He Took Me to Catch the Rat, But the Rat Was Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: O Holy Night
During the Christmas Eve solo Cathal Dwyer walks into St. Colman's with three men, tells Aisling she is coming with him until her father comes home, and she walks out on her own feet and leaves her father the voicemail herself.
Cathal walked into church during the second verse of "O Holy Night."
I saw him from the choir loft, where I stood at the rail with my hand on the wood.
He took the last pew and kept his black coat buttoned.
Three men stood behind him, and none of them held a hymnal.
I had waited six years for his family to send someone through a door for me, and I did not stop singing.
My father kept their books until the winter he took forty-one thousand dollars of their money and left the state.
That same month, his brother died on a cellar staircase in a police raid, and the family decided somebody had sold him.
They decided it was my father.
My mother sat alone in the fourth pew from then until she died, and nobody passed her the peace.
I took the high note on "fall on your knees" and held it.
It was the one thing in that church that belonged to me.
When the communion line moved up the aisle, Cathal did not stand.
The three men stayed in the pew with him.
He watched me the whole time.
After the last hymn the children went out the side door in their coats with their mothers' hands on their shoulders.
The choir director put her mouth next to my ear.
"There's a way out through the rectory, Aisling," she said.
"Go now."
"My mother's things are in that house on Cumberland Street," I said.
"If I run, he goes there instead."
I went into the sacristy and hung my white robe on its hook.
The door opened behind me and closed again.
Cathal Dwyer stood with his back against it.
He was six foot two, with cropped dark red hair and a nose that had been broken once and set badly.
He looked tired, and he looked at me with his mind already made up.
"That was a good solo," he said.
"It's the only reason I'm still standing up," I said.
"The Table met at six tonight."
His voice was low and even, and he did not move from the door.
"They've given your father until the eleventh of February to kneel in this church and say what he did."
"My father is in Florida," I said.
"Then he'll hear that his daughter is in my house."
"I'm not going to your house."
"You'll sleep there," Cathal said.
"You'll eat at my table, and you'll go nowhere without my man behind you."
"And if I say no?"
He crossed the room in three steps and put his thumb on my mouth.
He pressed down on my lower lip, slowly, until my lips parted under it.
I could smell snow on his coat and the candle smoke in his hair.
"I'm not asking," he said.
"And I'll tell you now, so you can't say I didn't."
His thumb moved along my jaw.
"I mean to have you in my bed before the new year, Aisling."
"You'll hate it right up until you don't."
I slapped him.
I hit him hard enough that my palm burned, and his head turned with it.
He put his tongue against the inside of his cheek and looked back at me.
"That's one," he said.
The door opened.
The priest stood there in his green vestments with his hand on the knob.
"Cathal, not in my church," he said.
"She walks out the front, Father," Cathal said.
"That's all I'm asking."
The priest looked at me and waited.
I took my coat off the hook.
My mother's rosary was in the pocket, and I closed my hand around it.
"Take the children home, Father," I said.
"I'll go."
I walked down the center aisle past the manger and the poinsettias.
I walked past the fourth pew on the left, and I did not look at it.
Cathal followed two steps behind me, and nobody carried me anywhere.
Snow was falling on Allegheny Avenue, and a long black car waited at the curb with its engine running.
I opened the back door myself and got in.
Cathal slid in beside me and took out his phone.
He held it out, and the screen shook a little in his hand.
"Your father changed his number twice," he said.
"It took six years to find the third one."
He pressed call and put it on speaker.
It rang five times.
"Yeah," said a man's voice, thick with sleep.
"Dad," I said.
There was a silence long enough for me to hear the television behind him.
"You've got the wrong number, sweetheart," my father said.
The line went dead.
He had called me sweetheart since I was four years old.
I took the phone out of Cathal's hand and redialed.
It went straight to voicemail.
"This is Aisling," I said.
"A Dwyer has me in his car, and the Table wants you on your knees in St. Colman's on the eleventh."
"Mom sat in the fourth pew with nobody next to her until the day she died," I said.
"Come home or don't, but I'll remember which."
I pressed the button to end it and put the phone back in Cathal Dwyer's hand.
"Drive," I told the driver.
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