Chapter Text
Mary does not remember her first time in a church – the church she was christened in, baptised in, began to become who she is in. But if she thinks back, that church is her earliest memory: some unidentified day, with dark wooden pews covered in engravings worn to anonymity, a chill in the air, and the soft murmur of words that she does not quite yet understand the weight of, that fall from her mouth alongside puffs of steam.
It’s a tiny stone church – though at that age, she does not yet know how small it really is, as it looms larger than any other she has seen. Its pews are rarely filled, its attendants long since lost to a larger church in the town that is not quite so stippled by age, or long since gone to their graves. Its centuries-old features have been lost to those years, lost to neglect, lost to countless loving touches.
And it is there, a constant in her childhood, every Sunday, as far back as she can remember. The days that they don’t go are so rare that they stand out in her mind: one day in winter, when she spent the morning feverish with the flu and clinging to her mother; a trip to a fishing village, to visit her grandparents, where they visited the local church there instead, with its tower overlooking the sea.
It is every Sunday that the love, the faith, is palpable. Love is the gentle, soothing voice of the priest, his voice speaking for God. That same warmth, that same care and grace, and it is Father O’Donoghue’s voice that she hears when she thinks of His voice in her mind. Love is her mother, gently guiding her hands as she crosses herself, because she can never remember whether it is left to right or right to left, or even which way is left and which is right.
And whether or not God is there and listening, amongst the stones hewn by hands long since turned to dust, she can feel His love embracing her, and she cannot recall a time when she did not.
---
She is seven, and they’re in Dublin, wandering through one of the cathedrals, her sister mumbling that she’s bored, but Mary is transfixed. It doesn’t feel like home in the way that their own church does, but the buttresses seem to soar into the heavens, and the stained glass windows cast a myriad of colours across the space, all creating a mesmerising beauty.
It isn’t crowded, but she is still sure that there are more people than she has ever seen in their own church, wandering around the space, staring at statues, making comments to their companions. A constant buzz echoing amongst the stone bricks, of voices in more languages than she can identify and more accents than she can count, but with that peace she always finds, in God’s house, under His roof and His eye and His protection.
And then – she doesn’t say a word when she sees them – four nuns, habits almost sweeping the floor, quietly wandering down a side aisle. One of them is stooped, wrinkled, wizened; how old she is, Mary can’t quite fathom, her own lifetime still infinitely sprawled in front of her. But one of them still looks young, or as young as a grown-up can seem – smooth skin, soft cheeks, bright eyes.
She’s still somewhat paying attention to her family: to her father’s drone about the facts he’s reading off the signs (she can read them herself, thank you very much); to her mother’s comments about heading off because rain was forecast (even though the sun is still very much shining, visible through the stained glass windows); to her sister’s complaints about her sore feet (Mary’s are sore too, but she’s keeping quiet). But her mind is wandering, and her eyes are too, to the heights of the ceiling, to the strangers around them.
And they turn to leave, though Mary knows she could stay there forever, and they cross paths with the nuns again. Up close, she is struck by how happy and how comfortable they look, and she can’t stop herself from lingering a half step, just to wave, slight enough that her parents and sister don’t notice, and one of them – the one she thinks is the youngest one – waves back, smiling warmly.
She doesn’t quite realise it until she looks back, years later, but in that moment, she knows who she wants to be, one day.
---
She realises that at seven years old. She is nine when she feels a second moment, just as overwhelming, of an as-yet-unnamed affinity with who she wants to be, what she wants to do.
A day at school in early spring, blue skies and still air, almost but not quite warm, and their teacher decides that they’re having science class outside today. They’re making parachutes for eggs – trying their darnedest not to break them in the drop from the top floor of the building, and she’s fascinated.
They’ve split into pairs, and her partner – a girl she never speaks to, because neither of them is the chatty type – mostly just doesn’t want to risk getting covered in egg splatter, even though there’s no risk of it at all. So Mary takes the lead, fiddling with the pieces of newspaper and bubble wrap and cling film, trying to figure out what might best cushion the fall, while the girl beside her gives their egg an incredibly detailed face.
A dozen eggs dropped out of the window, and seven break, but theirs is not one of them, and she wants to know what the deciding factors were. Some that broke were quite similar to theirs; some that didn’t, she really wonders. But they don’t talk much about that in class – in fact, they don’t at all, because the bell goes not long after, and their teacher is away for the next three science classes, and by the time he’s back, they’re talking about volcanoes.
Not that she’s still as interested, anyway. Eggs are one thing, but she wants to learn about gravity, now, too, and then planets, and space, and black holes and the stars, her imagination swiftly moving on from stories of science on Earth.
It isn’t a whole new world unfurling in her mind now – it is their own world, unveiling more secrets than she can possibly imagine, hiding in plain sight. Everything around her has its own story, and she can’t help but want to know them all.
---
It is not just realising who she wants to be, either. The world is full of possibilities, and she cannot experience it all, but she can certainly examine her options.
She kisses a boy at a friend’s birthday party, because he asked, because he was nice, because it felt like what she was supposed to do. Mostly it’s just sticky and tastes too sweet and she can’t help but feel like she’s doing something wrong, and she can’t place why. Maybe there’s something wrong in her having thought nothing much of it at all.
Something lingers, though, and that idea of possibility – even if it isn’t like that particular experience – attaches itself to the taste of almond paste, the same way that sunlight in stained glass brings back memories of a wide-eyed nun, the same way that cracking an egg into cake batter brings back the thrill of the world she knows nothing about.
And there are so many possibilities, to be found in so many places. She is twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and she reads everything she can – anthropology and geology and always physics, which she finds she cannot pull herself away from. Science magazines, when she leaves primary school and they finally have a proper school library. Classic literature, borrowed from her grandmother’s shelf and leaving traces of dust where they lay, books about forbidden loves and sweeping moors, about the yawning chasm between heaven and hell and those that breach it. The esoteric books on her grandfather’s shelf, stories and histories from across the centuries and around the world – he sees her staring at the spines one day, her summer reading jumping from Brontë to Buddhism to botany, and calls her a little magpie, because he knows that she is just like him in that way; he sends her home with his I Ching box tucked in her bag after one weekend that she spent poring over it, more than he’s touched it in twenty years.
And even still, she is being called, called to something that feels closer as she runs rosary beads between her fingers, as she murmurs under her breath to a being she knows can hear whatever she wants Him to hear, but she needs to feel herself say it, too.
---
Sometimes, it is the rosary beads that she runs through her fingers, to anchor herself to reality. Sometimes, it is the yarrow stalks, the motion becoming easier with time and practice. Sometimes, it is a pen that she twirls as she reads, spending far too much time on her physics homework, and as little as possible on her French. Half her mind present, half her mind on what she thinks could come.
---
She stays behind, one day, because they walked to church – they always have, for as long as she can remember, through rain and hail and shine and snow. She is fifteen, almost sixteen, and her conviction runs through to her bones. She doesn’t say the truth of why she is staying – she just wants to talk to Father O’Donoghue, because Dante’s God and Milton’s God and their God are so different, and she knows he’s read them too, and she wonders, what does he think? And she just hopes that it’s enough for her parents to believe, because she can’t stand them knowing, not yet.
The same man, with the same warm and caring voice, that has become His in her mind. She wonders how old he was when he came to this church that he seems now to be an irreplaceable part of – he’d seemed so grown up when she was so young, but now that she thinks about it, he can’t be much older than her parents.
And he doesn’t seem surprised to see her linger behind – half the children she grew up with in the church show up for Easter and Christmas and when they aren’t working hard at school: the services an obligation, if not a punishment. The congregations are not much smaller, but they are older. She stands out merely for having persisted.
He’s standing next to a pew, a few of the church’s bibles in his hand, borrowed but not returned to their shelf. “How are you today, Mary?”
She tilts her head to one side, makes some sort of noise that she hopes says that she is more fine than she is, but at that, he sits, and shuffles along in a way that she knows to mean to join him.
No sense waiting, then. And his reaction is one she isn’t worried about. “Father, how old were you when you knew you wanted to become a priest?”
If he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it, but he pauses a moment, glancing up as he pulls the memories from the past. “I think I was nineteen, if that. Went to university for a year, tried to study chemistry, and knew that that wasn’t what I wanted to do. But I think it went back further than that, so when I realised, it was like nothing else made sense, knowing what I was like when I was younger. And as soon as I took those first steps, I knew this would be my life.”
She nods carefully at that, thoughts firing in her mind that she doesn’t want to say, doesn’t even yet know how to.
He doesn’t let her silence linger. “A lot of the – well, boys, I suppose – I was there with were still finding their feet. They didn’t all stay. But some of the most tentative are the most fiercely driven and devoted priests I know now, and some of the most surefooted didn’t last a year. One boy said – and I cannot forget it – that he felt like he was hiding behind God, rather than walking alongside him. It’s something where that conviction comes to everybody in ways they may not expect.”
Mary remains silent, chewing her lip, her brow furrowed, and he lets her sit in that silence, his piece said.
After what feels like an eternity in her mind, and a moment in his, she murmurs, “Please don’t say anything to Mam or Da – they’ll just worry. I’m really not even sure yet.”
“And if they ask?” She’s known him her whole life. She knows that this conversation will be akin to a confession.
“We were talking about poetry.” At that, her eyes widen a little, and she can feel her voice speeding up. “And I do want to talk to you about that - some time, not now, they’ll kill me if I’m too late home.”
She’s on her feet as she speaks, already on her way out. And she smiles and waves, and doesn’t see him chuckling – he can see a little of his younger self in her, and can see far more sureness than she lets on.
Meanwhile, in her head, the idea is settling; no longer a tenuous journey blanketed in the unknown, but rather, a path for her future glittering gold in her mind’s eye.
---
A plan had formed neatly in her mind, so perfectly that she had barely stopped to think. Two paths, in a neat parallel, and she knows, deep down, that she has to be on her own to follow them. Not a word said, until those paths were set out in front of her, immovably set in stone within her soul.
And so, she does not say a word of her plans to anybody, not until she has a course, a flat, and a scholarship waiting for her in Dublin.
She could have, she knows that, but she didn’t. Didn’t want the pressure from her parents – pushing her towards something that she is already quite happily moving towards, making sacrifices she doesn’t want them making for her. She knows quite well that they can’t afford to help her much, but equally well, she knows she will find her own way.
It’s hard to stop herself from spilling it all when she starts to share – that she somehow managed a scholarship that covers all her fees and something of her living expenses, that a friend of Father O’Donoghue helped her find a flat. She feels as though she’s somewhat assuaging their fears, because it’s all under control, and they don’t need to worry about her. But too, she cannot hold back her excitement.
And the more she talks about it – the more about the classes she wants to take, about the research they do at the university, about everything she knows is to come – the less likely, she thinks, they are to notice how much she’s still hiding. They don’t have an inkling of the sisters she plans on meeting as soon as she has moved – they’re under the impression that she will keep up the habit of church on Sundays, not least because their priest helped her find somewhere to live, and probably not much more.
But she knows, just as surely that she knows what she wants to learn, that this is how she wants to live, and she keeps it close to her heart. Not a word breathed until it is set, and she is certain of what is to come.
---
The first cloister she visited made it clear to her that this, while close, was not where she would end up: something just didn’t feel right, and she decided to go with her gut instinct. It was the sisters she had visited one nondescript, rainy weekend that had felt right, halfway through her first semester. No habits – just crucifixes under blouses, not at all what she had expected for what would feel so quickly like home. But they had welcomed her, had listened to her talk about her relationship with God, had spoken joyously about their work with refugees in their parish, and of one sister’s currently burgeoning reading group for children. Immediately, she knows it is where she is meant to be.
Her classmates had spent their first year splitting their time between studying and partying – to the detriment of some, who decided themselves that theoretical physics was not their path, if their grades didn’t decide it for them. Mary spent her first year half in study and half in contemplation, in full confidence of what she knows she wants.
She takes the first steps to become a postulant in the summer after her first year of university, and that is when she tells her family.
She knows not to expect anger; it is the fear that surprises her. They’d raised her – taken her to church, seen her devotion, seen her love for God, how could they not expect this?
“Are you sure this is what you want to do?”
Maybe her mother’s words would have given her pause, once. But now, not at all. She knows it with the conviction that has taken root in her heart, as confidently as she knows that the sky is blue. She has never been in love, has never travelled, has felt drawn to little else in her life. But she isn’t sure that her mother will even believe the impassioned speech she had spent her journey home writing in her head, the end result of months of thinking it through on her own, the farthest thing from an impulsive decision it could be. She has never been so sure in her life.
None of it comes out. Instead, she can only say, “Yes,” hoping that her smile will wash away some of the worry in her mother’s eyes.
The way in which her mother pulls her into a hug and doesn’t seem to want to let her go makes her think that no assurance would work.
---
Her first year had cemented a routine that perseveres throughout her studies. One side of herself, a dedicated student, driven to succeed, with her grades reflecting that. The other side of herself, just as dedicated to her faith – there are no numbers to reflect her success, nothing to define as right or wrong, but she can feel herself moving forward nonetheless. Both sides, moving in harmony, through her second year, and her third. She becomes a novitiate as she faces her final year of studies, and knows that she is not ready for those studies to end, as she feels her life truly beginning.
And with the feeling of her life truly taking flight, she knows, with a sudden solidity, that she does not want to stay in Dublin. She’s comfortable – happy, even – but there is a distinct awareness of the world outside of her view, and how much she cannot see. For some, she had faith, for there is no other way to know; but there is a world beneath her feet, with a solidity and a certainty – no maybes, no good and evil, it just is.
There are physics programmes farther afield that she cannot stop thinking about – and departments that she would much rather be a part of, with professors whose names she is acutely aware of, rather than the professor at Trinity who would be running her postgraduate studies, a man with whom she has never agreed once, and she knows that she is not about to start. Her dislike of the man is something she has confessed many a time, but her grace in his presence will not preserve her sanity if she has to see much more of him.
Still, it tears at her that she has to leave her sisters – with whom she has found more of herself than she ever could have dreamed, and who have guided her to the point that she is ready to begin her vows. But she tells them, and they’re happy for her, happy to see her walk a path God has laid out for her, even if it leads her away from them. They know God will be there, alongside her; they can be alongside her in spirit and in company, too, as all but Sister Marguerite can use email, and she isn’t yet deaf enough to not use a phone.
She finishes her degree, and accepts an offer to study her Master’s degree at Oxford University; she takes her vows, and contacts the order in Oxford that some of her sisters know, her pursuing of her path to be guided by them, now.
It is as though she blinks, and she finds herself alone in a country she has never set foot in, hoping that her work or the sisters she is set to meet soon will make it feel like home.
---
Oxford is beautiful, and new, and completely unfamiliar; it only sinks in that she is so far from everything she knows when she spends her first night alone in her flat. Her parents are a phone call away; her order – not her own, any more, but always her order – are just as far, yet just as close. But still, it is her first time outside of Ireland, and she is dizzy with anticipation for what is to come.
She arrives in the city on Thursday; she meets her sisters on Sunday. She would have gone sooner, had she not spent her Friday in a haze at the university, and her Saturday realising that, among other things, cooking utensils were non-optional. Briefly, she contemplates buying a bike, but she’s still enjoying meandering around; she’s sure that decision will change soon. And then, a Sunday service, feeling conspicuous in a room full of people who don’t even yet know her face, and in which she is, briefly, momentarily, anonymous.
And then, she meets them, right after the service, and – well, it’s fine. Just fine. Not the homecoming of meeting her sisters in Dublin, but she can see it changing, eventually.
The first day – the first hours, the first minutes. Some of the eldest, she would know as sisters on sight, cardigans and skirts harkening back to the outfits adopted by some orders as they abandoned habits. Some of them coo over her accent. The younger ones – though there are fewer of them, here – are dressed just as she is: soberly, in plain colours and modest garments, but with nothing to mark out who they are.
It isn’t that they are unwelcoming – far from it – or that they are closed off, or unkind, but it still takes her time to settle in with them, to get to know them, in a way that she never needed with her sisters back home. They’re the only Catholic sisters in Oxford, and Mary wonders if they are somewhat clinging to that, but it isn’t her place to judge that – even though they are a little older, a little less involved in the wider world, as though the eldest are in mourning for the days where they might have easily sought out a cloister instead.
Ostensibly, they all follow the same doctrine, but sometimes, it doesn’t feel that way. She’s the only one studying – she quickly stops bringing up her Master’s in their company, because as well as they mask it, she can still tell that there is a certain degree of judgement she never used to feel. A sister in Dublin – ten years older than her, and American – had worked at the university, specialising and lecturing in medieval history. She was far from the only one with a vocation outside of their shared calling, but one with whom Mary had been close, walking the same parallel paths of serving God and studying His world, seeing each other on campus, and commiserating over deadlines and the waiting times for library books.
Instead, the same woman cooing over her accent asks her on three separate occasions: “How long are you studying for?”
“My Master’s is a year programme—”
“Well, that’s very good, not long at all.”
She knows acutely well that it is not the end of her path.
---
Her fellow students, however, are not so hard to get to know. She was never close to anybody at Trinity – always busy, firmly fixed to goals that they did not tie into, and never seeing any classmates often enough to worry about any more conversation than they had to. She’d see them for a semester on cosmology, or Ancient Greek, and never again; her sisters were her closest friends. Here, her classmates are all just as set on their education as she is, and just as dedicated to their studies. It’s far easier here than it ever was in her undergraduate to just spend time with them – more classes in common, and more time that they need to spend on their work, just to keep up.
She doesn’t really bring up her vocation with them. She’s not the only one to be busy outside of study – not the only one who turns down every night out clubbing. Some are working, some have children, some would simply rather stay home, or keep their lives to themselves. She finds herself opening up, however, more than she’d have expected, and her answer swiftly simplifies. What once was I’m a sister taking her vows turns into I’m becoming a nun, and little more than that.
There are small mercies, though: rather than anything personal, the most common response to that is, “But you don’t dress like a nun?”
Most of her classmates finish their degrees and pursue other paths. Some are set on further study. A few, including her, make it into the Oxford doctoral programme, and she is quietly glad for the cohort that stays.
---
Mary’s phone calls to her parents are frequent. Her calls to her sister are not, and it doesn’t take much for her to remember why. A brief catch-up, of the goings-on in Zoe’s life and the lack thereof in Mary’s, and--
“You’re coming home for the summer, aren’t you?”
“Well, I can’t, really – I haven’t had a chance to stop, and I’m still a novitiate and they want me staying around, especially because I was run off my feet with my thesis, and if I want to not stagnate there, I can’t just put everything off and—”
“Ma and Da are going to kill you, you know that, right?”
“You could come here, you know that, don’t you?”
“You’re not getting them on a plane unless you’re getting married or buried, and Lord knows there’s only one of those options left now.”
“You can come without them!”
“And not have them paying for everything?”
“Fine, don’t come visit and have me paying for your food, I’ll see you at Christmas.”
Mary sees a message from Zoe that night, with a screenshot of her flight booking for a month away.
---
It’s theoretically a week. Enough for Zoe to see some of the sights, to complain about the boy she just dumped, and for Mary to wave her goodbye before they wind up at each other’s throats again like they’re teenagers.
On day four, Zoe changes her flight home, because of a date – and a planned second one – with a man she met in the line for, of all things, a train ticket.
Mary can’t fathom the thought of a relationship, let alone launching straight into another, and that’s without spending as much on a flight change as on the flight itself. But Zoe goes home after that second week, and Mary’s life disappears into the laboratory and the library.
Christmas comes, as does three days at home, and winter goes, and suddenly it has been eight months since Zoe’s summer visit, the time flying past in a haze of seeing the walls of the lab in lieu of sunlight. Eight months, and Zoe is in Oxford with a suitcase, to move in with the boyfriend she’s been keeping in touch with online.
Mary still feels as though she’d been impulsive in moving to Oxford – away from everything and everyone she knew, in pursuit of an academic career that half her sisters now seem to expect her to end, and which, to her, feels like it’s only just beginning.
Her relationship with her sister is, somewhat miraculously, better than it ever was when they were children, and she’s glad for that, not least because she feels like she’s going to be the closest person at hand when Zoe’s relationship with Richard inevitably falls apart.
---
At the end of the first year of her doctorate, Mary professes her vows to God.
A year later, and Zoe is married.
---
The ceremony is back home, because, as it turns out, Zoe does still have some fondness for the place, and Richard has no particular fondness for Oxford.
And thus, at the wedding ceremony, Mary finds herself seeing people she hasn’t even thought about for years. More than once, she finds herself asked what she does, and she realises that she always leads in with that she works at the university, that she is studying for her doctorate, and that becoming a sister always seems to be the second thing she says.
Yes, she’s very happy with her doctoral studies.
No, she doesn’t have a boyfriend, that’s part and parcel of becoming a sister.
No, it’s not Catholics who are letting priests get married now, but it’s all very modern, isn’t it?
It does feel as though she’s hiding herself away, but she doesn’t particularly fancy being asked a dozen times in an evening what a bright young thing like you is doing, throwing away your freedom. She has her freedom, in her studies and her faith, and nobody else needs to understand that.
---
She is happy with her life. She knows that.
She is halfway through her doctorate – actually halfway, as her supervisor thinks she’s working exactly as fast as she should be, her research moving roughly the way she wants, with nothing setting her back more than the time frame allows for. She is happy with her sisters, working with them in God’s name, and the few that she knows look down on her career don’t say a word.
What is reverence, after all, if not studying God’s world, understanding it in every way that they can, to know it better going forward? He has led her down this path, just as freely as He led her down the path to Him, and she intends to make the most of it. She has offered herself to Him, heart and soul, and, as though in exchange, He has offered her the world. He is who she seeks when she needs support, guidance, love; He is who she supports when she sees something, finds something, that might make this world a little easier to live in, a little more fascinating.
She receives her doctorate – to some, she remains Sister Mary, but to the rest, she is now Doctor Malone – and it is He who she thanks.
---
And she works. Two paths in parallel, as the years slowly roll by. She stops thinking of Graham as her supervisor, because he’s her colleague; Oliver, too, is her colleague, no longer her equally-stressed fellow student with an equally erratic sleep schedule.
She works on papers – gets them published, too. She teaches classes. She talks to Zoe more than she’d ever have expected – spends time with her, where she can; spends time with her and her children, when they’re small and squalling and growing too quickly to fathom.
Her parents come over when Brogan is born, and again when Michael is a few months old. She goes to see them once.
---
It’s a paper on particle physics that catches attention, and suddenly, Mary has her passport in hand, and a flight booked to Lisbon. She’d avoided the last conference abroad – hadn’t meant to, but she was committed to an event with her sisters she’s already forgotten the details of, and nobody prodded again. In fact, it’s her first conference abroad at all, the rest being limited to Oxford, a handful in London, and one in St. Andrew’s.
Lisbon feels worlds away, rather than less than three hours’ flight, and she’s far more excited than she expected about a conference with hundreds of people from the world over, instead of a few dozen. The conference is quite broad – there are topics on the agenda she last thought about in her undergrad, and talks narrow enough that she finds herself wanting to go, just to see how they might be studied further.
Belatedly, she realises that she knows nobody there besides the handful of colleagues she is travelling with – the thought comes to her as she sits on the plane, feeling the engines hum and then roar into life, sat next to a stranger, crucifix idly between her fingers with the point digging into her thumb.
---
The flight, the evening, the morning of orientation and shaking hands and figuring out where everything is, her mind is on her speech, on the PowerPoint on her laptop, on the cue cards she’s gone over enough times she isn’t sure she even needs. It isn’t nerves – she just needs to know that she knows what she’s talking about, even though it’s all she’s thought about since this particular research project started.
And then. It’s fine. It goes well. A Congratulations from Graham, a few people asking her questions about the work, about the potential for further research.
She’s elated, but she has also never felt so firmly grounded. The reality of where her work might lead – how others might use that as a spring board or a scaffold for a dozen different things, or how it may be a stepping stone to something she cannot think of. This is what she is meant to be doing – to be researching, to be learning, to be sharing that information, the collective knowledge of the world growing day by day, piece by tiny piece.
And with the infectious joy of that, she says yes to dinner by the beach, because she is amongst colleagues, amongst friends, and how can she not?
---
It is a dozen of them, in the end, at a long table, the night growing darker but not cooler, the scent of the sea on the breeze. The conversation bounces back and forth between languages – sticks mostly to English, briefly to Italian, to Spanish, to Portuguese as the two people who speak it translate parts of the menu.
The talk drifts away from their work – it always does, with wine and good company and the need to relax – and to everything else that follows alongside in life.
She listens, she briefly mentions Zoe – Mary sees her niece and newborn nephew often enough, but she still can’t keep up with how quickly they grow. She doesn’t mention the sisters, because almost nobody here knows about that; she doesn’t dwell on that feeling almost freeing.
Easy conversations that move swiftly away from work, of family and friends, of lovers and partners, of travelling alone and bumbling through languages, of lives that she has never even yearned for, never thought about.
Graham is sat diagonally from her; Oliver is at the other end of the table. To her left, an American woman with a whiplash-quick sense of humour; to her right, an Italian woman with dark hair and dark eyes and olive skin and a smile that seems to come so easily to her.
It’s the scent of jasmine that makes Mary’s head spin – she tells herself it’s the wine, because she rarely drinks much of it, but she knows it isn’t.
The woman to her right – Doctor Montale when she speaks tomorrow, but Alessa tonight – keeps turning her gaze to Mary, and it would almost make her blush. She feels like she should be ignoring her, should be trying to dissuade her, but she does neither, and doesn’t particularly want to.
There’s a band playing, and the table half empties to a dance floor. Mary doesn’t feel the slightest urge towards that – there are some ostentations she consciously pushed away as she moved into a religious life, but the need to be in the middle of a dance floor was not one of them – and instead, she’s still at Alessa’s side, as they both watch on with horrified amusement at Graham dancing impressively poorly.
It’s easy to be next to her, under the light of lanterns and the moon, the haze of a warm conversation and a warm breeze.
The scent of jasmine, that Mary is close enough to tell is Alessa’s perfume, and noticing it makes her frankly giddy.
“Did you always want to do physics?” Alessa’s hair falls like a curtain, Mary can’t help but notice, and she almost doesn’t hear the question for seeing that instead.
But it comes to her, all too easily. It’s too easy to talk to her. “I almost always knew it’d be something in science, but I didn’t really think about physics specifically for a while. Did you know?”
“I liked it. I was good at it.” Alessa pauses, smirks. “It made all the boys scared of me, which was good, too.”
Mary laughs – suddenly incredibly conscious of what she looks like, what she sounds like, because she knows Alessa is watching her, not looking anywhere else. “I went to an all-girls school – there weren’t any boys there to worry about.”
Someone – Mary doesn’t even notice who – orders desserts, and Graham hands her something before disappearing again. He’s definitely drunk, and presumably, everyone can tell. Or they would be able to, if they weren’t all just as drunk.
Dark hair and dark eyes in a darkening night, some sort of almond cake she doesn’t know the name of, the wine barely making her head spin, but the way her mind is wandering unbidden is making it spin far more.
She can see Oliver at the bar, can see that the night is seemingly only beginning, and it feels like a cue to leave, but she can see the same resignation, see the same need for an early night on Alessa’s face. Maybe she isn’t always the type to leave early – probably not, really; Mary feels like an anomaly for that – but hour-long lectures delivered at nine in the morning aren’t exactly best done hung over.
And so, instead, they walk.
The beach is quiet, and their hotels are in the same direction, so really, it isn’t hard to do. It’s not hard for their arms to brush.
But it isn’t a long walk, and they’re soon stood in front of Alessa’s hotel.
“Do you want to get a drink tomorrow night?” Alessa smiles, and pushes her hair back behind her ear. “I think I will want one after my talk.”
Mary can feel herself smiling. “I’d love that.”
At that, Alessa grins, and leans close, her hand on Mary’s arm – kisses her cheeks, her lips with the speed and lightness of butterfly wings, and all Mary can smell is her perfume, her hair, and it’s making her head spin.
Alessa is still leaning close, close enough to whisper a soft Goodnight in Mary’s ear, and then, she is left alone.
This isn’t her – the Mary that she’s supposed to be doesn’t mirror the cheek kisses that are making her pulse quicken, doesn’t say goodnight to a woman she just met with the promise of an evening together.
She doubts that sleep will come easily for her anymore. She could go back to her hotel - should go back to her hotel, confess and pray and plan how to say no to the next evening.
Instead, she pauses on the beach outside her own hotel, and forces herself to sit, staring out at the ocean, her feet bare and digging into the slightly damp sand, watching the moonlight on the waves. The tide is coming in – a vast, dark sea, slowly rising towards her.
It’s as though she left a part of herself behind, at some point she cannot identify. As though something that was once so core to her being has fallen away like sand, leaving her performing the motions with nothing behind them. And she’s only just noticed the absence.
She sits with her arms hooked around her knees, her left hand grasped in her right. She has spent so much of her life with her fingers would have danced over rosary beads in a comforting, familiar motion; now, they’re not even with her, like once upon a time they always were. She doesn’t even know when she stopped carrying them. Instead, she runs her thumb over the knuckles of her opposite hand, mimicking the motion, but the words don’t come, and her fingers feel stiff.
Who is there, that she is praying to?
She can’t stop herself from fidgeting, can’t stop herself twisting and intertwining her fingers when a familiar motion won’t do any more. Runs her fingers through her hair, catching them on every knot. Twists her fingers through the chain of her crucifix, runs the tip of the cross under her thumbnail, tries to distract herself from the churning in her stomach.
It’s as though something is missing. As though she is stepping down a ladder in the dark, and instead of the next rung, her foot finds only emptiness.
And with the sudden, overwhelming rush of a wave crashing, everything is gone.
Her fingers are still on her crucifix – small and plain, a gift to herself when she became a postulant, barely taken off in the years since. And it’s nothing, nothing to take it off now, to stare at it in her hands.
There’s no reason to keep it, no higher being for it to represent, but she still stares at it, frozen – not by indecision, but by the overwhelming shock, of everything crumbling around her, even if it had all been fragments, barely held together.
Before she can let it paralyse her, she throws the crucifix into the sea. She cannot even tell which wave it plunged into, the water already crashing and dragging it into the dark oblivion.