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Back Afraid of the Light
Chapters (29)
  1. Cover
  2. About the Author
  3. Also by Douglas Kennedy
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. one
  7. two
  8. three
  9. four
  10. five
  11. six
  12. seven
  13. eight
  14. nine
  15. ten
  16. eleven
  17. twelve
  18. thirteen
  19. fourteen
  20. fifteen
  21. sixteen
  22. seventeen
  23. eighteen
  24. nineteen
  25. twenty
  26. twenty-one
  27. twenty-two
  28. twenty-three
  29. THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

‘It’s God’s will,’ she told me when I found myself in freefall after losing another child. ‘Your lack of faith is allowing God to punish us in this way. You have brought this all down on us. Because God knows that you have fled Him.’

eight

YOU HAVE BROUGHT this all down on us. Because God knows that you have fled Him.

I tried to write that comment off as part of the anguish that Agnieska was going through. But it pushed me away further. It also added to the guilt I was already feeling about retreating into my work and focusing all my energy and love on Klara – which, in turn, pushed her mother away even more. Then one day she came home from work and informed me that she’d had a panic attack while cleaning a patient’s teeth, causing him to bleed. The dentist had immediately suspended her from his practice – and she informed me there and then that her days as a hygienist had ended. No longer could she face looking into someone’s mouth again. From this moment on she was going to devote herself to the Church. While I tried to be supportive – and mentioned that losing the second salary was going to impact our standard of living – her response was a simple one:

‘“In sickness and in health … for better and for worse …”’

It was difficult arguing my way out of that one. Even Todor counseled me that – after all she had suffered – ‘the important pastoral work she was doing was crucial to her well-being’.

Todor informed me of this around the same time that he had finally been, parish-wise, bumped upwards. No, he hadn’t achieved the loftier heights he was aiming for in the Church. The Archbishop of Los Angeles found him a little too ambitious for his liking. The fact that he was born in Sofia and brought over to the States as a baby made him come across to His Eminence as an emigrant on the make (as Todor learned from certain insiders in the Church). Especially as this archbishop was an old-school Irish American with a wildly anti-Communist bias who even regarded John Paul II with suspicion because he came from the Socialist East – and also took pleasure in holding back far too outwardly ambitious priests. So Todor was blocked from advancing further up the hierarchy until His Eminence died in his sleep one night. A few years later his successor was impressed by the anti-abortion work that Todor was doing in the Valley and decided to give him the posh parish he always craved: Beverly Hills.