Help & Soar
by Nicholas Montemarano
The first rule: never go in empty. I had learned this half my lifetime ago, when I was fifteen, from a girl named Linda. She had been talking about sins. Bring plenty of venials, she told me. I loved her, and wanted her to save me. Her Catholic school uniform—pleated plaid skirt, white blouse, burgundy knee-highs—smelled of incense. We kissed, and only kissed, and it remains the best sex I’ve never had.
Now, thirty years old, on a cold January afternoon, huddled in my pea coat, I pushed against the wind toward God. I had venials, but also mortals. What eased my anxiety, as I entered the church, was Linda. Once I smelled her, the rest returned to me—her large brown eyes, her mouth, her voice. I had wanted to know everything about her, especially about her being Catholic. When she went to Confession, did she mention me? Not by name, silly. What about what we did? Sometimes. What did the priest say? The usual. Chastity, love, marriage. Was she nervous? The priest is more nervous than I am. Plus I never go face to face.
Relieved that the church was otherwise empty, I chose the traditional side of the confessional and closed the curtain behind me. I was confused—and alarmed—to see the priest clearly enough through the cross-shaped openings in the wood lattice grille between us. That meant he could see me. He was young for a priest, but older than me, his hair dark. I kneeled and began, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it’s been twenty years since my last Confession.”
“Welcome back,” the priest said.
“I forget what happens next,” I said.
“Have you reflected on your sins before coming here?”
“Yes.”
“And are you truly sorry for them?”
“Yes, Father.”
I was sorry. This had nothing to do with me, but to do this properly, I had to believe it had everything to do with me. Were I to recite a list of sins without true feeling, none would be the wiser, but I took pride in doing things right, and this task—I prefer not to use the word job—mattered greatly.
A soul was at stake.
I wasn’t sure I believed that—I hadn’t been raised Catholic and had never been to Confession—but someone did, a man who had opened his heart to me, and whose words resurrected buried feelings within me.
“Start big,” the priest said. “Say what you’re most afraid to say.”
I couldn’t summon the courage to say the worst—not specifically.
“I haven’t been a good man,” I said. “I’ve been ungrateful, unkind, hateful, and worse. I’ve failed people who used to love me but don’t love me anymore. And who could blame them.”
“Do you believe that God loves you?”
“I don’t see how.”
“He does,” the priest said. “Right now, especially.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Your sins, no matter what they may be, will be forgiven. All you need to do, with an open heart, is ask.”
“But some things,” I said.
“There isn’t one thing beyond God’s mercy,” he said. “Whatever it is, we’ll lay it at God’s feet, together.”
“It’s too much,” I said. “My life feels like one long sin. Mistake after mistake after mistake. Maybe the only right thing I did was beg my wife to take our daughter and run away. Maybe it was the one time a voice inside me, the part that knows right from wrong, cried out—you know, at the very least, better late than never, you can protect them. But before that, where was that voice?”
“It’s speaking now,” he said. “Let’s listen to it.”
“I was a scary man,” I said.
“You scared your wife and daughter.”
“Yes.”
“Is there more?”
“I hurt them.”
“You physically harmed them.”
“Forgive me, yes.”
Through the grille I saw the priest shift in his seat. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and said, “Are they safe now?”
“They’re gone.”
“So you’re no longer—”
“God, the damage I’ve done.”
After a pause, he said, “Is there anything else that voice inside you would like to say?”
“Just that I’m sorry, and I wish I could go back in time. But I don’t know when it began—that’s the problem. I’m a veteran, by the way. Iraq, PTSD. That’s not an excuse, Father.”
“Are you getting help?”
“I talk to someone.”
“Good,” he said. “The Church is here for you too. So am I.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Is there more?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I must be holding you up.”
He stood suddenly and opened the door of his box. Then he closed the door and sat down again.
“There’s no one else,” he said. “Only you, me, and God. Nothing is more important than this. Unless the church were on fire, nothing could make me leave until we’re finished.”
“They flinched when I came near them,” I said. “They were afraid, and I know what that feels like.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I just want God to know how sorry I am and that I’d give anything to go back in time and somehow—”
“This is the moment,” he said. “This and every moment after.”
“It’s been twenty years,” I said. “I know there have been other sins, but I can’t think of them. I’ve told you the big one. I never killed anyone in Iraq, as far as I know.”
“Your sins are forgiven,” he said. “For your penance, pray the Rosary every day for the next week.”
“That’s all?”
“Keep going after that—every day, if possible.”
“I will, Father.”
“Do you remember the Act of Contrition?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Repeat after me,” he said. “Lord have mercy on me.”
“Lord have mercy on me,” I said.
“Do not look upon my sins.”
“Do not look upon my sins.”
“But take away all my guilt.”
“But take away all my guilt.”
“Create in me a clean heart.”
“Create in me a clean heart.”
“And renew within me an upright spirit.”
“And renew within me an upright spirit.”
“Amen.”
“Amen,” I said.
“May God bless you,” he said. “Go forth and sin no more.”
On the other side of the curtain was a dark church dimly lit by votive candles. And on the other side of the heavy church doors was blinding sunlight, the same cold January day, the same winter wind to walk against.
“Mission accomplished,” I told my boss, Yuuto.
“Why so sad?” he said.
“Actually,” I said, “mission not yet accomplished. I need to say the Rosary every day for the rest of my life.”
“Really?”
“A week, the priest told me, but I don’t think that’s enough.”
“If Father says one week, then one week,” Yuuto said. “Then, mission accomplished.”
Each time I stood in Yuuto’s office, it seemed smaller. So did Yuuto. He was a small man—short, slight in build. I had no idea how old he was; he could have been sixty, but looked closer to forty. Not old enough to be my father, yet he was fatherly. He made me a cup of green tea and placed the teacup and saucer beside his own on his extremely neat and organized desk. He always had hot water ready to make tea—for me, for anyone. I didn’t drink tea, and he knew this, but he made the gesture anyway every time I was in his office. Sometimes, as now, I reciprocated by at least holding the warm cup in my hands. I knew that it made him feel good to believe that he was helping. His name, he had told me many times, meant: help and soar. This was, in fact, the name of his business—though it was more than a business to him. He cared. Or seemed to. He was, after all, an actor—a failed actor, like me. But, as far as I could tell, he wanted to do the right thing. He had worked for a similar company in Japan and had the idea that such a service would be welcome—and profitable—in the United States. He was right: in five years, he had doubled his employees. Need was continuing to grow. I had been working for him for just over a year.
Help & Soar provided almost any service you could imagine—except sex. I had waited in line for people to buy Springsteen tickets. I had been shoved and kicked on Black Friday outside a Best Buy and raced dozens of stumbling people to buy a video game for a child I would never meet. Once a week for six months, until she could no longer afford me, I had acted as a woman’s dead brother; we went to the movies together, cooked dinner, looked through photo albums, and reminisced about moments I pretended to have shared with her. I tried to act as her brother would act, based on a questionnaire she had completed, and whenever I did or said something her brother never would have, she kindly corrected me. Sometimes, naturally, I slipped into being myself, and she was fine with this. And then one day Yuuto told me that the assignment had come to its conclusion—for now. He reminded me that, no matter any attachment I might have developed for the role or for my “sister,” I was not to see her or contact her, and if she tried to contact me, I was not to respond. “Bad for business,” he said. “And remember, you have already helped very much.”
I had played the roles of father, son, dead husband, remorseful other man. One of my specialties was apologizing for things I never did. That and what Yuuto called by its Japanese name, “bitches of complaints,” what in the States he called “venting services.” This service provided anyone with such a need a pair of sympathetic ears—mine—to listen to tearful or angry rants about anything: unfair bosses, cheating spouses, ungrateful children, inconsiderate neighbors, rude airline employees, racism, the impending erasure of white men, the President of the United States, illegal immigrants. My job was to listen, nod, say, “I know, I understand, that must be hard, tell me more.” Sometimes, after such bitches of complaints, I would drive back to the office complaining aloud to myself about the client I had just visited. A few times, unable to help myself, I started to complain to Yuuto. He nodded and said, “I know, it’s hard. I know. I understand.” And then I recognized my own words—the words I had been trained by Yuuto to say—and realized that he was probably acting, though he really did seem to care a little, and then I would stop.
Now, my tea growing cold, he looked at me. “Mission almost accomplished,” he said. “Hard part is over.”
He was right, and yet the confession weighed on me. Another man had hurt his wife and daughter. Another man, guilt-ridden and lonely and traumatized by war, had been afraid to speak the words I spoke for him. But had I really helped the man? I certainly hadn’t helped his wife and daughter. I tried to convince myself—though my only knowledge of Catholicism had come from Linda—that I was an intermediary between the man and the priest, just as the priest was an intermediary between me and God, and somehow it counted as a true Confession. Even so, I sat there in Yuuto’s office with the man and his sins on my shoulders.
“The company name is not Help,” he said. “It’s Help & Soar. Don’t forget Soar.” He finished his tea and looked at the cup in my hands. I took a sip because I thought he wanted me to. “Remember, we help not only the client but us. We are meant to soar too. Otherwise, why do this?”
“Maybe I’m not cut out for this work,” I said.
He smiled. “You said that the first week, and here you are.”
“I get caught up.”
“That’s what makes you good at this,” he said. “You are my best.”
“My father told me I wasn’t an actor.”
“Yes, I know. But look at you.”
“He would say I’m a failure.”
“Would you like to speak to me as your father?”
I laughed and shook my head. “So you’re working right now?”
“No, but I can,” he said. “A freebie.”
“No, thanks,” I said. I downed the rest of my cold tea, even though I hated the taste. Yuuto smiled, clearly pleased, and I couldn’t help but smile too.
But that night, I couldn’t sleep. My father was with me, and my mother. They were talking to me.
Father: We’re not cut from the same cloth.
Mother: He used to call me Sharon Sharon. Always twice. That’s how I knew he loved me.
Father: Your mother overreacts. Whatever the appropriate emotion, she triples it.
Mother: One day he started calling me Sharon, rather than Sharon Sharon. Then he stopped saying my name altogether.
Father: Careful, she’ll do the same to you. She’ll make you responsible for her emotions. You won’t be able to breathe.
Mother: We were the sun, the moon, the stars to each other.
Father: So much drama.
Mother: Let him run off to his soap opera. He’ll remember. He’ll come back.
Father: I’m not coming back.
Mother: Why didn’t you help me?
Father: It’s not your fault, kiddo. It’s not mine either.
I was fully awake now, still in bed, laptop on my lap, watching YouTube videos of my father. For a decade, until his death, he had a major role on a soap opera. I can watch any episode online and hear my father’s voice. He and the character he played shared the same first name, Jack. In the scene I was watching, Jack’s younger wife had just confessed to an affair. She begged for his forgiveness, but he said, “You manipulative bitch! I hope you die alone!” I listened to this line more than a dozen times, and then the episode ended and the show’s theme music played. It’s a beautiful, tear-inducing song. Or maybe work was getting to me. “Work should not feel like work,” Yuuto had told me more than once.
During my training, he told me that in order to do the best job, you had to bring yourself, your own emotional history, into the role you were playing. And he warned me that the reverse could happen, that the emotions from the role could seep into your real life. He smiled, as he often did, and said, “It’s all real life.”
I returned the following Saturday, kneeled, and waited. When the priest slid aside a solid wood panel so that I could see him through the openings in the grille, I began as I had the first time, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been one week since my last Confession.”
“God is listening,” he said.
“It’s me,” I said. “The man from last week who harmed his wife and daughter.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I said the Rosary every day.”
“Good.”
“But I don’t feel any better.”
“Is that why you come here?”
“No,” I said. “Well, yes, to be honest.”
“I believe that you will,” he said. “Eventually, God willing.”
“I have questions,” I said. “What good does it do if I come here and ask God’s forgiveness if I don’t make amends?”
“Good question.”
“Shouldn’t I seek forgiveness from my wife and daughter?”
“Yes,” he said, “but only for their sake, not your own, and only if doing so wouldn’t frighten them or further harm them.”
“What about a letter?”
“You could write them a letter, but not send it—not yet.”
“I wouldn’t know where to send it anyway.”
After a brief silence, he said, “Is there more?”
“I might need to write a letter to other people too,” I said. “My mother and father, for example.”
“Did you sin against them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They’re both dead,” I added.
“May they rest in peace,” he said.
As much as I liked that phrase, I had a hard time imagining either of my parents resting in peace. Their voices in my head were never peaceful. And my father, at least as I saw him in his role on the soap opera, lived a life in perpetual turmoil. The Jack he played had been divorced four times, twice as many as my father had. He had fathered two children out of wedlock. He had murdered his business rival only for the man to return from the dead. When my father died, the Jack he played did not, and one day a new actor took over the role. The character of Jack, it seemed, would never rest in peace.
“Is there more?” the priest said, and I resolved then to use this question the next time I was working “bitches of complaints.”
“Father, if you commit suicide, do you automatically go to hell? I mean, is it definite?”
The priest closed his eyes and paused before answering.
“Are you feeling tempted to commit such an act?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“If you are, you can tell me.”
“I’m not.”
“Every life is sacred,” he said. “Christ is inside every person. Imagine Christ as a light inside each of us. In some people, that light is large and bright. For others, it’s dim and small, but it’s still there. Heaven, as I see it, is when there’s nothing but light. And hell is when that light goes out—in other words, when a person allows Christ inside them to die.”
“So committing suicide is killing Christ.”
“In a way.”
“Sounds like you go to hell for something like that.”
“Are you sure this isn’t about you?”
“It’s not,” I said. “I mean, it is, in that I want to know.”
“Keep praying,” he said.
I did.
If anything, prayer brought Linda closer. It was probably a sin, but sometimes when we made out in her parents’ basement—this was during the months preceding my father leaving us and moving to California—I asked her to pray. At first she thought I was weird, and refused, but I kept asking, and she whispered the Hail Mary and the Our Father while we were kissing. I could feel the prayers on her lips, and on mine. She knew what was going on in my home. Just as she knew, in the months following my parents’ split, that my mother was having a breakdown. I wouldn’t have known to call it that then. I might have said that she was very sad, and frightening me with things she would say.
He’ll be sorry when—
By the time he comes back, it’ll be too late.
If someone asked what the worst time of my life was, I would say, honestly, that it was the year I turned fifteen—the year my father left, and then my mother. But if someone asked what the best time of my life was, I would say, honestly, that it was the same year—because of Linda. Linda, who left Queens for boarding school a year after I moved to California to live with my father. We exchanged letters, and saw each other a few times a year, but I was changed. I wasn’t right. I had become needy, like my mother. All I wanted to do was kiss Linda, to get lost inside her mouth. I told her, when we were sixteen, that I wanted to marry her, and in her next letter, she wrote, “I’m not sure I’m good for you right now.”
“It’s me again,” I said.
“Yes,” the priest said.
I hadn’t bothered with “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“I wrote a letter to my wife and daughter,” I said.
“Good,” he said.
It did feel good. And awful. Even though they weren’t my wife and child.
I gave the letters to Yuuto on the day I quit. I asked him if he would deliver the letters to the man for whom I had confessed. I wanted the man to read apologies perhaps he was incapable of putting into words. He had found enough words to tell me the terrible things he had done, and I believed that he was truly sorry. But I also believed that a confession to God meant very little without making amends to actual human beings.
“He is a client,” Yuuto said. “This is not our policy.”
“I know.”
“For you, I will consider.”
“Please.”
“Okay,” he said. “For you.”
I tried to write letters to my parents, but couldn’t—not yet.
As soon as I was able to, I ran away from my father. The only reason I didn’t move all the way back to New York was because I was also running away from the ghost of my mother. So I moved to Chicago, where I have lived since—far enough away from both of them.
Or so I thought.
They found me anyway, or I found them, in a confessional.
“Is there more?” the priest said.
Everyone, I believe, has one story they’re most afraid to tell. I told the priest mine: my parents’ split, my mother’s breakdown, how needy she was, how often she would corner me for hours to vent—to bitch her complaints about my father—and how I would listen and sometimes not listen, and then would lie in bed face down and scream into my pillow, so angry I wanted her to leave me alone, go away, die.
I was speaking as myself now, of course, though as far as the priest was concerned, I was still the same man who had hurt his wife and daughter.
“No matter the role,” Yuuto had told me, “you can’t help but become yourself, just a little. Sometimes, more than a little.”
“I should have known,” I told the priest. “She had the hole in the garage roof fixed after so many years. She parked the car in the garage even though it wasn’t meant for a car,” I said. “It was a junk garage in a small backyard in Queens. The car hardly fit down our narrow driveway.”
“You didn’t know,” the priest said. He had turned to look at me through the cross-shaped openings in the grille.
“I left the house to see my girlfriend.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I shouldn’t have gone out,” I said. “That hole had been in the garage roof for a decade, and suddenly she had it fixed.”
“You tried your best,” he said.
“So did my mother.”
“God knows that.”
“Is my mother in hell?”
“Your mother was ill,” he said.
“She was sad.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Tell me, Father,” I said. “Is my mother in hell?”
“She was, then,” he said.
“But now?”
“No one can say they know the extent of God’s mercy,” he said. “Not me. Not the Pope. No one.”
I breathed in deeply the smell of church—wood, incense, the musty curtain separating me from whoever might be waiting their turn.
“Is there more?” he said.
I wanted to ask him the same question.
I came home late that night—later than usual. Before I opened the garage door, I could hear the car running. My mother slumped at the wheel, sleeping. Not sleeping.
I needed to speak every detail, but the words were stuck.
“Son,” the priest said, “is there more?”
“Yes, Father,” I said. “There’s more. Much more,” I said. “So much that I don’t know where to begin.”
Now, thirty years old, on a cold January afternoon, huddled in my pea coat, I pushed against the wind toward God. I had venials, but also mortals. What eased my anxiety, as I entered the church, was Linda. Once I smelled her, the rest returned to me—her large brown eyes, her mouth, her voice. I had wanted to know everything about her, especially about her being Catholic. When she went to Confession, did she mention me? Not by name, silly. What about what we did? Sometimes. What did the priest say? The usual. Chastity, love, marriage. Was she nervous? The priest is more nervous than I am. Plus I never go face to face.
Relieved that the church was otherwise empty, I chose the traditional side of the confessional and closed the curtain behind me. I was confused—and alarmed—to see the priest clearly enough through the cross-shaped openings in the wood lattice grille between us. That meant he could see me. He was young for a priest, but older than me, his hair dark. I kneeled and began, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it’s been twenty years since my last Confession.”
“Welcome back,” the priest said.
“I forget what happens next,” I said.
“Have you reflected on your sins before coming here?”
“Yes.”
“And are you truly sorry for them?”
“Yes, Father.”
I was sorry. This had nothing to do with me, but to do this properly, I had to believe it had everything to do with me. Were I to recite a list of sins without true feeling, none would be the wiser, but I took pride in doing things right, and this task—I prefer not to use the word job—mattered greatly.
A soul was at stake.
I wasn’t sure I believed that—I hadn’t been raised Catholic and had never been to Confession—but someone did, a man who had opened his heart to me, and whose words resurrected buried feelings within me.
“Start big,” the priest said. “Say what you’re most afraid to say.”
I couldn’t summon the courage to say the worst—not specifically.
“I haven’t been a good man,” I said. “I’ve been ungrateful, unkind, hateful, and worse. I’ve failed people who used to love me but don’t love me anymore. And who could blame them.”
“Do you believe that God loves you?”
“I don’t see how.”
“He does,” the priest said. “Right now, especially.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Your sins, no matter what they may be, will be forgiven. All you need to do, with an open heart, is ask.”
“But some things,” I said.
“There isn’t one thing beyond God’s mercy,” he said. “Whatever it is, we’ll lay it at God’s feet, together.”
“It’s too much,” I said. “My life feels like one long sin. Mistake after mistake after mistake. Maybe the only right thing I did was beg my wife to take our daughter and run away. Maybe it was the one time a voice inside me, the part that knows right from wrong, cried out—you know, at the very least, better late than never, you can protect them. But before that, where was that voice?”
“It’s speaking now,” he said. “Let’s listen to it.”
“I was a scary man,” I said.
“You scared your wife and daughter.”
“Yes.”
“Is there more?”
“I hurt them.”
“You physically harmed them.”
“Forgive me, yes.”
Through the grille I saw the priest shift in his seat. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and said, “Are they safe now?”
“They’re gone.”
“So you’re no longer—”
“God, the damage I’ve done.”
After a pause, he said, “Is there anything else that voice inside you would like to say?”
“Just that I’m sorry, and I wish I could go back in time. But I don’t know when it began—that’s the problem. I’m a veteran, by the way. Iraq, PTSD. That’s not an excuse, Father.”
“Are you getting help?”
“I talk to someone.”
“Good,” he said. “The Church is here for you too. So am I.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Is there more?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I must be holding you up.”
He stood suddenly and opened the door of his box. Then he closed the door and sat down again.
“There’s no one else,” he said. “Only you, me, and God. Nothing is more important than this. Unless the church were on fire, nothing could make me leave until we’re finished.”
“They flinched when I came near them,” I said. “They were afraid, and I know what that feels like.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I just want God to know how sorry I am and that I’d give anything to go back in time and somehow—”
“This is the moment,” he said. “This and every moment after.”
“It’s been twenty years,” I said. “I know there have been other sins, but I can’t think of them. I’ve told you the big one. I never killed anyone in Iraq, as far as I know.”
“Your sins are forgiven,” he said. “For your penance, pray the Rosary every day for the next week.”
“That’s all?”
“Keep going after that—every day, if possible.”
“I will, Father.”
“Do you remember the Act of Contrition?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Repeat after me,” he said. “Lord have mercy on me.”
“Lord have mercy on me,” I said.
“Do not look upon my sins.”
“Do not look upon my sins.”
“But take away all my guilt.”
“But take away all my guilt.”
“Create in me a clean heart.”
“Create in me a clean heart.”
“And renew within me an upright spirit.”
“And renew within me an upright spirit.”
“Amen.”
“Amen,” I said.
“May God bless you,” he said. “Go forth and sin no more.”
On the other side of the curtain was a dark church dimly lit by votive candles. And on the other side of the heavy church doors was blinding sunlight, the same cold January day, the same winter wind to walk against.
“Mission accomplished,” I told my boss, Yuuto.
“Why so sad?” he said.
“Actually,” I said, “mission not yet accomplished. I need to say the Rosary every day for the rest of my life.”
“Really?”
“A week, the priest told me, but I don’t think that’s enough.”
“If Father says one week, then one week,” Yuuto said. “Then, mission accomplished.”
Each time I stood in Yuuto’s office, it seemed smaller. So did Yuuto. He was a small man—short, slight in build. I had no idea how old he was; he could have been sixty, but looked closer to forty. Not old enough to be my father, yet he was fatherly. He made me a cup of green tea and placed the teacup and saucer beside his own on his extremely neat and organized desk. He always had hot water ready to make tea—for me, for anyone. I didn’t drink tea, and he knew this, but he made the gesture anyway every time I was in his office. Sometimes, as now, I reciprocated by at least holding the warm cup in my hands. I knew that it made him feel good to believe that he was helping. His name, he had told me many times, meant: help and soar. This was, in fact, the name of his business—though it was more than a business to him. He cared. Or seemed to. He was, after all, an actor—a failed actor, like me. But, as far as I could tell, he wanted to do the right thing. He had worked for a similar company in Japan and had the idea that such a service would be welcome—and profitable—in the United States. He was right: in five years, he had doubled his employees. Need was continuing to grow. I had been working for him for just over a year.
Help & Soar provided almost any service you could imagine—except sex. I had waited in line for people to buy Springsteen tickets. I had been shoved and kicked on Black Friday outside a Best Buy and raced dozens of stumbling people to buy a video game for a child I would never meet. Once a week for six months, until she could no longer afford me, I had acted as a woman’s dead brother; we went to the movies together, cooked dinner, looked through photo albums, and reminisced about moments I pretended to have shared with her. I tried to act as her brother would act, based on a questionnaire she had completed, and whenever I did or said something her brother never would have, she kindly corrected me. Sometimes, naturally, I slipped into being myself, and she was fine with this. And then one day Yuuto told me that the assignment had come to its conclusion—for now. He reminded me that, no matter any attachment I might have developed for the role or for my “sister,” I was not to see her or contact her, and if she tried to contact me, I was not to respond. “Bad for business,” he said. “And remember, you have already helped very much.”
I had played the roles of father, son, dead husband, remorseful other man. One of my specialties was apologizing for things I never did. That and what Yuuto called by its Japanese name, “bitches of complaints,” what in the States he called “venting services.” This service provided anyone with such a need a pair of sympathetic ears—mine—to listen to tearful or angry rants about anything: unfair bosses, cheating spouses, ungrateful children, inconsiderate neighbors, rude airline employees, racism, the impending erasure of white men, the President of the United States, illegal immigrants. My job was to listen, nod, say, “I know, I understand, that must be hard, tell me more.” Sometimes, after such bitches of complaints, I would drive back to the office complaining aloud to myself about the client I had just visited. A few times, unable to help myself, I started to complain to Yuuto. He nodded and said, “I know, it’s hard. I know. I understand.” And then I recognized my own words—the words I had been trained by Yuuto to say—and realized that he was probably acting, though he really did seem to care a little, and then I would stop.
Now, my tea growing cold, he looked at me. “Mission almost accomplished,” he said. “Hard part is over.”
He was right, and yet the confession weighed on me. Another man had hurt his wife and daughter. Another man, guilt-ridden and lonely and traumatized by war, had been afraid to speak the words I spoke for him. But had I really helped the man? I certainly hadn’t helped his wife and daughter. I tried to convince myself—though my only knowledge of Catholicism had come from Linda—that I was an intermediary between the man and the priest, just as the priest was an intermediary between me and God, and somehow it counted as a true Confession. Even so, I sat there in Yuuto’s office with the man and his sins on my shoulders.
“The company name is not Help,” he said. “It’s Help & Soar. Don’t forget Soar.” He finished his tea and looked at the cup in my hands. I took a sip because I thought he wanted me to. “Remember, we help not only the client but us. We are meant to soar too. Otherwise, why do this?”
“Maybe I’m not cut out for this work,” I said.
He smiled. “You said that the first week, and here you are.”
“I get caught up.”
“That’s what makes you good at this,” he said. “You are my best.”
“My father told me I wasn’t an actor.”
“Yes, I know. But look at you.”
“He would say I’m a failure.”
“Would you like to speak to me as your father?”
I laughed and shook my head. “So you’re working right now?”
“No, but I can,” he said. “A freebie.”
“No, thanks,” I said. I downed the rest of my cold tea, even though I hated the taste. Yuuto smiled, clearly pleased, and I couldn’t help but smile too.
But that night, I couldn’t sleep. My father was with me, and my mother. They were talking to me.
Father: We’re not cut from the same cloth.
Mother: He used to call me Sharon Sharon. Always twice. That’s how I knew he loved me.
Father: Your mother overreacts. Whatever the appropriate emotion, she triples it.
Mother: One day he started calling me Sharon, rather than Sharon Sharon. Then he stopped saying my name altogether.
Father: Careful, she’ll do the same to you. She’ll make you responsible for her emotions. You won’t be able to breathe.
Mother: We were the sun, the moon, the stars to each other.
Father: So much drama.
Mother: Let him run off to his soap opera. He’ll remember. He’ll come back.
Father: I’m not coming back.
Mother: Why didn’t you help me?
Father: It’s not your fault, kiddo. It’s not mine either.
I was fully awake now, still in bed, laptop on my lap, watching YouTube videos of my father. For a decade, until his death, he had a major role on a soap opera. I can watch any episode online and hear my father’s voice. He and the character he played shared the same first name, Jack. In the scene I was watching, Jack’s younger wife had just confessed to an affair. She begged for his forgiveness, but he said, “You manipulative bitch! I hope you die alone!” I listened to this line more than a dozen times, and then the episode ended and the show’s theme music played. It’s a beautiful, tear-inducing song. Or maybe work was getting to me. “Work should not feel like work,” Yuuto had told me more than once.
During my training, he told me that in order to do the best job, you had to bring yourself, your own emotional history, into the role you were playing. And he warned me that the reverse could happen, that the emotions from the role could seep into your real life. He smiled, as he often did, and said, “It’s all real life.”
I returned the following Saturday, kneeled, and waited. When the priest slid aside a solid wood panel so that I could see him through the openings in the grille, I began as I had the first time, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been one week since my last Confession.”
“God is listening,” he said.
“It’s me,” I said. “The man from last week who harmed his wife and daughter.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I said the Rosary every day.”
“Good.”
“But I don’t feel any better.”
“Is that why you come here?”
“No,” I said. “Well, yes, to be honest.”
“I believe that you will,” he said. “Eventually, God willing.”
“I have questions,” I said. “What good does it do if I come here and ask God’s forgiveness if I don’t make amends?”
“Good question.”
“Shouldn’t I seek forgiveness from my wife and daughter?”
“Yes,” he said, “but only for their sake, not your own, and only if doing so wouldn’t frighten them or further harm them.”
“What about a letter?”
“You could write them a letter, but not send it—not yet.”
“I wouldn’t know where to send it anyway.”
After a brief silence, he said, “Is there more?”
“I might need to write a letter to other people too,” I said. “My mother and father, for example.”
“Did you sin against them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They’re both dead,” I added.
“May they rest in peace,” he said.
As much as I liked that phrase, I had a hard time imagining either of my parents resting in peace. Their voices in my head were never peaceful. And my father, at least as I saw him in his role on the soap opera, lived a life in perpetual turmoil. The Jack he played had been divorced four times, twice as many as my father had. He had fathered two children out of wedlock. He had murdered his business rival only for the man to return from the dead. When my father died, the Jack he played did not, and one day a new actor took over the role. The character of Jack, it seemed, would never rest in peace.
“Is there more?” the priest said, and I resolved then to use this question the next time I was working “bitches of complaints.”
“Father, if you commit suicide, do you automatically go to hell? I mean, is it definite?”
The priest closed his eyes and paused before answering.
“Are you feeling tempted to commit such an act?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“If you are, you can tell me.”
“I’m not.”
“Every life is sacred,” he said. “Christ is inside every person. Imagine Christ as a light inside each of us. In some people, that light is large and bright. For others, it’s dim and small, but it’s still there. Heaven, as I see it, is when there’s nothing but light. And hell is when that light goes out—in other words, when a person allows Christ inside them to die.”
“So committing suicide is killing Christ.”
“In a way.”
“Sounds like you go to hell for something like that.”
“Are you sure this isn’t about you?”
“It’s not,” I said. “I mean, it is, in that I want to know.”
“Keep praying,” he said.
I did.
If anything, prayer brought Linda closer. It was probably a sin, but sometimes when we made out in her parents’ basement—this was during the months preceding my father leaving us and moving to California—I asked her to pray. At first she thought I was weird, and refused, but I kept asking, and she whispered the Hail Mary and the Our Father while we were kissing. I could feel the prayers on her lips, and on mine. She knew what was going on in my home. Just as she knew, in the months following my parents’ split, that my mother was having a breakdown. I wouldn’t have known to call it that then. I might have said that she was very sad, and frightening me with things she would say.
He’ll be sorry when—
By the time he comes back, it’ll be too late.
If someone asked what the worst time of my life was, I would say, honestly, that it was the year I turned fifteen—the year my father left, and then my mother. But if someone asked what the best time of my life was, I would say, honestly, that it was the same year—because of Linda. Linda, who left Queens for boarding school a year after I moved to California to live with my father. We exchanged letters, and saw each other a few times a year, but I was changed. I wasn’t right. I had become needy, like my mother. All I wanted to do was kiss Linda, to get lost inside her mouth. I told her, when we were sixteen, that I wanted to marry her, and in her next letter, she wrote, “I’m not sure I’m good for you right now.”
“It’s me again,” I said.
“Yes,” the priest said.
I hadn’t bothered with “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“I wrote a letter to my wife and daughter,” I said.
“Good,” he said.
It did feel good. And awful. Even though they weren’t my wife and child.
I gave the letters to Yuuto on the day I quit. I asked him if he would deliver the letters to the man for whom I had confessed. I wanted the man to read apologies perhaps he was incapable of putting into words. He had found enough words to tell me the terrible things he had done, and I believed that he was truly sorry. But I also believed that a confession to God meant very little without making amends to actual human beings.
“He is a client,” Yuuto said. “This is not our policy.”
“I know.”
“For you, I will consider.”
“Please.”
“Okay,” he said. “For you.”
I tried to write letters to my parents, but couldn’t—not yet.
As soon as I was able to, I ran away from my father. The only reason I didn’t move all the way back to New York was because I was also running away from the ghost of my mother. So I moved to Chicago, where I have lived since—far enough away from both of them.
Or so I thought.
They found me anyway, or I found them, in a confessional.
“Is there more?” the priest said.
Everyone, I believe, has one story they’re most afraid to tell. I told the priest mine: my parents’ split, my mother’s breakdown, how needy she was, how often she would corner me for hours to vent—to bitch her complaints about my father—and how I would listen and sometimes not listen, and then would lie in bed face down and scream into my pillow, so angry I wanted her to leave me alone, go away, die.
I was speaking as myself now, of course, though as far as the priest was concerned, I was still the same man who had hurt his wife and daughter.
“No matter the role,” Yuuto had told me, “you can’t help but become yourself, just a little. Sometimes, more than a little.”
“I should have known,” I told the priest. “She had the hole in the garage roof fixed after so many years. She parked the car in the garage even though it wasn’t meant for a car,” I said. “It was a junk garage in a small backyard in Queens. The car hardly fit down our narrow driveway.”
“You didn’t know,” the priest said. He had turned to look at me through the cross-shaped openings in the grille.
“I left the house to see my girlfriend.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I shouldn’t have gone out,” I said. “That hole had been in the garage roof for a decade, and suddenly she had it fixed.”
“You tried your best,” he said.
“So did my mother.”
“God knows that.”
“Is my mother in hell?”
“Your mother was ill,” he said.
“She was sad.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Tell me, Father,” I said. “Is my mother in hell?”
“She was, then,” he said.
“But now?”
“No one can say they know the extent of God’s mercy,” he said. “Not me. Not the Pope. No one.”
I breathed in deeply the smell of church—wood, incense, the musty curtain separating me from whoever might be waiting their turn.
“Is there more?” he said.
I wanted to ask him the same question.
I came home late that night—later than usual. Before I opened the garage door, I could hear the car running. My mother slumped at the wheel, sleeping. Not sleeping.
I needed to speak every detail, but the words were stuck.
“Son,” the priest said, “is there more?”
“Yes, Father,” I said. “There’s more. Much more,” I said. “So much that I don’t know where to begin.”