Chapter Fourteen

6:10 am

St. Sebastian High School sports field

NYC

Now no cop in their right mind would ever voluntarily go see a department shrink for anything more than a quick question or two. None of them have a bleeding clue what it's like to be out on the street, college egghead assholes, the lot of them. So when it came time for the required visit after a critical incident, like, say your fiancée being shot and dying on you, it was far better to put your game face on and make them believe you were just as fine as any angel in heaven. And you were, after all. If you were weak enough to really need a shrink, well, could you really be trusted to have someone's back? Besides, they all bowed to the brass, you know, those reports of theirs were always coming back to bite someone in the ass, and that someone might not be you.

But a priest, oh now, a priest was different. You never knew when you carried a badge. Take the wrong corner, slip up one second, just be on the opposing side of someone's Very Bad Day, and the next thing you know it's you and St. Peter having a pint before he let's one of New York's Finest into the ultimate retirement. It did well to always be on the rights with God so it was only the smart thing, then, to have a priest on your side. Besides, confession was good for the soul and couldn't be repeated in court or to IA.

So while seeing a shrink was frowned upon by the other cops, no one questioned what went on between a man and his priest.

Which was why Don Flack, Jr. joined his old friend Ryan McMurphy Jr., aka Father Ryan, for a few miles around the track of the high school where he worked three mornings a week.

Father Ryan was, in fact, a five way whammy. Not only was he a priest, Point One, but he'd also been a friend since St. Agatha's first grade. He'd been there for everything from hockey in the frozen street to May Kellerman after the fall dance, when they were all of fifteen. He knew all the high points of the past, and all their ramifications and results, which was Point Two. His old man was also a cop, one who served with the legendary Don Flack, Sr., and he had three brothers and two brothers-in-law on the force. In fact, it was only by virtue of him claiming a Higher Calling, and his mother's subsequent Putting Her Foot Down that Ryan wasn't a cop himself. So he had damned good second hand knowledge of what it was like Out There, something you couldn't get out of a book (Point Three).

And if after the seminary the Diocese sent him to college to become a shrink, one who specialized in critical incident psychology and dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, well, that's was no one else's business. But it was Point Four, and why the unflappable Don Flack Jr. stayed so unflappable. He could tell Ryan anything from what happened to the guy who killed Jess to how he really felt about Mack Taylor, get a thoroughly professional opinion, and Ryan could and would always claim the seal of the confessional.

Besides, he knew Ryan's Big Secret – that the only reason why he took the collar was because after nothing but Gifted classes, and having both boys graduate high school at sixteen, Valedictorian and Salutatorian (Ryan got first because he was taking the collar, that was the only difference between them), both Don Flack Sr. and Ryan McMurphy Sr. insisted their sons follow them into the police academy, and both refused to have anything to do with any paperwork that would allow their boys to become egghead liberals who forgot where they came from and thought they were better than their old man. Ryan was the one with the balls to stand up to his old man, lock it in his pants and find a way to go to college anyway.

Flack respected and envied him for that.

And Flack was the only one who knew that next year, as soon as Ryan had that all-hallowed PhD, he was telling the church to go straight to the hell it created. Because there had never been any calling, both men had fallen about as far away from the church as you could get. As Ryan put it over his third pint one night, if there was really a God running things then he was one sick perverted sonofabitch, so it was a hellofalot healthier to believe the evidence, that there was no one running the show at all. Flack raised his own pint, and agreed with Point Five.

The problem was that the Bishop, who was beginning to suspect that Ryan's faith was nothing but a show, had sent him away for the summer on retreat, which did nothing for Ryan's faith, or lack thereof, but did give him a chance to nearly finish his dissertation. The end result was that Flack had to spend the first chunk of their first run of the fall getting Ryan all caught up.

"And you want to marry this girl?"

Yeah. It's like she's this perfect little fae thing who grew up in Tir Na Og, where everything was beautiful and clean and not the crap of New York, ya know. Then some evil king from our world snatched her out of there."

"And you're the knight in shining armor who rescued her. Your metaphor is crap, you know that? And you need analysis. Let's stop, damn it, I've just spent three months on my ass."

"Then running is good for you. Why is my metaphor crap?"

"Other than that you have a savior complex as wide as the East River? Because if that was the perfect fairyland then the lost princess would be welcomed back with opened arms, no questions asked, and the knight would be everyone's hero. Instead they're planning to punish her for disturbing their perfection; it's the princess' fault for getting captured by the evil king in the first place. And you, Mr. Knight, ought to have left well enough alone."

"For serious?"

"They weren't looking for her."

Ugh, Flack thought, good point. "So now what?"

"To make use of that painful metaphor, think of fairyland as a cage. Gilded and clean but still a cage, built out of conformity. There's something very safe about a cage, you can't get out but nothing can get in. So long as everyone plays along that cage stays intact, and everyone has the sense of being safe, but if one person tries to be themselves, poof, the cage is gone. Ergo, if the evil king pounced, then the cage wasn't secure, which means she had to be breaking the rules of conformity. Now that the evil king is gone she's been trying to hang on to that cage, to reestablish the rule of conformity even if only in her head, because it represents the only safety she's known. Yoder made her realize that she can't do that and be in any way honest enough with her self, not even honest enough to maintain her own sanity. Your job is to help her learn that she can be safe in this big, confusing world without a cage, and so be free to fly."

"Yeah, but she wasn't the one breaking the rules. She didn't let the evil king in."

"Doesn't matter. She's different now; she threatens the stability of the cage by existing."

"That's not fair."

"A cop thinking life is fair."

Flack chewed on this for a half a lap. "So what do I do?"

"What you've been doing. Keep communicating, encourage her to try those wings, don't turn away from her even when it gets real sticky. Don't let her try to slip back into that cage, as much as she will have to mourn the loss of the beauty of it. And remember, the world out here isn't kind to fae, a lot of the time it expects a kind of conformity of its own. You're going to be fighting at both ends."

"What if in the end she wants to fly away from me?"

"If it's really love, you have to take the risk. You know this."

"You're a joy in the morning, you know that?"

Father Ryan laughed at his friend. "That's what you get for making me run before coffee."