The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

Jim stopped. He closed his eyes. There was the soft beat of rain on the panes. Otherwise the room was silent. The house was silent. Then he started talking again.

“I went on the longest worst bender I’d ever been on. I just shut the door and drank. I knew I’d killed that baby, but I was terrified that I might have killed her too. Any minute, I thought the police are going to be here. Any minute Professor Maitland is going to call. Any minute … I could easily have killed her beating her like that. The way I kicked her? It’s a wonder I didn’t. And for days I just lay in that apartment and drank. I’d always stockpiled enough booze to do this, and I don’t know how long it was before the booze started running out. I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t bathing, nothing. Just drinking, drinking and crawling around that place on my hands and knees at times, looking for bottles to see if there was anything left in them. Well, you can figure what happened.”

“Mom and Dad.”

“Right. There came a banging on the door and it was Mom and Dad. It had been ten days, it turned out, ten days, and it was my landlord who’d called them. I was overdue with the rent. And he was worried. He was a nice guy. Well, the bastard probably saved my life.”

“Thank God for that,” said Reuben. He tried to picture all this, but he couldn’t. All he saw was his brother, looking collected and strong in his Roman collar and clerics, sitting in the chair opposite, pouring out a story he could scarcely believe.

“I told them everything,” Jim said. “I just broke down and told them the whole thing. I was drunk, you understand, so it was easy—to slobber, to cry, to confess all I’d done. Confessing things when you’re blind drunk is a cinch. I felt so sorry for myself! I’d wrecked my life. I’d hurt Lorraine. I was flunking out of school. I told Mom and Dad all of it, I just let it loose. And when Mom heard how I’d beaten Lorraine, how I’d kicked her, kicked the life out of that child, well, you can imagine the look on her face. When she saw the bloodstains all over that carpet, on the floor, on the walls … And then Mom and Dad just put me in the shower, cleaned me up, and drove me straight south to the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, and I was there for ninety days.”

“Jim, I’m so sorry.”

“Reuben, I was lucky. Lorraine could have put me behind bars for what I did to her. As it turned out, she and Professor Maitland had gone back to England before Mom and Dad ever came knocking on my door. Mom found out all that. The professor’s mother in Cheltenham had suffered a severe stroke. Lorraine had made all the arrangements with the university. So she was all right, it seemed. Mom was able to verify that. And the house in south Berkeley was up for sale. Whether Lorraine had checked into a hospital herself after I beat her, well, we never could find out.”

“I hear you, Jim, I know what you’re telling me. I understand.”

“Reuben, I am nobody’s hero, nobody’s saint. If it wasn’t for Mom and Dad, if they hadn’t taken me to Betty Ford, if they hadn’t stuck with me through that, I don’t know where I’d be now. I don’t know if I’d be alive. But look, listen to what I’m telling you. Play along with Celeste for the sake of the baby. That’s lesson number one. Let her have that baby, Reuben, because you do not know how you might regret it to your dying day if she gets rid of it because of something that you say! Reuben, there are times when it is so painful for me to even see children, to see little kids with their parents, I … I tell you, I don’t know if I could work in a regular Catholic parish, Reuben, with a school and kids. I just don’t. There’s a reason I’m deep in the Tenderloin. There’s a reason my mission is working with addicts. There’s a reason, all right.”

“I understand. Look, I’m going to go talk to her now, apologize.”

“Do it, please,” said Jim. “And who knows, Reuben? Maybe somehow this child can keep you connected to us, to me, to Mom and Dad, to your flesh and blood family, to things that matter for all of us in life.”

Reuben went at once to knock on Celeste’s door. The house was quiet. But he could see the light was on in her room.

She was in her nightgown but immediately invited him in. She was frosty, but polite. He stood there and made his apologies to her as sincerely as he could.

“Oh, I understand,” she said with a faint sneer. “Don’t worry about it. This will all be over for us soon enough.”

“I want you to be happy, Celeste,” he said.

“I know that, Reuben, and I know you’ll be a good father to this baby. Even if Grace and Phil weren’t here to do the dirty work. I never had any real doubt about that. Sometimes the most childish and immature men make the best fathers.”

“Thank you, Celeste,” he said, forcing an icy smile. He kissed her on the cheek.

No need to repeat that parting shot to Jim when he went back to his room.

Jim was by the fire still and obviously deep in his thoughts. Reuben settled into his chair as before.

“Tell me,” Reuben said, “is this the real reason that you became a priest?”

For a long moment Jim didn’t respond. Then he looked up as if he were slightly dazed. In a low voice, he said, “I became a priest because I wanted to, Reuben.”

“I know that, Jim, but did you feel you had to make amends for the rest of your life?”

“You don’t understand,” said Jim. He sounded weary, dispirited. “I took my time deciding what to do. I traveled. I spent months in a Catholic mission in the Amazon. I spent a year studying philosophy in Rome.”

“I remember that,” Reuben said. “We’d get these great packages from Italy. And I couldn’t figure out why you weren’t coming home.”

“I had a lot of choices, Reuben. Maybe for the first time in my life, I had real choices. And the archbishop asked me the very same question, actually, when I asked to enter the priesthood. We discussed the whole affair. I told him everything. We talked about atonement, and what it means to become a priest—to live as a priest year in and year out for the rest of one’s life. He insisted on another year of sobriety in the world before he’d accept my application to the seminary. Usually he demanded five years of sober living, but admittedly, my period of drinking had been relatively short. And then there was Grandfather Spangler’s donation and Mom’s ongoing support. I worked every day at St. Francis at Gubbio as a volunteer during that year. By the time I entered the seminary, I’d been sober three years, and I was on strict probation. One drink and I would be out. I went through all that because I wanted to, Reuben. I became a priest because that’s what I wanted to do with my life.”