Switching Between Two Lives
“Are you really buying the Eddie’s garage across the street?” Father Lorenzo asks from his space in the confessional, all the light of the afternoon sun absent from the darkened space.
“Technically it’s a converted barn, I’m thinking of buying it. Property around here is a good investment. And I’ve decided to stay out here through the end of the year, makes sense with JP living on the Vineyard.” Annie answers as she closes the small door and turns to sit down. She takes her place across from Lorenzo, who she can see clearly through the wooden lattice that divides them. “I made the offer on Monday and Eddie said we should know any day now. Thank you for letting me know about the space.”
“I’ll miss our dinners with Nona.”
“We can still have dinner with Nona, but I’ll need to cut back my time,” Annie answers sitting back, allowing her spine to connect with wall behind her. “I’ve been sliding along these past few months and I’ve finally started to accept that I can’t be sure what each day will bring and then the idea hit me.” Annie stops and leans close the lattice allowing her nose to touch the soft wood. “When I got here, Lorenzo, I was surprised by what I have. I felt so alone out in LA, after everything. But all the food I’ve been cooking for Nona and Charlie and Dottie, it changed me. Taking care of Nona is helping me forgive, and I feel better.” She expresses so quickly that Lorenzo has to lean in close to hear every word and her soft breath flushes his cheeks. “You know that when I left I never thought this could be possible, but Cambridge, this neighborhood, it feels like home, now. It’s good and I want to stay, for a while.”
He sits back and he can see she is smiling through the screen that separates them. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
“Can you leave?” Annie says as she moves herself away from the wooden lattice.
“I don’t live in confessional, you know,” he says with an amusement. “Bundle up, I’ll meet you behind the church in ten minutes, I just need to check in with Mrs. O’Leary.”
Annie sits for moment after Father Lorenzo leaves and breathes in the musty scent of the space. She opens the door and walks into the empty chapel, the sound of her boots on the stone floor the only sound. As she exits through the large wooden doors, the bells of St. Catherine ring one single chime, reminding Annie it is already one o’clock. She stands with her back toward the butter-yellow brick wall of the church and pulls a joint from her left pocket. The afternoon sky darkens as she lifts the lighter to the paper tip and inhales slowly as she makes her way carefully down the cement staircase. Before walking toward the back of the church, Annie stands on the sidewalk, joint alit in her right hand, and looks at the stout brick structure across the street.
What Annie knows is that the nineteenth-century stable was converted by Eddie’s family in 1965 when his father replaced the oversized barn doors with a dark plate-of-glass and added an entrance to the right side of the building. It still held the shape of the original stable but inside it was a converted into a place for veterans to play cards and get something to eat.
With the closed for business sign still taped on the plate-glass window, and Eddie’s black truck parked outside the closed front door, she wonders if maybe this is her purpose. She wants to restore the kitchen Eddie’s father had set up to support the veterans living in North Cambridge, and where Eddie had hosted cooking classes for the immigrant families living in the housing on the other side of St. Catherine’s. Annie closes her eyes and feels hope rise in her chest as she takes one more drag and gently extinguishes the half-smoked joint on the side of the pink lighter she’d taken from Dottie that morning, before placing it into a small baggie inside her side pocket.
“There you are,” Annie hears as she turns away from the street and toward the church. “I love days like this,” Lorenzo sings out without taking his focus off Annie. “Let’s walk to the cemetery. Mrs. O’Leary packed us a couple of egg salad sandwiches and some chips.”
Annie lets herself laugh and feels for a moment the child she used to be walking these same city streets. “I remember the first time you took me to the cemetery, it was probably the first week I moved in. It was the day you told me about your parents.” She pauses and feels that moment again remembering that she felt connected knowing he didn’t have a dad either, but sad knowing he didn’t have a mom. “It wasn’t like today, there was a moody sky with clouds closing in and I wanted to go home. But you insisted. And when I almost started to cry because I was so afraid, you told me that story of why you always felt closest to them in the fog.”
Lorenzo smiles at the memory of his eight-year-old self. “Nona had a friend, he was her priest so maybe not a friend exactly, who was always at the house after the accident. We were at the cemetery and the fog was rolling in and Nona said we had to go. But it was the priest who told me that angels travel in the mist and that helped me feel closer to my parents. Before the car accident I don’t know what I believed in, but after I could see angels.”
Annie nods at the memory and reaches out to touch his hand but doesn’t take his in hers. They walk toward their destination quietly together lost in their own childhood traumas.
As they approach the slightly rusted metal gates of the St. John’s Cemetery, the sounds of a bagpipe playing the notes of Amazing Grace float out onto the sidewalk. Annie turns her head to ask Lorenzo if he can hear it, but before the words can pass her lips she sees the tears in Lorenzo’s eyes.
“Bagpipes touch my soul,” Lorenzo says to Annie as they pass through the rusted gates and turn away from the bittersweet sound and toward the oak tree growing majestically over a tall marble headstone. “This place reminds me why we must all take pleasure in the world now and use our time here for good.” He smiles at Annie as the unfolds the plaid blanket in his backpack and places a small paper bag on top of it. “Have a seat, lunch with Mom and Dad.”
Annie takes her place across from the aging headstone so she can read the inscription she memorized when she was eight.
Rest In Peace Beloved Mother and Father, Wife and Husband,
Daughter and Son
May We Meet Again In Heaven
Antonio Lorenzo Zanobetti and Maria Rodriguez Zanobetti
***
As they finish their lunch of egg salad sandwiches, chips and an apple, she thinks about the story Lorenzo told and the details he was never able to answer about his parents. How did they meet? Why did Nona get custody? Who were his other grandparents? Did he have any other family?
On the day his parents died, his past simply disappeared - except for the names on the headstone - and Nona made all the decisions for his future. “Do you think we need to know the status of the past to understand our present,” Annie asks while putting away the remains of their lunch, the taste of egg salad making her wish for a mint.
“The secrets are always more interesting, playful even, when living in a pained history,” he answers in a riddle Annie thinks she understands.
“Do you think there’s a difference between happiness and pleasure? Or that desiring pleasure means you’re destined to be unhappy. Can I be happy without feeling good?” Annie stands with a stretch of her arms toward the small leaves forming on the branches of the oak tree and reaches down to help Lorenzo shake out the itchy wool blanket they’d been sitting on.
“Happiness is not a destination, it’s a state of being. Fleeting but possible.” He answers bending toward the light green lawn to pick up the ends of the blanket.
“Do you think I can be happy without faith?” Annie asks, still holding her end of the blanket not ready to fold it into Lorenzo’s outstretched arms.
“Yes,” Lorenzo says quickly, but with the words still floating between them he knows that isn’t his truth. He walks toward Annie and takes the ends of the blanket into his elevated hands and folds it into a roll that he places under his right arm. “I believe we all need faith,” he offers carefully. “And my faith requires a level of commitment that not everyone is capable of.” He stops but Annie can see he has more to say by the way he is staring at her. “Faith can give you a lighter sense of being true to yourself, it can create an inner coherence. It gives hope, even in the darkest of times.”
“The bible makes formal what common people know. Your Church systemized and made morality accountable,” Annie answers curtly, but Lorenzo does not seem to notice.
“I can help you, with faith. I will be accountable for you, your own personal spiritual guide.” He stops, but takes her smile as acceptance before continuing with his offer. “But we should start small. We can play a game of temptation bundling.”
“What’s that, something devilish?”
“We pair something you want to do, but may lack the willpower to follow through on, with something you love to do, but may feel a little guilty about indulging. You know, pleasure with a little pain. Like you can only watch your favorite Netflix show when you are at the gym, so that encourages you to go the gym more often so you can finish a series. Get it?” Lorenzo smiles awkwardly at Annie’s squinting eyes.
“So maybe when I’m in the confessional, which I am thoroughly enjoying and feel our talks are helping me a lot, you can teach me about faith. Do we split the time evenly?”
They stand staring into each other’s eyes and Lorenzo smiles. “How about for every ten-minutes of compassionate listening you have to endure five-minutes of faith lesson.”
Annie nods as she turns toward the rusting gate, already regretting her decision.
She feels Lorenzo beside her, his puppy dog excitement buzzing at her side. “Adding faith to your life could be a way to become whole, not who you used to be but someone new and different and happy,” he smiles. “In a way you seem to think is impossible but I know is not.”
“Do I have to become someone new? Maybe I can just return to who I wanted to be.”
As Annie and Lorenzo walk quietly through the neighborhood, she thinks back to her twenty-three-year-old self who so desperately wanted to leave Cambridge. She remembers that girl sitting alone on the Oak Bluffs pier, the cool misty air blowing around her and the gentle woosh of the trees blending into the distant sounds of people having fun. She was moody but not unhappy, she had wanted something new and the invitation from JP’s Mama to spend twelve-weeks on an island felt like a gift. That night she had brought a sweatshirt with her to the pier, and the sticky cool sea breeze felt familiar from her summers in Maine and she’d felt a crack allowing starlit bursts of light into her inner darkness.
JP had appeared by her side without a sound, and when he’d spoken she’d turned so quickly she almost knocked him into the cold night ocean. “Remind me never to sneak up on you,” he’d said with a glint in his soulful brown eyes.
And she’d smiled and then he smiled, but she forbid herself to be swept up in his beauty despite her racing heart because she was not his friend, she was his tutor. “I’m from Maine, hearty sea people. I can take care of myself.”
He’d nodded in approval. “You’ll like it here. Just don’t engage with Mama. Keep it superficial, don’t let her know too much about you. She’ll use it to her advantage.”
Annie had laughed but he hadn’t. “I’m not joking, I’m just giving you an honest warning. She brought you here to punish me. I’m sorry you’ve been caught up in her drama. She’s freaked out about me going to Harvard in the fall and but I don’t want to study this summer. One last glorious summer, understand?”
“Maybe she’s doing this for you, not to you,” Annie had said.
“You don’t know Mama, yet.” And he’d smiled in that way and she’d melted. “We need a plan.”
“I have a one,” Annie had said earnestly not understanding what he meant. “Mama made me a schedule for the summer. It’s quite impressive, really, a full binder and color coded. What you need to review, cultural activities, even an exercise plan. Tennis every morning. And a booklist.”
He’d laughed and laughed and then took Annie’s hands, his silhouette against the dark-blue-sea and the night sky lit by the stars she loved had felt so familiar and dangerous. “That’s not how this summer will be.” She’d felt it then, the irresistible lure of his darkness. She’d pulled back and taken her hand from him. And that’s when she’d known that Mama’s plan to punish JP might fail.
“You with me?” Lorenzo says breaking Annie’s willful reminiscence.
“Just daydreaming about my younger self,” she says plunging her hand into her pocket to retrieve the half-smoked joint in the plastic baggie. She stops at the corner with the bronze statue erected for the local politician who helped build St. Catherine and lights the end of the joint with Dottie’s pink lighter. Lorenzo stands a few steps away looking up at the majestic bell tower.
“Why did you to go to Martha’s Vineyard that summer,” he says quickly not turning to look at her directly. “You had a degree from MIT, you didn’t have to be a tutor for a kid who had already been accepted at Harvard. I never really understood that.”
“It was Mama,” Annie reminds him, taking a drag and blowing the smoke up into the dimming afternoon sky. “She is very persuasive when she senses weakness. She sensed that I was a little lost and she couldn’t believe how I’d tutored JP when he was working in the lab, he got his best grades his senior year.” She smiles thinking of those nights studying together as she takes another small drag of the pink joint. “I needed to get away from here. Turns out Martha’s Vineyard was a place for people like me, damaged and searching.” Her billow of smoke rises up into the afternoon sky.
Lorenzo turns toward her and breathes out a sigh. “I know what it feels like to want one thing, but choose another, but when you left for good, it broke Nona.”
Annie lifts the tip of the pink joint to her lips, and without taking her eyes from Lorenzo inhales and blows out three rings of white smoke. “I hope she’s forgiven me, for wanting what wasn’t mine,” she says quietly, the words lingering in the smoke she exhales. “I forgave you.” Lorenzo and Annie stand quietly together on the empty street corner, their eyes lock before she finishes releasing the words in her heart. “For not being mine.”
Annie taps the smoldering tip on the pink lighter, extinguishing its light orange glow, and holds the unlit joint in her right hand. She takes a step closer to Lorenzo with the blanket still folded under his arm. “What I’ve learned is that we find what we need when we are not looking.” Annie senses an icy wind sweep across her neck and feels alive in the cold aura. “I miss our childhood of just being.” She smiles at him without masking herself and takes his hands in hers.
“We all want the same thing,” he says allowing his hands to be held by her. “We all want to be allowed to be who we are. I don’t know if faith will work for you, but keep asking questions.” Lorenzo’s dark eyes are less serious and more sad.
“I miss having him here,” Annie confesses, tears burning her tightly clenched eyes, fighting the drops sliding down her cheeks. “And I miss Colette.”
“That’s love.” Lorenzo places an arm around Annie’s shoulders and pulls her next to him. And without expecting to say anything he finds his thoughts escaping his lips. “When you were away, did you miss me?”
He feels her shoulders tighten as she pulls herself ever so slightly away from him. They stand for a moment that they suffer for an eternity before she speaks her words.
“I missed this place, the house, the hood, the tree.” Annie says with a nervous laugh knowing he wants her to say more but that she can’t. Not on the corner across from St. Catherine. Rather than answering what Lorenzo needs to hear, she says, “Thank you for reading the letter with me, think I could be Annie Todd, a girl with two first names.”
“Please, don’t change the subject. Did you miss me?” He asks again with an urgency in his voice as he removes his arm from her shoulders and turns to look her in the eye.
“It’s always the cover up that gets you,” she says cryptically as she fumbles to put the roach back into the baggie. “Plus, like Nona always said, you can’t miss what isn’t yours.” She turns her gaze away from Lorenzo and allows her panic to rise as she starts to walk away from him.
“Do you believe that great transformations can happen in a moment?” Lorenzo calls out after her but she doesn’t turn to see him. “Because that’s the story of my life,” he yells out louder than he expected to be heard over the traffic driving down Rindge Avenue. He sees her across the street and understands she isn’t waiting for him so he runs to catch up with her, avoiding being hit by the small city van turning the corner.
“Have you been happy Lorenzo? Because you know no can be happy who isn’t honest about their own choices,” Annie says without breaking her stride, her breath ragged and hoarse.
“I never had a choice and you, of all people knew that.”
“Your deception was categorically different from anything I’d ever known. I didn’t want your pity,” Annie says feeling her cheeks burn.
“I didn’t pity you Annie, I wanted to see you as you are. I didn’t want you to focus on what was missing but what you had. You were my best friend.”
“Turns out both my best friendships have been based on lies.”
“Why didn’t you come back?”
Annie stops and turns without warning almost knocking Lorenzo into the traffic racing down Rindge Avenue. “I didn’t come back because after everything that happened, on the day Colette entered this world I woke up and realized the pain was gone. I wasn’t high or drunk, I was just better because Colette appeared in this world.” Annie shakes her head at the ground to jolt the sadness of not being with her from her soul. “It had taken so much energy to deal with the pain of that decision to not have children, that when she appeared the regret was gone. I felt lighter. Hopeful. I wanted to be with them, JP, Khadijah and Colette. I couldn’t miss you Lorenzo, because you were never mine and they were. They are. But I forgave you a long, long time ago.”
He wraps her in his arms and she feels safe close to his beating heart. As she steps away to make her way back to Pemberton Street she says, “Thank you for lunch,” and turns as the bells ring out three times and Father Lorenzo understands he’s truly forgiven as he listens to the sounds of the birds and the children playing, before turning back to his life at St. Catherine of Genoa Parish.