A small smile tugged on Adam’s lips. “Was it nice?”
“It’s a lovely little village,” Father said before Mother cut him off.
“It’s not,” she insisted, going pale in the light coming through old wooden windows Adam feared she might faint at any moment.
Father sighed, placing the damp napkin in an empty dish. “What your mother means is that it’s very remote and that the locals still cultivate many pagan traditions. You will have your work cut out for you, but the people wear their hearts on their sleeves.”
Mother grabbed Father’s hand and offered him a smile so fake it made Adam’s teeth ache in sympathy. “Honey. Could you bring us some cherry compote? I’m sure Adam will appreciate homemade preserves for dessert.”
It was obviously a way for her to have a couple of minutes alone with Adam, but all three of them pretended the short trip to their cellar was really about cherries.
Shadows seemed darker than usual on Mother’s angular face, her lips pursed, her brows low under her fringe, but she didn’t even look up at Adam and only spoke once the apartment door shut behind Father. “You cannot go there.”
Adam cleared his throat and stuffed a piece of cutlet into his mouth. He hated to disappoint his mother, but he had no say in where he worked, and she knew that. When he’d come for dinner earlier, he’d worried she’d be devastated over parting for six months, but her reaction was far more dramatic than he’d expected.
“It’s just a six months. Maybe you could visit me there?”
Mother massaged her temples, and her blonde locks wiggled when she shook her head before staring back at Adam with eyes almost as blue as his own. “You don’t understand. There’s evil in that place. I know it might sound strange, but I swear it’s true.”
Adam yearned for Father to come back. What was it this time? He’d been weirded out when Mother claimed to have smelled roses in the room after finishing a biography of Father Pio, but this was already taking the cake. Even her claims about Adam’s sleepwalking being induced by demonic possession were negligible in comparison.
“Mom, Satan doesn’t work in such ways. I am a priest. I’ll be fine.”
She grabbed his hand, and he couldn’t help but notice the rosary ring on her finger—with a small cross in place of some kind of stone and ten little bumps along its circumference. “Just stay quiet and listen to me. That place is where you were conceived, after we tried for four years with no success whatsoever!”
Adam cleared his throat. “And that’s… bad?”
The crow’s feet by her eyes deepened when she scowled. “We were there to spend some time in nature. Hike, and that sort of thing. The villagers seemed normal but continued some old pagan traditions. You know, like hanging red ribbons above a baby’s crib to keep it safe from mamunas, or jumping over a bonfire on St. John’s Night. It all seemed so innocent, and we both got caught up in it.”
Adam remained still out of respect, but worry spread through his mind when he realized that if religious devotion wasn’t within the social norm, people might have considered his mother a bit mad. But he listened when she continued, entwining her trembling fingers.
“We set up our tent in the wild, and one morning I got up really early. The weather was so beautiful that I decided to gather some raspberries from bushes we’d seen nearby. Something startled me, and I saw a nun, right there, in the middle of the forest. But that’s not the strangest thing. She was pregnant.”
Adam frowned. It wasn’t impossible for a nun to get pregnant, but he doubted there were any who’d choose to be out and about in their robes once their condition became obvious. But he listened, watching Mom turn the rosary ring on her finger, as if she were praying.
“I didn’t want to be insensitive and pretended I didn’t see her bump, but as she joined me and collected fruit herself, she started the topic of babies. It was a strange experience, but I told her about our problems with conceiving. She touched my abdomen and told me I’d surely have a son of my own very soon. And then… she just turned and made her way down the path leading deeper into the forest. I called out after her, and when she looked back, her stomach was completely flat, as if I’d imagined her baby bump. And a month later, I found out I was pregnant with you,” she said, voice trembling.
Adam’s head was full of chaotic thoughts when he met her reddened gaze. She was mentally sound, even if her zeal sometimes skirted the line between religious devotion and fantasy. But he also realized that this wasn’t the first time she advised him not to travel to that remote region of the country.