The Original Sinner: The Saint Part 55

She never wanted to tell him he could go. But she knew his vines waited for him and she cared about him too much to keep him from the land and the work that was his raison d'etre.

"I think I'm ready now," she said.

"I'll come with you," he whispered. He knew what she needed and offered first, saving her the indignity of having to ask for it.

They rose from bed and bathed together. Nico put on yesterday's clothes-he'd brought no others with him. She wore a simple white skirt and sweater.

Nico took the urn off the fireplace mantel and put it in her hands. He held the door open for her and side by side they walked the stone path toward the lake. The sun had risen and G.o.d had given them a perfect spring morning-cloudless and cold.

They reached the water's edge and Nora stood so that the lake lapped at her toes.

"I prepared a speech on the plane ride over," she told Nico. "Seems stupid now. I tried to say it yesterday and could only get one word out."

"Say it now. I want to hear it."

She swallowed and nodded. Then she began.

"S0ren ..." She paused and let the pain claw at her. The dead felt no pleasure, but they felt no pain, either. Pain, too, was proof of life. "S0ren isn't here. I know you wouldn't want him here so I didn't ask him to come with me."

She stopped again, breathed again.

"You should take that as a sign of how much I love you, that I didn't ask him to come with me."

Another breath.

"You never should have hated him. I think I hated you a little because of how much you hated him. But that was unfair of me, and I'm sorry. After all, you're the reason we're together. If you hadn't made me go to church that day, practically tricked me into going to church that day, I would never have met him. But you know what's funny about you and him?"

Nora closed her eyes. A tear escaped and dropped into the water at her feet.

"I still remember on the way to church that morning, you asked a question. You said, 'All I ever wanted was a daughter who loves G.o.d, goes to church, respects her priest and maybe even respects her mother a little. You think that's too much to ask?' Well, Mom, I go to church every Sunday. Did you know that? And I not only respect my priest, I love him with all my heart. And I do respect my mother, too. More than a little. She put up with me for thirty-six years. I think you probably qualify for sainthood at this point."

Nico stepped forward and with his bare hands wiped the tears off her face.

She looked into his pale green eyes.

"She thanked me, you know," Nora said. "The mother superior of her order called me two weeks ago and said, 'Come now if you want to see your mother this side of heaven.' I left immediately. Got there just in time. She was already going in and out of consciousness. But she woke up enough to recognize me. That's when she thanked me."

"For what? For coming?"

"For being a bad daughter," Nora said, laughing. "Mom smoked until I was eleven years old. She caught me trying to smoke one of her cigarettes. That's when she quit. That might have given her a few extra years, quitting. By the time they found the cancer, it had spread all over her. She didn't even have any symptoms. Only a cough."

"Be grateful you had those few hours. My father dropped dead in the fields."

"What would you say to him if you could say anything?" she asked.

"Blood might be thicker than water, but wine is thicker than blood," Nico said.

It was over a cup of communion wine that she'd first looked into her Father's eyes.

"That is it," she said.

She turned back to the water before her-the expanse of lake so clear and blue and cold. She wished the water weren't so cold.

"A nun for a mother. A priest for a lover. S0ren, now I can hear G.o.d laughing at me."

"He's laughing at me, too," Nico said. They both knew why.

"I wish we could have found a way to be friends," she said as if her mother could hear her. "I wish we could have known each other better. But you never told me your story. I wish you had listened to mine. If you'd heard the story I told Nico last night you would know that S0ren was the best thing that ever happened to me, that he wasn't the monster you wanted to believe he was. I am glad I left him, though, ten years ago. At least you and I got to spend a little time together."

She stopped once more to breathe. Why was it so hard to breathe?

"You probably thought I was angry at you all this time," Nora continued. "And that's why I stayed away from you. But the truth was I wasn't angry. I'd worked so hard to become another person and the minute we were together, I was Ellie, your disappointment of a daughter again. I hope the view is good from where you are right now, and you can look down and see that my life is beautiful and rich and full of the love of generous and n.o.ble people and that my days are filled with work that is fulfilling and worthwhile and my nights are even better and none of your business."

Nico laughed softly next to her. She wished she could take his hand, but the box weighed her down. She would let it weigh her down no longer.

"I hope you see, too, that I do love you, and I did love you all this time, even when we were apart. And I will see you again someday, because even though your heart led you down a different road than mine, we will eventually reach the same destination."

She knelt at the water and opened the silver box that contained her mother's precious ashes.

Gingerly she lowered the box into the water and let it sink to the bottom. The ashes of Margaret Delores Kohl, of Sister Mary John, of Nora's mother, rose up and spread through the water like a pale cloud.

"I love you, Momma."

It took everything she had to say, but she said it and she said it smiling.

She unclasped the saint medal she'd worn for a week now.

"Every saint medal I own S0ren gave me. Every one but this one."

"Who is it?" Nico asked.

"Saint Monica. My mother wore it all her life. Monica, patron saint of mothers of disappointing children."

"Is that why she wore it? She thought you were a disappointment?"

"Monica was also patron saint of women in abusive relationships."

"You said she thought S0ren abused you. Is that why she wore it?"

"No." Nora looked Nico in the eyes. She remembered her father slapping her, shoving her, choking her. "She gave it to me before she went into the coma and told me something I never knew, but should have. Father Greg gave it to her two months after she got married. Only he knew the truth. She wore it because of my father. That's why she'd hoped for a miscarriage. Not so she could become a nun, but so she wouldn't have to marry my father who beat her. It wasn't that she didn't want me. She didn't want him. And all this time I thought she regretted having me...."

With a shaking hand, Nora reached out over the water and let the necklace go.

But before it could break the surface of the lake, Nico caught it.

She looked at him in surprise.

"I never told you this, but you were my nightmare," Nico said to her, clutching the medal in his fingers. "I counted ten men my mother had affairs with. Those were the ten I saw. I know there were others. I also knew I looked nothing like my father. I knew someday someone would tell me the truth, the truth I didn't want to know. And that person was you. Even if this medal feels like a weight, don't let it go. Your nightmare might turn into your best dream someday."

Nico turned his hand and showed her a tarnished gold band that he wore around it.

"My father's wedding ring," Nico said.

He took her wrist and poured the silver chain and pendant into her palm.

"If you stood outside the circle that is S0ren and me and our love for each other, you would see me sleeping with dozens of other men in the past twenty years. You would see him loving someone else, another man who S0ren loves as much as he loves me. It makes no sense to anyone outside our circle. But step inside it and you'll find nothing but love there. You don't know what secrets your parents kept from you. You don't know what their marriage was. If your father didn't judge her, didn't hate her, you shouldn't, either."

Nico nodded and put his arm around her. They walked away from the water, away from the ashes, away from her grief, away from her past.

"You're leaving now," she said once they reached the cottage. "I feel bad for keeping you up all night. It's a long drive on little sleep."

"I'll be thinking of you all the way home. You'll keep me awake."

"Thank you for listening to me. I needed to talk last night."

They held each other for a long time. She felt Nico's body trembling under her hands.

"Are you laughing?" she asked him.

"Trying not to," he said. "I'm laughing at Kingsley for giving you Sutherlin as a last name."

"I told that a.s.shole if he called me Eleanor Sutherlin again I'd slap him into the next century. When I became a dominatrix and needed a new name, he pulled that out of his memory banks."

"What did you do?" he asked, as they walked to his car.

"I slapped him into the next century."

Nico grinned at her.

"What happened to your Wyatt? Did you keep in touch with him?"

"No," Nora said, her smile fading. "We looked good on paper, Wyatt and I did. And S0ren and I made no sense at all. But here it is, almost twenty years later and S0ren and I are still together, still in love. And Wyatt ..."

"What about him?"

Nora swallowed hard. "Four years after we graduated, they found him dead in his apartment in Chelsea."

Nico's eyes widened.

"Turns out Wyatt had bipolar disorder. Explained how he had so much energy he could talk circles around me, which takes either talent or a manic episode. A college friend of mine told me. Apparently they changed his meds and he ..." She paused and tried to imagine her life had she stayed with Wyatt. Would they have married? Could she have helped him? Would she have been a widow at age twenty-six? "They published his poetry after he died. He was good."

"Nora," Nico said. "So much lost."

"So much found." She took his face in her hands and kissed him. "Do you believe in G.o.d?"

"I'm a grape farmer. My whole life I've watched water turn into wine. Of course I believe in G.o.d."

She took a deep shuddering breath and looked up at Nico. Last night had meant something to her, meant so much that she couldn't bear to sully it with a secret.

"Ten years ago I got pregnant. It was Kingsley's. I didn't have the baby. I should have told you this months ago, should have told you before you even kissed me. I'm telling you now. I don't regret my choice, but all this time I haven't been able to shake the feeling I was supposed to have Kingsley's child. When I learned about you that feeling finally went away."

Nico only stared at her a moment, and then he did something she never expected he would do. He kissed her on the forehead.

"It went away, because I am Kingsley's child," he said. "And you had me, Mistress Nora, and you will always have me."

"Nico ..."

"Kingsley is my father. S0ren is your 'Father.' We were meant to find each other. And that is my theology."

"I appreciate your theology," she whispered.

He kissed her then, a final kiss, a goodbye kiss. The worst kind of kiss.

After the kiss, Nico didn't speak. He turned away, got into his car and drove off. He didn't look back when he left her, and she watched him until he disappeared from view.

Nora returned to the cottage, crawled into bed and slept the day away. When she awoke it was nearly night in the Black Forest but still evening in America. She found her phone and walked with it until she picked up a signal.

It rang only once before he answered.

"Eleanor?"

"G.o.d, I've missed you."

"Where are you?" S0ren asked, sounding more relieved than she'd ever heard him.

"Bavaria," she said. "I'm in the Black Forest."

"Bavaria? It's been two weeks and no one's heard a word from you. What are you doing-"

"Mom died."

On the other end of the line she heard nothing but stunned silence.

"It was lung cancer," she said, as if it mattered. It didn't.

"Little One, I'm so sorry."

"She only had days or hours, they didn't know. That's why I left so fast. I had to be there before she was gone."

"Were you?"

"She was lucid for a day before lapsing into a coma for four days. I held her hand while she died." Nora closed her eyes. Her mother had clung to life with terrifying tenacity. On the fourth night of the watch, Eleanor had fallen asleep bedside, holding her mother's hand. Her mother's hand was warm when Eleanor fell asleep. By the time she woke up five hours later, it was cold. "She wouldn't have wanted me leaning on you for comfort. She wouldn't have wanted you there, even for me. Out of respect for her ..."

"I understand," he said. "I know how she felt about me. And I was always grateful that she kept our secret even though she hated me."

"I owed her because of that. Before she died, she said she wanted her ashes spread here in the Black Forest. This was her favorite place as a little girl."

"How are you, Eleanor?" S0ren asked, and she heard the concern in his voice from an ocean away. "Tell me the truth."