The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

“What about faith?” Reuben asked. He was remembering what Margon had said, that Jim was a priest who didn’t believe in God.

“Oh, it’s about faith,” said Jim. His voice was low now and more confidential. “Of course, it’s about faith—faith that this is God’s world and we’re God’s children. How could it not be about faith? I think if one truly loves God with all one’s heart, then one has to love everybody else. It’s not a choice. And you don’t love them because it scores you points with God. You love them because you are trying to see them and embrace them as God sees and embraces them. You are loving them because they are alive.”

Reuben was unable to speak. He just shook his head.

“Think about it,” Jim said in a whisper. “Looking at each person and thinking, ‘God made this being; God put a soul into this being!’ ” He sat back in the chair and sighed. “I try. I stumble. I get up. I try again.”

“Amen,” said Reuben in a reverent whisper.

“I wanted to work with addicts, with drunks, with people whose weaknesses I understood. Above all, I wanted to do something that mattered, and I was convinced that as a priest I could do that. I could make some difference in people’s lives. Maybe I could even save a life now and then—save a life, imagine—to make some kind of amends for the life I’d destroyed. You could say that AA and the Twelve Steps saved me along with Mom and Dad. And yes, they led to my decision. But I had choices. And faith is part of it. I came out of the whole nightmare having faith. And a kind of crazy gratitude that I did not have to be a doctor! I can’t tell you how much I really did not want to be a doctor! Medicine doesn’t need any more coldhearted selfish bastards. Thank God, I got out of that.”

“I can’t quite understand it,” said Reuben. “But I’ve never had much faith in God myself.”

“I know,” said Jim, looking into the little gas fire. “I knew that about you when you were a little kid. But I’ve always had faith in God. The creation speaks to me of God. I see God in the sky and in the falling leaves. That’s always the way it was for me.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Reuben said in a low voice. He wanted Jim to go on.

“I see God in the little kindnesses people do for one another. I see God in the eyes of the worst down-and-out derelicts I deal with.…” Jim broke off suddenly, shaking his head. “Faith isn’t a decision, is it? It’s something you admit to having, or something you admit that you don’t have.”

“I think you’re right about that.”

“That’s why I never preach to people about the supposed sin of not believing,” said Jim. “You’ll never hear me condemning a nonbeliever as a sinner. That makes no sense to me at all.”

Reuben smiled. “And maybe that’s why you sometimes give people the wrong impression. They think you don’t believe when in fact you do.”

“Yes, that does happen now and then,” said Jim, with a soft smile. “But it doesn’t matter. How people believe in God is a vast subject, isn’t it?”

A silence fell between them. There was so much Reuben wanted to ask.

“Did you ever see or hear from Lorraine?” he asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I wrote an amends letter about a year after I left Betty Ford. I wrote more than one. But they came back to me from the forwarding address she’d left in Berkeley. Then I got Simon Oliver to confirm that she was in fact in Cheltenham and at that address. I couldn’t blame her for returning my letters. I wrote to her again, laying it all out in more candid terms. I told her how sorry I was, how in my eyes I was guilty of murder for what I’d done to the baby, how I feared I had irreparably hurt her so that she could never have a child. I got a brief but very compassionate note: she was all right; she was fine; not to worry. I had done her no lasting harm; I should go on with my life.

“Then before I went into the seminary, I wrote to her again, asking after her welfare and telling her of my decision to become a priest. I told her that time had only deepened my sense of the wrong that I’d done to her. I told her how the Twelve Steps and my faith had changed my life. I put too damned much of my own plans and dreams and ego in that letter. It was selfish of me really, now that I look back on it. But it was an amends letter, too, of course. And she wrote back an extraordinary letter. Just extraordinary.”

“How so?”

“She told me, if you can believe it, that I had given her the only real happiness she’d known in recent years. She went on to say something about how miserable she’d been before I’d come into her life, how hopeless she had been until the day Professor Maitland brought me home. She said something about her life having been changed for the better completely by knowing me. And that she did not want me ever to worry that I had done her a particle of harm. She said she thought I would be a marvelous priest. Finding such a meaningful vocation in this world was indeed a ‘wondrous’ thing. I remember she used that word, ‘wondrous.’ She and the professor were doing ‘splendidly,’ she said. She wished me every blessing.”

“That must have impressed the archbishop,” said Reuben.

“Well, actually, it did.”

Jim gave a short dismissive laugh. “That was Lorraine,” he said. “Forever kind, forever considerate, forever generous. Lorraine was always so sweet.” He closed his eyes for a moment and then went on. “About two years ago—I don’t remember the date actually—I read a brief obit for the professor in the New York Times. I hope Lorraine has remarried. I pray that she has.”

“Sounds like you did everything you could,” said Reuben.

“I’m haunted by her and that child,” Jim said. “When I think of all the things I might have done for that child. Whether I wanted it or not, think what I might have done for it. Sometimes I just can’t be around children. I don’t want to be any place where there are children. I thank God I’m at St. Francis in the Tenderloin and that I don’t have to minister to families with children. It eats at me, what I could have provided for that child.”

Reuben nodded. “But you’re going to love this little nephew of yours who’s coming down the pike.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Jim said, “with all my heart. Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say those things about children. It’s just …”