I nodded. I didn’t even go back to my office.
KAREN
By the time Jamie arrived, the crowd had grown to two dozen.
“How are they?” I asked as she slipped out of her coat.
She shrugged. “Patient. I don’t think they’re going to be any sort of problem. I’d be more concerned with the group on the sidewalk.”
“What group on the sidewalk?”
We peeked out the crack between the blind and the frame of the window. “That group.”
Father Peter was on the sidewalk in front of the house with a group of protestors waving placards that read, WORSHIP NOT FALSE IDOLS and JESUS DIED FOR YOUR SINS. They seemed to be singing as they marched in a looping line. Father Peter was at the epicenter, his black coat pulled tightly around himself. To one side of him, a wiry young man clad only in jeans and a T-shirt, feet bare against the cold December concrete, almost buckled under the weight of a rough-hewn wooden cross twice his height. On his other side was a huge man dressed in coveralls, his arms folded across his chest.
“They’re singing hymns,” Jamie added in a whisper, as if they might hear her and discover our hiding place.
And then, as if that was exactly what had happened, Father Peter’s stare met mine. It was all I could do not to jump back.
“He’s looking right at us,” Jamie said in a tense whisper. “Who is that?”
I let the curtain fall back against the window frame. “Lock the door behind me,” I said, not pausing to pull on a jacket or shoes.
“Karen, where are you going? What are you doing?”
“Just lock the door behind me,” I repeated, striding down the concrete steps in my socks and past the pilgrims.
I don’t know where the courage came from. Anger, more than anything else. If I had stopped to think about it, I would have stayed inside. Instead, I forced my way through the even line of protestors, their song and their ranks falling to pieces around me.
Father Peter smiled coldly. “Mrs. Barrett.”
“What are you doing here?”
His smile widened, revealing his yellowing teeth. “Demonstrating my right to free assembly.”
“And what was that in the paper this morning?”
He stood easily a foot taller than me, and the man in the coveralls loomed over him.
“You were warned,” he said, too quietly for the bystanders to hear. Then, a little louder, and for their benefit, “We won’t allow you to make a mockery of our faith.”
A few people in the crowd grunted their support.
“And that’s how you do it? By spreading lies about us?” Letting my voice rise.
“What lies?” he demanded. “You’re the one who claims that your daughter can heal the sick, but where are those people you claim she’s healed? Where is the woman who first went to the newspaper? Where is this Jeffrey Kelly you claim was cured? Why isn’t he here, standing up in your defense?” He held my gaze just a moment too long, enjoying himself.
“Get out of here. Get away from my house.”
“We’re on public property here. We’ll stay.”
“We’ll stay,” one of the protestors shouted.
The crowd started to close around me.
“I’ll call the police.”
His eyes gleamed. “Oh, the police will come. They’re eager to speak with you and your husband.”
My anger condensed into a cold, hard ball of resolve. “You want miracles?” I asked as I started back to the house. “I’ll give you miracles.”
Jamie opened the front door as I reached it.
“Let’s start allowing some of these people in,” I said. “Do you mind looking after the door while I stay near Sherry?”
“Yeah, okay. What do I do?”
“I want you to get full names, addresses, phone numbers, doctor’s names, everything. We need thorough records.”
She nodded. “How many should I let in? How fast?”
I hadn’t even considered this. “Just a few at a time, I guess. I’ll let you know.”
I pulled open the front door, filling the foyer with cold, bright light. Stepping out into the chill, I leaned over the woman who was first in line, helping a young man in a wheelchair. His head lolled back and his mouth twisted into a spasming rictus, his eyes moving independently of one another as his hands jerked and jumped. She looked at me with a face touched with sadness and exhaustion.
“Would you like to come in?” I asked. My throat was thick with emotion.
As I helped her with the wheelchair, I glanced up the driveway at the long line of people waiting for a miracle. And, on the sidewalk, the dark shape of Father Peter watching it all.
RUTH
The quiet line of pilgrims shifted from the front walk through the door and foyer and into Sherry’s room. They were hesitant to speak, whispering the names of their conditions or injuries to Jamie in voices no one could overhear, slipping unobtrusively into Sherry’s presence for their private moment, closely watched by both Dr. McKinley and Karen.
They came in pairs when they couldn’t come alone, the companion helping to support, to guide or to push, offering words of comfort or encouragement. They always asked Jamie, “How does all of this work?” “What’s going to happen in there?” and then, more confidentially, leaning toward her, “Is it all for real?” Skepticism and hope were in such a delicate balance. Jamie didn’t answer, just made the appropriate notes on her pad and directed them to follow the line.
Once inside Sherry’s room, Karen guided the pilgrims to kneel on the pillow beside the bed if they were able, gently shifting Sherry’s arm so her palm rested against their forehead.
“You’re welcome to pray,” Karen said quietly. “If you’d like to.”
Many of the pilgrims did pray, their voices almost soundless. “Glory be to God in the highest…Our Father who art in heaven…” The others remained silent, but their eyelids lowered and I thought they were probably praying to themselves.
After a moment, Karen gently removed Sherry’s hand from the pilgrim’s forehead and helped the ailing to their feet.
By noon, when I looked out the front window, the line of people was as long as it had been when we’d let the first come in. A television van was parked at the curb, the camera flashing in the sun.
“Why don’t you open that up?” Karen asked from behind me. I let the curtain fall as I turned to face her.
“But what about—?” I started, thinking about the crowd on the other side of the glass.
She shook hear head. “We’re not hiding anything,” she explained. “It’d be nice to get some light in here.”
I drew back the curtains and raised the blinds. In the sunlight, I could see that her face was drawn. She held her breath every time she touched Sherry’s hand to a pilgrim’s forehead, as if willing something to happen while at the same time terrified that it might.
When she saw me looking at her, she smiled wearily. “I’m okay,” she said.
I wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince.
Midway through the afternoon, Dr. McKinley gestured at his watch and Karen nodded in understanding. It was 2:45, and Karen had decided that she would shut the door for the day at 3:00. “Ruth,” she asked. “Would you mind taking over here? I’m going to choose a place to stop the line.”
The feel of Sherry’s hand was as familiar to me as if she were my own daughter. I followed the pattern Karen had set, bidding each of the seekers to kneel, then gently touching Sherry’s hand to bowed heads, brows.
As I said “You can pray if you’d like,” I watched the steady rise and fall of Sherry’s chest, heard the sound of the breath passing between her slightly parted lips—her only voice.
I found myself thinking of miracles.
By three, the last pilgrims of the day had passed through. The ones Karen had turned away left silently, knowing they could return tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next.
HENRY
I don’t know what I was expe
cting at the Barretts’ house. I had read the article in the paper and I wondered if I would arrive in time to see the police arresting them, or people throwing things at the house.
Instead, it was pretty quiet. There were people with signs on the sidewalk singing hymns, but in the lineup to see Sherry everyone spoke as if they were in the library, or clutched their crosses, mouthing silent prayers.
Sherry’s mother came to the door, speaking to the crowd in a voice most of them couldn’t hear. The message passed quickly down the line: it was almost three o’clock. They’d start seeing people again at ten the next morning. The crowd trickled away with little fuss.
I could picture Sherilyn running in the front yard, giggling, toward her parents. I only knew her from the hospital bed, the pictures in the papers, from the blurred shape in front of the truck, but I felt like I knew what her laugh had been like, how she ran. I felt like I carried a part of her with me.
Inside, someone closed the blinds, and I found myself staring at a reflection of the yard in the suddenly mirrored surface.
“Show’s over,” came the voice from the driveway, directed at me.
The man was tall, wrapped in a long black coat. A chill ran through me.
“I’ve startled you,” he said. “Henry Denton, I presume?” He stopped just close enough to make me uncomfortable and, grinning, extended his hand.
“I…”
After a long moment in the cold air, he drew his hand back, tucking it into his pocket. “You’re wondering why I can see you.”
I could barely nod. His eyes were a flat gray, his pupils barely noticeable. He radiated cold the way a road radiates heat in the summer.
“My name is Peter,” he said, extending his hand again. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
I took his hand reluctantly.
His grip was machinelike in its steady force. Torque. His smile widened. “I knew you would come,” he said, just before I pulled my hand away.
I backed up. “Who are you?” I asked, finally finding my voice. “What, what are you—?”
He stepped forward, maintaining his uncomfortable closeness. “I told you. My name is Peter. I know your fat friend in the library. I know what you’re doing here, watching this house.” The wave of cold wrapped itself around me and I could feel bile rising in my throat. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough to this family already?”
I couldn’t help myself: instinct took over and I ran. I ran as far, and as fast, as I could, glancing over my shoulder to see if he was following.
He wasn’t.
I slowed to a gasping walk as I neared downtown, where the sidewalks were filled with people. For once I took comfort in their blindness, in my invisibility.
Why could he see me?
I only began to calm down when the doors of the library closed behind me and night began to fall.
KAREN
It was just after five when the doorbell rang. Jamie, Ruth and Stephen had gone home.
Mary was standing on the stoop.
“Hi, Karen.” She shifted. “I just, uh, thought I’d drop by and see if Simon wanted me to drop off his stuff. I tried his cell, but he’s not answering.”
“His stuff?”
She nodded. “From my place. Didn’t he…?”
I shook my head. “He’s not here. I haven’t talked to him since this morning.”
“This morning?”
I nodded.
“When this morning?”
“He called me after his meeting.”
She looked confused and glanced around herself. “After his meeting?”
I nodded and stepped to one side. “Why don’t you come in?”
She hesitated for a moment, then brushed past me, in a wash of clean scent. I closed the door behind her, taking care to turn the deadbolt.
In the family room, she sat on the couch across from me. Simon’s sleeping bag and pillow were at the other end.
I felt like I was really seeing her for the first time. I could understand how Simon would have fallen in love with her, that smooth face twisted with worry.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
Her voice dropped almost to a whisper.
“I don’t know if I should be the one to tell you this. Simon’s meeting—”
“I know they fired him, Mary,” I said. “Is that what this is about?”
She nodded without meeting my eye.
Of everything that had happened since the morning of the accident, Simon being terminated by the firm was probably the least surprising, especially after the newspaper story, and what had happened to Jamie and Stephen.
His voice on the phone as he described his meeting with the senior partners had been fractured, devastated. His world was coming apart around him.
“I’m coming home,” he said. “I’m on—”
“Simon.” I stopped him. “Don’t. Don’t come home, not like this. Try to work it through, or walk it off.”
“But I should be there. With Sherry and everything that’s happening.”
“It’s fine, Simon. It’s going fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“You were going to be gone all day, Simon. It’s fine.”
I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or upset.
“I haven’t seen him since this morning.” Mary said. “They changed the locks to his office and reassigned me. I thought he would be here.” Her words seemed to bubble out of her in a single breath.
“He’s not. He said he’d be staying at a hotel downtown. I’m not sure which one. There are some things he needs to work out.”
“That’s good.”
I was stunned. “Do you really mean that?” I asked.
“When we were up in Tofino, and he saw the newspaper story”—she shook her head—“It was pretty clear that this is still his home. This is where he needed to be.”
Her eyes were bright. “I know what you must think of me, but I never wanted to be the kind of person who—if Simon was going to be with me, I wanted him to want to be with me, not—”
“Not just running from something else.”
Our eyes met, and she nodded.
She leaned back into the couch, spent.
I wished I could hate her.
The doorbell rang.
SIMON
The bank machine spat out several hundred dollars in twenties, which I scooped out of the basin and tucked into my wallet, keenly aware of the small group of youths hanging around the vestibule. I studied the balance. There was enough. And soon my severance would kick in.
“Spare some change?” one of the girls asked as I came out.
I shook my head. “No, not tonight.” I tensed, aware of the other kids around me, half-expecting to be jumped from behind.
“Have a good night anyway,” the girl said, smiling. An angel of the concrete.
“Thanks,” I stammered. “You too.”
It was dark and colder than it had been through the afternoon—it was hard to stop shivering. My jacket was too thin and the wind cut through it. The prostitutes were huddled in doorways, out of the wind, any exposed skin raising in chicken flesh. None of them spoke to me in the three blocks between the bank and the hotel.
The lobby of the Balmoral was almost too warm, thick with voices and cigarette smoke from the adjoining pub, one of the roughest in Victoria.
The desk was staffed by someone who appeared to be in his late teens, face pocked with acne scars, hair dyed blond and cut close to his skull. As I approached he barely looked up.
“I’d like to rent a room,” I said, attempting to be casual.
“For the night?” he asked, pulling a pink registration slip from under the counter.
“Do you have weekly rates?”
He nodded, bored. “Hourly. Daily. Weekly. Monthly.”
“What’s the weekly rate?”
“Private or shared?”
I must have looked confused.
“Bathroom,” he snapped. “Private or
shared?”
“Private.”
He named the price and I nodded.
“In advance.”
“Sure.” I filled out the registration form with the chewed ballpoint.
“You have to fill in your vehicle registration,” he interjected, pointing at the appropriate line, which I had left blank. His fingernail was chewed down to the quick.
“I don’t have a car.”
“Hmm,” he said, as if lacking a car had lowered me in his estimation.
He separated the copies of my registration form, handing me the illegible yellow copy, trading the pink copy for the key in the slot marked 316.
“Elevator’s over there.” He gestured vaguely toward an area behind the entrance to the pub.
My room was on the third floor around the corner from the ice machine and overlooked the street. I was surprised to find it mostly clean—it smelled of stale cigarette smoke and fresh cleanser—and mostly quiet, street noise blocked by the triple-paned glass. There were burn marks on the windowsill, and a small cigarette hole in the bedspread. When I pulled back the sheets they were worn but clean. On the wall above the head of the bed was an atrocious painting of a ship on a dark sea; facing the bed was a small television, a remote control resting atop the cable box. In the bathroom there was a single glass on the shelf, wrapped in white paper. When I unwrapped it to get a drink of water, it was so badly scratched it was textured.
I went back to the door, shot the bolt and hooked the chain.
Then I sat at the end of the bed, facing the television, my hands on my knees. My reflection was stretched and distorted, a rumpled caricature of someone I could barely recognize.
KAREN
There was a stranger at the door, squinting under the porch light.
I stepped back, bumping into Mary.
“Good evening,” he said. He fumbled in his pocket for his identification. “I’m Sergeant Richards, with the Victoria Police.” He was a large man, solid but starting to go soft. The sort of man who would always seem rumpled, whose suits would never fit quite right.
“You’re Karen Barrett?” he asked, folding his wallet back into his pocket.
“Yes.”
“I’d like to have a word, if you’ve got a minute.”
Before I Wake Page 21