The Original Sinners: The Red Years

She went to her closet and dug through it. Today she would do something she did only once a year—dress conservatively. She found her only skirt that went past her knees, her only black shoes with a low heel, her only blouse that wasn’t designed to show every inch of cleavage. She even found a strand of pearls she’d received as a gift from her grandmother years ago and put them on. She pulled her hair back and up, taming the wavy mane as best she could and applied half her usual amount of makeup.

Today she was going to church.

As Nora drove she fought off the twin demons of eagerness and fear that this day always visited upon her. Shortly after three she pulled into the parking lot at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. She’d been christened here as an infant, made her First Communion here, and this was where she first saw Søren over eighteen years ago.

Sacred Heart had thrived under Søren’s watch. From barely over a hundred members, the church had trebled in size during his time here. A handsome polyglot only twenty-nine years old when first he arrived, he was everything priests were not usually known for being—erudite, witty and charming. Two other priests in nearby diocese had been removed from their posts for allegations of sexual offenses in the past two decades. Catholic parents brought their children to Sacred Heart in droves. They knew Father S. could be trusted. And although Nora knew who he was with her behind closed bedroom doors, those parents were right to trust him.

It was funny, she thought as she entered through the front doors of Sacred Heart, how little she remembered of her childhood here. Even Father Greg, Søren’s predecessor, wavered in her mind as little more than a memory of elderly kindness. Then one Sunday when she was fifteen years old, Søren had come like an Annunciation; it was as if God Himself had hailed her by name.

She paused in the foyer and glanced around. Foyer…Søren always corrected her when she called it that. “It’s the narthex, Eleanor,” he’d said, hiding his smile. “Not the foyer.” Next time she referred to it in his presence she’d called it the “lobby.”

Glancing around, Nora tried to sift through the thousands of memories that descended on her. She saw the little shrine to the Virgin Mary in the corner of the entryway and the burning candles beneath her. Nora stood before the shrine, closed her eyes and remembered…

She’d been sixteen years old, almost seventeen, and her best and only friend was a girl named Jordan. Introverted and shy, Jordan had no idea she was also quietly beautiful. They’d gone to the same Catholic high school, had most of the same classes—all the same but for English her junior year. Nora had been in the highest-level class and Jordan, never the writer Nora was, had an easier teacher. Nora would never forget the ashen look on Jordan’s face one day after school. It took three days for Nora to drag it out of her—Jordan’s English teacher, a married man in his forties, had kept her after class and put his hand up her shirt. He’d offered her an easy A in the class in exchange for the obvious. Nora had been livid and threatened to beat the teacher to death with her bare hands. Jordan had sobbed, terrified that no one would believe her, that no one would help her. After all, this English teacher was also the basketball coach, and the team was having the best season in years. Jordan made Nora promise not to tell the school, and in return Nora made Jordan promise to tell Father S. To this day Nora still didn’t know what Søren had done or said to the teacher. She only knew Søren had gone to her school on a Friday and by Monday the teacher was gone.

Nora had raced to church after school that day and found Søren praying here by the shrine to the Virgin Mary. She’d told him how grateful Jordan was, how shocked the whole school was, how nobody knew why the coach had left so abruptly.

Søren hadn’t smiled. He’d only lit a candle.

“Was that hard to do?” She remembered standing in this very spot and asking him that question. “Telling that guy off?”

“It was frighteningly easy to put the fear of God into him,” Søren had said. “And almost enjoyable. Why do you ask, Eleanor?”

She’d zipped up her hooded sweatshirt and plucked nervously at the ragged cuffs. “I thought it might be hard for you. You know, since you’re in love with me.”

Søren had met her eyes and she saw she’d actually managed to catch him off guard, one of the few times in their eighteen years she had.

“Eleanor, there are suicide bombers on the Gaza Strip who are less dangerous than you are.” He started toward his office. She followed him, nearly running to keep up with his long strides.

“I’m going to take that as a yes,” she’d said when they arrived at his office door.

“I’ve always been an admirer of the Cistercian monks.” Søren stepped into his office. “Especially their vow of silence.” And he’d closed the door in her face.

She’d smiled nonstop for the next two weeks.

Nora opened her eyes and stepped away from the shrine and out of the memory. Her heels clicked on the hardwood floors grown slick and shiny with age. She thought she’d find Søren in his office working. But she paused outside the sanctuary when she heard the sound of a piano wafting through the heavy wooden doors. Inhaling the muted notes, she slipped inside the nave and stepped quietly toward the chancel where Søren sat at a grand piano.

He didn’t look up at her as she came to the piano. She placed her hands flat on its polished black top. Closing her eyes again, she let the subtle waves vibrate through her and into her. The last note shivered up her arms and down to her feet. As the note echoed throughout the nave and back to the altar Nora opened her eyes.

“The Moonlight Sonata,” Nora said. “My favorite.”

Søren smiled and played a few stray notes.

“I know it is.”

Nora returned the smile and leaned forward, running her hand over the smooth black surface.

“Happy anniversary, Søren.”

Søren smiled again, one of his rare, genuine smiles that reached his eyes. Something caught in her chest and she let her own smile fade.

“Happy anniversary, little one,” he said, his voice as gentle as the last note of the sonata.

With those four words came a thousand more memories. She and Søren had never, would never marry, had never dated in the traditional sense of the word, but never had they questioned what day would become the signifier of the beginning of their life together. The first time Søren had beaten her and then taken her virginity was thirteen years ago on Holy Thursday, the day before Good Friday, the day when Christ celebrated His Last Supper. Jesus, God Incarnate, had knelt before His disciples and washed their feet on this night. Thirteen years ago tonight Søren had done the same to her. Even as the liturgical calendar changed, they never once considered celebrating their anniversary on any other day but this too-neglected holy day, this last night of Christ’s freedom before He was taken, this last night to share a quiet moment alone with those He loved.

Søren began playing the haunting melody again, and she let it draw her inexorably into its insistent rhythms. She watched his hands, his perfect pianist’s hands, and recalled all too well how intimately she knew those hands, how intimately they knew her. One courageous strand of Søren’s perfect blond hair threatened to fall over his forehead. She longed to reach out and brush it back.

“You played this for me that night,” she said as the music faded. Nora closed her eyes and let the past come to her. “You were playing it when I came to the rectory.” She remembered that night like yesterday, slipping in through the tree-shrouded back door, following the music to Søren’s elegant living room. She stood in silence and watched the priest who would become her lover that night play by the light of a single candle the world’s most beautiful piece of music as if it had been written by him and for her. “The next morning I woke up in your bed for the first time.”

“The best morning of my life,” Søren said.

“And mine.” Nora felt the old tug of love and straightened, trying to brush it off her. “When did the church get a grand piano?”

Søren smiled.

“A mysterious stranger had an Imperial Bösendorfer delivered to my home on my most recent birthday. I donated my Steinway to the church.”

“That was very generous of that mysterious stranger,” Nora said with a sheepish grin.

“Very generous indeed. Although the Steinway still plays beautifully.”

“It’s had a tricky sustain pedal for ages.”

“Yes, and whose fault is that?”

“That is not my fault,” Nora protested. “Do you recall what you were doing to me at the time? I had to hold on to something, didn’t I?”

Søren looked down at his hands. His fingers hovered over the keyboard playing soundless phantom notes.

“You could have held on to me.”

Nora only swallowed, finding herself in a rare moment of speechlessness. Perhaps sensing her discomfort, Søren dropped his hands to the keyboard and began playing again.

“The Moonlight Sonata is a strange piece of music,” Søren said. “It’s been called a Lamentation. You can feel that when you play it, can feel the sorrow and the need in the endless repetitions. It’s simple to play but maddeningly difficult to play well. The arpeggios allow great freedom of expression. Too much freedom in untutored, unskilled hands. They say Beethoven wrote it for a seventeen-year-old countess, the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. He may have loved her. More likely he was simply trying to seduce her.”

“It would have worked for me.”

“It did work for you.”

This time Nora smiled at the memories Søren’s words conjured. Again she slid her hands lovingly over the piano. “My God, the crimes against nature that have been committed on this piano.”

“I hope you aren’t referring to my playing.”

“Never. I know how gifted those hands of yours are.”

“Some decorum please. We are in a church, Eleanor,” Søren reminded her with only a playful hint of sternness about his lips.

“Forgive me, Father.” She composed her features into a pantomime mask of contrition.