Out Of The Deep I Cry

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  She wanted Mrs. Marshall to go, too. “I don’t think you should be alone,” she said. “And I certainly don’t think you ought to be driving home this late at night all by yourself.”

  The older woman patted her arm. She had actually hugged Allan and Renee as they left, a shining example of Christian forbearance Clare wasn’t certain she could have emulated. “I’ll be fine, dear.”

  “You’ve had a pretty big shock. Please, at least just let me call Mr. Madsen and have him take you home. You can wait here until he comes.” She looked around at the Rouses’ well-made furniture, their family pictures, the books and magazines in the glass-fronted cases. She wondered what had been earned, and what had been stolen from Jane Ketchem’s money.

  Mrs. Marshall did that mind-reading thing again. “What am I going to do with the trust money?”

  Clare didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Money isn’t good or bad in and of itself. It’s what you do with it.”

  Mrs. Marshall bit her lip, scraping a spot in her lipstick. “It might as well have been a blood payment for my brothers’ and sisters’ lives. For my parents’ lives.”

  “However they earned that money, whatever your mother did, surely she sacrificed enough to make it clean.”

  “You’d think so.” The older woman’s voice regained some of its tartness. “Unfortunately, for thirty years it’s benefited the Rouse family instead of the clinic. That’s not what she wanted. I feel…” She took Clare’s hands. “I feel as if I owe it to her to do something with it. Owe it to all of them.”

  “Something… that’s not the church roof?”

  “Not all of it. Would you think it terrible of me if I only put in enough for the immediate work? If we had to rely on fund-raising to make up the rest?”

  Clare shook her head. “I was never wild about the idea of taking the money away from the clinic. Do you want to set the trust back up again? Make payments to the board of aldermen this time, to keep it all out in the open?”

  “I don’t know. The clinic’s gotten along without it perfectly well all these years. I believe I’d like to find something more personal.”

  Clare smiled slowly. “Let me introduce you to Debba Clow.”

  “The one who won’t vaccinate her child?”

  “We’re working on that. Maybe hearing your parents’ story might help. I have her number in my-” Clare slapped her pockets, reflexively patting for her cell phone, until she remembered where it was. Her clothes were half dried by now, and smelled of mildew. “Never mind. She has a son, Skylar, who could benefit from someone with deep pockets taking an interest in him. She wants to teach him at home, and they could use aides, autism specialists, extra speech and occupational therapy-you could make a difference. And it would be”-she smiled a little-“personal.”

  With a little more pressing, Mrs. Marshall agreed that they should call Mr. Madsen, and the elderly attorney seemed happy enough to be of service. “When you’re my age,” he said, “you don’t sleep all that much anyway.”

  By the time they dropped Clare off in front of the historical society to retrieve her car, she was pretty well dried off. She sat behind the wheel for several minutes. Debating: Rectory? Or the hospital? She didn’t surprise herself when she went for the hospital. If Russ had been released, she’d be on her way without much time lost. If he was still there, and awake, they could talk. She could picture herself, sitting on the edge of his bed. Maybe holding his hand. And they would talk.

  Her clericals did the trick again, getting her past admissions after hours. Although the security guard in charge did look strangely at her. Walking past the dark plate-glass window of the gift shop, she saw why. In addition to the reek and the damp wrinkles, her black blouse and pants were streaked with dried mud, and her hair was-well, better not to think of it. Russ didn’t care.

  She took the elevator up to the third floor. “I’m here to see Russ Van Alstyne,” she said to the charge nurse. “Downstairs, they told me he had been admitted?”

  “That’s right.” The nurse, a twenty-something man with curling hair, flipped open a chart. “He had to have his leg recast. And he had some signs of fluid in his lungs, so he’s being kept overnight for observation. But I’m afraid he’s asleep now.” He looked at her clerical collar. “Are you his…?”

  She smiled over her disappointment. “Just let him know that Clare Fergusson stopped by to see him. Thanks.” She pushed away from the nursing station’s counter.

  “Excuse me?” A voice hailed from down the hall. “Are you Clare Fergusson?” Clare turned. A pocket goddess-there was no other word for her-was walking toward her. She smiled and waved. “I was just coming out to grab another cup of tea and I heard your name.” She was tiny, curvy, with a tousle of Marilyn Monroe hair and a flawless complexion. She reached for Clare’s hand. “I just had to say thank you.” Up close, she had soft-edged lines around her eyes and overlapping front teeth that made her smile charming instead of perfect. “I’m Linda Van Alstyne.”

  Clare moved her hand up and down, propped a smile on her face, said something.

  “Mother Van Alstyne told me you were the one who got Russ out of the woods and to the hospital when he broke his leg. I’m so grateful. He just goes out and does these crazy things, you know.” She laughed. Musically, of course. “So I’m glad he has friends looking out for him.”

  Clare said something else. She thought she might melt into the floor, like the Wicked Witch of the West. She was the Wicked Witch. She deserved melting.

  “Were you visiting someone from your church?”

  Clare’s mouth worked.

  “Well, it’s great to finally meet you. I’ll tell Russ you said hi, okay?” She gave Clare’s hand a final squeeze and glided back up the hall to the kitchenette like the woman in the Roethke poem. Describing circles as she moved.

  Clare felt her way to the elevator. Sometime later, she found herself in the chapel room. She sat for a long time in the half-light, staring at the nondenominational wall hanging at the front of the room. Just sitting. Then she 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

  NOW

  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, th
e 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 Ministers Monthly magazine.”

  “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 make that disappear by writing me a letter. Were you listening to your sermon? I was. You can’t make yourself dead again when you’ve come alive. So you’re scared. Christ knows, I am, too. But like you said. We have to have courage.”

  She bent over, breathing deeply.

  “Clare?” He tried to see her face. “Clare? You’re not going to faint, are you?”

  She let out another short laugh. “No.” She sat up, took a breath, then stood. “Come here.”

  He grabbed the cane he used to help him get around in his walking cast and followed her up the aisle, across, to a place where the pews had been cleared away. He could see from the water damage that this was where the roof had given in.

  “This is the window that Mrs. Marshall gave in her mother’s memory. It’s hard to see at nighttime, but you can make the details out.”

  He looked at it.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about the Ketchems. About what went wrong for them, and for Allan Rouse. I think they all saw something they wanted, something they were tempted by, and they said, ‘I deserve this.’ ” She looked up at him. “I don’t want to make the same mistake.”

  He reached out and took her hand in his. “I’m not trying to talk you into an… an affair. I don’t want to be unfaithful to my vows.”

  She smiled, a shaky, crooked smile. “Me, neither.”

  “There’s something in me that recognized you. Right from the start. The parts of me that always felt alone, the parts of me that I always kept hidden away, out of sight-I could see that you had them, too.” He smiled a little. “Sorry. I’m not saying this very smoothly.”

  She stepped closer. “I never asked you to be smooth. Just to be yourself.”

  He had to close his eyes for a moment, to get himself under control. “That’s just it. I know I can tell you, ‘This is who I am.’ And your answer will always be-”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t want to fall in love with you,” she said. He tightened his grip on her hand. “I’m sorry.” Her voice was on the edge of crying.

&nb
sp; “Oh, love.” He let his cane clatter to the stone floor and pulled her to him. “Why?”

  She tipped her head back to meet his eyes. “Because we’re going to break our hearts.”

  He wanted to reassure her, but what could he say? She was right. So he rocked her back and forth and they clung to each other, while the candles burned down and the sad-faced angels held out their glass promises. For he doth not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men.

  Julia Spencer-Fleming

  Julia Spencer-Fleming is an American novelist. She lives in Maine with her husband and 3 children.

  ***

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