THE PRIEST AND THE SINNER

CHAPTER THREE: WHAT THE DEAD LEAVE BEHIND

The house smelled like her mother had only just left it.

That was the worst part. Not the dust on the windowsills or the stack of unopened mail on the kitchen table or the calendar on the wall still turned to August the month Eleanor Voss had stopped being able to reach things above her head. The worst part was the smell. Lavender and something underneath it, warm and faintly sweet, the smell of a person distilled into the rooms they'd lived in until the rooms were all that was left.

Scarlett had been sleeping in the house for three nights and she still hadn't gotten used to it.

She stood at the kitchen sink on Friday morning with a mug of tea she'd made from bags she'd found in the third cupboard she'd opened, and she looked out the window at the back garden overgrown now, the flower beds gone to seed, a rusted watering can tipped on its side near the fence and she thought about the fact that her mother had looked at this same window every morning for twenty-three years.

Had stood exactly here.

Had drunk something tea, coffee, later in the decline probably something stronger before noon and looked at this same square of garden and had whatever thoughts a woman alone in a house has in the early morning when there is no one to perform for.

Scarlett had never wondered about that before. What her mother thought about in the mornings. It hadn't occurred to her to wonder, because wondering required a kind of tenderness toward a person that she'd spent eleven years carefully not feeling.

The green paint tin was on the counter. She'd bought sandpaper and a good brush and she was going to do the front door today, before the snow came, because it was the kind of task that had a clear beginning and a clear end and required enough physical attention that the rest of her mind could go quiet for a few hours.

She needed her mind to go quiet.

It had not been quiet since Wednesday.

She drank her tea and did not think about a priest standing on church steps in the morning light saying I meant it with the particular quality of directness that made the words land differently than they should have. She did not think about grey eyes or a voice that moved through a confessional screen like it had weight behind it. She did not think about the moment in the hardware store when he'd said the green one and she'd felt, absurdly, like he'd given her something.

She finished her tea.

She picked up the sandpaper.

She went to work

The door took four hours.

She sanded it down to bare wood in places where the old paint had bubbled and cracked, and she filled the gaps, and she let it dry, and she applied the first coat of green in long careful strokes from top to bottom. The colour was darker wet than it had looked in the tin almost black in the shadow of the small porch roof, but where the pale autumn sun caught it, it was exactly the right shade. Deep and true and permanent-looking.

She was applying the second coat when Lena Parish appeared at the garden gate with a paper bag under one arm and a bottle of wine in her hand and the expression of someone who had been exercising restraint for three days and had reached the limit of it.

"I brought lunch," Lena said. "And I want to know everything."

Scarlett kept painting. "There's nothing to know."

"You've been in town four days. You've been to church twice." Lena pushed the gate open and came up the path. "You, Scarlett Voss, who told me at seventeen that organised religion was a conspiracy to keep women small and frightened."

"I was seventeen. I was being dramatic."

"You were being you." Lena stopped beside her and examined the door. "That's a good colour."

"I know."

"Who picked it?"

Scarlett applied a long careful stroke from the top hinge to the bottom panel and said nothing.

Lena said: "It was the priest, wasn't it."

"It was a collaborative decision."

"Oh my God." Lena said it with the reverence of someone who had just been handed exactly the story they came for. "Scarlett."

"Don't."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're doing the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have a very specific face that you make when you think I'm about to do something catastrophically stupid and you're deciding whether to stop me or watch." Scarlett looked at her. "Which is it?"

Lena considered that with genuine seriousness. "I haven't decided yet," she said honestly. "Tell me things first and then I'll decide."

Scarlett looked at the door. At the wet green paint, dark and bright at once.

"He knew my mother," she said. "He sat with her every week for four months. He was with her at the end." A pause. "She trusted him completely. And I sat in that confessional and talked for forty minutes and I couldn't " She stopped. Started again. "I couldn't figure out how to leave."

Lena was quiet for a moment, which for Lena meant something. "What is he like?"

Scarlett thought about it honestly, the way she thought about things she was trying not to romanticise. "Careful," she said. "But not in a withholding way. In the way of someone who knows their words have weight and doesn't want to waste them." A beat. "He's very direct. I didn't expect that."

"He's been that way since he came back," Lena said. "Eight years ago. He grew up here did you know that? Left for the seminary at twenty-two, came back at twenty-four as a priest, and the town you know this town, Scar. They were ready to be suspicious of him, the way they're suspicious of anything that comes back changed. And he just" She made a gesture with the wine bottle. "He disarmed them by being exactly what he said he was. No performance. No distance. He shows up. Mrs Callahan's husband dying, he's there at two in the morning. Flood damage at the parish hall, he's there with his sleeves rolled up. People here love him."

Scarlett thought about that. About choosing to come back to the place that made you and offering yourself to it, all of yourself, with no reservation.

She had done the exact opposite.

"He must have given something up," she said. "To do this."

"Everyone gives something up," Lena said. "The question is whether they chose it."

Scarlett put the brush down and wiped her hands on the rag she'd tucked into her belt and stepped back to look at the door. Two coats. It needed one more, tomorrow when this had dried. But already it looked transformed — the house that had been apologising for itself with its peeling paint now had something to stand behind. Something that said I am still here I still matter.

She thought about her mother choosing this colour for the house and running out of time to do it.

"Come inside," she said. "I'll make more tea."

They sat at the kitchen table the way they'd sat at kitchen tables since they were sixteen years old — Lena with her elbows on the surface and her chin in her hand, Scarlett with her legs pulled up sideways on the chair, both of them talking the way women talk when there's no one watching and no impression to manage.

Lena had brought sandwiches from the deli on Market Street and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc that they opened despite it being half past one in the afternoon, because the situation, Lena said, warranted it.

"Tell me about your mother," Lena said. "The real stuff. Not the version you'd tell someone who didn't know her."

Scarlett looked at her wine glass. "I've been going through her things," she said. "There are letters. Ones she wrote and never sent. To me, mostly. Some to her own mother — Gran's been dead since I was twelve, but she kept writing." She paused. "The hospice nurse said some people do that. Keep writing to the dead like the distance doesn't matter anymore because all distance is the same distance at some point."

Lena said nothing, which meant she understood.

"She wrote me a letter every birthday," Scarlett said. "Even the years she was drinking. Even the years I wasn't speaking to her. There are fourteen of them in a box in the wardrobe. Some of them are — " She stopped. Her throat was doing the thing it kept doing. "Some of them are very clear. The ones from the last few years, when she was sober. And some of them are — you can tell. The handwriting. The things she says. You can tell which years were the bad ones."

"Did you read them all?"

"Not yet." She took a slow breath. "I can only do a few at a time."

"That's not weakness," Lena said. "That's sense."

"It doesn't feel like sense. It feels like I'm avoiding something."

"You're pacing yourself. There's a difference." Lena poured more wine into Scarlett's glass without asking. "She was proud of you. I want you to know that, since you and I are talking about her now, which we probably should have done the moment you drove into town. Eleanor talked about you to anyone who'd listen. The modelling, the travelling. She had that photo "

"The one from the garden."

Lena looked at her. "You found it."

"In her Bible. The night I arrived." Scarlett looked at the table. "She wrote on the back. She was everything good." Her voice was steady by force. "I don't know how to I don't know what to do with that sentence, Lena. Because she never said it. In all the years she had, she never once said anything close to that to my face, and now she's gone and she's said it on the back of a photograph where I can't respond to it and I can't ask her what she meant and I can't " She pressed her lips together. "I can't tell her I know. That I got it. That I understand she was trying."

Lena reached across the table and put her hand over Scarlett's. Didn't say anything. Just left it there.

They sat like that for a moment.

"I hate this town," Scarlett said.

"I know."

"I always hated it."

"I know."

"It's different now." She looked around the kitchen. At the calendar still on August. At the faded curtains with the small yellow flowers her mother had chosen years ago and never replaced because replacing them would have meant admitting that time had passed and things had changed. "Or I'm different. I can't tell which."

"Both," Lena said with certainty. "It's always both."

After Lena left at four o'clock she had a night shift at the hospital, reluctantly surrendered to duty Scarlett went upstairs and opened the wardrobe in her mother's room and took out the box.

It was a shoebox. An old one, from a pair of boots that had worn out years ago, with the word SCARLETT written across the lid in black marker in her mother's handwriting.

She sat on the edge of the bed.

She lifted the lid.

Fourteen envelopes, each with a year written in the top right corner in the same black marker. She spread them out on the bed in order, the way you'd lay out a hand of cards, and looked at them.

Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one, twenty-two the years she was in Toronto and then New York, the years she'd had her phone number changed and not given her mother the new one. Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five the years of the worst distance, the silence so complete it had its own texture.

Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine.

The year she was twenty-nine was this year. The year her mother died.

She picked up the envelope marked 29 and opened it.

The handwriting was shaky but deliberate. Like someone who knew their hands weren't reliable anymore and had taken extra time to make each letter clear.

My darling Scarlett,

I am writing this in February and your birthday is in April and I do not know yet if I will be here in April so I am writing now while I can still hold the pen properly.*

*I have been thinking about the things I should have said. There are too many of them for one letter so I am going to say the most important one and trust that you are smart enough and you are, you have always been the smartest person I know to understand that all the other things were contained inside it.

I am sorry I did not know how to love you the way you deserved. I knew how to feel it. I did not always know how to show it without the showing getting lost in everything else that was wrong with me. That is not your fault. It was never your fault. I need you to believe that.

You are going to be all right Not because life will be easy it will not, it never is, and I would not insult you by pretending otherwise. But because you have always been braver than you think you are. You left That took more courage than staying ever would have. I watched you leave and I was so angry and so proud and so frightened for you all at once, and I never told you the proud part, and I should have.

I should have told you so many things

*Go to confession at St Augustine's. Not for God I know you, my love. Not for God. For me. Go and sit in the dark and tell the truth for once without managing it Father Daniel will listen. He is very good at listening.

He reminded me of you, actually. The honesty. The way he doesn't waste words.

I love you. I have always loved you. I simply did not always know how to make you feel it.

All my love, every bit of it,

Mum

Scarlett read the letter twice.

Then she folded it carefully along its original creases and put it back in the envelope and set it on the nightstand beside the photograph.

She sat on the edge of her mother's bed in the quiet house and looked at the window where the light was failing, the sky outside going the pale dark grey of early winter dusk, and she thought about what it meant to love someone so completely and not know how to make them feel it. Whether that was a tragedy of character or a tragedy of circumstance or simply one of the ways people failed each other without intending to, the gap between the feeling and the expression of it wide enough for a whole relationship to fall into.

She thought about her mother sitting in a confessional and finding not God, she didn't think it was God, not for Eleanor Voss who had prayed every Sunday of her life and drunk herself to sleep every Friday but a person. A specific person who had listened without flinching and helped her understand that you could be flawed and frightened and have made every possible mistake and still, still, be worth something.

She thought He reminded me of you. The honesty. The way he doesn't waste words.

She picked up her phone and looked at it for a long moment.

She thought You are thirty-four days out of a relationship that ended badly. You are in your dead mother's house sorting through a life you were not present for. You are in a town you left because it was suffocating you and it has not gotten larger since then.

She thought He is a priest

She thought I know

She put the phone down and lay back on her mother's bed and stared at the ceiling with the letter on the nightstand beside her, and outside the first snow of the season began to fall, softly and without announcement, covering the garden and the rusted watering can and the unfinished door that was going to need its third coat tomorrow, if the weather cleared.

She lay there and listened to the silence of the house and thought about what her mother had written.

*Go and sit in the dark and tell the truth for once without managing it.*

She had done that.

And now she didn't know what to do with the consequences

She called Lena at nine o'clock, when Lena was on her break.

"I'm going to stay longer," Scarlett said. "Than two weeks."

A pause. "How much longer?"

"I don't know yet." She looked at the letter on the nightstand. "There's more to do here than I thought. The house needs work before I can list it, and I there are things I want to understand. About her. About the last few years." She paused. "About what she found here at the end."

Lena was quiet for a moment. Scarlett could hear the hospital sounds behind her

the soft alert tones, the murmur of a ward.

"You know I'm glad you're staying," Lena said carefully. "I want to be glad without conditions."

"But."

"But I know you, Scar. I know the difference between you staying for a reason and you staying for a person. And I just " A pause. "I need you to know the difference too."

Scarlett looked at the ceiling. "He's a priest."

"I know."

"That's not that's not what this is."

"Okay." Lena said it in the way that meant she was filing the response and reserving judgment.

"He knew her," Scarlett said. "He knew the version of her I never got to know. And I want to understand that. I want to understand what she found in that place, in those conversations. That's a legitimate reason to stay."

"It is," Lena agreed. "It's also the kind of reason that can expand to fill whatever space you give it."

Scarlett said nothing.

"Stay," Lena said. "I want you to stay. Just know what you're doing. Or at least be honest with yourself that you don't know yet. That's the thing with you, Scar. You're the most honest person I know about everything except yourself."

Scarlett laughed a short, genuine sound. "My mother said something similar."

"Smart woman." A pause. "Read the letters. Paint the door. Stay as long as you need." A beat. "And be careful."

Scarlett thought about a grey-eyed man standing on church steps in the morning light.

"I know," she said.

"I know you know," Lena said. "I'm saying it anyway."

She fell asleep with the lamp on and the letter on the nightstand and the snow still falling outside, and she dreamed about a house with a green door that was open just open, not broken, not forced, simply standing wide in the way of a house that expected someone to arrive.

In the dream she stood at the gate and looked at the open door and could not decide whether to go in.

She woke at three in the morning to the silence that snow makes of a town, that particular muffled hush that turns the world into something smaller and more intimate.

She lay in her mother's bed in her mother's room and looked at the ceiling and thought Two weeks was never going to be enough.

She thought You know what you're doing

She thought Do I

She turned onto her side.

The lamp was still on.

The letter was still on the nightstand.

Outside the snow went on falling, quietly and without apology, covering everything