“Hey, Dad.” His face did not move, but his eyes acknowledged me. I touched his arm, which felt cold and soft, and bent and kissed his cheek. For better or for worse—and too often it is for worse for so many of us—adulthood had arrived, whether I wanted it to or not.
“I’m here, Dad,” I whispered in his ear. “And I’m going to make sure everything is okay. I’m going to take care of things. I’m going to take care of Mom. You just concentrate on getting strong again.”
19
The nurses brought in a hospital bed for my mother. “I’ve slept with that man for twenty years,” she said, weeping. “I’m not going to stop now.”
Mickie and I left the hospital together at close to morning. I passed the turn for our house and continued south on the El Camino. “I’m not going home, Sam,” Mickie said. “I’m going to stay at your house.”
“Okay,” I said without any further comment. “But I have someplace I need to go before we go home.”
I parked on Hillside Drive directly in front of the OLM church.
“Sam?” Mickie said.
“You can wait here,” I said. Mickie had stopped going to church years earlier. She said she believed in a higher being but not in religion. I had continued going to Sunday Mass to appease my mother. Anytime I suggested I would not go caused friction between us. It had been easier on all of us if I just bit the bullet, though I’d long ago begun to question my faith, or perhaps my mother’s faith. After all, I could not recall any occasion when God had stepped in and helped me, despite smashing my prayer bank repeatedly. I figured if there was ever a time for God to show himself, this was it.
“I’ll go with you,” Mickie said.
The front doors to the church were locked, but the side door remained open.
Inside, the stained-glass windows were dark. The overhead fixtures offered only a dull light. Shadows from the flames in the bloodred candles flickered and danced across the walls and the statues of the various saints as Mickie and I walked down the center aisle. She took a seat in the first pew. I continued to the railing, genuflected, and made the sign of the cross, but I did not kneel. This was not between me and the man on that cross. I turned to my right, walking to the alcove with the white statue of the barefoot Blessed Mother crushing the snake beneath her feet. I knelt and looked up at her brown porcelain eyes as I had done as a child on that aborted first day of school at OLM. I had the same strange sense I had felt back then, that the Blessed Mother was looking down at me, using the eyes of the statue to see me. I wasn’t sure where to begin or what to say. I was angry and upset. If God knows everything, then he knew that much.
“Why?” I finally asked. “All she’s ever done is pray to you. All she has ever done is ask for your help. Is this what she gets for her devotion? I’m done asking for things for myself. I’m done asking to be normal, for my eyes to change color, but she deserves better. My father deserves better. If this is God’s will, then I’m asking you to intervene and for once show me why I am supposed to believe that all of this is for a reason. I want to believe,” I said, struggling to hold back tears. “I want to believe, okay? But you have to give me some reason to believe. Please. Please give me a reason to believe that everything she’s taught me is real and that your son has not abandoned her. Don’t do it for me. Do it for her. Heal her husband. Heal my father.”
Then I thought again of my prayer piggy bank, and in my mind I smashed it open—this time, I knew, beyond repair. I laid every prayer at the bare feet of the Blessed Mother.
I don’t know how long I knelt before her. At some point, I felt Mickie’s hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Sam. Let’s go home.”
On our way out, I stopped before the flickering candles, fishing in my pockets for change. “I don’t have any money,” I said.
Mickie grabbed one of the long sticks and lit it, then handed it to me. “I don’t think God cares about the money at this point,” she said. I lit one of the candles, said a silent prayer for my father and my mother, and we left.