Woman of God

Chapter 87

SIX MONTHS had passed since the morning I drove into a church parking lot expecting to return home that night.

Since then, I had rented out my brick house in Cambridge, resigned from my job at Prism, and taken a new job at the Spring Street Women’s Clinic, and I was living my new life to the fullest extent in JMJ’s rectory with James.

His church was flourishing. There were overflow crowds that included people from other faiths, and clergy from other churches, who came to JMJ because they wanted to replicate what James had done in their own parishes.

On that high-summer morning, James wore plaid and denim. He held Sunday Mass on the wide deck he and other men and women in town who also knew how to use hammers and saws had built behind the church.

Rows of folding chairs were set up on the lawn. Daisies encroached from the field, and James and the choir had to compete with birdsong.

James spoke to the congregation about changes he saw happening in pockets of church communities across the country. Priests were getting married, women were becoming priests, and more liberal views on same-sex marriage and abortion were shifting people’s view of what it meant to be Catholic.

“These changes will feel radical and worse to some, but those who believe that God is love will have an easier time understanding that anything that gets between a person and his love of God is wrong.”

James was a soft-spoken but powerful orator. People nodded as he spoke to his ever-expanding flock. But he didn’t tell them what I knew.

Cardinal Cooney had called James several times, making serious threats: excommunication for one, and a civil trial on the grounds that James was defiling the brand of the Roman Catholic Church by advancing “seditious ideas” and, in so doing, “undermining the Word of God.”

How could Cardinal Cooney hope to succeed with these charges? James was doing God’s work, not just in JMJ but in the community that surrounded Millbrook. He was helping the poor, finding jobs for the unemployed, visiting the jail in Springfield, and generally bringing out the best in people. Three other JMJ churches had sprung up in Massachusetts, and I thought that was what had inflamed the archdiocese.

JMJ was spreading.

The choir of young girls was singing when my phone buzzed from my skirt pocket.

It was Kyle Richardson.

“Brigid,” he said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but G.S.F. is in Mass General. He’s been diagnosed with lung cancer. Stage four. He’s asking for you.”

“What?” I said stupidly.

Kyle said, “He wants to see you before he dies.”

Chapter 88

MY FATHER wanted to see me before he died, but I didn’t want to see him. I’d filed G.S.F. away in a box the size of a small bean in the back of my mind and almost never thought of him at all. But I remembered what he said when I’d seen him last: that he had put food on the table, pulled strings to get me into Harvard, and put up with my so-called crappy attitude.

True enough.

So it came down to duty. He asked for me, and I owed him for all the things he’d given his wife’s bastard child.

The Clinton Family Home was a nursing home near the town of Westbrook, in an agricultural plain thirty-five miles north of Boston. The sprawling facility had roofs topped with cupolas, walls of windows and balconies looking over a western view of endless meadows and pasture land.

I entered G.S.F.’s private room as a nurse was leaving with his lunch tray. He was sitting up in bed, looking pale and thin and just as forbidding as ever.

“Dad,” I said.

The word just jumped out of my mouth. I went to his bedside and kissed his cheek, and he said, “Take a seat.”

“Sure.” I dragged a hard-backed chair to his bedside, sat down, and asked, “How are you feeling?”

“They won’t give me my drugs, Brigid. Why not? What’s the difference at this point if it’s heroin or methadone?”

“Heroin is illegal,” I said.

“I think you can get me out of here,” he said, plucking at the tape holding an IV in place in his arm.

The veins in his arm looked like major highways on a map of the Midwest. Must’ve been a nightmare to find a good one.

“Leave that alone,” I said.

He sighed and looked at me with a question in his eyes.

I wondered if he was going to apologize to me for twenty years of tough love without the love. I wondered if he was going to ask for forgiveness.

But he said, “This is it, Brigid. I don’t mind. Take it from the great Franz Kafka: ‘The meaning of life is that it stops.’”

He went into a coughing fit that lasted three or four minutes and must have hurt like hell.

I stood and put my hand on his back, keeping my eyes on the IV line, making sure that he didn’t yank it out, and finally he pulled himself together.

He sipped water, then launched another lofty quote from the dead writers’ and philosophers’ society. “As Socrates so wisely said, ‘The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.’”

“You’re thinking of God? Would you like to pray?”

“Hell, no.”

He tried to laugh and was overcome with a coughing fit, spitting blood into tissues, and the chest spasms kept on coming.

A buzzer dangled from the side rail. I thumbed it hard.

A nurse came in, took a look at George, and left. She returned a minute later and gave him a shot.

“You need anything else?” she asked him.

“What else have you got?”

“I’ll check in on you before I go off duty.”

He waved her off as if he were flicking away a fly.

But he did settle down. I sat beside him, watching blue skies and fluffy clouds through his windows, and tried to call up a good memory of me and G.S.F. watching a movie, or a ballgame, or driving somewhere or dancing to something. I came up with no good memories. But I did remember the harsh criticism, rejection, and unapologetic neglect.

“Dad,” I said. “You wanted to see me?”

“I did?”

“Didn’t you? Kyle said you asked for me.”

“Oh. I don’t remember. I was just thinking of something Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote. ‘Death should take me while I am in the mood.’ And I am in the mood, Brigid. My will is out of date, and I fired my lawyer. But stop off at the house. Take the books and pictures.”

“Okay. Thanks. Feel better.”

He fell asleep then. It was the drugs, not death. I stood looking at him, thinking of him, my mother, our small house on Jackson Street, his inability to forgive my mother for having me or forgive me for being born. And now he couldn’t even say I’m sorry when he was close to death.

I should forgive him, right? But I didn’t feel it. At all.

I waved to the nurse on my way out the door.

Chapter 89

JAMES HAD asked me to go with him up the steep and narrow staircase to watch the sunrise from the bell tower. The air was chilly, but we sat close together on a bench built inside the railing as daybreak lit the distant hills. I liked this little seat with a view so much. Like the rocky outcropping in the woods behind us, where I had opened my heart to James last year, I felt close to God here. I also felt part of this church, this village, and very connected to James.

We were holding hands. James looked deep in thought. I asked him what he was thinking, and I was prepared for him to say that he was rehearsing his homily, or that the tower needed painting, or that he missed Harold Noah, a parishioner who had moved away.

He squeezed my hand and said, “I didn’t think I was ever going to be this happy.”

“I know. I feel that way, too.”

But the look on his face actually worried me. He was happy. Okay. Was there a but?

I flashed on the two of us making love last night on the sofa in front of the fire. I hadn’t seen anything but love and ecstasy on his face. Had something changed after he doused the flames? Had he finally hit a wall of guilt? James was still a Catholic priest who was living with a woman and having unabashed unmarried sex inside a church. Priests had been excommunicated for less.

James hadn’t spoken since I’d boarded this train of runaway thoughts. He sat still, looking past the big bronze bell, out to the timeless silhouette of the mountains.

“James? Is something wrong?”

“I never looked for anything like this,” he said. “I thought I would get my happiness from serving God. From helping people. Maybe from a big plate of fried chicken and potatoes every now and then, and sometimes happiness is a good bed.”

“Sure,” I said. “Nothing wrong with that.”

But?

“I’m so lucky, Brigid. That, despite all the bad stuff I was worried about the morning I met you in St. Paul’s, you spoke to me. And that I recognized you for the good woman you are. I’m lucky. Or God really does love me.”

“Both, maybe?”

“Both. Definitely.”

But?

“I was thinking that we have an opportunity,” said James. “Well, we have many opportunities, but one in particular.”

“What kind of opportunity?”

My mind raced ahead. Opportunity to open yet another JMJ church? Go down separate roads? Take-or, in his case, renew-vows of celibacy? What?

“I want to build a life with you in God’s grace. I love you, and I want to marry you, Brigid. I want to be your husband.”

Tears were in his eyes.

Tears sprung into mine, too.

“Is it okay?” I asked him.

“Okay to marry? It’s okay with me,” James said. “Is it okay with you?”

I was laughing and crying at the same time.

“It’s okay with me,” I said.

“Thank you, God,” James muttered, grabbing me into a hug. “You scared me for a minute, Brigid.”

“I scared you? That’s hilarious.”

“Hang on,” he said. He released me, dug in the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out a little black box. He opened it, and there was a ring winking up at me, with a cornflower-blue center stone and a diamond on each side.

“I bought it in Springfield,” he said. “I liked the sapphire, but if you don’t like it, we can return it.”

“Are you kidding? I love it.”

He told me to stick out my ring finger, and he wiggled the ring onto it. He took both my hands in his and said, “Brigid. Will you marry me?”

I said, “Yes. I will.”

I collapsed into his arms, both of us laughing, hugging, rocking, nearly toppling off the narrow bench that was never meant for activity like this.

When we were somewhat composed, James took me over to the ropes, placed my hands around them and his hands over mine.

“Thank you, God,” we said together, and together, we rang the bell. Our happiness could be heard all over the town.

“Amen.”

Chapter 90

IT WAS my wedding day.

I was in the tiny second bedroom in the rectory with four new friends, my bridesmaids from JMJ, who were buttoning me into my ecru satin-and-lace vintage wedding dress and taking pictures. There was hardly room enough for the five of us to stand, so getting me ready for the big day was quite a riot.

I hoped I was ready.

Since our bell ringing seven months ago on that crisp February morning, James and I had planned a church wedding that would be true to us and would also approximate Catholic doctrine, which filled a book with rigid rules and rites that couldn’t be personalized or amended.

We also took turns being scared.

I pictured my dear Karl, who had died three years ago. Ours was the only marriage I ever expected to have.

After Karl’s and Tre’s deaths, I was so devastated that even if God Himself had shown me that I would marry again, I would have been appalled.

James had talked about his little freak-outs, too. He had taken vows of celibacy. He had never planned to marry, and the intimate architecture of a married life wasn’t in his mind. As soon as he married me, he would be laicized, meaning he’d lose his clerical rights and authority.

He was giving up a lot to be with me.

After weeks of planning and replanning, we threw the book away. Our love was deep and tested, and we had broken so many rules that crossing the line into a godly but off-road marriage ceremony was just our speed.

Everyone in Millbrook was invited to the wedding. James spoke to the Millbrook Independent, the town’s online newspaper, saying, “Come to our wedding if you can hear the bells-or think you can.”

Now, from upstairs in the rectory, I could hear organ music filling the stairwell. Soon I would be walking toward the altar and my new husband. I was humbled, excited, and scared half to death. I was having physical manifestations of all of that-sweating and light-headedness-and then I was falling.

When I opened my eyes, Dr. Foster was peering down at me, and James was peering over Doc’s shoulder, looking more frightened than when he’d been on trial.

“What happened?” I asked.

Katherine Ross, my bridesmaid-in-chief, said, “You were buttoning your shoes…”

Dr. Foster had a stethoscope at my chest. He asked, “Have you eaten today?”

“Bread. Jam. Coffee.”

“Have you ever had heart problems?”

“No, Joel, I haven’t.”

“How about panic attacks? Ever had one of those?”

“No.”

“In that case, you just had your first.”

Doc Foster and James had each taken one of my hands and had helped me into a chair when Louise Lindenmeyr, my dear friend from Prism, burst in with a bouquet she’d brought from Boston.

“Brigid. Are you ready? Hey. What’s going on?”

“I fainted.”

Louise said with total medical confidence, “James, she’s okay. You get out of here, why don’t you? Brigid? Ready or not, it’s showtime.”

Chapter 91

JAMES AND several men from our congregation were straightening up the church after our standing-room-only wedding, and I was doing the same for our living quarters inside the rectory. As I picked up and put things away, hung up my wedding dress and boxed my shoes, I tried to remember everything that had happened today. I wanted to make sure to commit it to memory.

The first thing I remembered was that when my bridesmaids and I crossed the yard from the rectory to the church, it began to snow. In September. A new weather record.

Snowflakes swirled around the steeple and the metal folding chairs on the deck, and the decision was made for us. Instead of having the outdoor wedding we had planned, we moved into the church. As Bishop Reedy said before the Mass, “I don’t think this church has been this full since Lincoln was inaugurated.”

The bishop was a wiry seventy-five-year-old with great strength and flyaway eyebrows and a very loud laugh. He had retired with the archbishop’s permission and was now a full-time farrier, living above his feed store, Reedy’s Feed and Seed.

Bishop Reedy had always been a bit of a renegade, but for now, at least, he was in good standing.

The processional to the altar was both hilarious and joyous. All the five-year-olds in town had been asked to be flower kids. They had picked roadside flowers-asters, goldenrods, and daisies-and they’d flung handfuls of them onto the wide board floors. Everyone laughed.

James looked staggeringly handsome as he waited for me at the front of the church.

Bishop Reedy beamed.

He led us through the customary vows: “To have and to hold…until death do us part.”

Honestly, that one gave me pause. I’d been through the death of a beloved husband before, and, while it was absolutely true that we would die, I didn’t want to think about that today.

James and I exchanged our own vows after that, each saying, “I promise to love you, to listen to you deeply, to support your passions, to stand with you even when there is chaos around us, to be a safe place for you, forever.”

After we had pledged our eternal love, Bishop Reedy blessed our rings and said, “You two are married now. James, you may kiss your wonderful bride. Brigid, you may kiss him back.”

Bishop Reedy had hitched a team of dappled gray draft horses to a farm wagon, and James, Bishop Reedy, and I led the snow-flecked wedding procession to the Candy Factory, a confectionery inside a huge barn on Route 283.

The snow was like icing on the cake.

My memory of the receiving line under the hayloft was something of a blur. I know I shook hands with and kissed the cheeks of several hundred well-wishers who showered James and me with blessings.

James also hugged and kissed me a lot, and we were grinning into each other’s faces when I heard my name. I looked up to see a very tall, dark-haired man coming toward me.

It was Zach Graham, aka Yank, and I hadn’t seen him since our scooter rides in Rome. I had spoken with him when he called after Karl and Tre died, and since then, we’d texted back and forth during baseball season.

But I never expected to see him at my wedding. And, frankly, I wasn’t sure he should be here.

He took my hand in both of his and said, “Sorry for crashing, Brigid, but I could hear the bells in New York. At least, I thought I could. Actually, I read the invite online.”

“You’re too funny, Zach.”

“I’ve very happy for you,” he said. “James looks to be a very good man. And I gather you’re kicking the Church in the butt.”

“So they say. I’m glad you came, Zach.”

“Be happy.” He introduced himself to James and said, “Good catch. She’s the best.”

The sad look in Zach’s eyes told me that he still had feelings for me and that this wasn’t the happiest of occasions for him. Just then, James spoke into my ear.

“Look. Coming through the door. I don’t believe it.”

Father Peter Sebastian from the Boston Archdiocese had attended our pretrial meeting in Kyle Richardson’s office, and he had also attended James’s trial. Now, he was at our wedding reception.

Why?

Sebastian was slim and dark eyed, and he looked soulful in his formal vestments. He joined the line, and when he was standing in front of me and James, he said very loudly, “His Eminence Cardinal Cooney sent me to inform you that this marriage isn’t accepted by the Church, and, similarly, your other activities are disgraceful and officially forbidden. This is a heads-up. There will be repercussions, James Aubrey.”

James said, “Only those who wish us well are welcome here, Father.”

“The cardinal will be in touch,” he said. He nodded at me, a sharp, silent condemnation, and when he was gone, his black presence remained.

James had squeezed my hand hard and said, “That bastard. Brigid, he’s the cardinal’s spear carrier. Don’t let him bring us down.”

I said, “No, no, of course not,” but I was so stunned by Sebastian’s pronouncement that even the delicious meal and dancing with my husband failed to undo Cardinal Cooney’s hand-carried warning that was now part of our history.

“He can’t hurt us,” James had said once we were in bed.

I wasn’t so sure. Sebastian had come a long way to confront us in person. Cooney wouldn’t deliver a toothless threat. After James fell asleep, I saw Father Sebastian in my mind. There he was, standing before us on our happiest day, and a feeling of dread came over me like a storm cloud crossing a sunny sky. I opened my mind to God, hoping for clarity or guidance. But I was alone, and not even prayer could drive that darkness away.

Chapter 92

THE STILLNESS of winter was ideal for hunkering down indoors, making a home, and making love with consequences.

I screamed when I saw the two blue bars on the home pregnancy test, and James shouldered open the bathroom door, afraid of-I don’t think he knew what.

“James! Look.”

I showed him the test strip, and I told him what it meant. He grabbed me, lifted me into the air, and told me what a wonderful woman I was.

It was a fantastic moment, and James’s joy over the baby I would be having knit us even closer as we planned for our future family. We had met in a church, married in one, made a baby here, too. I felt triply blessed, and I wanted to try for a grand slam.

I knew that G.S.F. had a limited capacity to love, but we had been in touch. He was dying. I wanted to give him some good news.

I called. I told him, “I’m going to have a baby.”

He said drily, “Congratulations, Dorothy.”

I couldn’t tell if he was being snide or if he actually thought that I was my mother. He may have been confused because of the drugs, or maybe he was just lost in the past.

“It’s Brigid, Dad. I’ll send you pictures after the baby comes,” I said.

A week later, Kyle Richardson called to say he’d been notified that G.S.F. had died.

I sat for a long time at my desk in the rectory, remembering my father. The bean-sized place where I had quarantined thoughts of him burst open and flooded my mind. I was both in the rectory and in my house on Jackson Street as a teen. My mother was in a drugged sleep in their bedroom, and George and I were in the kitchen, where he was reading my essay on epic poetry.

His criticism was scathing. I was just fourteen, two grades ahead of other kids my age, still fearful of his enormous, condescending presence. But I stood up for myself that day.

“You’re being too hard on me, Dad. Don’t forget. I’ve been getting As.”

He had taken a pen and written across the entire face of the paper, C-. Sloppy thinking. G. S. Fitzgerald.

I wouldn’t be able to turn the paper in the next morning. I would have to retype and probably rewrite it again. I shouted, “I hate you!”

And he said, “Hate me all you want. Someone has to give you standards. You need something to push against, Snotface.” And then he quoted Nietzsche, saying, “‘What does not kill me makes me stronger.’”

I was furious. After telling him that I hated him, I shouted, “I wish you were dead!”

I didn’t want to remember that, but now that he was dead, I had no defense against it.

I remembered that I rewrote the paper. I got an A+. I didn’t tell him. George gave me plenty to push against until the day my mother died and I finally freed myself.

But had I?

After Harvard, I had gone to one of the most rigorous medical schools anywhere. I had achieved high grades, and I had gone to one of the arguably most savage places on earth to practice medicine. Not once but twice.

There was no denying it in this moment, when I was all alone with the memory of the man who had stood in for my unknown father. What hadn’t killed me had indeed made me stronger. And now I missed the son of a bitch who had been the dominant influence in my life to this day.

Of course I forgave him. Why couldn’t I do it when he was alive?

I folded my arms on my desk then, put my head down and cried. I cried for the caring moments we never shared, for the fact that he had never told me he loved me and that I understood now that he had loved me. I cried because he hadn’t known Karl and he would have liked and respected him. He hadn’t known Tre and would never know the child I was carrying.

I cried because my father was gone.

When I was all sobbed out, I washed my face.

Then I went down to the church and prayed for G.S.F.’s immortal soul.

Chapter 93

WINTER MONTHS flew by, and while unique and devastating weather patterns disrupted growing seasons around the globe, spring unfurled in western Massachusetts with leaves and buds and red-breasted robins.

The first Sunday in May, James presented a woman priest to our congregation. Yes, a woman priest. Her name was Madeline Faulkner, and we welcomed her at JMJ with applause and coffee and sugar cookies in the basement room.

Madeline was in her mid-thirties, had degrees in theology and law, and had missionary experience in the Amazon. She made a presentation to the congregation and was welcomed and well received. If the archdiocese knew or cared about this new priest, they didn’t say anything to us.

That evening, Madeline, Bishop Reedy, James, and I had dinner in our oaken kitchen: chicken stew and honeyed tea and fresh apple pie.

Madeline asked me, “Have you seen the film Pink Smoke over the Vatican?’

I hadn’t.

“It’s about a movement that began back in 2002,” she said. “Seven women were ordained in international waters, outside the reach and regulations of the Roman Catholic Church. Incredible, really.

“Women protesting the exclusion of women by the conclave that chose Pope Benedict released a cloud of pink smoke in front of U.S. cathedrals in Rome. Other women, in support of female ordination, did the same in the streets and from balconies throughout the world. Pink smoke, Brigid.”

I said, “White smoke rises from the Vatican when a Pope is chosen…”

“That’s it,” said Madeline. “Pink smoke suggests that one day we could have a female pope.”

“May we live so long,” Bishop Reedy said.

Reedy, James, and Madeline proceeded to quote historic church elders who laid down Church law blocking women from the priesthood.

It was quite hilarious, really, to listen to the three of them snapping out quotes from ancient history that still lived today.

“Paul,” said Reedy. "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I don’t permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be silent.”

“Tertullian,” James said, grabbing my hand. “Woman is ‘the devil’s gate.’”

“Timothy,” said Faulkner. “‘I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.’” She banged the table with her fist for emphasis, and we all laughed.

As for me, I counted my blessings: I had love. I had friends. I had a baby on the way, and I was helping clergy who came to JMJ seeking guidance on opening breakaway churches like ours. A dozen new JMJ churches modeled on ours had started up throughout the Northeast in this past year. Congregations had opened their minds and their doors. Under the name of the church, the acronym JMJ was posted on the churches’ signs and doorways to let worshippers know that all were welcome.

I was excited to be at ground zero of this sea change in Catholicism. A woman priest. A married priest. Inclusiveness was catching fire. What next?

Chapter 94

WE NAMED our 110 percent healthy baby girl Gillian, and she became Gilly before we had even left the hospital. She was bright pink, had James’s blue eyes and my red hair, a glass-shattering scream, and she was absolutely beautiful, made with love.

James beheld his daughter with such awe, handled her with such tenderness, that it felt to me that he couldn’t believe that he had actually fathered a child.

He kept saying, “Brigid, look at her.”

“I see her. I see her.” I brushed her wispy hair with my fingertips. “Gilly, open your eyes.”

I’d gotten to know and love this baby deeply while I carried her, but when she was inside me, she reminded me of the months I had carried Tre and how much I had loved that little girl.

But when Gilly was first put into my arms, my heart swelled so much, I could hardly breathe, and, while I would never stop missing my firstborn, I was overcome with love for Gilly, more than I could possibly say.

I didn’t let Gilly out of my sight. And that was exactly how she wanted it. She slept in our room, and when I took a new job at the Maple Street Clinic, only a few blocks from the church, I took Gilly with me. I commandeered an office next to mine, had a door installed between us so that I could watch her all day. Worse yet, I documented her waking and sleeping hours, her appetite and her bodily functions, in my journal. I was keeping a medical chart. I was that terrified that she might for some reason die.

It was nuts, but I forgave myself for being overprotective. And James forgave me, too. Gilly must have approved of the care she was getting, because she kept growing and thriving. I finally exhaled when she was six months old and I let James take her out of the house without my hovering over them.

Meanwhile, media storms continued to rage around our home.

The press knew of Gilly’s birth, and James’s being a married priest with a child added to his colorful history and mine, creating too much human interest to be ignored. It was as if the tiny farm town of Millbrook, Massachusetts, were outlined on the map in red marker pen and reporters had stuck innumerable pins in it.

We’d been married for just over a year and a half on the day I plucked our baby out of her bouncy seat and said to James, “Expect the unexpected.”

“Wait. That’s my line.”

“Yep. I’m just borrowing it. You can have it back later.”

We three dodged the ever-present media vans at the intersection, cut through a lane between two cornfields, and connected up with a side street where I’d parked my car overnight.

During the mystery drive, I told James that our landlord owed money to the bank and that our rent wasn’t covering it. He had decided to sell JMJ.

“I can’t believe this,” James said.

“I negotiated with the bank, and if you agree, I want to pay off the mortgage. We’ll own the church outright.”

“How much is it?”

“I can afford it.”

“Really? Oh. Wow. I should have guessed by now that you are loaded, Brigid.”

He said that without judgment, but, still, he sounded wounded.

“I was waiting for the right time to tell you. Is this the right time?”

“This church. You want it, too?” he asked me.

“Yes, I really do.”

Minutes later, we entered the Springfield Bank and Trust. Mrs. Stanford was waiting for us. She motioned us into chairs in front of her desk and asked to hold Gilly.

“Gilly,” she said, “you are absolutely breathtaking.”

Gilly pinched the nice lady’s nose.

We signed the papers and bought a church, and on the way home, we took the truck into a car wash. Going through that watery tunnel just amazed and delighted Gilly. She laughed, waved her hands, and burbled, making her doting parents simply fall apart.

If I noticed the silver hatchback that seemed to be around the church a lot and that had been two cars in back of us on the way to Springfield, it didn’t register enough for me to even mention it to James.

“We own our home, sweet home,” James said as we headed back to Millbrook. “You’re stuck with me now, girls. Lucky, lucky me.”

Chapter 95

WHEN MADELINE Faulkner became the pastor of a church in Pennsylvania, she was barraged by every type of media attention, from blog articles on both sides of the controversy, to unrelenting network-news pieces. A woman priest was a huge story, and my old school friend Tori Hewitt sent me links to the Italian news coverage of American Catholic heretics.

I was amazed to see our names and faces: James’s, Bishop Reedy’s, Madeline’s, and mine, all of us accused of blasphemy in top newspapers and glossy magazines.

Meanwhile, right here at home, protesters surrounded JMJ and shouted at our parishioners as they came to church. Being at the center of what could turn into mass hysteria made me sick. James was also distraught. He prayed for guidance, and he apologized to the town for the way our presence had disturbed the peace, and he thanked town leaders for their understanding.

In fact, I wasn’t sure the town board had our backs.

One morning, Gilly and I were just yards from the entrance to the Maple Street Clinic when that silver hatchback that I’d noticed peripherally cruised up to the sidewalk and braked hard.

The man in the driver’s seat buzzed down his window and shouted, “Hey! Brigid!”

He was square-faced and flushed, with thinning brown hair and a thick, workingman’s build. I didn’t know him, had never seen him before. I put Gilly behind me, stood between her stroller and the car, and asked the red-faced man, “Who are you? What do you want?”

“You’re doing the work of the devil, Brigid. I know it. God knows it. We’re not going to let you get away with this.”

We? There was no one else on the street-no cars, no pedestrians-which was absolutely normal for Maple Street at nine a.m.

I said, “Are you threatening me?” And when he didn’t answer, I dug into my enormous handbag, filled with baby things, and searched for my phone.

I felt ridiculous, but I said, “I’m calling for help.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Do it. Go ahead.”

Then he stepped on the gas, and his car shot down the street like a missile. I memorized his license plate, and once I’d settled Gilly into her office crib, I called the sheriff.

“A lot of people are mad at you JMJ’ers, Dr. F.,” said Sheriff Munroe. “Just avoid this guy. He’s just shooting off his mouth.”

My next call was to my attorney, Kyle Richardson. I told him that I’d been threatened by someone who had acted truly crazy. “I have his plate number.”

Kyle made calls, and by the end of the day, I knew the name of the man who’d said I was working for the devil, and that he meant to stop me.

His name was Lawrence House, and he was a former town councilman, now divorced, but, according to police reports, he didn’t consider the divorce to be valid.

Kyle told me, “His ex-wife has complained about him, but she didn’t make it official. The cops went to her place a few times, walked him out, and warned him not to bother her or the children, and he backed off. He doesn’t have a record.”

That Sunday, JMJ was packed again. The young people in Millbrook weren’t discouraged by the press gaggle lining the street. In fact, many of them waved at the cameras and even spoke with reporters before going inside.

James was giving his homily when a man stood up several rows back from where I was sitting with Gilly and shouted, “None of you are Catholics! You will be damned to hell. Especially you, James Aubrey. Especially you, Brigid Fitzgerald.”

It was Lawrence House.

As ushers tried to escort House out of the church, he got away from them and pulled a gun. I saw the flash of metal in his hand. Adrenaline shot my heart into overdrive.

I yelled, “Everyone get down!”

The family in the pew in front of me dove for the floor. Pews tipped, making shocking cracks against the floorboards, and people screamed. I hid behind the pew and covered Gilly’s body, but in my mind, I saw that lunatic level his gun at James.

James said calmly, “Guns don’t belong in the house of God.”

“I have a carry license!” House shouted. “I can bring it anywhere.”

Pandemonium erupted as some people tried to hide and others broke for the doors. Everything happened so fast that when I looked up, I was surprised to see that James and several of the young men in the congregation had tackled House and were holding him down.

I scooped up the gun from where it had fallen as if I were fielding a bunt, and then I called the police.

This time, they came.

Chapter 96

THEY MET over drinks in the archbishop’s office at the end of the day.

Cardinal Cooney was cheerful. The men assembled around the fine cherrywood conference table in the plain, white room were the best lawyers in the city and probably the state.

Cooney knew all four of them personally and well: Harrington, Leibowitz, Flanagan, and Salerno. He played golf with them and belonged to the same political party, banked in the same banks. There were two other people at the table, his right-hand man, Father Peter Sebastian, who was Harvard Law, and Fiona Horsfall, a public-relations heavyweight.

They had worked together and had contained most of the garbage that had come out about the Boston Archdiocese after James Aubrey had been exonerated. After Aubrey got off scot-free from the charges against him, Horsfall had fashioned a campaign to make both him and the Church look as good as possible.

That wouldn’t be their goal today.

Cooney made sure everyone was comfortable, then said, “It starts with Aubrey. He’s the match to the gasoline. Breakaway churches are bad enough, but a runaway trend is intolerable.

“Peter. You went to the wedding. Tell us about it.”

Father Sebastian clasped his hands together in front of him on the table and talked about Jesus Mary Joseph Catholic Church.

“It’s about three thousand square feet and almost primitive. I sat through the Mass, and Aubrey is charismatic in the modern sense of the word. He could have done well in politics. He’s freewheeling. He does a credible job, but he makes off-handed comments. He answers questions during the service. He reads messages about headlights being left on in the parking lot.

“What he lacks in gravitas, he makes up in sociability. I think he can move people. Well, that’s self-evident.”

Cooney said, “Thank you, Peter. I guess Jesus had some of these traits, which is why I boil Aubrey’s influence down to one word. ‘Dangerous.’

“Right now, we have the upper hand,” Cooney said to the group. “What’s our best move? Can we sue him for abuse of the word ‘Catholic’ when he defies the legitimate doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church?”

The lawyers were prepared.

They told Cooney that the word “Catholic” couldn’t be branded or protected, that Greeks and members of other Orthodox churches used the term “Catholic,” but that it was possible to cast doubt on Aubrey’s authenticity and credibility.

Said Flanagan, “Make him out to be a cult leader, not a priest. There’s a reasonable basis for it. And he should be defrocked.”

“Already done,” said Cooney. “He’s off the payroll.”

“And excommunication?” asked Salerno.

“It’s in the works,” said Cooney.

Sebastian added, “I agree, Cardinal, when you say that Aubrey is dangerous, but he’s not invincible. He was accused of sexual predation. Even though his accuser recanted, we could say publicly and loudly that Brent recanted not because Aubrey was innocent but because he couldn’t take the pressure of what the trial was doing to his family.”

“What else can we use?” Salerno asked Sebastian. Salerno was a big man who spoke sparingly unless he was in court. Cooney thought him to be a great litigator, one of the best.

Sebastian said, “He’s in love with his wife and child. He won’t let anything touch them. An attack on them could shut him down.”

Cooney turned to his P.R. consultant. “Fiona, what have you dug up on the wife?”

Fiona Horsfall held up a thick file on Brigid Fitzgerald. “She’s very well regarded. Has a huge reputation for her medical work in South Sudan. She was considered heroic. Saved many lives. Assisted our military in bringing down a paramilitary terrorist-or, as some say, our military assisted her.”

Cooney was pacing now, touching the backs of chairs as he walked around the table. “Go on,” he said.

“She exhibited heroism again in a bombing a few years ago in Jerusalem. She has done a lot of work with the poor and disadvantaged. She’s seen as pious but accessible and down-to-earth. She’s working in a clinic now.”

“Forget about her, then,” said Cooney. “Concentrate on Aubrey. Full-court press. It will be easier and much more effective to cut Aubrey down-”

Horsfall interrupted.

“Your Eminence. I think Fitzgerald is a big influence on Aubrey. She has been and is currently instrumental in the expansion of this JMJ movement.”

“Fiona. You’ve just said she’s unassailable. Focus on Aubrey. He’s the public face of his church. He’s the pervert who is challenging Rome and canon law, defying two thousand years of Catholic doctrine.

“Bloody him. Put him out of business. I want his ratty little JMJ movement to die.”

Chapter 97

JAMES WAS patching the roof when a slick, blue late-model sedan pulled up to our doorway.

He jogged downstairs and asked, “Are we expecting someone?”

I had Gilly in my arms when we opened the door to Father Sebastian of the Boston Archdiocese.

Why was he here?

The last time I’d seen him, he had crashed our wedding, given us the stink eye, and wished us a bad life.

The priest said, “I’m sorry to drop in like this, Dr. Fitzgerald, but I have an urgent message for James from the cardinal.”

“Have a seat,” I said, sitting down next to James.

“Cardinal Cooney wants you to know that your excommunication is in process, James. You will be severed from the Church, and you know what that means. You won’t be able to conduct rites of any kind-not Mass, not marriages, not confession, none of it.”

James said, “I get it. I won’t be a priest under the auspices of Rome, but I will be a priest under the auspices of God. Which is all that matters. Is there anything else?”

“Yes. It doesn’t have to go this way, James.”

Sebastian wasn’t speaking to me or even looking at me. I could have been a dust bunny under the sofa. That was fine with me, because it gave me a chance to observe the cardinal’s emissary at close range. He was well dressed, crisply pressed, presenting himself as a messenger, but he was more than that. Sebastian was Cooney’s chief of staff, with a degree in law from Harvard.

“You’ve lost me,” James said.

James’s expression was even, but I knew that this threat from the archdiocese felt like being kneecapped with a ball bat. James loved God and he loved the Church.

Gilly felt the tension in the room. She reached around my neck and held on to me fiercely, and I shushed her as she started to whimper.

“Let me clarify,” said Sebastian. “Cardinal Cooney asks that you stop this destructive rebellion, James. Don’t call this a Catholic church. It’s not. Stop proselytizing. Stop undercutting the Church, and the cardinal will drop our public-relations offensive. Do you understand?”

“I’m sorry you had to come all this way, Peter,” James said, getting up, displacing the cat. “Be careful when you back out that you don’t hit the oak tree. It’s been here for a hundred years.”

Sebastian stayed seated.

“James, I must know if you understand me. The full force of the Boston Archdiocese is poised to launch a campaign against you. You will be painted as a pervert, as a tool of the devil, as a cult leader, and your followers will be tarred with the same brush…”

I had heard way too much of this crap, and I couldn’t stay quiet anymore.

I jumped to my feet and said to the outrageous Father Sebastian, “Please understand us. James is a good man and a good priest, and there’s nothing you can say that will stop the JMJ movement. The Roman Catholic Church’s threats, rigidity, and exclusion are exactly why people are coming to JMJ. We will fight anyone who gets between people and their love of God, and we will win.”

Now Sebastian was on his feet, too, and Gilly let loose with her signature, glass-breaking wail.

“I wasn’t speaking to you,” Sebastian said to me over the din.

James said, “Brigid and I are of the same mind. I’ve got work to do upstairs. Rain is in the forecast.”

The priest made a gesture, as though brushing dirt off his hands. When he had cleared the threshold, James closed the door hard behind him.

Baby and I went into my husband’s arms.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I expected to be excommunicated. But I am worried that Cooney will intimidate people and that they’ll be frightened away.”

“Some will. Many won’t,” I said.

I took Gilly upstairs to her room and soothed her as I looked out her window. I watched Father Sebastian get into his car, and I stayed at the window until that black cloud of a man drove away.

Chapter 98

AT FOUR in the afternoon, I was stitching a nasty head wound at the clinic when a patient called the front desk and I was called to the phone, stat.

“Doctor, it’s Chloe.” Chloe’s voice trailed off, and I called her name several times until she came back, saying in a weak voice, “I’ve killed myself.”

“Where are you?”

“Downstairs. Tell my mom.”

Chloe Tremaine was one of my patients. At seventeen, she was a heroin addict, twelve weeks pregnant, and trying to clean up. I ran outside and found her lying on the pavement, curled into a ball. She wasn’t dead, but a great amount of blood was soaking through her pink flannel pajamas.

She was just conscious enough to say, “I had to get rid of it. Tell…Mom…I’m sorry.” I tried to keep her talking, but she had passed out.

Chloe lived with her boyfriend in his parked van behind the pizzeria where he worked, around the corner from the clinic. She had come in irregularly for checkups and had told me that she wanted the baby, but she was shooting up, horrified at herself for doing that, not eating or sleeping properly. She was a total mess with a sweet personality and a desperately dangerous and chaotic life.

Now, curled up at the intersection of Maple and the highway, she was close to death. Her pulse was thready, and she had a high fever, indicating a raging infection. But the loss of blood was going to kill her first. I wouldn’t be able to save her in our low-tech walk-in clinic.

By the time the ambulance arrived, Gilly was under the care of our head nurse, and I had Chloe’s medical records in my hands, including her pre-signed permission for procedures including surgery to save her life.

As messed up as she was, I was fond of Chloe. I talked to her nonstop as we tore down Interstate 91 at rocket speed, assuring her that everything would be fine.

Dr. John Nelson, the attending emergency surgeon at Springfield Metro Hospital that day, had booked an O.R. for us and was ready to assist. We scrubbed in and assessed Chloe’s condition as critical. She was given a complete physical, a blood transfusion, and an MRI.

We were able to ascertain that Chloe had thrust a sharp instrument up her vagina, likely a coat hanger, hoping to hit something that would induce a miscarriage.

The fetus was dead, and the instrument Chloe had used had pierced the spongy walls of her uterus, clipping an artery on the way to puncturing her bowel, which had introduced a massive infection. She was septic, on the verge of shock, and I couldn’t even give her Kind Hands’ fifty-fifty odds. The very small chance we could save her was still dropping.

Over the next four hours, Nelson and I performed a complete hysterectomy and tried to stabilize our young, stupid patient. I felt stupid, too, that I hadn’t guessed during those prenatal counseling sessions that she had considered doing this.

Chloe survived the surgery, and her condition stabilized. I was looking in on her in the ICU, waiting for her mother to arrive, when a nurse found me.

I asked her, “Is Chloe’s mother here?”

The nurse had a very strange look on her face.

“Dr. Fitzgerald. Your husband is trying to reach you. It’s an emergency. You’re wanted at home.”

“What kind of emergency? What happened?”

The nurse didn’t know.

It had to be Gilly. Something had happened to Gilly. Please, God. No.

I called James. He didn’t answer.

I’d come to the hospital in an ambulance, and I was going to have to return home the same way.

I went out into the hallway and shouted, “I need a bus to take me back to Millbrook. I need it now.”

Chapter 99

THE PARAMEDIC drove the ambulance as if it were his child’s life on the line. We reached Millbrook’s town limits after I’d gotten the message that James had called. During that drive, I was in a roaring panic. My God, it was so late. The clinic was long closed. I’d forgotten Gilly. What had happened to her? What had happened to my child?

James was with her, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he?

I prayed, asking God to please let my daughter be safe, but if He heard me, He didn’t respond. I called James until I had jammed his mailbox with my messages, and we finally approached the rectory.

What I saw was so unbelievable, I thought I was in one of my open communications with God. But this scene was 100 percent real, in this time and place. While I was out, hell had come to our door.

The street fronting the church was clogged with cars, and four fire trucks were parked up on the grass. Fire burned behind the church’s arched windows, and flames shot through the roof. The blaze looked like a living thing, an evil entity that was determined to destroy everything it touched.

Where is James? Where is Gilly?

The churchyard was pitch-black and raging orange at the same time. I searched the fire-illuminated faces of the bystanders and called for James. Water arced through the air, soaking the rectory’s roof, our home, only fifty feet from the blazing church. The flames fell back, but the heat and roiling smoke made even breathing nearly impossible.

Where is James? Does he have Gilly?

A group of men with their backs to me were talking among themselves. I called out, “Please help me. I’m looking for my husband and child.”

The men turned.

The one closest to me was the maniac Lawrence House. He’d pulled a gun in a church jam-packed with people, including dozens of children, and warned me that because of our message, there would be hell to pay. Had he done this?

“Sorry, Doctor. I haven’t seen him,” House said. “You know what this is, don’t you?” He waved a hand toward the conflagration.

“What are you saying?”

I was looking past him, scanning the onlookers for my husband’s face.

“Divine intervention,” said House, with great pleasure. “Di-vine in-ter-ven-tion. And you earned it. In full.”

I was staring at him, speechless with fury, when someone pulled at my arm. I spun around, ready to do violence.

It was Katherine Ross, my former bridesmaid, and she had Gilly in her arms.

I screamed my daughter’s name and grabbed a double armful of Gilly and Katherine together. Kath was saying, “Gilly is fine. She’s fine. My mom has your cat.”

Gilly reached out her arms. “Where were you, Mommy?”

Kath handed my precious toddler to me, and I kissed her and held her so tightly that she yelped.

“I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry. I was at the hospital. Kath, where is he? Have you seen James?”

She shook her head no.

I gave Gilly back to Katherine and said, “Please. Take care of her. I need to look for him.”

I ran.

I rounded the church, and I saw a crew holding hoses on the western side, the side that faced the rectory. James was wearing a fire hat and aiming a hose at the roof.

“James.”

I ran to him and held on to him as he kept the hose trained on the flames.

“I couldn’t find you!” he shouted over the crackle of fire, the roar of streaming water, and the grinding engines. “Katherine has Gillian. I was in the rectory when the fire trucks came. I called you.”

“I was in a no-phone zone at the hospital. What happened?”

James waved his hand toward the church, taking in the blackened walls all the way up to what was left of the bell tower.

“Our wonderful old church. I can’t believe this.”

But I could believe it. I remembered an image of myself floating on a glassy sea with flames leaping around me. God had sent rain. And he had enveloped me in a ball of light.

James shouted, “We hosed the rectory down so that sparks can’t set fire to the roof! Can you give me a hand with this hose, Brigid? My arms are wearing out.”

I stepped in front of my husband, and we stood together with our hands on the line, dousing the fire.

“Thank God,” he said to me. “No one was hurt. No one died.”

Chapter 100

AT ONE in the morning, James, Gilly, and I opened the front door to the rectory. Our little home was smoke filled, water soaked, and uninhabitable. James left his phone number with the fire chief, and we drove to the closest motel on the highway.

We went to bed in our clothes, didn’t sleep, and were back at the site of the fire at six a.m. Police arrived, as did the fire chief, an arson investigator, and an insurance adjuster.

The fire was out, but the nightmare continued.

I stared at what remained of JMJ and tried to picture what had happened since yesterday morning, when I kissed James good-bye, got into my car with Gilly, and drove to work. Sometime between taking Chloe Tremaine to the hospital and getting word in the ICU that there was a go-home emergency, this devastation had occurred.

I tried to picture that first spark. Had the wiring in the old church frayed and started the blaze? Or had someone deliberately torched our dreams?

The arson investigator, a man with a deeply lined face and a badge pinned to his jacket, stopped us from going into the church. He introduced himself as Walt Harrison and said, “It’s not safe in there, folks. The rest of the roof could fall through. Same for the floor.”

We stood just outside the dripping doorway as Harrison flashed his light around the scorched and ashen interior.

“Here’s what I see. This fire started under the loft. A Molotov cocktail, or something like it, was tossed under there. Superheated smoke and poisonous gases traveled into the bell tower and steeple. As the gases ignited, the steeple, the tower, this section of the roof, collapsed.”

Pale shafts of light came through the open roof and illuminated the ancient church bell, lying on its side on the floor.

Harrison took us to his mobile office inside a van. He asked, “Who do you think would do this?”

James told Harrison about the raging controversy surrounding JMJ, concluding, “Some people”-his voice cracked-“a lot of people think what we’re doing is wrong.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Harrison. “I’d like you to look at some photos that were taken at the fire. Arsonists-if it is arson-are fascinated by the fires they set. They really cannot stay away.”

Harrison turned his computer screen toward us and clicked through shots of the crowd watching our burning church. I skipped over the faces of neighbors and friends and stabbed at the face of a man who hated us.

“I ran into him last night, Walt. His name is Lawrence House, and he told me that the fire was ‘divine intervention.’ Months ago, he pulled a gun in our church. We got it away from him before he could hurt anyone.”

James gave details to Harrison, and I thought ahead to the near future.

Our congregants would have to be interrogated.

The church would have to be rebuilt.

Even the rectory would require rescue.

I thought of my father quoting Nietzsche at my fourteen-year-old self: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

This fire hadn’t killed us. We would come back from this. And we would be stronger.

Chapter 101

I WAS painting the new cabinets in the rectory kitchen when Zach Graham showed up without warning, shouting, “Hello, Red!” Totally startled, I knocked over a paint can, which jumped off the counter and beyond the drop cloth, scared Gilly, who burst out crying, and sent Birdie racing across the spill, tracking powder-blue footprints across the ancient wide-board floors.

Zach laughed at the chaotic scene he’d caused, which was right out of a fifties Lucille Ball comedy, with me in the starring role. I didn’t find it funny. He got that, loud and clear.

“Uh-oh. So sorry, Brigid,” said Zach. “I woulda called, but I don’t have your number.”

“That can be remedied, Yank. Got something to write on?”

“Let me help,” he said.

His help with paper towels was pretty hopeless, but Gilly became fascinated with Zach’s attempts and stopped screaming.

“All done,” he said. “The floor can be washed, right?”

I was glad to see Zach and, at the same time, a little freaked out that he’d just shown up in my house without warning. I moved the drop cloth, the bucket, and the brushes out of the way, put on the kettle, washed my hands in the big, old-fashioned sink, and after Zach did the same, I handed him a dish towel.

I sent Gilly out to the vegetable garden with a basket for peas. The garden was safe, fenced in, and I could watch her from the kitchen windows.

“So. How ya been?” I asked Zach.

“Well, I broke a wrist playing pickup hoops. All better now.” He flexed to show me. “I’m taking Italian at the New School. And my girlfriend dumped me because, I don’t know. She said it’s not me. She likes someone else better. My best friend.”

“Oh, man,” I said. “Will you live?”

“In time. Every time a door closes, etc.”

I poured tea, brought cookies to the table.

Zach said, “So, the door that opened is actually a great door. Tall. Wide. With an awesome view.”

“Really?”

“I’ve been offered a book deal. Actually, I mentioned your name, but I didn’t expect a publisher to jump over his desk and push a contract into my hands.”

“Wait. My name?”

“Brigid, I had this idea. The Jesus Mary Joseph movement really is a phenomenon. By my last count, there are nearly a hundred JMJ churches now, is that right?”

“One hundred and two. I think. We’re not always told.”

“I stand corrected. One hundred and two in what? Three years? It’s tremendous. It’s controversial. It’s dramatic, and with new records being set every day for the number of bad things happening simultaneously in the world, people are looking for ways to feel connected to God. You and James are providing answers. That’s what makes this a story that must be told.”

“Zach, you’re not a Catholic. You’re not religious at all.”

“You’re right. But this wouldn’t be about me. I don’t have to be Catholic to believe in all the good you and James are doing,” he said. “You’re on the right side of history. And think about this. If I write a book about the JMJ movement, it would offset the cardinal’s smear campaign. That would be good for you, wouldn’t it?”

Before Zach walked in, I’d been thinking about the fire investigation, which had gone nowhere, but the fire was such a personal attack, it remained lodged in my mind. There was no evidence against Lawrence House, and he was still walking free. I saw him at the grocery store, the gas station, the pizzeria, the thrift shop. He wasn’t on my tail, but he was always around. Sometimes he was accompanied by other men, all of whom looked at me as if I were dirty. There could be another attack. A worse one.

I didn’t want to go far from home.

After the fire, I’d taken a leave from the clinic and was splitting my time between managing the church restoration, consulting with priests who’d come to learn about JMJ, and spending mommy time with Gilly. James had been traveling during the reconstruction, attending services in other JMJ churches, which, as Zach had noted, were sprouting up all over the country.

I really didn’t want Zach to write about us. Our work was about making the Church accessible to everyone. And yet, we were in the public domain. Could I even stop Zach from writing this book?

I stared past Zach to the garden, where Gilly was chatting with the scarecrow. My eyes welled up.

Zach said, “Brigid. Brigid, don’t worry. I won’t do this book unless you and James are behind it.”

“I’ll talk to James,” I said.

“Good,” said Zach. “No pressure.”

Zach was a powerful personality, and his New York Times byline lent authority to all his work. Zach was our friend, right?

He hugged me and kissed my cheek, and I waved good-bye to him from the doorway. A few days later, after a lot of thought and prayer, I forwarded my journals to him with a caution.

“This is just a loan.”

“I’ll take very good care of this,” Zach said.

I hoped he would.

Chapter 102

IT WAS a gorgeous morning in May, and there was an overflow crowd at this, the first Mass in the restored JMJ church. We’d installed new double doors on the southern side that opened out to the large deck and the hay field beyond. I stood alone in the sacristy, listening to James speak to the congregation. I was wearing a simple, loose-fitting white dress with a hem to midcalf, a crucifix on a long, gold chain, and a white linen scarf that covered my head.

I heard James say, “No priest has ever been more moved to celebrate Mass than I. Brigid, please come out.”

I had a nervous stomach, and I felt light-headed, too, but I refused to faint; nothing could ruin this remarkable day.

Last night Bishop Reedy had ordained me by candlelight here in our precious church. I was a priest now, and today, I would give my first Mass.

I assured myself that I could do this, and I prayed to God, saying, “I’ll do my best, Lord. Thank You for my glorious life and for giving me this opportunity to do Your will.”

I walked out to the altar and looked around at the packed pews, the standing-room-only throng that had spilled out into the sunshine. Every pair of eyes was on me, every face was expectant.

James was sitting in the first seat in the front right-hand pew, my usual spot, with Gilly beside him. They were holding hands.

I began the liturgy, speaking to everyone inside the church and to those standing within sight, to those just outside the walls, to all who had heard the bells or thought they had.

I knew every element of the Mass, and I hardly stumbled over the Latin words. I spoke in English, too. I forgot myself and became one with the congregation. I thrilled to the dialogue between us and was uplifted by the voices of our choir, coming from the strong, new loft.

I had not committed my homily to memory. There just hadn’t been time, but I stood at the altar and told the assemblage, “I am so glad to be here. I feel so much love for all of you, and of course I’ve been worried that I might make some mistakes this morning. And then I reminded myself that there was no wrong here, with all of us together in the house and in the presence of God.”

I spoke of the Resurrection and of the rebirth of this church. I said that sometimes change brought grief and sadness, and I saw the tears in James’s eyes.

I said, “I’ve found that the greatest growth comes in times of change. And through this church, we are changing the way we think about God’s love. He’s here for all of us. All of us.”

As the choir sang “Agnus Dei,” I anticipated the Communion I was soon to receive from my dear James. I’d never felt as close to God and, at the same time, to another human being as I did then.

I offered Communion to the hundreds of people who had gathered in our church that day. Some of them were friends, and others were people who had come to Millbrook just for this celebration and to see a Catholic woman priest.

I said and repeated to each supplicant, “The body of Christ.”

“Amen.”

“The blood of Christ.”

“Amen.”

I gave the Prayer after Communion, speaking to the blessings of the Lord, and then I dismissed the congregation-who, against all reason but to my great, blushing delight, broke into applause.

I opened my mind to God, and I felt that special channel between us with an overlapping vision of the kind I had experienced before. I was both inside this old and beloved church, and I was with Him in an open field of pure light.

I thought, Thank you, God, for this beautiful, blessed day.

The light formed a sphere like the one that had enclosed me in Jerusalem. Now it surrounded me and James and Gilly and the entire congregation.

I had spoken to the congregation in a general way about changes that we might never see coming. I knew that what was happening now was profound. The blessings of this day, my first Mass, the hundreds of expectant faces, the love of God and my love for Him, the light encompassing every one of us-I knew that I had to keep these memories alive for as long as I lived.

Whatever came next.

Chapter 103

THAT NIGHT, James and I watched Cardinal Cooney on the eleven o’clock news condemning my “ordination.” After he took shots at me, James, and our dear friend Bishop Reedy, he warned “true Catholics” not to be led astray.

The cardinal got so much airtime, we could switch from station to station and see him going after the “destructive” JMJ movement on every one of them. His latest spin was to call JMJ “Aubreyism,” an affront to the Vatican.

In the weeks after my ordination, Cardinal Cooney defrocked Bishop Reedy and formed alliances with the archdioceses in other cities. He stirred up the Church’s donor base with a fund-raising campaign, and I thought that it was only a matter of time before the pope weighed in with his own condemnation.

The cardinal was clearly unnerved by what we were doing, and his reaction scared me.

He said it again and again: The Church had been very clear about the role of women. Jesus chose twelve men to be his apostles. Stand back, womankind. Don’t even think of stepping up to the altar. Don’t even think about it.

James and I were mentioned in all of the cardinal’s diatribes. Sometimes, the inflammatory image in the corner of the screen was of me, Aubrey’s wife. Aubreyism’s fake woman priest.

But as the weeks became months, it seemed that the cardinal’s smear campaign had backfired. As appealing and omnipresent as he was personally, more renegade “Catholic” churches had come into being. Existing churches were transformed into JMJ churches. New churches were opened in people’s homes, and by Gilly’s fourth birthday, the movement had spread to South America and Europe.

The press continued to be fascinated by us, and Gilly had her own fans. A sparkly redhead, Gilly Aubrey was verbal and quite funny. And she could really ham it up when a camera was pointed at her.

Which was not good.

I remember a pushy reporter in a cute sundress and heels chasing Gilly up the walkway to the church, demanding,“Gilly, come and talk to me.”

I got between my child and the reporter, and when I had the reporter’s complete attention, I signaled to the others in the media van, and the three or four paparazzi I could see across the street, and waved them into the church.

When they had all assembled, I said, “Everyone, I understand why you’re here, but Gilly is just a little girl. We need an agreement, all of you and me. I will be available right here every weekday at ten to answer your questions, but my daughter is off-limits. Seem fair?”

I gave the reporters my email address and invited them to church on Sunday. I started my weekday press meetings the next day, Monday, and they were actually good for all concerned. The reporters became normal people when we could talk one-on-one. And I got to know them: Jason Beans from the Globe, Arthur Glass from the World Press, Antonia Shoumatoff from the Millbrook Independent, and well-known reporters from cable and network news.

The aggressive attacks stopped. Susie Kennedy, the reporter who had chased Gilly up the path, was from USA Today. She started bringing brownies to the morning meetings. Often we all talked about world events having nothing to do with our church or religion at all.

Once in a while, Zach showed up. He was still with the New York Times, and he had questions, too. After the others left, we would sit together on the steps of the rectory and talk.

Sometimes I learned more about JMJ’s progress from Zach than even James and I knew.

“And you, Zach? How are you?”

“Growing back my beard,” he said in Italian, giving me a broad grin. “My editor likes my pages, and now I’ve got a dog.”

“A dog?”

“Chihuahua named Jeter. He travels well.”

We talked baseball for a while, and that was when I forgot that Zach was a reporter. He was just Yank. I told him that I was working on all cylinders and James was, too. That James looked tired, but he was doing what he loved.

“I get that,” Zach said. “Me too.”

Gilly came over and told Zach that she had had a dream about him. “You were Zach and the Beanstalk,” she said.

When it was time to go, Zach hugged me, kissed my cheek, as always, and waved good-bye.

I asked myself once again if Zach’s book was really going to be good for JMJ or if it would be just another punching bag for the cardinal.

I didn’t know it then, but Zach Graham was the least of my worries. I was about to be blindsided by someone much closer to home.

Chapter 104

WHEN I took my seat opposite celebrity broadcaster Morgan McCartor on the 60 Minutes set, I didn’t have the slightest premonition that my secret life was about to be cracked wide open.

James was home sick with the flu, but the pre-taping of the show couldn’t wait. McCartor was unconcerned about the programming change and introduced me to her TV audience of twenty-five million viewers. She sketched out the highlights of my life in glowing terms, from my work at Kind Hands, my near-death injuries on the battlefield, and the tragic loss of Karl and Tre, to my dramatic marriage to James Aubrey, my ordination, and the turmoil our movement had brought to Catholicism worldwide.

I almost couldn’t take so much attention and fought the urge to squirm in my seat.

McCartor, on the other hand, was in her element.

She was beautiful and smart and was so familiar to me from her interviews of presidents and killers and rock stars, I almost thought of her as a friend. She tossed me some softball questions, and I got relatively comfortable, and then she hit me with her best shot when she said, “Brigid, take a look at this clip, will you?”

I watched as my darling Gilly’s face filled the big screen. She was wearing a cherry-print jumpsuit with mismatched socks and shoes, her new favorite look this summer. An off-camera voice was saying to her, “Gilly, when you say your mom talks to God, you mean she prays, isn’t that right?”

And Gilly, my dear daughter said, “Sure, she prays. But sometimes when she talks to God, He talks back to her. She told me so.”

My face heated up. Gilly. What made you say that?

McCartor was saying, “Brigid, tell us what your daughter means. Do you converse with God?”

I had to decide right then, with cameras rolling, whether to tell the truth and risk whatever fallout ensued, or to deny my connection to God.

Morgan McCartor was saying my name.

“Brigid? Is it true that you not only speak to God, but He speaks to you?”

I was thinking fast, editing my own thoughts. How could I explain my personal experiences with God without sounding insane?

I gave it a try, relaxing my shoulders, speaking to my “friend” Morgan as if we were sitting together over coffee at a kitchen table.

I said, “Sometimes, on rare occasions and never on demand, my mind is filled with what I feel strongly is the word and presence of God. It’s a momentous experience, and while it’s happening, it’s as if I’m both in the actual, physical present and, at the same time, in a metaphysical realm. I see moving images unlike anything I have ever seen or could ever imagine. I hear a resonance, almost like a voice, responding to a question in my mind. I have to interpret these visions and find the answers to my questions within them.”

McCartor was right there, ready to ask, “What kind of questions, Brigid? What kind of answers? What can you share about this amazing phenomenon with us?”

“I can say that the first time I experienced this-this overpowering connection-was the day that I was shot. My heart stopped, and it took several minutes to bring me back. Technically-and by that I mean literally-I died. I’ve been neurologically cleared by the best doctors. I don’t have brain damage, and I’m not crazy. So, what do I think? That through my death, a channel opened in my mind to the presence of God.”

I conveyed a full stop after “God,” and the TV interviewer got it.

“That’s all you’re giving us?”

I laughed. “Seems like an awful lot to me.”

McCartor said, “Thank you, Brigid, for this most extraordinary interview.”

She turned directly to the camera and told the audience what to expect in next week’s show, and then hot lights went out, stagehands applauded wildly. McCartor leapt out of her chair and embraced me.

“You’re an amazing person, Brigid. It’s hard to believe what you’ve told us, but I do believe you. I’ve never had an interview like this. You’re inspiring to so many people. You’re the real thing. And, take it from me, I know the real thing.”

Chapter 105

LAWRENCE HOUSE was on a bar stool at Cal’s Roadhouse, watching 60 Minutes on the TV over the bar, when Morgan McCartor signed off. Sunday-night drinkers crowded the far end of the bar, a group of rowdies crowded the dartboard, and a couple of kids were fooling around in a booth in the back.

Typical night in a one-saloon town.

House said to the bartender, “Bill. Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“Our lady priest was on TV again.”

“Oh, her. Can I get you another one?” Bill asked House.

“No, I’m done.”

A fanfare came over the TV, announcing a breaking news story. House grabbed the remote and turned up the volume as the on-screen reporter intercepted Cardinal Cooney leaving the Boston Archdiocese and heading to his car.

The reporter asked, “Your Eminence. Do you have a comment for us on the Sixty Minutes interview with Brigid Aubrey?”

The cardinal scowled at the camera, then said, “Brigid Fitzgerald Aubrey has said more about her loosely wrapped mind than anything I can say. She’s delusional or blasphemous or both, but in any case, she took the Lord God’s name in vain. She can answer to Him.”

“YES,” thundered House as he thumped the bar with his empty glass. “That’s right, Cardinal. You got that right. Woman’s a fraud and a heretic.”

The bartender was mopping the bar. House shouted to him, “The backlash is coming, Bill! The tide is turning. God-loving people are getting fed up.”

On screen, the cardinal disappeared into the backseat of his car, and the TV reporter turned to face the camera.

“Chet, I’ll be outside the Millbrook JMJ church tomorrow, see if I can get Brigid Aubrey’s comments.”

House slapped some cash on the bar, said “Good night, Billy,” to the bartender, then walked outside onto the street, empty except for the fallen leaves scudding across the pavement.

He unlocked his car and got in.

He sat for a few minutes, thinking about what Brigid had said, how disturbing it was to hear her sickening so-called experiences going out all over the country. It was good, what Cooney had said. But was it enough? Mrs. Aubrey had fouled the name of God with her sick mind. She and her predator husband were infecting true believers with their dangerous nonsense, and nothing seemed to stop them.

House started up the car and drove to the intersection of Main and the highway and parked under a tree where he had a good view of the lights coming from the upstairs windows of the rectory.

He switched off the engine and settled in to watch and to wait. While waiting, he prayed to God.

Chapter 106

JAMES WAS celebrating the second Mass of the day with a full church on a sunny morning in August.

He was in love with everything about this place, from the restored bell tower to the two-hundred-year-old floors and the new, hand-carved crucifix over the altar.

And he loved the people of this town.

He adjusted his stole and was beginning to receive Holy Communion when he felt a sharp stabbing sensation behind his right eye, more stunningly painful than anything he had ever felt before. The chalice jumped from his hand. He stepped back, lost his footing, and dropped hard to the floor.

What is happening? What is wrong with me?

He felt hands pulling at him, heard questions being shouted, but he couldn’t comprehend any of it. The fierce pain obliterated words, his vision, and, struggling to get up, he realized that he had no control at all over his body. He vomited onto the floor.

James tried opening his mind to God as Brigid had described to him, but all he felt was the astonishing, unrelenting pain and the certainty that he was drowning. James heard himself say, “Not…going…to make it.”

He didn’t want to die. Not yet.

He lost consciousness and came back to the pain, still roaring through his head like a runaway train.

James heard his name shouted right next to his ear.

“Daddy!”

He opened his eyes and tried to smile at Gilly; then he rolled his eyes up and glimpsed Brigid’s stricken face.

She said, “James, the ambulance is coming. Hang on to me. Hang on. Please. We’ll get through this.”

“I can’t,” he said. “Last. Rites.”

She screamed “No!” but he knew she understood. He dropped away again, and when he opened his eyes, Brigid was there, making a cross on his brow, forgiving him for his sins, slipping a drop of wine between his lips.

The immense pain dragged James back again into nothingness. His last thoughts were, Brigid has prepared my soul. And, The pain.

Chapter 107

GILLY AND I were at Sloan’s Funeral Home, sitting in the front row of the reposing room, empty except for my beloved James, lying dead in his open coffin before us. It was good that Gilly and I had this private time to say good-bye to him, to pray for him before his funeral.

But even prayer was knocked down and sucked under by my grief. Gilly, too, was devastated, switching back and forth between choked sobbing and long, sad silences. It felt as though my heart kept beating only so that I could be there for our daughter, who had watched her father die in agony.

I knew James’s cause of death before we got the M.E.’s report. The suddenness and severity of his pain, the seizures and tremors, the dilated pupils and strangled speech, had told me that a brain aneurysm had ruptured, that his blood had rushed through and flooded the space between his skull and brain. If there had been time to get him into surgery-if only there had been time-maybe, maybe, he would have lived.

I looked at my husband in his coffin, with so many tall vases of flowers banked around him. Knowing that he was beyond pain gave me no solace or consolation. We had loved James so much. Gilly would grow up without him, and he had been deprived of so many things he had wanted to do. How could I sleep again in our house without him?

Gilly was lying across two chairs with her head in my lap. I dropped my hand to her head, buried my fingers in her hair. As she stirred, air rushed past my ears, and I saw a soft light arcing over James’s coffin-but he wasn’t there. The body lying on white satin was mine.

I was dead.

It wasn’t James who had died, it was me.

What had happened to me?

Had I died in South Sudan?

Or was I immobilized in a hospital, my body paralyzed while my brain lived in a dream world? Had everything that had happened after I’d been shot been an illusion? I was more confused than during the times when I’d connected with God. I was no longer sure where I was, what was real.

It was happening now, the warmth inside my chest, the breeze from nowhere, the split locations and overlapping scenes.

There I was, sitting with Gilly on a folding chair, and there I was, enclosed in a wooden box with diffused light all around me, cool satin behind my neck. I smelled lilies close by. And I heard the indistinct sound of voices.

God. What is happening?

You know.

I know what?

I saw both dimensions in the round. Gilly and I were in chairs a few yards away from the casket. James was with us, too. James. He was alive. His cheeks were pink, his eyes were bright, and he seemed-happy. He took me into his arms, and I held him tight while sobbing into the crook between his neck and shoulder. I smelled his skin and hair. This was reality. This was real.

At the same time, I could see from where I lay in the coffin. I didn’t have to sit up or even open my eyes as others came into focus. Colin knelt before my coffin and winked at me. I felt an indescribable pressure in my chest when I recognized the child sitting over there behind Gilly, kicking her seat-that was Tre.

Karl was beside Tre. He apologized to Gilly. I couldn’t quite hear the words, but I saw the kindness and love in his face. My father approached the coffin. I heard him say, “You were a good girl, Brigid.”

Tears streamed down my cheeks, and still the overlapping images persisted.

I saw refugees I’d known and who had died at BZFO, and the dead patients at Kind Hands, and soldiers who’d been massacred on the killing field. Father Delahanty knelt before my coffin and prayed, then he stood and crossed my forehead as I had crossed his.

He said, God has a plan for you.

That tore it completely. What was this plan?

I cried out, “God, why? Why did you let James die?”

When I’d asked God, “Why?” He’d given me birds. A baby who’d been run over in the street. The death of my own child. Of Karl. God had told me, He lived the full extent of his life.

Now the resonance came to me, the words, Be with Gillian. Feel what it is to be alive.

Gilly’s voice cut through the vision, coming to me clear and strong at my side. She tugged my hand.

“Mom. Mommy. We have to go.”

The vision dissolved. Sloan’s dim reposing room was lit only by candles and sconces, not divine light. Earl Sloan Jr. walked stiffly toward me.

“We should be going. But do you need another moment?”

I was shaking all over. “Please.”

I said to Gilly, “Let’s say our good-byes to Daddy.”

I put my arm around Gilly’s waist as I knelt before James’s coffin and said the Lord’s Prayer. I was thinking, What just happened? What am I supposed to understand from this? Was that really the Word of God? Why has He left me to suffer again?

It came together as our car followed the hearse to the church. I had a lingering sense of what I’d experienced in the funeral parlor. I was sitting in the backseat of a hired car with Gilly beside me. And some vestigial part of me was lying in the coffin instead of James.

I understood.

God was showing me that life and death were transient states, indivisible parts of a whole.

I would see James again. I would be with my love.