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good Catholic child, towrestle the feeling away. He’s mine , I breathed to myself, in and out, a premonition of loss eclipsing every need in that room. I was nine years old and he was all I had.
    Moments later, Pauline stomped over in a high-heeled rage, I knew it, I knew it, how many times did we warn you, we knew it, we knew it , guarding us as Father Mike took Mrs. Blanchard to get her eye dressed. off they went in his big blue car. Seeing her planted there, her narrow, translucent, finely veined hand still packed over her eye, I surrendered to a form of vertigo, a rolling dislocation that made me look at this crumpled, crying woman, this woman I adored, and think, That’s my seat you’re in. Get up.
    After that night, Father Mike forbade me to cross the Blanchard threshold whenever Ray came home. Not that it made much difference, for Mr. Blanchard spent more time at sea than on land that summer, then vanished for good in the fall. Soon thereafter, Father Mike was made to leave. Then me.

SIX
    It always began the same way: a startled waking in the terrifying dark. Moonless. Starless. The stairs poured downward, long and endless; my heart seemed to beat outside my body. Perhaps I dreamt of monsters, or bad men who had taken my parents away. Once I reached the landing it was a clear shot to his tiny bedroom off the parlor. His door was open. He listened for me. I flung myself into his bed, scattering cats.
    “What is it?” he asked. “What, Lizzy?”
    It was the smell of him—the drugstore shaving-lotion smell that to this day brings a wave of longing—that unloosed me. I began to wail, probably for my lost parents, and I wanted nothing but to be held all night by this poor, saddled man who had to get up at five for the early Mass. He petted my hair, told me my parents were watching over us, and Jesus, too, and our guardian angels, and that nothing else bad would happen. He promised.
    “It’s a nightmare,” he said. “Nightmares are make-believe.”
    “Can I sleep here, Father?”
    “You can stay here till you feel better, and then I’ll take you back upstairs.”
    “But I want to sleep here. Pleasepleaseplease.”
    “I’ll carry you up. You just think about your guardian angel, that nice, big angel that’s going to sit by your bed all night long, and you’ll feel all better by the time we get you tucked in, I promise.”
    “Why can’t I sleep here?”
    “Because girls aren’t supposed to sleep in boys’ beds.” “But you’re not a boy.”
    “Actually, Lizzy, I am.” That’s just how he said it, too: Actually, Lizzy, I am.
    “You’re not. Please, Father. Pleasepleaseplease.”
    Most people’s memories do not go back this far. I was so small on this night I’m thinking of that I did not know girl from boy. So small that he could not refuse me.
    He tucked me into his bed. He put me on top of his blankets, then covered me with a quilt. He then slipped back beneath the covers and kept his arm around me. This was not exactly the arrangement I wanted—I wanted to sleep under there, where he was—but it did the trick. I woke in my own room in daylight.
    Waking in terror every few weeks, I fled down those stairs again and again, beelining for Father Mike’s bed. He picked me up, carried me back upstairs, talked me back to sleep, but after two or three more trips he’d relent and let me burrow into his bed. Who would blame him? Who would imitate the unique loneliness of the parish priest, no live-in brothers to buoy him, no wife to comfort him, no friend to stand with him on equal ground? He let a child into his bed, always arranging the blankets in that fussy chasteness, and let her take her comfort. What was he thinking, waiting for my breathing to slow, my quivering body folded against his? Was he thanking God for me? Was he wishing to be a normal man, a father who had to get up not to say Mass but to make first shift at the shoe shop or the mill?
    I always woke in my own bed, no longer