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to move, move, move. She wants to holler but she can’t fi nd her voice. All she can do is stumble behind Sister as though they’re connected by an invisible line, Sister, fl apping ghost-like in front, plates shattering to the fl oor behind with a brittle echoing sound.
Earthquake!
Even before he has a chance to name it, every nerve in Luke’s body screams the word. Running like crazy down the hall, down the stairs, along corridors, barely aware of all the others bumping and fl apping against each other like fi sh trapped in the bottom of a storm-tossed boat. Th
ey are trying
to run away from it, only they can’t because it’s everywhere, even outside.
Even in the sky itself.
Kids and teachers, nuns and priests, all of them outside, running back and forth, trying to decide which way to go, crying and praying and throwing themselves down onto the ground as if onto the back of a giant animal, galloping off into space. Trying to hold on. Everything jerked back and forth like somebody big is playing ball with the planet, somebody as big and mean as Father Mullen’s God.
When he looks up to the mountains, Luke feels suddenly dizzy: Even the mountains are rolling back and forth, back and forth. Like huge ships on an angry sea.
Good Friday, Father Mullen thinks. Good Friday.
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• • •
As the terrible trembling dies down, Chickie realizes, suddenly, that she and Donna are holding hands, clinging to each other’s fi ngers hard enough to crush bones, holding on as if their lives depend on it, neither of them aware of what they’re doing.
Th
eir ears fi ll with a sudden rushing silence that makes Donna feel a terrible loneliness, all of a sudden, like she’s standing on God’s runway, watching the last plane leave. She feels left behind again, even though she can still feel Chickie’s hand. She wants to run after somebody or something. Don’t leave! Don’t leave me!
She lets go of Chickie’s hand and sinks to the ground.
“Oh.” Breathing the word soft as a sigh.
And Chickie knows, feeling Donna’s fi ngers slip from hers, knows suddenly and certainly that there’s nothing else to say, nothing left in the whole wide world save the sound of that one word, rising up from Donna’s chest like a spirit departed.
Oh.
Th
eir fi ngers tingle as the blood rushes back into their hands.
Oh.
Th
ey both see it at the same time: Sister Sarah, lying on the ground, clutching her chest, motionless.
Luke had watched her fall, fl uttering down onto the still-rolling ground, weightless, as if gravity had departed from 234
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her skinny old body, her bones at last as light as bird bones.
He’d seen the fl ickering of her habit, watched Sister Mary Kate fl y down beside her, saw Father Flanagan running, running, his robes fl apping. And he imagined, for just a second, that the whole world was littered with the black-and-white robes of nuns and priests falling, dropped from the sky like fl ies or fl ags.
Th
e ends of his nerves are still jangling with the electricity of it. Even in the center of this sudden stillness, his blood still buzzes.
Th
e sound of things returns, piece by piece, but his head feels stuff ed with cotton, noises arriving slowly as if from a great distance: the staccato of scared girls, the squawking of the youngest ones, the sudden shriek of Sister Mary Kate’s voice, sharp as gunshot.
“Help! Oh help me! Please! ”
Sister Mary Kate is kneeling down on the ground next to Sister Sarah, and the pain in Sarah’s body is squeezing her face shut tight. Tight as an old fi st.
Father Flanagan is still running, his heart pounding in his ears, remembering suddenly just how far they are from everything civilized. Hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, if there is one left. For a second he even wonders if there really is any help left anywhere.
One of the boys could have carried her alone—it wouldn’t take two adults together, but they did it that way anyhow.
Sister Sarah and her skinny old body, as hollow as an empty seed husk.
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Luke goes cold inside, watching Father and Sister Mary Kate and all the kids, the way they move, everything fl owing as if in slow motion. Like he’s there but not really there, the same way he felt when they told him the news about Bunna’s death, that time.
Sister Sarah is gone. You don’t have to look at her to know the truth of it. You can feel it in the air.
It’s how the earth decides, he thinks.
Th
ey are walking in behind the slow string of nuns and priests and kids, moving cautiously as if afraid to disturb the ground again. Inside, the school looks ravaged, like somebody big ran through all the rooms swinging a two-by-four. Books spilled out of bookcases, windows broken, everything out of place, everyone scurrying everywhere, even into the nuns’
quarters. Th
ey’re so shocked by the sight of it all
