Before I Wake

by Robert J. Wiersema

  I bowed my head. “You can count on me, Father.”

  KAREN

  Closing the door and locking it, I watched as Mary edged her way through the small crowd of protestors on the sidewalk. I waited until she reached her car safely before I turned off the front light.

  After feeding Sherry and changing her, checking her stats, I kissed her on the forehead, saying “Goodnight, sweetheart,” then I climbed up the stairs to my bedroom.

  The house was completely, absurdly still. I was aware of the silence in a way I hadn’t been since just after Simon left. I went downstairs to check Sherry again. Back in bed, I couldn’t find a comfortable position, twisting from side to side, flipping my pillow, throwing off the comforter to cool off, pulling it back up when I got too cold.

  Finally, I gave up. Sleep wasn’t coming, and I didn’t want to read in bed. I pulled on my robe and went down to the kitchen.

  The ceiling light turned the darkened patio door into a mirror. I kept catching glimpses of my reflection as I looked in the drawer under the phone for some paper and a pen.

  Back in Sherry’s room, I took the largest of her books from the basket beside the bed and set it on my lap. Centering the paper on the book, I took the cap off the pen and began to write.

  “Once upon a time, there was a princess in a kingdom by the sea. Beset by…”

  December 10-23

  Victoria New Sentinel

  Tuesday, December 10, 1996

  Can she heal the sick?

  Controversy surrounds “miracle child”

  ~City Desk~

  The parents of four-year-old Sherilyn Barrett, comatose since a car accident last April, opened their Fernwood home to a steady line of injured and ill pilgrims yesterday. Following reports that Barrett had seemingly cured several people…

  SIMON

  I stopped short as I turned the corner onto Shakespeare at about 7:30 a.m. There was a crowd in front of the house, and judging from the garbage and the lawn chairs, they had been there all night.

  They had leaned their signs against the fence, and most of them were hunched over steaming takeout cups. They were dressed for the weather, but they still seemed cold, stomping their feet and rubbing their arms.

  I was in front of Cecil’s place next door when they noticed me.

  “It’s the father!”

  The crowd surged toward me, the protestors coming into focus.

  A woman in a floral dress with a heavy brown coat shouted, “How can you do this to your child?”

  “Why?” screamed a man with a close-cropped beard and glasses, wearing thick socks in his sandals.

  “Liar!” said a pretty blond girl in her mid-teens.

  I kept walking. I never thought they’d touch me. So when hands shoved my chest, grabbed my arms, I stumbled and lost my balance, almost fell.

  “Sinner!”

  I righted myself, then lowered my shoulder and pushed through them to the gate.

  The protestors shouted behind me, waving their fists and signs, but no one followed me into the yard.

  “Are you all right?” The question came from a young woman in a wheelchair, first in the line of six pilgrims at the base of the ramp. The words were thick and hesitant and it was clearly difficult for her to speak.

  It took me a moment to answer. “Yes. I am,” I said. “Did they do that to you too? Block your way into the yard?”

  She nodded.

  I let myself into the house with a key I hadn’t used in months.

  “Karen?” I called as I slipped off my shoes.

  “I’m with Sherry.”

  She was smoothing a new nightgown over Sherry’s legs.

  “How long have those people been out there?”

  “The protestors?” She drew the covers up. “Most of the night,” she said. “A few of them, at least. More have been arriving since it got light.”

  I shook my head. “They blocked the gate. I had a hard time getting through. Apparently they’ve been doing it to the pilgrims as well.”

  “Are you all right? Is anyone hurt?”

  I rested my hand on Sherry’s leg, reassuring myself. “They pushed me around a bit. I’m going to call the police.”

  “They were already here.”

  “What?”

  “It was a busy day.”

  She started by telling me about the previous day with the pilgrims, about Dr. McKinley losing his job. I stopped her when she told me about her confrontation with Father Peter.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I asked. “My cell was on.”

  “It wasn’t exactly the best day for you either.”

  “I would have come.”

  “I know.”

  I didn’t say anything when she told me about Mary staying for dinner, and she didn’t volunteer any details. I was surprised to hear that John Richards had come to the house.

  “So he just wanted to ask some questions?”

  She nodded. “He said there wasn’t an investigation, but that someone else might be in touch. He said you should call him.”

  I had already planned to, the moment she mentioned his name. “I will,” I said, trying to ignore the sick feeling in my stomach. “In the meantime…” I squeezed Sherry’s leg.

  “Yeah.” She picked up a bundled diaper from the bed. “Let’s get ready for the day.”

  By 9:30, when Ruth, Stephen and Jamie had all arrived, the lineup of pilgrims reached the gate.

  Shortly before ten, the television trucks and Father Peter arrived in such close succession it was as if they had planned it. No sooner had the crews readied their cameras than the protestors began singing. Up came the signs: WORSHIP NOT FALSE IDOLS. PROPHET, NOT PROFIT. There must have been two dozen of them, marching along the sidewalk, across the width of the front lawn, shouting and chanting and singing.

  Father Peter stood away from the group, watching them from the rear of a plumber’s van. Out of range of the cameras.

  “We’re ready,” Karen said. I let the blind fall back against the front window and turned to face her.

  “What should I do?”

  “Do you want to start off by keeping records at the door? Jamie set up a clipboard yesterday.”

  The shouting and chanting was gaining in force and volume as the protestors tried to drive the pilgrims away from the house. The pilgrims ignored them as best they could, and the protestors increased the pressure, leering into the yard, singing hymns. The television cameras devoured it all.

  Then Karen opened the front door, and the day’s parade of the sick and the dying began.

  I spent the morning taking down information as the pilgrims passed through the foyer. I assumed, initially, that it would be better to keep my distance, to maintain my objectivity. Dispassionate distance is one of the first skills you learn as a lawyer: don’t fall for a client.

  I kept my head down, my eyes focused on my clipboard, only glancing up when someone new came though the door.

  “Your name is?”

  I was pleased with how smoothly everything was going: by noon, I had more than twenty names on my list.

  And then Lorraine Coombs touched my arm.

  I was writing her name when I felt her fingers just above my wrist. Her touch was hot, sticky.

  I glanced up and met her eyes, liquid blue and bright. She smiled. Her skin was bright red, damp with sweat. With one hand, she clutched the handle of her walker as if she might collapse without it. With the other, she had reached out.

  I couldn’t look away.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “As good as I’ve been in a while,” she said, still smiling.

  “Can I get you anything? Water, or—”

  “No, that’s fine.”

  I set the clipboard down and tucked the pen into my pocket. “Let me help you,” I said.

  She took my arm, and we walked, halting step by halting step, to see Sherry.

  “Thank you,” she said in the doorway to Sherry’s room, her
face lighting up when she saw my daughter.

  “You’re welcome.”

  After that, I began to notice how each pilgrim’s face lit with hope and desperation when they first saw her. None of them were reluctant, none of them reserved. They hoped—no, they believed. They believed that my daughter could save them, that her touch could help them reclaim their lives.

  I envied them their faith, the clarity of their belief.

  After the last pilgrim left at three, I followed Karen to the kitchen.

  She had been the very embodiment of strength and balance through the day. She seemed to be everywhere at once, and nothing seemed to throw her off. She was in the front yard, talking with the pilgrims as they waited in line, learning their names, their stories. She was at the gate, helping them push past the protestors into the yard. She was in Sherry’s room, checking on our girl. She was taking over from Ruth, from Dr. McKinley, from Jamie and even me, when we needed a break. I never saw her flag.

  We left Ruth and Dr. McKinley working with Sherry, and Jamie sorting through the information that we had collected about the people who had come through the house. I was pouring her a cup of coffee when she asked, “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

  She was sitting at the table, and I set the mug in front of her.

  “It is. I wasn’t expecting it to be like this.”

  “Like what?”

  I sat down across from her.

  “So personal, I guess,” I said, sipping my coffee. “I’ve seen a lot of people who were sick or hurt. I’ve done the best I can for them; that’s been my job. But with the case work, it’s so clinical, so detached. I’ve never felt…connected like this.”

  She smiled a little and nodded. “It’s important, this. What we’re doing.”

  “Yeah. Maybe that’s what I was trying to say. It feels like I’ve spent my whole life focused on what was important to me, and there was a whole world out there that I wasn’t even really aware of.”

  I was trying, but that wasn’t quite what I meant.

  Seeing my daughter through the eyes of the pilgrims was a revelation. I had fed Sherry and washed her and dressed her, had sung her to sleep and sung to her when I knew that she would not awaken. She was a beautiful little girl who smelled of shampoo and soap and milky skin, whose laughter had sounded like singing. I had been there at her birth. I had been there at the moment of her death, and when she had come back.

  In the eyes of the pilgrims, though, she was something else, something more. At some point in the last few days, she had stopped being my little girl alone and had become a vessel for their hopes and their faith, a glowing symbol where once there had been a child who liked to fill her pockets with stones.

  I struggled to reconcile the two visions of Sherry in my mind—I wanted to deny the pilgrims their beliefs, to preserve the image of my daughter as just a little girl, but I couldn’t.

  I tried again. “It’s…”

  “Real,” she said.

  Our eyes met across the table.

  “Real,” I said.

  KAREN

  “Simon’s gone?” Jamie asked as I came back into the kitchen.

  I nodded. “Guitar case in hand. A wandering ministrel he.”

  Jamie smiled.

  “It was hard.”

  “Having him here?”

  “Letting him go,” I said. “I wanted him to stay.”

  “That wouldn’t—”

  I shook my head. “No. That wouldn’t have been good.”

  “You don’t want to rush into anything.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “Yes,” I said. “Yes I do. That’s the whole problem.”

  SIMON

  I stopped at McDonald’s on the walk back downtown and wolfed down a burger and fries without even tasting them. But even with the stop, the six o’clock news was just starting as I turned on the TV in my hotel room.

  We were about three stories in—not breaking news, but ahead of the first commercial. The piece was short: the pilgrims from the morning, some file footage of the accident scene, Father Peter’s protestors singing their hymns on the sidewalk. He was nowhere to be seen—he had a knack for disappearing when cameras turned to him.

  After the story, I shut off the television.

  I had arranged to meet John Richards in the hotel bar at eight, and I had no idea what to do with myself before then.

  I stretched out on the bed. I was exhausted, but when I closed my eyes my mind sprang to life—no chance of sleep.

  I unpacked the bag I had brought from Karen’s, refolding the clothes and tucking them into the battered dresser under the TV. I stacked the books on the bedside table, reading each back cover before I put it down in hopes that something would appeal. Nothing did.

  Turning the television on again, I flipped through to the top of the dial and back again. Nothing.

  I took my time showering, just standing for a while in the hot water as it washed the day away. I toweled off thoroughly, put on a clean shirt, checked my watch.

  6:47.

  I was at a complete loss.

  Hair still damp, I paced around the room, replaying the day in my mind, thinking about the pilgrims: their faces, their eyes, their hope, their faith.

  Everything that had consumed me up to now seemed a thin veneer hiding the true texture of the world. A gaudy surface designed to distract, to keep me from pulling aside the curtain, to keep me from looking for the deeper truths I was sensing now.

  I sat down on the bed and opened the guitar case. My fingers started picking out a blues, but I stopped myself. The idea of sitting alone in a hotel room playing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” was too trite to bear.

  Then I remembered that among the books I had brought from the house was a collection of Child ballads. I riffled through the pages. There.

  I cracked the spine and started to play.

  The wind doth blow today, my love

  And a few small drops of rain;

  I never had but one true-love

  In cold grave she was lain.

  There were secrets in ancient songs like the ones Francis Child collected; secrets that I couldn’t explain, that I didn’t understand. They were all story songs, and you always knew where you were going, verse to verse. But there was an entire world just under the surface. A world of ghosts and angels and demons pulling the strings, all with their own stories, their own motivations, impossible for the characters—or the listeners—to fully understand.

  The chords vibrated through me and it felt like every one of my cells opened to welcome the music like rain. I sang, and for a moment, I felt a part of something larger, something just beyond my understanding. Every word seemed to bring me closer.

  LEO

  The only light in the church basement was from the candles, stuck with their own wax to the bookshelves. When I lit them I said a Hail Mary as I waited for each wick to catch. Candles always make me think of Jesus, His brightness in a world of dark. They made me feel so proud I could be helping.

  Pride. That’s a deadly sin.

  But it felt so right to be doing God’s work. To be standing tall against the forces of evil.

  Even with the candles, the room was more dark than light, and filled with people. Everyone was waiting. Everyone jumped when Father Peter stepped out of the shadows.

  “I apologize for our surroundings here tonight,” he said as he walked to the front. “It’s not pleasant, but the need for privacy outweighs comfort.” He didn’t talk loud, but I could hear him all the way in the back. Nobody else was making a sound. Quiet as a church mouse. Church mice.

  “I don’t want to keep you in this place any longer than you have to be. I’d like to begin with a prayer.”

  Everyone bowed their heads. We all knew the words.

  We said amen after Father Peter, then the room was quiet again.

  “You all know why we’re here,” he began. “I’d like to take a moment to thank those of you who were with me to
day at that house, and to think of those who aren’t with us tonight, because they are still there, doing the Lord’s work in the dark of night.”

  A few people said, “Amen.”

  “If you were at the Barretts’ house today, you saw those misguided souls, those who believe that Sherilyn Barrett can perform miracles. Can perform miracles! As if she were gifted at the piano, or could paint.” People whispered in the dark.

  “Miracles are the province of God!” He lifted his hands over his head. He punched the air and almost shouted. “And yet these people continue to insist that this little girl is somehow holy. Unbaptized, but holy. Taking money for these miracles, but she is holy!

  “I have been inside that house. I have seen that little girl. I have uncovered and revealed their lies for what they really are: a cruel attempt to make money—to make money!—from the pain and suffering of other people. To take advantage of people who are too weak, too desperate, to take solace in the Lord, to put their faith in God alone. It is our job to protect these people.

  “I’ve been in that house. I’ve looked at that little girl. There are no miracles there, only lies and deception.

  “But they will not stop. The Barretts will not stop their lying. The truth has been revealed in the newspapers—you’ve all seen it. Everybody knows that they are lying, but still they prey on the weakness of the sick, the crippled, the suffering, the weak in God. They must be stopped. We must stop them!”

  Father Peter bowed his head. “Let us pray for strength.”

  SIMON

  Sergeant John Richards was waiting for me at the bar, a bowl of peanuts and a plastic cup in front of him.

  He stood up and extended his hand as I approached.

  “How are you, John?” I asked, sitting next to him.

  “I been better,” he said, settling himself back onto his stool. He looked like a boxer gone to seed, big and shambling. “Nice place you got here.”

  The bar at the Balmoral had a reputation as the roughest in Victoria. It stank of spilled beer and cigarette smoke, piss and vomit. There was no pretense of civility—no music, no plants, just the raised voices of its patrons, battered furniture and hazy blue light. “All the comforts of home,” I said.