When She Woke (37 page)

No,
Hannah thought.
Not so amazing.

Reverend Easter poured a generous amount in one mug and a splash in the other and handed the former to Hannah. The pungent smell of alcohol assaulted her nose, and she held it at arm’s length. “You drink every last drop of that. Consider it medicinal,” the priest said, with serene authority. Hannah complied, raising it to her lips and taking a tiny sip. She expected it to be acrid and unpleasant, but it was delicious, tasting of honey and lemons and something charred that must be the Scotch. And it did make her feel better, and swiftly, fanning ripples of warmth outward from her belly, relaxing her muscles and soothing her frayed nerves.

Reverend Easter sipped her own in companionable silence, leaving Hannah free do nothing but sit and warm her bones. The older woman—Hannah guessed she was in her late fifties or early sixties—looked at her from time to time, her expression curious but not avid or calculating. Not judging. The priest didn’t want anything from her, Hannah realized. Not thanks or contrition or confession, though she had the sense that if she wanted to confess, Reverend Easter would listen with sincere interest and unflappable calm, no matter what came out of Hannah’s mouth. She studied her companion for more clues to her nature, wondering what it was like to be a female priest, whether she’d ever been married—she wore no wedding ring—and how much of what the Bible said was true she actually believed. Somehow, Hannah couldn’t imagine a woman who kept a secret stash of whiskey and referred to Jack Frost’s balls like old friends believing there’d been dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.

“Feel better?” Reverend Easter asked, after a while.

“Much. Thank you.”

“Well,” the priest said, with a satisfied nod, “that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“You know that nagging feeling you get sometimes, like you’ve left something undone? Less than an hour ago I was in my nightgown, brushing my teeth, seconds away from crawling into my warm bed, when it reared up and started its poking and prodding. ‘Oh, no,’ I told it, ‘I’m not about to go out in this mess, there aren’t a dozen people in this entire city who know how to drive in snow, and though I may be old I’m not ready to die just yet.’ But it’s stubborn, that feeling, even stubborner than I am. It just kept pestering me until finally I gave in and got dressed and drove back down here. And now, I know why.”

“You think it was because of me.”

“I’m sure of it.”

“Do you believe it was God’s doing?” Hannah wanted so badly for the priest to give an equally unequivocal answer:
Yes, absolutely, of course it was.

“Do you?” the priest asked.

“I’d like to, but …” Hannah shook her head.

“But how can God exist, in the face of all the cruelty and injustice in the world, is that it?” the priest supplied.

Hannah nodded, and Reverend Easter said, “A Catholic would tell you that questioning God is your first mistake, that faith must be blind and absolute or it’s not faith at all. Of course, if I were a Catholic, I’d be wearing a habit not a collar, and my opinion about such important doctrinal questions wouldn’t matter a damn to anyone.” She took a sip of her tea and considered Hannah with arched brows. “Something tells me you’re familiar with that kind of faith.”

“Yes, I am, but I’m not … I wasn’t Catholic.”

Reverend Easter waved her hand dismissively. “It doesn’t matter to God what we call ourselves, or even what we call Him. We’re the only ones who care about that. But as an Episcopalian and not an evangelical,” she said, with a knowing look at Hannah, “I’ll answer your question with another question, or rather, with a bunch of them, which is how we tend to do things. How else do you explain the miracle of your beating heart, the compassion of strangers, the existence of Mozart and Rilke and Michelangelo? How do you account for redwoods and hummingbirds, for orchids and nebulas? How can such beauty possibly exist without God? And how can we see it and know it’s beautiful and be moved by it, without God?”

Hannah felt a jolt of recognition, of rapport. But then, with a shrug, she refused the offered bait. “Maybe beauty just is,” she said. “Maybe it’s inexplicable, or beyond explanation.”

Reverend Easter beamed with the pride of a teacher whose student had just solved an especially tricky equation. “An apt definition of the Almighty, wouldn’t you say?”

Hannah bit her lip and looked down into her nearly empty mug, swirling the remaining liquid around.

“You don’t have to stop thinking and asking questions to believe in God, child. If He’d wanted a flock of eight billion sheep, He wouldn’t have given us opposable thumbs, much less free will.”

Hannah stared at the eddy in her mug, her thoughts an untidy muddle. She’d been taught that free will was an illusion; that God had a plan for her and for everyone, a pre-mapped destiny. But if that were true, then He’d meant for her to get pregnant and have an abortion, to be chromed, to be despised and humiliated, kidnapped and almost raped. She saw suddenly that this was at the core of her loss of faith: a reluctance to believe in a God who was that indifferent or that cruel.

And yet. There had been good things too, gifts of kindness and love: Kayla, Paul, Simone, the messages from Aidan, the stranger on the motorcycle, and now, this compassionate, knowing priest. Hannah had not been tortured by the Fist, had not been raped or captured by the police. God’s doing, or the result of her own choices—to become Aidan’s lover, to have the abortion, to take the road the Novembrists offered, to make love with Simone? What was all of that, if not an exercise of free will? She squeezed her temples between her thumb and middle finger, feeling confused and utterly spent. How could predetermination and free will both exist?

“It’s late, and I can see that you’re tired,” the priest said kindly. “I’ll just ask you one more question. You needn’t answer it unless you want to.”

Hannah made herself meet the older woman’s gaze, prepared to say,
Because I had an abortion.

“I know why I’m here tonight,” the priest said. “Do you?”

“No,” Hannah said. A lie, but if she spoke the words—
I came looking for Him
—then she would have to act on them, would have to leave the shelter of her skepticism and hack her way through the tangle of her doubts and fears, failings and longings. What if she lacked the strength? What if she mustered the strength, but there was no grace at the end of the journey? What if she found grace but lost herself again in the process?

“If you want to unburden yourself, I’ll listen.” Reverend Easter bowed her head slightly and angled her body away from Hannah’s— inviting to her to confess, she realized, and to receive absolution. What a relief it would be to lay down her burdens, to hand them off to Reverend Easter and to God! But as badly as she wanted to, it just felt too easy right now, and too overwhelmingly hard.

“I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Reverend Easter turned back to her. “There’s nothing to apologize for. When you’re ready, you’ll know it.”

They stood, Hannah with a wince. “You should take some aspirin and put some ice on that when you get wherever you’re going. Cabbage leaves are good for swelling too.”

Hannah smiled at the image of herself walking around with cabbage stuffed down the back of her pants. “Thanks, I will.”

When they reached the side door, the priest asked, “Can I drop you somewhere?”

“No, I don’t have far to go.”

Reverend Easter considered her, head tilted to one side as if she were trying to make out the words to a faraway song. “That may be,” she said finally. “Or it may be that you have a greater distance than you think. But either way, you’ll get there eventually.”

Hannah leaned down and gave her a swift, impetuous kiss on the cheek. The priest stiffened involuntarily, and Hannah knew somehow that she was uncomfortable because she wasn’t used to being touched. Was she lonely? Did she ever regret the choices she’d made?

“May I give you a blessing before you go?” the priest asked, her color high.

Hannah took the other woman’s hand in both of her own, ignoring the slight resistance, and squeezed it. “It’s not necessary, Reverend. You already have.”

• • •

S
HE ENCOUNTERED NO
one else on the way to Aidan’s. She was the sole inhabitant of an eerie white universe, silent except for the
squidge
of her boots on the snow.

She had an anxious moment when she came to the gate and another at the back door, but both were unlocked as promised. She stepped into marvelous warmth; wastefully, Aidan had left the heat on for her. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw the flashlight on the wall. It came on when she pulled it from the socket, revealing a narrow room lined with boots, umbrellas and coats hanging from a row of hooks. One was empty, and she hung her own jacket there, between a large wool overcoat and a smaller light blue one. The irony of the arrangement wasn’t lost on her, but she was too weary to care.

She took off her boots and moved through the house in her stocking feet, getting quick glimpses of a large kitchen, a formal living room, a family room. She found the stairs and went up them, feeling like a burglar in an old vid, flinching a little with each protesting groan of the wood. Half a dozen doors opened off the hallway. She hesitated before turning the handle of the first one, hoping it wasn’t the master bedroom. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want its specificities imprinted on her brain: the antique or modern wood or wrought-iron frame of the queen- or king-sized bed where Aidan and Alyssa slept; the stripes or flowers adorning the cotton or linen of the duvet cover or bedspread or handmade quilt; the pale pink or yellow of the cotton or silk or cashmere robe draped carelessly over the chaise longue or footboard of the bed; the two pairs of satin or leather or boiled-wool slippers on either side of the bed, neatly aligned, waiting for his and her feet.

She opened the first door and found a book-lined office. As she stepped inside Aidan’s scent enveloped her, triggering an ache, a hollow pang akin to hunger. The temptation to linger here in his sanctum, to shut the door, turn off the flashlight and sit breathing in his scent in the chair that had cradled his body countless times was outweighed, barely, by her need for sleep. She left, closing the door behind her. The room across the hall, she was relieved to find, was the one she sought: a smallish guest room with a double bed and a connecting bath. She dropped her pack gratefully on the floor and shucked out of her clothes, wrinkling her nose at their musky odor. It occurred to her that she could give Farooq a serious run for his money, but she was too done in to do more than run a wet washcloth over her face and upper body and brush her teeth before collapsing into the bed.

Her last thought before sleep claimed her was of Reverend Easter, snug in her nightgown in her own lonely bed. Without pausing to think about it, Hannah sent off a prayer that the priest would have a long and happy life, and someone to love her and hold her in his—or her—arms at the end of it.

T
HE RHYTHMIC CREAKING
of the stairs yanked her from oblivion into instant, total wakefulness. She waited, holding her breath, and heard him pause, as she had, at the top of the stairs.

“Hannah!” he called out. His voice was hoarse, urgent. She felt it enter into her blood and tissue and bones, felt her body incline, plantlike, toward it, even as her mind quailed. The moment was here, now.

“Hannah?” he called again, a question this time, colored with worry.

“I’m here,” she said. She heard his step quicken and sat up in the bed.

“Where?” he cried.

“Here, in the guest room,” she said. The windows were heavily curtained, but there was morning light coming in from the hallway. At the last second her courage failed her, and she shifted position, putting her back to the open door. She heard him stop on the threshold.

“Hannah?”

“Close the door,” she said, “and leave the light off.”

He made a sound of impatience and longing. “No, my love, please don’t be ashamed. I want to see you. I
have
to see you. Do you think it matters to me—me, the man who is to blame for your suffering!—what color your skin is?”

She heard him take a step toward her. “Don’t,” she said sharply, and he stopped.

An image came to her from “Beauty and the Beast,” not the sanitized version she’d grown up with, but an older, darker tale she’d found in an illustrated book at the library, about a maiden who was forced into marriage with the king of the ravens and carried off to his castle. He’d been turned into a raven by an evil sorcerer who’d cursed him to remain a bird for seven more years. Until then, she was allowed to see him only during the day, in his bird form, and was forbidden to see him at night, when he took off his feathers. For six years and 364 days she lay obediently beside him, their bodies separated by a sword. But on that last night, she couldn’t bear it anymore and decided to see what he looked like. She lit a candle and found a naked man, beautiful beyond words, lying on the other side of the sword. A drop of wax spilled onto his bare chest, startling him awake. By seeing him in his true form, he told her, she’d cursed him forever. Hannah had never forgotten the engraved image of the young girl, mouth agape in wonder, staring down at the horrified face of her husband in the instant he apprehended his doom.

Hannah knew that Aidan meant what he said. He was a hundred percent sure that if he turned on the light, he would see beauty and not a beast.
But what in life is a hundred percent sure?
He thought he was prepared for the sight of her, but she knew that he wasn’t, any more than she had been, in the Chrome ward. He’d be horrified, even if he didn’t let his face show it.

“I’m not ready, Aidan,” she said. “Please, do as I asked.”

She waited. The door shut, plunging them into absolute darkness. He remained standing near the doorway, his breathing loud and uneven. She could feel his uncertainty fighting with his need. She went to him then, navigating by the sound of his breath. Her outstretched hands found his chest, moved to his face. His arms encircled her, and he gasped when his hands discovered her nakedness. He breathed her name, once, and then he was crushing her against him, kissing the top of her head, her brow, her cheek, her lips, her neck. He moaned and fell to his knees, wrapping his arms tightly around her waist, pressing his face into her abdomen. She felt the wetness of his tears against her skin, the wetness of his mouth, descending. But that was not what she wanted now, not what her body was demanding, and so she dropped to her knees and kissed him, drawing his tongue into her mouth, unzipping his pants and pulling him onto her, into the churning, heaving river that was her body. The current swept them up and carried them home.