She washes her face and plaits her hair and returns to the sanctuary half-asleep for the midnight prayers. It’s hard not to weave on her knees, not to rest her head against the altar railing and slip from the world.
Ruth and Ami join her. Ami keeps her head bowed, her fingers laced so tight that her knuckles blaze white, but Ruth looks Tabitha straight in the eye. “We covered for you,” she says.
Tabitha nods. “Thank you.”
“What did you find?” Ruth asks. Ami closes her eyes tight, mumbling prayers as if to drown out everything around her.
Tabitha thinks of the Scripture with the journal written in the margins. She thinks of the burden of the knowledge and wonders what it would be like to share it. To seek counsel of someone else.
She thinks of telling Patrick. Of lying in the spring grass with his fingers tangled in her hair.
“A basement,” Tabitha says truthfully. “Old dusty bottles and broken shelves.” She turns her attention to the altar and the cross though she still feels Ruth’s heavy gaze.
“That’s it?” Ruth sounds disappointed, deflated.
Tabitha nods and joins in Ami’s mumbling prayers, reciting the words without thinking or hearing or feeling them. In her mind she’s begging God to tell her what to do—what choice to make.
Tabitha sneaks back to the room underground whenever she can, each time with a growing sense of dread and apprehension rather than excitement and joy. She sits on the old bed surrounded with the taste of mildew, and she stares at the book lying on its rickety table.
There hasn’t been an entry recorded in it for seven years—since the last oldest Sister passed on in her sleep. She wonders if the Sister simply forgot to mention the book to her successor or if its loss was more purposeful. If maybe the Sister meant for the village to forget its past and start anew.
Tabitha understands that this determination rests in her hands now. She’s suddenly become the keeper of her village, and she must decide whether to accept or demur.
Thus agitated, Tabitha paces down the long dark hallway past the rows of locked doors, past the tiny room with its bed and book and rot. She stops at the end of the tunnel farthest from the Cathedral basement and sits on a narrow set of steps carved into the earth.
Above her, set horizontal to the ceiling, is another locked door. Another taunting gate. She’s tired of these damn secrets, tired of them pulsing in her dreams. She pulls useless keys from her pockets and shoves them into the lock, but none of them will turn.
She trembles with the rage of it and storms back to the basement, ripping apart one of the old empty shelves until she has a pile of dry splintered wood cradled in her arms. For good measure, she swipes a few candles from the table just inside the door and piles it all haphazardly under the lock on the door at the other end of the tunnel.
She strikes her flint, letting sparks fly until everything begins to smoke darkly. Eventually the wood catches, and the flames lick the old wood around the lock on the door. She stumbles back down the tunnel seeking fresh air and watches it, her eyes burning and her lungs protesting while heat sears her face.
She’s never been one for patience, and when she thinks the fire’s done enough damage, and when she starts to fear that the smoke might be leaching itself too far down the tunnel, she wraps one of the moldy blankets around her arms and scatters the charcoaled wood, stomping it out with her feet.
Not even caring that the steps are burning hot and that stray embers sear against her skin, she kicks at the lock with her feet until it breaks free.
Fresh air storms in through the opening, bathing her face with its pure sunlight. It’s like an epiphany, this rising from the ashes and into an outside world.
She crouches in a tiny clearing, nothing but soft clover spread around her, white flowers woven through it. An old fence circles around her, woven through with blooming vines that make Tabitha feel like she’s stepped into another world.
She flings herself out into the grass, feeling the caress of the soft earth against her burned face and fingers. A shard of bright sunlight streaks through the trees, falling on her face, traces of smoke and ash sparkling around her. And for a few moments, nothing exists in her world except her breath and blood and pounding heart and belief that she’s been reborn here for something important: something greater than herself.
The hare moon is pregnant in the sky. Tabitha watches it from her little clearing in the woods. She doesn’t care that the dead have sensed her and wandered from the Forest to trace their fingers along the old links of the fence. She sits cross-legged, old pilfered tools that she’s used to repair the door to the tunnel scattered around her.
She has two days to decide what to do about Patrick. The words from the journal about duty rattle around in her head, but her body remembers the feel of his fingers weaving around her spine.
She prays to God, but He’s silent. She searches for guidance, but the Forest only moans.
Two days later her hands tremble so badly she has to replait her hair several times before it will lay flat along her back. Her face is scrubbed clean, her tunic freshly washed, and she pretends to gather wildflowers from the cemetery while she waits for the Guardian patrols to rotate off so that she can sneak through the gate and down the path.
It’s an achingly beautiful spring day, one whose soft air whispers into Tabitha’s ears about love, and she smiles as she listens. It’s been too many months since she’s seen Patrick, and as she makes her way to him, her body almost vibrates with excitement and anticipation.
In her arms she carries the basket he’d left for her, this time with fresh flowers hiding a change of clothes underneath. Pressed against her breast is his letter.
If he asks her to leave her world for him, she will say yes.
She practices saying it as she walks: “Yes, yes, yes, yes!” She smiles and blushes and twirls each time she utters the word.
When she arrives at the gate, he’s not there, and she has a moment of uncertainty. She sets the basket on the ground and then picks it up again. She runs her hands over her tunic, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles. She holds her breath and blows it out and tugs on her braid and paces.
The dead catch up with her and rake at the fences, and they do nothing to calm her agitation. She grabs a stick from the ground and pokes at them, trying to force them away but, of course, they don’t notice or care or move. Not when she flays their skin. Not when she destroys their eyes with a sharp squish, despising the idea that they’re somehow looking at her and judging her.
She’s about to scream in frustration, and she closes her eyes and inhales deep, trying to find a way to calm the mortified burn of her skin. She’s standing just like that, strong and tall in the middle of the path with her fists clenched when Patrick finds her.
“Tabitha,” he says, his voice sounding dryer than she remembered, like the bark of a dew-starved tree.
She smiles, of course she smiles, the world suddenly lilting into place. When she turns to him, he’s nothing as she remembered and the same all at once. The blurred bits of her memory sharpening into focus: his eyes a deeper green, his lips fuller, his skin that much more lush and warm.
“My Patrick,” she cries out, racing to him.
It isn’t until he fumbles with the gate that she sees he’s not alone and her steps falter. She tilts her head, looking at the little boy stretching on his toes to grasp Patrick’s fingers.
“Patrick?” she asks. She’s thrown off by his recent absence, by him being late. By the child.
Patrick looks between the two of them. He pulls the boy in front of him and grasps his fingers around his shoulders. Tabitha doesn’t notice just how tight his grip is on the child.
“My brother,” Patrick says. She can tell he’s trying not to sound hesitant.
“I...” She doesn’t know how to finish the statement.
“I need your help, Tabby,” Patrick says, and she hears the misery in his voice. He falls to his knees and crawls to her. He wraps his arms around her waist and presses his face into her abdomen. Her hands go to his head, slip into his hair, but her eyes are still on the little boy who just stands there. Watching.
Patrick is telling her how he missed her. How he loves her and didn’t know what to do when she wasn’t there before. How so much has gone wrong and his father has died. She nods and tells him she understands and how
