A Talk with a Pastor and a Nun

When I got back from Edinburgh, I talked to one of the boys who knows how to drive into taking me to a church here in Bucharest. The sister of the man my father killed goes there. I told the Roma boy not to wait on me. I waited out front in the snow until the congregation let out, and there she was coming out the church door. When she stopped to greet the pastor, I confronted her.

"Why are you here?" she asked.

"You know why," I said. "My father." I said that right in front of the pastor. She walked off and wouldn't talk to me, but then I talked to her pastor. I told him that she lied at  my father's trial. "She's in your congregation, and she lied and sent an innocent man to prison for life. Her lie is now your problem too."

"No, it's not," he said.

"You're in charge of her soul. That makes her your problem."

Can't say he liked it much, but he got in his car and went to talk to the woman. I waited four hours for him. I stood in the snow for two hours, and then a nun come out and asked me if I'd like some tea, so I went inside. She took me into a back room. The sound of a church with no one in it is so quiet. I felt like falling on my knees right there and asking God to help my father. The nun had a hotplate and some tea bags. A little goat milk. She received a call from the pastor, and he told her about me is the reason she brought me inside. I told her that the woman had lied abut my father. "Killing a man is a bad thing, even if it's a accident," she said. I started crying. I don't cry a lot these days, but my mother is gone. I know I shouldn't have run away from home, but I was mad at the world. Four years is a long time to be mad. But visiting my father in Codlea Prison, and then seeing how my mother had abandoned him changed me. It just hurt a lot seeing my mother with a new life and a new family.  After the nun and I talked a while, then she gave me a book to reed. She said she had to fill out a financial report.

Finally the priest returned. He asked me if I had seen what happened. I said no, but my father's not a liar. As a matter of fact he's probably too honest. He knew he was as much to blame as the other man. What I heard was that the other man tried to use a shovel on my father, but my father took it away from him, but the man wouldn't leave him alone. My father hit him with it. He felt bad about it, but there was nothing he could do.

The priest didn't seem very impressed with my story. He said he'd s talk to the woman again. I told the priest that life is a long time to spend in prison for an accident.

The nun drove me to the Roma camp. She asked me why I stayed with a Godless people.

I told her because no Christians would take me, and I had to live somehow. We'd come to Bucharest a couple of years before from a town in the northeast corner of Romania. I hadn't seen any of our family in years. Many of them had been killed under Communism. Wiped out almost our entire village.

It was getting dark when I arrived back at the house. Drina wouldn't speak to me for a few minutes. I believe she doesn't much want my father out of jail because that would mean that I'd leave her, and she'd have to find help somewhere else. I don't hold out hope for anything happening. I just write my vampire novel, and let the world keep turning. I care more about my main character than I do about my own life. She's a sweet innocent girl who has a lot on her plate too. I'm well into Chapter 34.