed. Abbey shakes her head. “Here I thought one of him was bad,” she says. “I see why I had to meet him, Leo, he’s like your other half.”
Jed feels himself tense at the words, but Leo seems delighted. “Wait and see,” he tells Abbey. “You two are much more alike than we are, really. You’re both from New Hampshire—”
“You’re from New Hampshire?” Jed asks, surprised. “Where?”
“Nashua,” she says.
He points at himself. “Manchester.”
“How about that.” Abbey takes a sip from her drink. Her eyes crinkle. “Practically neighbors.”
“And you’re both Catholic,” Leo adds.
“Though I make no claim to be as devoted as you are,” Abbey says wryly. Jed tugs at his collar, suddenly self-conscious.
“Jed’s devoted, all right,” says Leo. “Never seen him give up on anything.”
“And that’s really how you became friends?” says Abbey. “Cartesian dualism?”
“No, no,” says Leo. “We weren’t friends until later. Here’s the story—”
This is how the story goes: Jed went to Notre Dame because he was thinking of becoming a priest, and then he met Leo, and knew he had no other choice.
He remembers, like it was yesterday, what it had been like to speak to Leo for the first time, to debate with him—the strange sense that he’d been doubled, that Leo had stepped out of a mirror to be Jed’s equal and opposite reaction. He can picture Leo’s sandy hair ruffled by the wind, his toothy grin, the athleticism underlying even his simplest movements. Jed had lost the battle before he’d even known it had begun.
It’s something Jed had always suspected about himself. He thinks his father suspected it too. But he never had the proof until Leo, until watching him lie on the grass outside the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, waiting for Jed to come out of Mass and continue the conversation they’d picked up that sunny day outside the stadium and never set down, over phone calls, letters, and train rides. Leo is an old problem, one Jed thought he could solve by joining the priesthood, and, when that didn’t work, hopes will be gone by the next time they meet. If not, then the time after that.
If he is honest with himself, Jed knows the true solution is simply to stop seeing Leo, stop being his friend at all. But how can that be right? he asks himself, when he kneels to pray for the strength to do so. How could that be what God has willed, or would ever ask of him?
Each month, when he goes to confession, Jed thinks he’ll bring it up. He’ll pour out his heart and perform his penance and be absolved, and it will be over.
Next time, he thinks. Next time. Next time.
“Have you started your sermon for tomorrow yet?” Leo asks him. They’ve been sitting long enough that the sun has crossed the midway point in the sky and is hanging in Jed’s eyes. “Or do you still leave things as late as you did in school?”
“I’ve started,” Jed says, squinting at him. “It’s a tricky one. Gospel of John. Jesus and the woman caught in adultery.”
“You know I won’t know it.”
“It’s like this. A group of religious leaders bring an adulterous woman to Jesus and ask him what to do with her. They’re trying to trap him because they think he’ll excuse her from the traditional punishment, which is stoning. Instead Jesus says to them—”
“ ‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone,’ ” says Abbey. She’s leaning back in her chair, her mouth twisted in a half smile.
“Right,” says Jed, glancing over at her. “So the woman is not condemned. But it’s an interpolation—we don’t know who wrote it, but it wasn’t John. So how do we take it?”
“As it is,” Abbey says firmly.
“Even though we don’t know who added it to the Gospel, or when, or why?”
“Why should that take away from its value?” Abbey brings her chair back down onto four legs, resting her elbows on the table as she looks at Jed. “You know it was removed from some texts because men were worried their wives would use it as an excuse to commit adultery?”
“I did know that,” says Jed.
“And you’ve considered why only the woman is brought for punishment, and not the man who sinned with her?”
“It’s crossed my mind.”
“Then you know the story’s existence is more important than its authorship. It matters because of what it tells us about gender, about history—and about empathy, about imperfection. ‘He that is without sin among you...’ ” Abbey’s voice is passionate, her face animated. As she speaks, the sunlight dances across her moving hands, glancing off the bracelet on her wrist. “The focus shouldn’t be on who added it to the Gospel of John, but that they did choose it for the Gospel, the only Gospel, that contains the words, Love one another—”
“—as I have loved you,” Jed finishes. His mouth is suddenly dry. He swallows, and says, “Funnily enough, that’s exactly what I was planning to say tomorrow.”
Abbey blinks. Then she sits back again. “Oh.”
Leo reaches out and tugs at the end of her ponytail. “Leave it to you to lecture a priest,” he says affectionately. “I knew you two would get along.”
“Hmm,” says Abbey. Finally she turns her gaze away from Jed’s. “Leo, we should go soon,” she says. “Remember, we have dinner with my parents.”
“Right,” says Leo, regretful. “I guess we’ve been here a while.”
They stand in a flurry of pushed-back chairs and napkins fluttering to the ground. “I’ve got the bill,” Abbey says, and vanishes inside. Leo turns to Jed. The golden light of late afternoon is casting his skin in an ethereal color, as though he is glowing from within. “It’s so good to see you,” Leo says. “I’m glad—you know—you’re the same.”
“You thought I’d be different?” says Jed.
“Maybe,” says Leo, and reaches up to tap the base of his throat, where a collar would be if he wore one. “I thought maybe. But it’s the same.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I knew you two would get along,” he says again.
Jed feels as though something is stuck inside his chest, pressing hard against his ribcage. “Yeah,” he says. “She’s great.”
When they part, Leo hugs Jed with the same force that he’d greeted him with. “We’ll see you soon,” he promises. “God, I missed you.”
“It was good to meet you,” says Abbey, at his shoulder. Her green eyes flash at him.
Jed echoes it back, mindless, barely aware of the words leaving his lips. “I missed you. Nice meeting you. I’ll see you. Goodbye.”
At the corner, he turns one way, and the two of them turn the other. Leo drops his arm around Abbey’s shoulders, carelessly, easily, and then they walk away.
There is a story in the Bible about looking back. Jed had heard it once in Sunday school, a million years ago, and he had never forgotten it: the burning city, the pillar of salt. Since then he makes choices and he sticks to them. This fact is the subject of one of the only compliments he can remember his father ever giving him—he’d been sixteen, in an argument with his brother, and his father had said, “Might as well give up, John, you know once Jed gets his teeth into something he’ll never let go of it.” As he’d left the room, he had told Jed, over his shoulder, “You get that from me.”
Yet now, as he watches Leo and Abbey leaving, choices swarm over Jed’s skin, sinking their hooks into his flesh, and he doesn’t know which one of them he wishes he were, or what it is, precisely, that he is longing to have. The other lives he could’ve led crowd his thoughts as Jed walks back home beneath the light-dappled shadows of the trees, home to the parish where he will spend the next six months of his life, where tomorrow he will deliver a sermon on empathy, on imperfection. He that is without sin among you.
Jed has never claimed to have the purest heart, but he has wished for one, has sought for one, has tried to live his life in accordance with the scripture. Honor thy father and thy mother. Forgive your father, Josiah. Take care of your ailing mother. Watch her die. I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me. Become a priest, take vows, swear your life away. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Mind your tongue, mind your every thought, be faithful. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness.
Thou shalt not lie with mankind.
Thou shalt not covet.
The doors to the church are open when Jed reaches them, but the pews are empty. It doesn’t matter. His head is full of voices, and he thinks he can hear a bell ringing somewhere far off, sending tremors through the earth. There is a candle they keep burning at the altar. Jed stumbles, falls to his knees before it.
He thinks of the sunlight on Abbey’s bracelet. Of Leo smiling sideways at him.
Love one another as I have loved you.
“Father, forgive me, for I have sinned,” he tries to say, but when he opens his mouth, between Abbey and Leo and the Lord, he finds he can make no sound at all.