Woman of God Page 23

  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.

  Part Five

  Chapter 108

  IT WAS forty-five nippy degrees in New York City this Sunday morning in February, and I was excited that I would be saying Mass at the opening of the three hundredth JMJ church.

  St. Barnabas was a stately, gray stone church in the East Village, built on a green in the eighteen hundreds, which over the last two hundred years had become a neighborhood.

  The church had been closed by the Archdiocese of New York in 2008, along with more than two hundred and fifty other churches that had fallen into disrepair. A benefactor had bought St. Barnabas at auction, and it was now to be reopened as a JMJ church.

  I walked anonymously through the throng of Sunday shoppers on East Fourth Street in my long, navy-blue coat and knitted hat and found the old church wedged between a Comfy Diner and an antique print shop, graffiti-free and perfectly intact.

  When I entered the church through the red-painted doors, I had expected to be welcomed by Father Hubert Clemente. But the young priest was not alone. He seemed a little awed and off balance as he introduced me to Father Giancarlo Raphael, who wore his black vestments and cummerbund with European flair.

  Father Raphael said in heavily accented English that he had just arrived from Vatican City to see me. He looked pleased and confident, but I didn’t get it.

  “Pardon me. Could you say that again?”

  As congregants flowed past me into the nave, Father Raphael explained, “Forgive me. I should say I’m here on behalf of Pope Gregory. I hope to have a few words with you.”

  I was startled, to say the least. I managed to say, “Father Raphael, I am deeply humbled, but, as I have just enough time to get ready, can you wait? The congregation…”

  “Of course. I am eager for your Mass.”

  After I finished a walk-through with Father Clemente, he introduced me to his rapt congregation.

  “Good friends,” he said, “you know all about our guest, who has become a guiding light to so many Catholics who have felt sidelined by the Church.

  “She eschews any title but likes to be called, simply, Brigid. And that humility, that belief that we are all the same in the eyes of God, is the essence of JMJ principles that we will be adopting here.”

  I felt welcomed and at peace as I began the Mass, but I couldn’t quite stop thinking about Father Raphael, the pope’s messenger, sitting three rows back on the aisle.

  He was waiting for me when I left the sacristy in my street clothes, as were dozens of congregants. I shook hands and exchanged kind words, and I signed scraps of paper to commemorate the occasion. Father Raphael stood to the side until I was finally alone.

  And then he had all my attention.

  “Brigid,” he said, “I have a special invitation for you.” He took an envelope from his coat pocket. My name was inscribed in calligraphy, and in the corner of the envelope was a coat of arms, the emblem of the Holy See.

  Father Raphael held the envelope out to me, and when I took it, it felt warm to the touch.

  “His Holiness Pope Gregory would like very much to meet you. These airline tickets are for you and your daughter, and my card is inside, too. Please let me know when it would be convenient for you to come to the Vatican.”

  Chapter 109

  THE PEACEFULNESS of flight above the clouds gave way too quickly to the near riot that was waiting for Gilly and me at Fiumicino Airport.

  We were met just outside customs by two very fit men wearing the smart blue uniforms of the Corps of Gendarmes of Vatican City State. Our driver was Alberto Rizzo, and our guard was Giuseppe Marone, who carried our slight luggage through the airport.

  I gripped Gilly’s hand and followed our assigned guards out under the swooping marquis, toward the street, when we were blocked by protesters who were shouting my name, calling me a heretic and the devil. One of them, a woman my age, was brandishing a cross. She said pleasantly, “I wish you to die.”

  Giuseppe strong-armed the woman out of the way. Alberto shielded us from behind, and we pushed forward through the loud and ugly crowd.

  I was utterly shaken by the hatred.

  I could stand up for myself, but this attack also affected Gilly. I kept my cool for my daughter’s sake and held her close to my side until we were safely inside a black Mercedes with Vatican City plates.

  Still, angry people, their faces bloated with hate, hammered on the car windows and roof with their fists.

  “You are okay now,” said Giuseppe. “No worries.”

  Two more black sedans joined us, one taking the lead, the other bringing up the rear, and we headed at top speed away from the airport and into the city. During the drive to the hotel, I tried to prepare myself for my upcoming meeting with the pope.

  I liked what I’d seen and read about Pope Gregory. He seemed kind, a moderate with modern leanings, but he disapproved of everything JMJ stood for. And he had to be disturbed by the widespread growth of our breakaway churches.

  I had a hard time imagining anything but a short, awkward meeting with Pope Gregory. I didn’t see it ending well. At all.

  Gilly was having a different experience entirely. She was absorbing everything: the wide avenues and historic landmarks, the police escort, the crazy Roman traffic. She had her hands pressed against the windows and said, “Mom, are we staying here?”

  Our car pulled up to the Hotel Hassler, a five-star hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps, overlooking the ancient city. Our bodyguards escorted us through the teeming and gilded hotel lobby to the front desk. All the while, her head turning from side to side, Gilly stared around in a state of subdued wonder.

  “Mommy, look. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, look.”

  I looked at the beautiful people, at the grand scale of the famous hotel lobby, at the rich appointments, and I laughed, delighting in my seven-year-old little girl’s innocence and astonishment.

  Gilly wasn’t in Massachusetts anymore.

  Our suite, like the lobby, was appointed in ruby red and gold, hung with Venetian mirrors and crystal chandeliers. There was a terrace the length of the suite with a fireplace and endless city views. On the table in the sitting room was an extravagant floral arrangement and a note from Father Raphael.

  It read: Welcome, Brigid and Gillian. I will come for you tomorrow morning at nine and bring you to the Apostolic Palace. Pope Gregory is very eager to meet you.

  We kicked off our shoes, and I was looking at the room-service menu on the video monitor when the room phone rang.

  Gilly answered, “Heyyyy.”

  Then, “Mom. Guess who?”

  Chapter 110

  I PEERED through the peephole and saw his face.

  “Open up, Red. It is I, your humble scribe.”

  I opened the door and told our bodyguards that Zach was a friend. I was so excited to see him—and yet puzzled. Zach insisted on making surprise drop-in visits. Why? He had a phone. I hugged my tall, journalist, book-writing friend, and Gilly flew across the room and jumped up into his arms.

  “I’m a royal princess,” she said. “Would you like to see my domain
?”

  “I absolutely would,” said Zach.

  As Gilly took Zach away, I shouted after him, “Why are you here?”

  “Easter week at Vatican City. I was available to cover it.”

  “Are you having dinner with us?”

  “Uh. Sure. Thanks.”

  I’d seen Zach every few months since he signed his book contract, and I knew him well enough by now that I could read between the lines on his face. Something was bothering him.

  But Gilly had Zach under her spell. She gave him the grandest of tours. He taught her the waltz while I signed for room service that was delivered after scrutiny by our guards outside the door.

  We tucked into a six-course gourmet dinner on our terrace overlooking the Spanish Steps, and after Zach pointed out the visible ancient landmarks, Gilly provided the entertainment.

  “I wanted kittens for my birthday,” Gilly was telling Zach.

  “Kittens and rodents are off the table,” I said.

  Ignoring me, Gilly went on. “After I got turned down for hamsters and kittens, I asked for Jesus to come to my birthday party.”

  I rolled my eyes. “She did not.”

  “Oh. How did that turn out?” Zach asked her.

  Gilly reached down into the front of her dress and pulled up a gold chain. “Look,” she said, showing off her new crucifix.

  “Beautiful,” said Zach, looking over Gilly’s head at me.

  I said, “Gilly, do me a favor? Get me my sweater? The pink cardigan.”

  While Gilly was gone, I said, “Zach, something is bothering you. What is it?”

  “Why don’t I just get right to it,” he said, looking miserable. “Maybe you caught it on CNN.”

  “What? No.”

  “There’s been a credible threat of violence against a JMJ church here in Rome.”

  “Oh, no. I hadn’t heard. When did this happen?”

  “Early this morning.”