thought. Then she prayed. After a while, she rose from her seat and went into the family lounge next door, which had vending machines, a coffeemaker, long sofas-and a writing desk, stocked with hospital stationery. A sixtyish couple slept on one of the sofas, he stretched out with his head in her lap, she sitting, her head tipped, snoring. Clare pulled the desk chair out as quietly as possible. She sat, head bowed, over the tablet of writing paper. Then she wrote. It wasn’t a long letter. It fit on a single sheet of paper. When she was done, she folded the sheet into an envelope and printed Russ’s name on it.
She took the elevator back up to the third floor. The charge nurse tilted back in his chair and scruffed his curls when he saw her. “Didn’t expect you back.”
She slid the letter across the counter. “Could you see that Mr. Van Alstyne gets this? When he’s awake?”
“Okay.”
She hesitated. “It’s for him. Nobody else.”
He searched her face. “I understand.”
She turned her back on the ward and its inhabitants, took the elevator down, and left the hospital without looking behind her. But in her car, she thought about it. The dark space and the rising water and his hands tangling in her hair. Then she shifted into gear and drove home.
Chapter 42
April 22, the Great Vigil of Easter
He was sitting in the dark in the rearmost pew of St. Alban’s Church holding a candle and he didn’t know why.
No, that was a lie. He had done what she asked him to in that damn letter. He had stayed away and he hadn’t called her. He had shown up at the Kreemy Kakes Diner and sat alone for the past two Wednesdays, impatient and pissed off, wondering when she was going to snap out of it and call him.
At some point between Wednesday lunch and this Saturday evening, he had realized she wasn’t. Which should have been hunky-dory with him, except that he had found himself crammed into a corner of his office, the edge of his hand in his mouth, trying not to let Harlene hear him. Crying, for Chrissakes, like a baby.
He just wanted to talk with her. If she was going to cut him off, he wanted to hear it from her, not from some piece of paper. She had asked him not to contact her. Fine. She hadn’t written anything about not showing up in church. He had seen the service listed in the paper. How could he have guessed the church was going to be full at ten o’clock on Saturday night?
There was a rustling, and everyone went quiet, and then Clare was at the door, surrounded by a bunch of other people, all of them in white robes. A skinny, balding guy was holding a candle nearly as big as he was. Clare was cupping some sort of bowl, and he was startled when something inside it flashed into flame. It was the only light in the building, and it made her look like a priestess from a time before anybody had even dreamed of Christianity.
“Dear friends in Christ,” Clare said, in a voice that rang over the stone and carried to every corner. “On this most holy night, in which our Lord Jesus passed over from death to life…” She went on with the invocation and then invited everyone to pray. He ducked his head. Everyone else seemed to know the words. Then the skinny guy backed away and brought the tip of the huge candle down to the bowl, lighting it. The white-robed people, all of whom had plain white tapers stuck in cardboard disks just like his, lit their candles from the big one. Then they touched candles with the folks sitting nearby, and next thing he knew, the guy sitting next to Russ was lighting his candle and gesturing for him to pass it on. The fire flowed forward, a wave of tiny lights surging to the front of the church until the whole space was illuminated.
Pretty impressive. He turned to look at the fire that had started it all and caught Clare just as she glanced toward his pew. Her eyes widened, but then she and the others were all marching up the aisle and there was a lot of fiddling with the big candle and the skinny guy singing about rejoicing. He went on and on about the candle and the light and the night being a Passover.
Then Clare said, “Let us hear the record of God’s saving deeds in history,” and the congregation got to sit down. After that, there was an endless string of Bible readings, the choir singing a psalm, and a prayer, one right after another. Russ felt like a kid again, trapped in the Methodist church with his mom pinching him whenever he squirmed. He amused himself by tipping his candle from one side to the next, laying out the melted wax in patterns, until Clare walked to the pulpit and began her sermon.
“And so the Day dawns,” she said. “You cannot stop it, no matter how much you might want to cling to the ordinary and the mundane. The day breaks, the mourners come, the stone is rolled away. ‘Why do you seek him here, among the dead? Go, he is living.’ And everything is changed.”
He knew he was imagining it, that there was no way she could see through the darkness and the light all the way to the back row, but it felt as if she were talking to him. Only to him.
“How frightening to embrace life, when one expected cold stillness. Scary. But none of us can stop it, and we’re wrong to try. We become used to deadening who we are and what we feel, but now the stone is rolled away. We cannot wrap the linens around ourselves again. No one ever promised that transformation was easy, but we are called to have courage. And faith.” She smiled, radiating light, and he could feel his heart cracking. “I want to walk the road with you, equally amazed, and see what we can make out of a world so new and so different.”
There was more, much more, three people baptized, and everyone vowing to renounce evil, and then the white-robed assistants pulled down black cloths that had been covering the cross at the front of the church and everyone shouted “Alleluia!” like it was a big party. The lady to his right took pity on him and handed him an open book, pointing out where they were in the service, and he realized it wasn’t that they all had memorized the words, it was that everyone read from the same book.
He didn’t go up for communion. He sat while the rest of his pew shuffled by, and he knelt when they did for the prayers, and he stood when Clare shouted, “Go in peace! To love and serve the Lord! Alleluia!” Then he waited, while the people around him hugged one another and rattled on about their Easter Sunday plans and left by twos and threes.
Eventually, there were only two left. He sat while she pulled off the heavy satin drape she had donned before celebrating the Eucharist, folded it, and laid it crossways over the altar rail. He sat, and she walked down the aisle, taking her time, and slid into the pew, next to him, as if meeting him in her church after midnight was a usual part of her routine.
Then he noticed her hands, half covered by her white linen robe. Shaking. “So. What did you think of the great vigil?” she said.
“It was beautiful. Long, but beautiful.”
They sat for a moment. Then she said, “You’re interested in developing your faith life?”
“That sounds like something they teach you to say in
“Yeah. Well. It’s not the done thing to ask someone what they’re doing in your church.”
“I came to see you. To talk.”
“I thought I covered everything in that note.”
“You know what really killed me about that Dear John letter? You signed it ‘Love, Clare.’ ”
She looked down at her lap. “That’s a common way of ending a letter.”
“Yeah. Right.”
She glared at him. “You’re a man in love with his wife, Russ.”
He pointed toward the altar. “And you’re a woman in love with her boss.”
She looked at him blankly, then hiccuped up a laugh. “I guess you’re right.”
He turned to face her. “Clare, I love you.”
Her laughter vanished. Her eyes widened. “I can’t believe you said that.”
He pushed on. “And you love me, too.” She pressed her hands over her mouth. She shook her head. “You can’t
