Rise

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  “You are Julie, right?”

  “Oh, yes.” Julie gave a short laugh. “Of course I am. I just assumed . . . I’m sorry. I’m distracted. Do you want to tell me why you’re here?”

  This time it was April’s turn to laugh. “Because I want to talk to you, actually. The village cell sends warmest greetings and an invitation to come and see us anytime. Everyone has been wondering about you and hoping you’re doing well.”

  Julie’s eyes flicked away, into the house with its many lights on, and sighed. “I hope I can answer that better later.” She looked back at April. “I’m doing better than I ever have. And I’m hurting badly. Does that answer the question?”

  “Maybe it does. Can we sit down?”

  “Of course.”

  They went into the living room together, and April sank into a loveseat while Julie sat in an armchair across from it, under a lamp.

  “Something happened to you,” April began. “And I wondered—I hoped—you could tell me about it.”

  Julie was regarding April closely—uncomfortably so. She shifted on the loveseat and tried not to clear her throat and make it obvious how scrutinized she felt. Julie took a long time to answer, making the awkwardness even worse.

  Finally she said, “I think I’m not the only one something happened to.”

  “The fire happened to me,” April said. “But I’m assuming you know about that?”

  “The fire is still happening to you,” Julie said.

  “And you?”

  “Right.” Julie folded her hands in her lap and looked down, gathering thoughts maybe. Or just reluctant to speak the thoughts she’d already gathered. “I don’t know if I have the answers you’re going to want to hear. I don’t know anything about being raised from the dead, if that’s what you want to know. I remember some things, but they’re strange, and I don’t think they could help anyone else.”

  “Honestly,” April said, “that was what I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Maybe you should explain why you decided to come here?” Julie looked hopeful, like they both needed help finding the beginning and this was her best guess for how to do it.

  “I thought the Spirit spoke to me,” April said. “I was . . . angry. About death, dying. I don’t know. I’m not sure why it affected me the way it did. It’s not like I haven’t been around death before. It just . . . it rattled me.” She didn’t add, And I felt like I was going to burn up from the inside. Just explode. Again.

  “Hmm,” Julie said, her tone both sympathetic and waiting.

  “And I just asked. The Spirit. What to do about death. And I thought I heard your name.”

  Julie sat back, surprised. “He sent you to me?”

  “Yes.” April frowned. “He?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you call the Spirit ‘he’?”

  Julie stared down at her hands now, and gave a nervous laugh. “I guess most Oneness don’t.”

  “No. We normally talk about the Spirit as a force . . . not as a person.” Although, now that she thought of it, Reese had used the same wording when they last talked.

  “Well then. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to tell you.” Julie’s face changed as she spoke, becoming a mask of unhappiness. She looked like she wanted to break down, but she held her shoulders rigidly straight and kept her hands clasped in front of her. “When I came to life again, I encountered the Spirit. And he is a person. And he is still with me. And I think . . . please, understand me. I know I’m new. I know I’ve only been Oneness for a tiny little bit of time, and I know that before that, I let myself be deceived and follow someone who was really evil. I don’t think I know everything. I . . .”

  “It’s okay,” April said. She leaned over and laid a hand on Julie’s. “It’s okay. You didn’t choose any of this. I understand. Just . . . what were you going to say?”

  Julie’s voice shook as she tried hard to hold it steady. “That I think the Oneness has forgotten something really important. That I’m supposed to help us remember. But I don’t know how.” Tears began to run down her face. “I came here to find Andrew, my husband, and try to make things right between us. I wronged him so much, and he’s been so patient, and so good. I hoped he would come into the Oneness when he saw the truth—felt it. But I tried to tell him, and I drove him away.”

  “That’s why he left this morning?”

  “He’s confused. He doesn’t know what to do.”

  “He isn’t the only one,” April said.

  “Mom?”

  A voice, younger than it should have been, interrupted them. Miranda was standing in the living room doorway in a nightgown, clutching a blanket and staring at April. She pointed. “Why is she here?”

  “She’s visiting, honey,” Julie said. “She just came to talk.”

  Miranda’s pointing hand began to shake. “I don’t want her here.”

  April started to stand, slowly. “I’m April,” she said. “I don’t blame you if you don’t remember me . . . I—”

  “I’m not stupid,” Miranda interrupted. “Of course I remember you.” She turned her eyes back to Julie. “Mama, make her leave. Make her go. I don’t want her here.”

  Her voice was beginning to rise, taking on a note of hysteria.

  And April was beginning to feel heat.

  At first she thought she was blushing—that the awkwardness, the embarrassment of the moment was flushing her cheeks. But it was more than that. It had started in her core, and it was growing, tingling in her fingers and toes, her arms and legs, shortening her breath, brightening her eyes.

  She jumped up. “I’ll go. I’ll leave.”

  But Julie was staring at her, and she reached out to grab April’s arm and pulled her hand back quickly, as though the touch burned.

  “No,” she whispered. “Stay.”

  “Mama! Make her leave!”

  April turned her eyes back on Julie, begging. For some reason that she could not explain, Julie’s word was holding her here.

  “Let me go. I need to leave before . . .”

  “Stay. Please.”

  Miranda’s voice rose to a scream. “Mama!”

  Another voice—a man’s voice—boomed through the house from the direction of the garage, seconds after April registered the sound of a door opening. “Miranda!”

  She had no choice.

  She ripped herself free of Julie’s request and ran.

  Chapter 8

  “What were you thinking?” Andrew shouted. “How could you let her come here when Miranda is like this? Did it even occur to you that she would trigger her trauma? She was there in the fire! Hell, she caused the fire!”

  Julie had not moved from the armchair where she’d been seated when April ran. Andrew had gone to Miranda, comforting her, taking her back to bed. He had been with her more than an hour before coming back to the living room, and Julie was still seated in the same place, the same position, hands clasped in her lap, eyes downcast.

  “I came back here hoping we could talk. I thought we could make something work. I just don’t know now, Julie. I just don’t know.”

  He collapsed into the couch across from her, looking exhausted.

  “Where were you all day?” she asked.

  “That has nothing to do with anything. Why did you let that woman in here?”

  “She’s a friend, Andrew. She saved Miranda’s life, as you know perfectly well.”

  “I know Miranda walked out of the fire holding her hand . . . her and some other woman with them. I don’t know anything else.”

  “You said she caused the fire.”

  “I don’t know why I said that. That’s . . . what it seemed like. Like she was the source of it.”

  “She’s full of the Spirit,” Julie said.

  “What, like you?”

  “It’s not manifesting in the same way, but yes.”

  “So this Person living in you is also a raging fire? The kind that killed multiple people and burned a cemet
ery to ashes? Great.”

  “Andrew, I’m sorry this isn’t simple. I wish it was. But please . . . I want this to work.” She swallowed hard. Her eyes were shining. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

  “I came back for Miranda. She needs me. Obviously.”

  “I wouldn’t have let anyone harm her, Andrew!”

  “She was screaming when I came into the house!”

  “You’re the one who told me she’s not okay. She wasn’t screaming because there was a real threat.”

  “That girl looked like a threat to me.”

  Julie just stared at him. “Then I’m sorry. Maybe we can’t make this work.”

  He shook his head and raked his hair in frustration. “So why was she here?”

  “To ask me about resurrection.”

  “Is that going to happen a lot?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll tell people whatever they want to know when they come.”

  “Great. My wife the freak show.”

  “Andrew.”

  He looked up at her, and the pain in her face stopped his heart. “I’m sorry. I don’t want it to be like this either. I want to fight for her, Julie. I want to fight for both of you. But right now you look an awful lot like a threat.”

  “I understand,” she whispered.

  “I went to my mother’s.”

  “Oh. How is she?”

  “Dead. I was at the mausoleum. You used to know my mother was dead, Julie.”

  This time she laughed. He smiled. What else could he do? What else could either of them do?

  She said, “Well. Not all the dead people I know are dead anymore.”

  He barked with laughter. “Could anyone else on earth give that comeback?”

  “I don’t know. Andrew, I want you to be with me. I want to be on your side. I want that more than anything. But I can’t deny what happened to me, and I can’t deny what’s living in me now. I can’t. It’s not a choice.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I really was at the mausoleum. Thinking about all this stuff. Thinking about what you’re supposed to do if your wife has been shot to death and resurrected by some power you don’t know anything about.”

  “Did you reach any answers?”

  He reached out and took her hand. “I guess you start by thanking that power. Or at least by not assuming it’s an enemy. I’m glad you’re alive, Julie.”

  She closed her fingers around his.

  * * *

  On the ground outside the window, shaking with cold but grateful for it, April felt the change in the atmosphere and smiled, her lips tight together against the frost gathering around them. She’d stayed, shaking as much with fear as with cold as Andrew shouted and the shouts played across her memories like a broken instrument. Stayed because she couldn’t leave Julie alone with a man who was so angry. Because she knew what that was like. Because someone needed to be there to intervene if that was necessary.

  And because she still needed answers she didn’t have.

  Had she, as she’d heard Andrew say, caused the fire?

  It had begun in her.

  She had prayed . . . in the place of peace she’d remained in since encountering the Spirit in the deep of the waters in the bay, she had lifted her head with confident courage and asked the Spirit to come. And he had come—as fire. Beginning deep inside her, and bursting out from her to consume the cemetery and the enemies of the Oneness. She had felt it as power and life, and she had taken Miranda’s hand—and Teresa’s, she remembered—and stepped out through the fire still burning with confidence, with courage, and with peace.

  Where was that peace now?

  Why had the fire turned her from confidence in the Spirit to fear of it? How had she become a stranger to herself, to the Oneness, and to the Spirit who gave them life?

  She admitted to herself, there in the cold, that she was terrified the fire would break out again. It kept trying. The growing heat, the passionate response—to things like death. And to whatever was wrong with Miranda. And every time she had done all in her power to keep it down, snuff it out, stop it from happening. Control it somehow.

  But what else was she supposed to do?

  She knew, from her childhood, what it was like to be out of control. What happened when violence simply broke out and raged on. The Spirit, through the Oneness, was supposed to be her shelter from all of that. Not a repeat of it—a repeat ten thousand times worse than the childhood nightmare could possibly have been, because her nightmare had been a relatively private one, and the Spirit filled the whole universe.

  The heat had died far down now, and snow was drifting in the air—it was getting too cold to keep sitting here. Wishing the couple inside the house luck, she rose and headed for the street where she had parked Richard’s car. She was fairly sure Andrew and Julie really loved each other. That they weren’t like her parents had been, even if tonight’s fight had been ugly and loud. The little she knew of their lives told her that their love should have ended long ago, but it had not; it had survived all that was thrown at it.

  She hoped it would survive this too.

  * * *

  When the plague at last had worn itself out and the countryside began to heal, to rebuild, and to live again, the death toll was devastating. Every family had lost some of their own, the elderly and the children proving especially vulnerable. The abbey in Via del Sol was far from immune; they had lost nearly half their sisters in the final count.

  But when they looked back, not one of the sisters felt that death had truly won. At the last, the victories outweighed the losses—or at least proved that death was not the only force in the world that required reckoning with. More than two hundred children who came to their doors in the year that the abbey functioned as a hospital survived. Of these, many had lost their families and did not go home again; most became One. They spread out and formed smaller communities throughout the country, ministering to the villagers and country folk who were still just trying to regain their feet and their hearts after the end of their world as they had known it.

  Carmela lived, though she lost her eyesight—a consequence of high fevers that Teresa was not able to bring down.

  The last thing she saw, she told Teresa, was that first painting of the Spirit. The one Teresa had done in the midnight hour when Niccolo lay at death’s door. “It is my comfort,” she told Teresa often. “It lies before my eyes always. A vision that gives me joy and strength.”

  “I would that it had given you healing also,” Teresa answered as they sat together in the garden under a warm spring sun, amidst lush new growth that Teresa could see and Carmela could not.

  “Who is to say it did not? I feel as one whose life has been snatched from the door of the netherworld and given back to her. Perhaps this vision had a part in doing that.”

  Even a greater grief, however, was that Niccolo had stopped painting. Teresa tried to convince him to take up the art again, but “I have lost my heart for it,” he told her, and that was the end of the argument.

  Ten years passed and Niccolo became a young man, handsome and strong, a servant to all. He travelled the countryside and joined the various Oneness communities as long as he liked until wanderlust took him again. Everywhere he went he was a favourite, and Teresa heard tales of the wonderful things he did.

  But things were not right if he was not painting.

  She had never forgotten her dream. Niccolo had a great purpose, a heroic one. But he would not reach it if he did not take up the brush again. Of that she was certain.

  One more grief equalled that, and it stayed settled in Teresa’s heart where she spoke of it to no one: that Franz Bertoller had been driven from their presence a lost man, unredeemed, and she had never done anything to help him. The look in his eyes had never ceased to haunt her.

  So when his message came, her heart was more ready than it should have been to receive it. They had unfinished business, her soul and his. And she was frustrated by her lack of impact o
n Niccolo, who was meant to learn her gift and take it to far greater heights and who instead spent his time riding horseback from place to place, being a charmer and a favourite and making everyone happy but her.

  Mother Isabel might have told her to turn the request down, to respond to Bertoller’s message with a polite refusal. But Mother was gone too, quietly succumbed to old age a year hence.

  His message was short.

  I regret to write that the plague has come to my own country. I have not forgotten the efficacy of your work in combating it. At present I have made of my home a hospital much like the one you once tended at the abbey. Help is lacking. I request your presence to show us the way, to tend to the dying, and to paint visions that heal.

  Yours as ever,

  Franz Bertoller

  He included none of the appellations of nobility, and that simplicity was the final thing to make up her mind.

  In any case, even if she could refuse him, how could she refuse the dying?

  She began to make preparations almost immediately. The journey would take ten days by horse; she would ride as quickly as possible, sheltering for the nights with the Oneness cells along the way. Preparations took longer than they should have, perhaps—she did not admit to herself that she was stalling, though inwardly she knew it.

  Niccolo was out on one of his journeys, and she hoped to convince him to come along.

  To revive the gift she knew he still had.

  To help the dream on to fulfilment.

  He had been gone some time; surely he would come home soon. The bond between them was still strong; though at times she thought he kicked against it, he always came home eventually. And Teresa knew that she was the real reason he did.

  Four days passed, and she knew she could not continue to delay. She had run out excuses to linger. She stood in the abbey looking out over the looping road as the sun set and the moon rose in the sky, deciding in her heart to leave come morning’s light.

  “Just a little faster, Niccolo,” she said to the road. “Ride just a little faster, and you will go with me.”