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By Root 1257 0

and then she had a sudden memory of the women of her long-ago night circle, the women who had come to her house bearing gifts for Paul. She remembered helping them once to clean the church, how they’d polished the pews by sitting on rags and sliding across the long smooth planks on their bottoms. More weight this way, they’d joked, laughter filling the sanctuary. In her grief Norah had turned away from them and never gone back, but it occurred to her now that they had suffered too, had lost loved ones, experienced illnesses, failed themselves and others. Norah had not wanted to be one of them or to accept their comfort, and she had walked away. Remembering, her eyes filled with tears. Oh, this was silly, her loss had happened almost two decades ago. Surely this grief should not be welling up, fresh as water in a spring.

It was crazy. She was crying so hard. She’d run so fast, so far, to avoid this moment, and yet it was still happening: a stranger slept on the pull-out sofa, dreaming, a mysterious new life within her like a secret, and David shrugged and turned away. She would go home, she knew, to find him gone, a suitcase packed, perhaps, but nothing else taken. She wept for this knowledge and for Paul, the rage and lostness in his eyes. For her daughter, never known. For Bree’s thin hands. For the multitude of ways in which their love had failed them all, and they, love. Grief, it seemed, was a physical place. Norah wept, unaware of anything except a kind of release she remembered from childhood; she sobbed until she was aching, breathless, spent.

There were birds, sparrows, nesting in the open rafters. As she came back to herself, Norah became aware, slowly, of their soft sounds, the flutter of wings. She was kneeling with her arms resting on the back of the pew in front of her. Light still fell through the windows in angled shafts, collecting in pools on the floor. Embarrassed, she sat up and wiped the tears from her face. A few gray feathers rested on the tile steps to the altar. Looking up, Norah caught sight of a sparrow winging lightly overhead, a shadow amid the greater shadows. Over the years so many others had sat here with their secrets and their dreams, dark and light. She wondered if their wild grief, like hers, had eased. It didn’t make any sense to her, that this place should have brought her such peace, but it had.

When she stepped back outside, blinking, into the sunlight, Paul was sitting on a stone in front of the wrought-iron fence.

In the distance, Bree was walking through the grass, her shoes swinging.

He nodded at the scattered stones of the cemetery. “I’m sorry,” he said, “for what I said. I didn’t mean it. I was trying to make Dad angry, so I could be.”

“Don’t ever say it again,” Norah told him. “That your life’s not worth it. Don’t ever, ever let me hear that again. Don’t think it, either.”

“I won’t,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

“I know you’re angry,” Norah said. “You have a right to whatever life you want to live. But your father’s right too. There will be certain conditions. Break them, and you’re on your own.”

She said all this without looking at him, and when she turned she was shocked to see his face working, tears on his cheeks. Oh, the boy he’d been was not so far away, after all. She hugged him as well as she could. He was so tall; her head only reached his chest.

“Look, I love you,” she said into his smelly shirt. “I’m so glad you’re back. And you really, really stink,” she added, laughing, and he laughed too.

She shaded her eyes, glancing across the field at Bree, closer now.

“It’s not far,” Bree called. “Just down the road a bit. She says we can’t miss it.”

They got back in the car and traveled once more along the narrow road, through the rolling hills. Within a few miles they began to glimpse white buildings through the cypress trees. Then suddenly the Abbey of Gethsemani stood revealed, magnificent and stark and simple against the rolling green landscape. Bree pulled into a parking lot beneath a row of rustling trees. As they got out of the car, bells began to ring,