Finally, as he rounded the final corner of the church and came back to the front yard, the wind gave one more rallying gust, and the leaf was returned to the same pile from which it had started. Father Melby stumbled the last few paces to the dogwood tree and stood there doubled over, clutching his knees.
Are you okay, Father?
He looked up to see Carol McDonnell peering out at him from beneath a hat the color of pumpkin-pie filling. Yes, he laughed. Just a little winded. I think someone is having a bit of fun with me.
Excuse me?
Never mind, never mind. What can I help you with, Ms. McDonnell? Some more leftover SASC business? Ms. McDonnell was the president of the St. Andrew's Service Committee, though Father Melby often found himself shouldering the responsibilities of the position.
Well, yes, in fact, she said. I came to see you about the next meeting. It's supposed to be on Thursday the second. But I found out my nephew is having his wisdom teeth out on Thursday the second.
I see. Well, that won't be a problem. We can certainly postpone the meeting until your nephew is on the mend.
Actually, what I was going to ask was if you could take over the chair for me? It would only be this one time, you understand. I don't want to be a burden on you.
Not a bit, not a bit. He was still breathing hard. Just give me a copy of the agenda, and I'll be happy to take care of it. And now, if you'll excuse me . . .
He took up the lawn rake, flipping the first batch of leaves into the trash with a twist of his shoulders. By the time he reached for the second, Ms. McDonnell was gone, stabbing across the parking lot in her high-heeled shoes.
It was late Monday afternoon when the woman with the delicately fearless voice returned to the confessional. Father Melby was lost in thought when she entered the chamber and once again failed to get a proper look at her. There was something inside him that desperately wanted to see her face, even though—and he realized this—he was disappointing his office by trying.
She was not so slow to speak this time. I'm afraid that I wasted my life.
What is your name, my child?
My name . . . There was a slip of paper sealed in a metal canister, and the canister was buried in a nameless field behind an old wooden house, and the house was slumping gradually back into the earth. Father Melby waited as she went there to retrieve the information. My name is Amy Elizabeth.
Amy Elizabeth, do you wish to make a confession? he asked.
She did not respond.
What is it that's troubling you, Amy Elizabeth?
I'm afraid that I wasted my life.
It was as though he had wandered into the presence of a doe or a fox, some infinitely sensitive wild creature that would take to its heels the second he made an unexpected move. Then you need to change your life. If you feel that you're wasting your life, you need to change it, he said. The Church can help you do that.
It's too late for me to change my life.
It was an argument he would not allow himself to get drawn into. Tell me, then, why do you feel that your life has been wasted?
Instead of answering him, she said, When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, and the sparks are all scattered into the wind.
I don't understand, he said.
That's why we survive as long as we do, because the people who loved us keep us going. Our parents. Our spouses. But what if you failed to love anyone? Have you thought of that? Then the energy that kept you alive is wasted. It has nowhere to go. What happens to it?
It occurred to him that she might be contemplating suicide. As cautiously as he could, he said to her, I think what you're talking about is the soul, my child. That part of us which is eternal. God tells us that after we die, if we've died in Jesus, the soul is translated into Heaven.
Quietly, giving off the air of someone speaking not so much to be heard as to amend her own interior record of the conversation, she said, Not the soul, the spirit.
Was he even necessary to the process? he wondered. Was she talking to him at all? Then she asked, Can you really help me? and he chastised himself.
I'll do anything I can, of course. I've been worried about you, Amy Elizabeth. Why is it that I never see you at Mass?
I'm there every Sunday.
Where do you sit?
I've been watching you, she said.
He was startled by a knock on the wall of the chamber.
Just a moment, he said.
It was Ms. Baskind, the church receptionist, who told him through the curtain that she didn't mean to interrupt, but she had only now received a phone call from the bishop and she'd ventured to place him on hold. Would you like me to take a message? she asked.
Father Melby was going to urge her to do exactly that, but then he noticed the silence from the other side of the grate. He understood that the woman—that Amy Elizabeth—had stolen away again. Are you still there? he whispered. His voice met the empty air.
The shadows were dark, and the curtain was still. In the sanctuary he saw not the slightest suggestion that she had ever been in the confessional at all.
The bishop, as it happened, was calling to tell the Father that he had heard about the blossoming attendance at St. Andrew's and was planning to pay the church a visit on Sunday the fifth of November. This gave Father Melby almost two weeks to plan his sermon. He had spoken before the bishop only once since he had taken his vows, but he would never forget the feeling of shame he experienced that day as everything he had intended to say came apart and went side-sailing away from him, leaving him little to do but mumble his way toward the benediction as swiftly as he possibly could. Nor would he forget the look on the bishop's face as he said good-bye to him at the door, a look not of disappointment but of fulfilled expectation, as if to say, Well, you're a good man, at least. You care for the souls of your flock, and by the grace of God maybe that will be enough.
Father Melby was determined to redeem himself this time. He had already prepared his sermon for the coming Sunday, and he set his revisions aside to concentrate on the next one. He began scouring the Bible for ideas before he went to bed, leafing through the Gospels and the Epistles, the Major and Minor Prophets, until finally his fingers buzzed with tiredness and his vision started to swim. And it was curious: even when he was certain that he had replaced the Bible on his bedside table, in the morning he would invariably find it splayed apart and resting on the carpet, the pages fallen open somewhere in the middle of the Song of Solomon.
He continued to wonder about Amy Elizabeth. How had she fled so quickly? What did she want from him? She had said that she attended Mass every Sunday. In between researching his sermon and counseling his parishioners, he combed through the church's photo directory for her, but the only Amys he could find were Amy Glassman, Amy Bright, and Amy Chase, whose voices in the confessional he was sure he would have recognized. Nor were there any unfamiliar Amys on any of the recent attendance slips. He even glanced at the local phone book on the thin chance that Elizabeth was her last name and not her middle one, but there were no Elizabeths at all listed in the white pages, much less any Amy Elizabeths, just a seamless conversion from William Elias to Benjamin J. Elkins.
________
That Sunday he was only a few syllables into the sermon when he felt the eyes of God settling upon him again. His skin began to tingle. He heard the shift in his voice. He saw the numerous tiny signs of interest breaking open in the faces of the congregation: tilted chins, clearer gazes, slightly parted lips. He was filled with an ascendant confidence. But for the first time he noticed another sensation riding along behind it, like a scrap of paper caught in the slipstream of a train: that aura of finely measured, intimate regret he always felt in the company of Amy Elizabeth. He was on the verge of understanding something. Deep in his head he heard a voice, and that voice was whispering to him.
I've been watching you, it said.
/> And, It's not myself I've given up on. It's time.
But it wasn't until his sermon ended that the suspicion he had been courting actually took shape.
It had never been God who was watching him. It had never been God at all. From the very beginning it had only been Amy Elizabeth—Amy Elizabeth and no one else. As the congregants stood and opened their prayer books, he scanned the pews for her. A thousand familiar faces were reciting the prayer of St. Sebastian in the soft yellow light of the hanging brass lamps, but no matter how diligently he looked, he couldn't find her there.
He was certain he was right, though. He had to be.
One by one, his thoughts were tumbling into place, each shiny wheel locking teeth with the next. The way she had vanished so suddenly from the confessional. The empty air he had glimpsed through the openings in the grate. The clicking noise that had summoned him out of his bed at night. The votive candle pinched out by a pair of sourceless fingers.
She had said, The energy that keeps you alive is wasted.
She had said, I'm afraid that I wasted my life.
There came a moment when his intuition carried him out in front of himself the way the wind carries a kite and all at once he guessed what she was, then another moment when he told himself that it could not be, that God in His mercy laid every spirit to rest, and then at last a moment when he knew for certain that he was right. He spent the rest of the service sailing through his own head on alternating currents of doubt and belief, returning again and again to the thought of Amy Elizabeth. Why had she appeared to him? Why had it taken him so long to catch hold of the truth?
If he let them, it seemed, his hands and his voice would complete the routines of worship for him. He followed absently along in his missal until one of the altar boys gave an inquisitory little cough to get his attention, and he realized that it was time to say the final prayer. In the name of the Father who has created you, the Son who has redeemed you, and the Holy Ghost who has sanctified you. Amen.
It took all his concentration to greet his parishioners as they filed out of the sanctuary. He had fulfilled his duties, apparently, for no one betrayed the smallest awareness that anything had gone wrong.
Your best yet, Father Melby.
The Lord was truly in the room with us this morning.
I tell you, Father, I'm going to have to get here early next week. Those folding chairs do a real number on the old lower back.
When the last of the congregants had departed, Father Melby allowed the front doors to swing closed on their hinges, their bottom edges brushing perfect quadrants of circles into the carpet. He took a deep breath and set to work. He went through the rooms of the church one by one, dowsing for Amy Elizabeth, calling out her name. It was a struggle to prevent his voice from trembling. I know you're here somewhere, he said. I'm ready to talk to you. Why don't you show yourself to me?
But she never answered. He resigned himself to the fact that he would have to let her come to him on her own terms.
He did not have long to wait. The next day he was in the confessional when suddenly he became aware that she had appeared on the other side of the fleurs-de-lis. He heard the gentle, whisked sound of her breathing, felt the unmistakable quality of her presence in the air—so very sad, so very determined—and said, It's you, isn't it, Amy Elizabeth?
She did not respond.
After a moment he continued. I have a question for you. If you are what I believe you are, why is it I can hear you breathing?
A watch—his own—gave a dozen loud ticks.
Slowly she answered, Because it pleases me to remember.
It pleases you?
Yes. Some things are hard to remember. Like talking. I remember words, but remembering how to talk is like remembering yourself as a child, so very small. All those times you saw your hands moving without understanding who they belonged to. Breathing is easier.
You're the one who's been listening to me on Sundays, aren't you?
Yes.
I used to think you were someone else.
He heard the curtain rustle and settle back into place. He had the distinct impression that she had swayed forward off the bench for a moment.
Why are you here, Amy Elizabeth?
It's not so hard to talk in here. So much . . . remorse in the air.
Not here in the confessional. Here in the church. Here in this world.
It seemed that he had triggered the switch again. I'm afraid that I wasted my life.
In his impatience he wanted to smack the wall of the booth, but instead he brought his hand to the cross he wore around his neck. He tried to remind himself of the duty toward compassion. I understand, he said.
You told me you could help me. Did you mean that?
You're in pain, Amy Elizabeth. I'll help you any way I can.
There's only one way.
Tell me.
I have to hand myself over to somebody, somebody who will accept me willingly. I failed to love enough. The energy has nowhere to go.
What do you mean, hand yourself over?
Stay right there, she said, and she gathered herself into a hollow whistling wind, blowing through the holes in the confessional grate. In an instant, he felt her wrapping herself around him, a warm-blooded buzzing sensation that seemed tighter against his skin than his own clothing. His nerves pricked in a hundred different places. His breathing came quick and shallow. His penis grew rigid, and he felt as though he were on the brink of handing himself over to something, some disturbance preparing to branch its way up through his body from the compressed center of the earth.
He wrenched away from her, scrambling for the curtain. The next thing he knew he was standing in the broad-backed space of the sanctuary, his face beaded with sweat. His legs felt simultaneously as heavy as stone and as buoyant as froth.
I'm a priest, he said after he had gained his balance. I took vows. I can help you, Amy Elizabeth, but not that way.
There's only one way, she said again from inside the empty confessional, a wrought-iron sorrow stiffening her voice. And then she was gone and Father Melby was alone.
The days that followed were a cataract of doubts and waking fantasies. He kept expecting her to reappear. He could hardly open a door or lie down to sleep at night without anticipating the whisper of her breathing. Every time a breeze touched the back of his neck, he felt his stomach drawing tight inside him. Every time he noticed a strange sound in the church, a tick in the walls, or a creak in the rafters, he stopped whatever he was doing to investigate, listening like a madman for signs of intention. He was still coming to terms with the realization that Amy Elizabeth was the one who had been scrutinizing him with such care. It would not be fair to say that he had been abandoned by God, he supposed, since his place within God's gaze had never been more than an illusion, a whimsy born of his yearning for some sign of divine patronage. But the gap he was left with felt nonetheless real to him: the absence of God where before he had imagined His presence.
He tried his best not to think about it. There was still the matter of the bishop's visit to worry about, after all. Every day, to the best of his ability, he marshaled his concentration to sit down and work on his sermon. But he seemed to carry the thought of Amy Elizabeth along with him wherever he went, like a rattling silver shopping cart filled with dozens of boxes and cans. It was moving through the church now, past the altar, the pricket, the stairs. It was right in front of his eyes. He could never completely ignore it, and the effort to pretend he could was distorting his behavior. Surely the members of his congregation had noticed his recent callousness. On Tuesday he snapped at the choirmaster, hanging up the phone when she called to tell him the dry cleaner had lost a bundle of the chorister's robes. On Thursday, at the SASC meeting, he took a seat in the chair by the window, directly next to Katie Becker, and when she pressed her knee against his under the cover of the table, he told her, brusquely, I would appreciate it very much if you would refrain from touching me like that,
thank you, Ms. Becker. A look of humiliation spread over her face like a dark stain. He hardly noticed when she got up to leave.
By Saturday night, after two weeks of preparation, he had finally managed to complete his sermon, a lesson taken from the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's Letter to the Hebrews. He was running a slight fever, and before he went to bed he swallowed a couple of Tylenol.
It was some five minutes later, while he was lying in the dark waiting for the medicine to dissolve through its casing, that Amy Elizabeth returned. She didn't say anything, but he knew right away that it was her. A spark of cold blue static leapt off his blanket. A powerful hopelessness soaked into the air. He felt he was being watched by the same pair of eyes that had watched him at the pulpit, heard by the same pair of ears. It was the first time she had come to him outside the confessional. She seemed to be waiting at the very edge of his room.
I thought you would be back again, he said. He was speaking quietly, but in the darkness his words fell like stones into still water, each one bold and insistent. I'm sorry if I upset you last time. I didn't mean to. But you surprised me.