Free The Gospel of Winter by Brendan Kiely Page A

each other. That was all I wanted: a sense of stability, of completeness, an assurance that any fear could be dissolved, that loneliness was a sickness cured when someone else’s exhale became my inhale and, together, neither of us could ever feel alone.
    As I stood on the bridge I began to feel sick. I only wanted to be told everything was going to be okay. I could give and give and give, and go and go and go, but I would wander aimlessly forever unless I had a road map that said, Aidan, go straight ahead, turn right, then left, then left again, and you will be where you want to be. Isn’t that what Father Greg kept promising? “A better home,” a way to feel at peace wherever I was? This is what our Lord asks of you, Aidan. This is what I ask of you. Shhh, shhh, soon you will feel much better. Soon everything will be better. You’ll know love. This is love, Aidan. This is love.
    I kept hearing his hush in my head as I stared down into the river from the bridge. His voice was in me, endlessly shushing. Occasionally, a shaft of ice shot out from beneaththe bridge and cut through the river until it passed out of sight into the dark distance. I couldn’t stay focused and fixed. I wanted a sense of direction, to be able to see myself clearly and say Yes, yes, yes, this is me , but my thoughts emerged and rippled over one another chaotically, and I couldn’t see through the mess.

CHAPTER 4
    T he most important things in life require a leap of faith,” Father Greg once told me. “Jesus did not turn stones into bread when he was starving in the desert, nor did he throw himself off the temple to prove he was the son of God. He knew he could survive on faith, not bread, and he knew he need not test his faith to believe in it. You must believe in me, Aidan. You must believe that I love you. Everything will be okay if you have faith in this love between us. Love is God in action.”
    And I did. I believed him. I continued to believe him when he was the only person to give me a birthday card in September, and when he gave me a copy of a photo he’d taken of Saint Aidan in a stained-glass window in England, and when he tore a clean handkerchief so we could each have a half one day when we both were sneezing, and when I laughed because he made me, and when he told meI would not feel this way forever, and when I cried and he held me and didn’t say “don’t cry” or “take care of yourself”; I believed him when he said “I will take care of you” and that it was okay to cry because it gave him the chance to take care of me more. There seemed like nothing else other than the strange, painful gravity he could provide.
    I was certain we had agreed that I would return the next day, the day after he’d asked me to leave his office for the first time, and I did not want to disappoint him. I left earlier than I had the day before, and I had the car service drive me over to Most Precious Blood again, with instructions not to pick me up until that evening. On the way, I thought about what I was going to say to Father Greg. I wanted to talk about Josie and Mark and Sophie, but I also didn’t. It meant I had something against which to compare, something that frightened me more and more on the drive over.
    When I got there, the lights were dimmed in the rectory, and it was quiet. The gate to the kitchenette was closed, and no one moved around in the main hall. The remnants of the phone-a-thon from the day before were littered about the far end of the hall. An easel held a poster of a schoolhouse lined with hash marks indicating escalating amounts of money. Across the top, scrawled in marker and in big, green handwriting I knew was Father Greg’s, it read S T . P HILLIP’S IS NOW A REALITY .
    The light in Father Greg’s office shone through the cracks around his door, and Father Dooley’s door was open.I could hear the mumble of his low voice on the