The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘So those people we saw, those versions of this room, they weren’t what you’d call ghosts?’ I ask, fearful for a moment that I have been talking to, falling in love, with the dead all along.

  ‘No, no, dear girl. They were all moments, just like this moment or the one just after and before. You are bound to one moment, held to it like a kite on a piece of string. But if you were free of it, well, I think maybe you could go anywhere, any time.’

  ‘Can I go into the future?’ I ask her. ‘Can I see what will happen if I change things, what the consequences will be?’

  Lydia shakes her head. ‘No one should know what lies beyond their own death, and, besides, right now you have no future. You can’t see what doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Luna.’ Pea comes to my side her hand on my shoulder. ‘You can turn back. You don’t have to do this, we can just go home and everything will be fine.’

  Lydia shakes her head. ‘I’m so sorry, but she can’t; the time for turning back was a long time ago, right at the first. If you’d fought then, maybe, but you so wanted to see, you just wanted to know. And now too much of you remains in the past where you are visiting. There is no turning back, not now. You must finish what you started, fate will demand it. Time has you in its grip and it won’t let you go until it’s done with you, or you with it.’

  It’s a relief, somehow, to know that climbing on a plane and flying home isn’t an option. At least now I know I don’t have to be brave, or make a difficult choice, because there is no choice. And I don’t have to fear for or mourn what I will lose, because really, in some other version of this life, it’s already gone.

  ‘There’s no other way?’ Pea asks Lydia urgently. ‘A better way?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lydia says honestly, that same mild smile. ‘I don’t know what it is you are doing. But I do know this: have faith. Faith in God, perhaps; faith in the people that matter, definitely. More than that, though, have faith in love. Love outlasts even death. It’s present in every moment, even those filled with darkness; it’s never exhausted, it never gives up or waivers. It’s the one force of the universe that will never be captured by an equation or your science. Have faith in love, and let it guide you, and you never know. Impossible things happen all the time.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

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  When humans believe in stories extraordinary things happen.

  Sometimes, it’s simply a moment of unity between strangers, seeing themselves in someone else’s narrative. When a story is told and retold so many times it becomes more than just ideas, it becomes truth, and that’s when wars are fought, people are martyred, lives are altered, rituals become habit, and habit becomes imbued in magic. Belief makes us who we are. Each religion is a story told so many times it has become the truth to some.

  That’s what I have always believed. On those rare occasions spent in church, amongst the scent of flowers and dust, sometimes with sunlight streaming through the window, I’d think all this is just a story, and it doesn’t matter.

  Now, though, I see exactly how important stories are.

  Not just the big stories, the stories that involve everyone, but the small ones too, the ones told from mother to daughter, lover to lover, father to son, shared again and again, and each time they are retold, binding those that tell them a little closer together.

  Stories are the only things that can ever really change the world. The stories that people believe in are the only ones that matter. Those are the stories that have the power to change everything we think we understand.

  This is my story – my story and my mother’s – and I am the only one with the power to tell it, and to change it, to change the way it ends.

  I walk quietly into the church and stand at the back in the shadows, listening to the quiet, breathing in the peace. Pressing my back against the wall, I close my eyes and I listen, I listen to the minute sounds that make up the air. The murmur of prayers, the rustle of skirts, the scrape of shoes, the breeze that blows over the tops of the candles, the crackle of wax. Listening, I wait until I can see each sound dancing before me, bright and wonderful. The cool surface of the bricks at my back crumble into dust and reassemble, the floor beneath my feet churns into nothing and become solid again, and I tune into the smallness of the noises. A breath of contrition, pressed together palms peeling apart, the jangle of rosary beads, the soft inhalation of incense.

  If there is one thing I seem to have brought away from Lydia’s, it’s this new way to understand, almost control, what’s happening around me, to move the minutes, hours and years that separate me from Riss with precision and design.

  As I open my eyes, my heart trembles, but I know at once that it has worked. I am back in 1977, now to make it count.

  The church itself seems quiet, the pews empty, no sign of any clergy.

  Walking out to the lobby, I see that the lunchtime mass is due to start in a little over an hour. Where would he be: somewhere in here, in the church or in the offices?

  Sticking to the sides of the building where the light is warded off by shadow, I skirt around the edges of the building, my focus on finding him pushing away the fear I am feeling to the very pit of my stomach where it lies in waiting.

  Treading as softly as I can, I walk between the front two rows of pews, crossing the aisle, heading towards the vestry door. It opens with an anguished creak, and it’s so ‘bad horror novel’ I almost laugh, filling in the tension with the appropriate sound effect. The first room, lined with robes on hooks, is empty, but behind the inner door, I can hear movement. Nerves grip at my gut, holding me in place for a moment before I tear myself off the spot and make my way towards the door. Pushing it open I see him, his back turned to me.

  ‘Father Delaney?’ I say the words, but they are expressed as barely more than a whisper, loud enough, however, for him to turn around and look at me.

  He smiles in recognition. Bright-blue eyes as vivid as the sky and just like mine, from the slanted outer corner to the fringe of thick, black lashes; my best feature, I have always been told. I see this in him for the first time, and I see myself reflected there, and the leap of recognition makes me smile. It makes him smile too, although he doesn’t know why.

  ‘I know you,’ he says, pleasantly, with an air of perpetual amusement. He is very handsome. ‘You’re the girl with the camera. You came back, I’m glad. Come in, I have a little time to talk.’

  Stepping into the room, I’m careful to leave the door ajar behind me, securing my exit route. What if Lydia was right, I wonder; what if the church itself was right, and love could be enough to save the day? If I could find it in my heart to love this man, then perhaps my love would be enough to alter his path. But no matter how deeply I search, there is no love here, not a shred. Only a deep abiding fury.

  ‘My name is Luna Sinclair,’ I say. ‘I’m your daughter.’

  His eyes widen, and for a moment I think I might see unease, but if do it is fleeting, because he laughs, bellows almost. His eyes sparkle when he laughs.

  ‘My dear, you are mistaken, and I’m so sorry that you have come all this way, but you must see that’s impossible. Apart from the obvious.’ He gestures at his dog collar. ‘I’m not old enough to be your father, I apologise is that seems ungentlemanly.’

  ‘Ungentlemanly.’ I laugh. ‘What I’m going to tell you is going to sound like I’m mad, but the truth is the truth and if you really listen you will hear it. In two days you will go to the home of my mother, and you will rape her. I don’t know why, I don’t know if you’ve done it before, if that’s the sort of monster you are, or if you’re the kind who hardly knew it himself until the moment is upon you. But either way, that’s what you do. You rape her, and nine months later I am born. I am born and her life is ruined. Not by me, you understand, but by you and what she does to you. She kills you.’

  Despite what Stephanie told us, I still tell
him the version in which he dies, desperate to connect to him somehow, and to appeal to his self-preservation instinct if nothing else. But he doesn’t flinch, his expression doesn’t waiver.

  ‘So you’re from the future, come to warn me?’ he says, and his smirk makes me want to kill him myself.

  ‘I told you it would be hard to believe.’ I take a step closer to him. ‘But you of all people should know that just because something is implausible, that doesn’t mean it’s not true.’

  ‘Are you comparing yourself to Christ?’ he says, and there his smile fades, a shadow falling across his eyes.

  ‘Just look at me,’ I tell him. ‘Look at me and tell me you don’t see that I am telling the truth. What you do, it changes so many lives, stunts them, deforms them away from who they should have been, not just my mother’s, but the people she loves too – and yours. Yours most of all. I’ve been given a chance to try and change your path, and I took it. Can’t you look at me and see that I am telling the truth? I am your daughter.’

  Delaney shakes his head slowly. ‘Luna, is it? I do believe that you think you are telling the truth, and if you’ll wait here for a moment I can find you some places you can go to get a little help. But what you are saying about me is not only deeply troubling, and offensive, it’s just wrong. I’m a man of God, I lead a quiet life here, despite everything – the crime, the poverty. The people of this parish are hardworking, simple people of good faith. I try to reflect that in my service to them. Before I became a priest there was a time that I loved many women, and not all of them well. If you’d come to me aged ten, with those blue eyes, then, perhaps. But what you’re saying, your story just isn’t possible. And I have never forced myself on a woman, not before or after I took the vow.’

  I discover that I want to believe him. No, it’s more than a want, it’s a need, a sudden vivid yearning, an actual ache to believe that everything Mum told us is wrong, that it was her fault, she did tempt him, put sin in his way and then destroy him. It was my mother that corrupted this good kind man. He is so charming, so credible, and if I am not very careful I could easily be drawn into his web of lies and never escape.

  ‘It’s time to take your mask off and tell me how many women you’ve raped, Father Delaney.’ I drop the bomb into the still of the air, and step back to watch it explode. Emotion floods over his face: fear, fury and shame, but not surprise. Thomas Delaney was not surprised by my question, not even in an age when priests were never questioned. The sickness returns in the pit of my stomach and I want to cry.

  ‘Women trust you, don’t they? They like you, they flatter you, but they aren’t the ones you want, are they? The ones you want are the ones you can’t have, am I right?’ I continue, forcing the words out of my mouth, determined to make him show his true self to me. ‘When was the first time you simply couldn’t stop yourself?’

  ‘Who the hell are you?!’ he bellows, his composure falling away, his words crashing out of the room to echo in the very tops of the chambers that make the church. ‘Get out of God’s house with your filthy talk.’

  ‘You think you’re safe here,’ I say, standing up as he marches towards me, holding my ground as he towers over. ‘You think you’re safe and that no one knows what you do, but I know. I know everything about you.’

  He is standing so close to me that the air between us fluctuates, makes and remakes itself, unable to find sense in the disruption I have caused, a grown woman standing next to the man that hasn’t fathered her yet. ‘I know what you have done and what you’re going to do, but I will make you a deal. You leave here today, right now. You pack your bags and you get as far away from here as you possibly can and I will keep your filthy secret for you. You leave Marissa Lupo alone, and I will let you be.’

  He pushes me away from him and I stumble, onto the floor.

  ‘Marissa.’ He crouches down studying my face. ‘The young woman from the tailors, she wants to see me.’

  ‘Just leave her alone.’ I want it to sound like an order, but its chimes more like a plea. ‘Leave her alone.’

  ‘Who are you?’ he asks me again, leaning closer to me, his voice quiet this time, almost a whisper as he reaches past my shoulder, and pushes to the door shut behind me, closing his secrets in. ‘Tell me what it is you want.’

  ‘I want her to be safe, that’s all,’ I beg. ‘Safe from you.’

  Delaney stares at me, his bright eyes suddenly intensified by tears.

  ‘Do you believe in God at all?’ I ask him, despairing.

  ‘Of course I do,’ he says. ‘God lives through me.’

  He sits back on his heels staring at me, and I scramble to my feet, my soft soles taking a moment to gain purchase on the tiled floor.

  There’s a rapid knock at the door, and a younger man hurries in.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, father,’ the man, hardly more than a boy, says. ‘I forgot the time.’

  ‘Not a problem, Danny,’ Father Delaney says, looking right at me. ‘Thank you for visiting, my child. You can be assured that I will certainly take into consideration what you told me today.’ He takes some leaflets out of a drawer. ‘I hope you will consider looking at these, there are good people who can help you. May God go with you.’

  I’m not sure exactly how I get out of the church, only that somehow I do. One moment I am cloistered in shadow and the next I am standing in the glaring sun and throwing up. I lean against the wall as people walk past me, a couple of people muttering insults under their breath. All I’ve had is one cup of coffee in the last few hours, though my body keeps convulsing long after my stomach is empty, until I’m eventually still, but even in the blazing heat I shiver, screwing up the leaflets about how to get my life back on track and throwing them in the trash.

  The horror that I can’t shake, that keeps rising like bile in my throat, is that he wasn’t scared of me; he wasn’t afraid. It’s as if his bright-blue smiling eyes won’t stop looking at me as I walk as fast as I can away from the church, bracing my trembling knees every time they threaten to buckle from underneath me. No, he wasn’t afraid of me, and he believed me when I told him who I was, and somehow that is the most frightening thing of all.

  Somehow I keep going, lowering my head, breaking into an uneven trot. I’m not even aware as I run past Sam’s Bakery that it’s the place where Michael works. If he hadn’t been standing in the window I would have kept on running, and even when I hear him call out after me my heart stops, but my feet don’t at first.

  ‘Luna, wait,’ he says. ‘I got to talk to you!’

  ‘I can’t …’ I turn on my heel to look back at him. ‘I feel like if I stop I’ll collapse.’

  ‘WAIT!’ I hear fear in his voice, but I start walking. ‘Wait, you can’t just … Goddam it, Luna, wait up!’ He rips off his apron and runs to catch up with me.

  ‘What the fuck?’ he says grabbing hold of my arms. As he grips my flesh hard, his gaze runs over me, and I know he is checking if I’m real or a fragment, a ghost. ‘You’re here, you’re real, you’re a real person. What the fuck was that all about last night? Was I drunk? I didn’t take anything … It was like … it was like the world melted around you.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, wearily, falling into his arms and leaning against his chest. ‘I’m so sorry that happened the way it did, but I didn’t know how to explain … to explain something that doesn’t have any explanations.’

  ‘That you are not from here,’ Michael says. ‘That you’re what, a ghost? An alien?’

  ‘I’m from another time – the future,’ I say. ‘I’ve come back to … right a wrong. To try to, anyway.’

  He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t flinch or pull away. And I wait.

  ‘What does that mean?’ he says, at last. ‘Does that mean I’m going to lose you?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ I say and my eyes fill with tears. ‘You really believe me? You don’t think I’m mad?’

  His fingers relax their grip as he watches me, every sweep of h
is gaze trying to decipher what he understands, and what he doesn’t.

  ‘Luna, last night you vanished. I mean you actually dissolved. The air seemed to … kind of buckle and, I don’t know, fall apart, and you went with it. One minute you and I were there, together, maybe more together than I have been with anyone. The next I was alone. And out of my mind. I thought maybe you were gone for good, I thought maybe you were dead …’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to leave you, I don’t ever want to leave you, Michael, but I must. I can’t do this anymore, this thing between you and me; it’s hard enough as it is. When I see you, I know you aren’t mine, and I’m not yours and my heart can’t take anymore. This needs to stop now. For both our sakes.’

  He shakes his head, pulling me into his arms again. ‘No, no, I won’t believe that. I don’t. I can help you, let me help you. Tell me the reason you’re here, please. At least give me that?’ His hooded eyes are so intense, so focused on me, as if he thinks that even if he blinks I might disappear again, and it’s hard not to want to be seen the way he sees me, as if my existence were vital to his.

  ‘I’m here to save a life, my mother’s life, my sister’s, my father’s,’ I tell him. ‘I’m here to right wrongs.’

  ‘Then let me help. Let me be the one that saves you,’ he says.

  ‘You can’t be,’ I say with sadness, because it seems like such a nice idea, to surrender into the arms of another, to be rescued. But I’m the one who is the rescuer here. ‘And I didn’t mean for this … for us to happen, it shouldn’t have. But it’s OK, I’ll be gone soon, and you go and write your books and you get out of here and everything you want from your life will happen. Years from now you’ll forget about me, or think I was that crazy woman that got under your skin for a bit. Who knows, maybe when you are a famous writer, you’ll put me in a book.’

  ‘Do you know that?’ he asks. ‘Do you know that about my future?’