Authors: Ginger Voight
“
I need you to page Dr. Ashcroft.” A pause. “Yes, I know it’s midnight. It’s an emergency.” Another pause. Adele grew impatient. “Just tell him it’s Adele Lumas. Lumas!” she snapped. Her teeth chattered so badly she had to clinch her jaw tight to spell out her name. “Tell him I’ve had another episode.”
As she held on the line she closed the vault with a slam, and made a hasty retreat from the building.
Rain misted down on
the Church of the Holy Sacrament that dreary fall morning that followed Adele’s harrowing, and understandably sleepless, night. The sky was positively gray, as if the sun itself could not face their sad gathering. Adele stood on the steps, oblivious to the rain, reluctant to go in behind a steady stream of downtrodden mourners. No day was as sad as the one where one must bid a final farewell to a child. Adele wouldn’t have come at all had her questions not been met with more questions. It was no longer just business. The dreams had made it all too personal. Now she had to know.
It drove her to attend this funeral, just the like funeral before that, and the others before that. Her feet carried her in, but
as usual her resolve carried her on.
She slipped into the back pew unnoticed
just in time to see the young, grief-stricken mother, Marisol Maldonado, crumple before a full canvas photo of Lily that stood at the foot of the altar. The child looked so full of life it was hard to find any similarity between that child and the one that lay on the slab at the morgue. The wail of a devastation resonated through the large sanctuary and danced all over Adele’s already frayed nerves.
Another woman, who looked like so many of the older gypsies of the t
own, instantly knelt at Marisol’s side. Adele wiped a tear away as Father Michael Pierce took the podium. He wore his twenty-five years well underneath the ornate white vestment that he had once told her represented the hope of resurrection for the dead. It was a message of hope, but when his dark eyes scanned the crowd, lighting briefly on her face, he looked as helpless as she felt.
“
What can you say to a mother who has lost her child?” he began as he glanced toward Marisol. His deep, rich voice was soothing, like a blanket chasing the chill of sadness away. “You can say ‘I’m sorry,’ but the words fall short of what you want to say. You want to say that it’s all a bad dream.”
Adele gave an absent nod. It should have all been a very bad dream and nothing else. Nothing like this.
Michael’s voice cracked with emotion. “What do you say to the person staring back to you from the mirror as he grapples with the kind of contradictions that arise in one’s faith? That no loving God could allow the death of a child, nor condemn a parent to the living hell that follows.”
He
paused as his gaze lit upon the parishioners one by one. “But it is not God’s love or lack thereof that suggests in any way we are spared from the harsh realities of life. Rather, we are given something far more precious. We’re given the assurance of faith – faith that love lives on. That death is not the end of things, but yet a new beginning to something so much greater than any of us can imagine.”
Adele
could bear it no longer. She slipped out of the pew and quickly through the door, nearly mowing down a man with long, wild hair in the process. Both she and the latecomer stared at each other for a moment, before she finally brushed past him to get out of the sanctuary that had become far too claustrophobic – as it always had been.
Once outside she gulped the fresh air, as if to push the
nameless and persistent sorrow way far down in a place she’d locked away a long time ago, determined never to revisit. It seemed a never-ending battle. She leaned back up against the stone exterior of the huge church and gasped for breath. Something on the street caught her eye. It was the hearse, and in the back sat a tiny black coffin.
Without any conscious thought, Adele walked directly to the sleek black car that crouched at the curb. The driver barely tossed her a glance because he was far too absorbed in a book. Adele used the distraction to her favor and sneaked around to the back. A praying woman would have prayed here, but Adele was far more interested in why the coffin sat out here rather than in the church in front of hundreds of mourners
who had clearly loved her.
Was the pain too much for the poor family to bear? Or was this coffin as empty as the mortuary slab from the night before?
This was a question that suddenly required an answer, and there was only one way to do it.
She opened the door.
The voices returned to whisper in her ear, the same familiar voices that had haunted Adele her entire life. She ignored them as she always had and moved closer in to find out how to unlatch the lid. The voices grew louder, tired of being ignored, and this time it grated on Adele’s seriously strung-out nerves. Adele tried to ignore the clamor, leaning closer and closer to the hard cold box. Just as her hand touched the lid, a bony hand grabbed her elbow and wrenched her back.
For a moment, and she
didn’t know why, she thought it was the long haired stranger from the church who had grabbed her.
“
What are you doing?” hissed the old gypsy woman from the funeral. Her black eyes burned holes into Adele’s startled face.
“
I was just going to…” Adele trailed off. What was she just going to do? Just going to make sure the girl was really inside the coffin? That she was really dead, not sitting up and talking? Even a crazy old gypsy woman wouldn’t buy that.
“
I was just going to say goodbye.”
The old gypsy eyed Adele head to foot.
“The people who want to say goodbye are in the church. Them I know. You, I do not.”
“
My name is Adele Lumas,” Adele began, but the gypsy was quick to cut her off.
“
I may not know who you are but I know what you are.” The gypsy released her elbow and shut the door. “The girl was alive and is now dead. There is no story here.”
If only it were that simple.
“She was murdered,” Adele stated unnecessarily. “If the parents would just talk to me maybe we could prevent it from happening again.”
“
Only one person can stop it,” the gypsy responded and slammed the door of the hearse shut, “when the time is right.” With that she turned on her heel and stalked away, just in time to blend with the other mourners who emerged from the church.
Adele sto
od helplessly on the sidelines.
A little later Adele opened the confessional booth, stepped inside, and knelt down.
The window slid open. “You stayed longer this time,” Father Michael chuckled. “Keep that up and people will start to think you’ve converted.”
“
You know me better than that,” she smiled. No truer words could be spoken. No one knew her like Michael Pierce. He knew her favorite guilty pleasure was a Doris Day movie marathon on a rainy afternoon. He knew that she didn’t like chocolate unless it was dark chocolate with dried fruit and nuts, specifically walnuts and blueberries.
He knew that she took her coffee so strong and black it
better resembled sludge. He knew her favorite color was purple and she hummed old Carpenters songs when she was stressed. In fact there was only one thing about her he didn’t know, and she had no intention telling him. Not now. Not ever.
“
Did you find out what you wanted to know, Addie?” he queried softly, his warm, deep voice familiar and comforting, like a favorite old pair of slippers.
“
As usual a church leaves me with more questions than answers. Like why Lily wasn’t even brought into the sanctuary.”
Michael stiffened as he looked away, which was her first clue that he was hiding something
. “It was the family’s decision, Addie. Sometimes it happens.”
“
Seems bizarre,” she answered back. “No public viewing, no open casket – those things I can understand. But simply not bringing the body into a church? Doesn’t make sense. What could have happened to their child that would make a devout religious family do something like that?”
“
Nice try, Addie.” She wasn’t above using their friendship to make her story. The frustrating part was he was above letting her.
She gave him a half-hearted grin.
“Can’t blame a girl for trying. Occupational hazard.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Is there more to it than that?”
“
No,” she was quick to answer. Much too quick. “What would there be?”
He
didn’t answer and neither did she. It was all he needed to know.
Michael Pierce thought about her the rest of the evening. But that wasn’t unusual. She had been on his mind since he met her in school over fifteen years before.
It was PE class in the fifth grade. They were performing some fitness test and he could tell the pale, striking girl next to him was in trouble as they took
off to run the requisite mile.
She was highly unusual, with a streak of white hair dancing down the middle of her pitch black hair. Over the years it would just get worse, back then it just looked like someone had taken a piece of chalk and
divided the hair on her scalp into a perfect part.
As they reached the far end of the track he saw her waver a bit and then collapse to her knees. Even though he knew he could beat the record if he ran back and left her behind, something in him just
couldn’t do it. She looked helpless as she knelt there, her standard PE uniform clinging uncomfortably to her lingering baby pudge. She ducked her head so that her long hair covered the mortified flush in her cheeks. It touched his heart. So he trotted back. He knelt beside her, she put an arm around his shoulders and they walked the rest of the way together, coming in dead last.
If pressed, Michael would admit he fell in love with her that day. He was blown away by her contradictory nature
– how she leaned against him for strength and yet he felt how powerful she really was as she struggled for each step with her head held high. She looked at him with such faith and yet so much fear that it took his breath away. Her eyes were much darker then and even as a mere boy he knew he could have stared into them forever.
At the time he knew
she was the most unusual person he'd ever met. It would take many years later for him to realize that it had been love at first sight, but unfortunately he made this observation just a little too late. By the time they were teens she’d gone to an emotional place he could never quite follow.
When it became painfully clear
they would never have a future together, Michael turned to the church for comfort and sanctuary. Soon it became his calling. If he couldn’t have the woman he loved, he’d instead spend his life in the service of others, safely preserved by the altar in case she ever changed her mind. His commitment to the priesthood was his mother’s dying wish, and he was happy he could give her that before she passed away and left him orphaned at the beginning of his adulthood.
Ironically, as he rose
to prominence within the church Adele allowed herself to get closer to him. In fact, in the last decade he had become the closest person to her. Their friendship had solidified in ways that made them more than friends, but just shy of lovers. He spent every day since the age of 15 praying for the serenity to accept it. She may not have loved him the way he wanted her to, but he knew she loved him the only way she knew how.
Yet on this night
, just like every night of his adult life, he couldn’t help but think of her as he snuggled under his covers. He wondered what she was doing at that moment, and why they couldn’t be doing it together. He thought of those violet eyes, that stark hair… her full curves he had only enjoyed courtesy of chaste hugs spaced much too far apart for his liking. He wanted to touch her every day, the simple reassurance that she was real, and in a very important way she belonged only to him.
Instead
his arms felt so empty without her, an unfulfilled promise that was never his to claim. He’d waited for her for so many years but she seemed oblivious. As he closed his eyes to drift to a place where he could love her fully and without restraint, his hopeful heart prayed once more that their day would come.
CHAPTER THREE
The hallway was long, unusually long. Adele could never see the end. What she could see on either side of the hallway were doors, lots and lots of doors. As she seemed to glide down the familiar path, her hands reached out on either side and brushed over each unyielding knob. None would open. None would ever open.
She braced, and the hair on the back of her neck began to rise. She knew that he would soon be behind her, whispering to her, hissing to her, pressing her forward. And she would run until she thought she was flying down the endless corridor, in a vain attempt to escape her life-long tormentor.
“If you love him,” the unseen stranger would suggest, seductively, hypnotically, “you will do it.”
That was
all he ever said, and the only way he would say it. But deep in her core she understood it as a threat. His ominous voice was old like the ages and crackled like paper. Deep like thunder yet soft as air.