at’s his particular vow for this particular
Good Friday, and he thinks it’s a good one.
Chickie Snow is not inclined to make vows right now. She takes her cookie and her glass of milk and sits down neatly at the table, all alone in the cafeteria. It’s a secret she and Sister Mary Kate share: her own private treat ever since that time when she fi rst came to Sacred Heart and got lost in the woods.
Fresh cookies and milk.
Even though she hasn’t said it out loud, she thinks of 229
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Bunna and feels those words catch in her throat: fresh cookies and milk.
Milk. Bunna never liked milk.
Donna kneels on the cold fl oor of the Sacred Heart chapel, feeling that wordless sense of understanding that comes sometimes. She can’t quite say what it is she understands, but it makes her feel happy, fi lled with a sense of belonging as wide as the ocean. It comes to her when she least expects it: in the hush of Sister Sarah’s garden, in the sweet soprano of all their voices singing together, and right here, in the dusky, cold sanctuary with the swish of Father Flanagan’s robes, whispering against the edge of it like slow waves on an endless beach.
Sister Sarah kneels, too, nearly invisible in the darkness. Her old joints ache, stiff against the chill air. When she kneels too long, it always hurts to stand again. On days like today, she wants to pray to put a stop to it all.
No, don’t make me stand again. Let me go home.
Amiq, stepping out of the shower, studies his face in the mirror. Th
e Saint Christopher medal Donna gave him hangs on
the metal shelf below the mirror. Saint Christopher Protect Us, it pleads. Amiq only takes it off when he showers and hardly ever looks at it anymore. Like it’s a part of him. He looks at it now and is suddenly struck by how strange it is—some white guy in a robe, leaning on a cane with a kid on his back. How had he come to attach any importance to a thing like that—a 230
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big gold coin, like a piece of foreign currency washed up from the shore of a distant county?
Strange, the way things take on their own meanings.
Chickie sets her glass of milk on the table, watching the way the milk makes little circular waves in the glass, thinking about Bunna, feeling way down deep inside herself the place that still belongs to Bunna, remembering Sister Sarah’s prayer: Guard well thy inner door where we reveal our need of Th ee.
Chickie will guard Bunna’s place forever and ever. If there really is a forever and ever.
Eternity. Father Mullen feels himself on the edge of it, at a deserted beach on the edge of a northern continent watching the ocean rise up into a massive angry swell so large he thinks he may have imagined it, may have imagined everything since one nameless sunny morning in Missouri on the shore of a boyhood pond, long forgotten.
A candle jerks, suddenly, in the Sacred Heart Chapel, snuffi ng
itself out.
Snuffi
ng itself out. Th
at’s how Father Flanagan describes
it to himself, startled at the thought of a candle, unattended, snuffi
ng itself out in the House of the Lord. He hears, in his mind, a sudden roar so strange, he dismisses it as impossible.
Th
e pipes are rattling, Amiq notices. Th
e pipes always rattle
when the little kids sneak down into the basement to swing 231
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on them. He remembers when he was one of the little ones, daring Sister Sarah to come swat him down.
Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, Amiq thinks, watching the medal swing back and forth on the edge of the rattling metal shelf. Traveling, he thinks. His whole life has been about traveling. Traveling away from everything he ever knew—the tundra, the ocean, the sound of the language and the feel of the wind . . .
Th
e pipes complain with a loud crack, and the sink
jumps.
“Hey!” Amiq hollers, holding on to the sink. “HEY!”
He imagines those little kids—a whole herd of them—
jumping up and swinging from one pipe to the next, yodeling like little Tarzans, then leaping off suddenly into the jungle of the boiler room.
Where the heck was Sister Sarah?
In the cafeteria, a plate rattles violently, and Chickie goes cold with a sudden fear. When the tables and chairs start rattling, too, her muscles freeze. She needs to hold on to something but can’t. Can’t move. Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe.
Th
e fl uorescent bulbs above her tap against each other, and the light fl ickers ominously. Nausea washes over her.
Sister Mary Kate comes fl ying out of the kitchen like a white sheet caught in the wind. “Run, Chickie! Run outside!”
Th
e sound of Sister’s voice is like a lifeline, pulling
