All Saints (11 page)

Unni asks her to sit down. He opens a file. Studies it for a moment. Sighs. Closes it. Very gently, as if breaking some shocking news to her, he informs her that she is menopausal. And because she is menopausal, he confides even more gently, bone density will start to become an issue. Particularly in her spine. And pelvis. He looks away when he says pelvis.

Kelly is leaning forward, eyes wide and encouraging, the posture she adopts when she's interviewing someone for
Saints Alive
. “So,” she coaxes, “we're going to do a bone density test?”

This seems to strike Unni as an excellent suggestion. He cheers up and asks her to remove her boots, belt and jacket, then lie down on the padded table under the scanner. “Put your bum here,” he says, pointing to a piece of yellow tape, “then swing your legs up.” He was so shy about saying pelvis that it takes Kelly a minute to realize he has actually said bum. Well, she thinks as she sits and swings her legs up, it's probably important to get the pelvis into the exact right spot. And what was he supposed to say—put your
gluteus maximus
here?

Once she's on her back on the table, Unni grasps her ankles and stretches her legs out straight. He asks her to unzip her jeans and spread the flaps. Looks away while she does it. Then he puts a bolster under her knees and asks her to be as still as possible, so as not to blur the images of her bones.

The scanner hangs over Kelly's groin like the arm of a scaffold. When Unni flips a switch, it starts making a noise like
wheenga! wheenga!
and advances, jerk by jerk, toward her face. She can see a panel on its underside, and a glowing light moving back and forth like a shifting alien eye.

Kelly used to be afraid of bones when she was a little kid. She used to have nightmares about human skulls. Lately in the shower she's started running her fingers over her soap-slippery face, exploring the angles of her jaw, the shield of her forehead, the round balls of her cheeks. She has never broken a bone. She's never even had a cut deep enough to reveal the bone beneath the skin. What's that from, she wonders now—
the bone beneath the skin
?

Wheenga! wheenga!

“This is nice,” she says encouragingly to Unni. “As tests go. Just lying here.”

“Please.” He puts a finger to his lips. “Even a little bit of talking makes movement.” She mouths
Sorry
and is still.

It's hard to be still.
Create in me a clean heart
. Breathe in.
And renew a right spirit within me
. Breathe out.

What is a clean heart and a right spirit, anyway? She's been going to church for years now and she still hasn't a clue what it's all about. She's not even sure why she goes. Why she's going today.

“You're afraid of death,” Bev said one day at work, shrugging. “That's what any religion's about. They promise you a lot of crap about heaven, just so you'll follow their rules.”

Bev can piss Kelly off sometimes with her cynicism. It's not her fault that the nuns laid such a guilt trip on her that she gets a migraine every Good Friday. “I'm
not
afraid of death,” she said, trying to keep it down because they were both on front counter and the borrowers shouldn't see library staff arguing. “I'm no more afraid of it than anybody else. And I don't believe in heaven. I mean, I have no idea what's going to happen. After. And I'm not even sure I care.”

“Please to be still,” Unni says. He must have noticed her tensing up.

Don't think, Kelly
, she thinks.
Relax your brain. Just be.

Wheenga! wheenga!

“We don't believe in our own death
…
”

Simon. He's been going on about death in his sermons for a couple of weeks now. Prepping them all for Lent.

“ … We know, of course, that we are going to die. But unless we have come close to death, have been touched somehow by the nearness and reality of death, whether our own or a loved one's … ”

His wife died a year and a half before he was appointed rector of All Saints. “My life changed,” Kelly remembers him saying simply when she interviewed him early on for
Saints Alive.
“And sometimes one change can lead to another.”

Wheenga! wheenga!

“ … even then, death can remain an abstraction. Not something we believe in and know. In our bones. In our blood.”

Has he ever said anything about heaven? Where does he think his dead wife is? Does he expect to meet up with her again when he dies?

She would never ask him. Unless. Her eyes are closing. Unless they were closer. Much closer. Than they are. Now.

Wheenga! wheenga!

They're in a car. Simon's car. He's driving. She sees his hands on the wheel. The cuffs of his shirt. Flannel shirt. Red plaid.

Wheenga! wheenga!

They are going somewhere. His place. His place in the country. A cabin or a farmhouse. They're going to have a lovely time. As long as. Because there's something. Something between them on the car seat. She has to take care of it. It's very important.

Wheenga! wheenga!

The scent of him. Smoky. Woodsy. Coming off his red flannel shirt. Filling the car. He's keeping his eyes on the road. Talking about his place. That he's so eager to show her.

Wheenga! wheenga!

She keeps her eyes on him. His hands on the wheel. His moving mouth. It all depends on her. She has to keep it quiet and still. What's between them.

Wheenga! wheenga!

It's asleep. Under a blanket. She reaches and touches it softly and feels his skin sliding over hers. She presses down gently on the warm blanket and feels his breath on her neck. The shape of him inside her.

Wheenga! wheenga!

She mustn't touch it any more. His red plaid shirt, his happy talk, the lovely time they're going to have at his new place, they all depend on her. She has to take care of them. She puts her hand back in her lap.

Wheenga! whee—Chirp!

The scaffold arm judders to a stop just south of her chin. Kelly opens her eyes. Blinks. Rolls her head back and forth. Her neck cracks.

“You may be sitting up now,” Unni says, swinging the apparatus to the side. “And you may … ” He gestures at the spread flaps of her jeans, looking away.

She doesn't want to sit up. She wants to lie there and stay inside her dream. It was so real. The wood smoke coming off that red plaid shirt. And the feel of that delicate sleeping bundle.

She sits up slowly and carefully. Swings her legs down. Zips and buttons herself. Stands. She's light-headed. Part of her is still inside the dream. It's like one of those early morning dreams you can go back into by shutting your eyes. But every time you do, it's a little more faded, a little less enveloping.

She barely hears what Unni is saying while she puts on her boots. Something about analyzing the results of her scan, then conferring with Susan, who might recommend a calcium supplement. She nods absently, thinking of all the widows' humps she sees in church.

Outside, she steps around the edge of a deep puddle on her way to the subway. It's ten past eleven. All Saints is just two stops north. She would walk it, if it wasn't so cold and slushy.

Polyp.

This is turning out to be an interesting day,
she thinks as she goes through the subway turnstile.
First I find out I have a growth that might or might not kill me. Then I fall asleep under a bone scanner and have an erotic dream. Now I'm off to church to get a dab of soot on my forehead and be reminded that I'm nothing but dust.

“Jesus, I used to hate that,” Bev told her once. “They'd take us out of school and herd us into church just so some old man in a dress could tell us we were going to die. Child abuse. That's what it was.”

Kelly thought it best not to tell her that she likes receiving ashes every year. Except,
likes
isn't the right word. There's something big and dark and solemn about the moment that appeals to her. She's very aware afterwards of the mark on her forehead, even though her bangs hide the smudge. And she always feels a small pang of regret when, at some point later in the day, she forgets and pushes her hair back with her fingers and rubs it off.

The subway car is almost empty and the ride takes less time than she thought it would. It's barely eleven-thirty when she mounts the stone steps of All Saints and pulls on the brass door handle. Inside it's quiet and dark. She hangs her coat on a hook in the narthex.

There's a little table in the nave with a sign propped up on it—THE ASH WEDNESDAY SERVICE WILL TAKE PLACE IN THE CHOIR LOFT. She walks in her damp boots up the centre aisle toward the chancel, trying to muffle her footfalls in the hush. In the choir loft she slides into a middle pew. The old wood creaks as she sits down.

She's never been up here before. They've always sat out in the regular pews for Ash Wednesday. She can remember when fifty or sixty people would show up for the noon service. But in the last few years they've dwindled to a dozen or less, so it makes sense to cluster in the choir loft. The attendance on Sunday has been getting steadily sparser too.

To pass the time, she studies the stained glass windows—the three above the organ that she hardly ever sees. There's one of Jesus on a donkey, entering Jerusalem while the crowd waves palms. The middle one is the Garden of Gethsemane, where he's praying not to have to go through with the crucifixion. The third one shows him risen from the dead, greeting Mary Magdalene outside the empty tomb. Nothing about the actual death. Odd. There is the plain wooden cross hanging above the altar. But no hint, anywhere in the church, of what happened on it—no nails, no thorns, no blood. She's never noticed that before. She should ask Simon about it.

He's probably in his office right now. Or maybe in the vestry, putting on his robes. It's eleven forty-five and she's still the only one. What if it ends up being just her and Simon? Will they go through with the service together, the two of them? The thought embarrasses her, after that dream. She wants, and does not want, such a thing to happen.

Just then an old woman in a green wool hat comes in through the east transept door. Kelly recognizes her from Sunday mornings. Thinks her name might be Julia. The woman spots Kelly and asks her in a chilled English voice if
this
is where the Ash Wednesday service is going to be held. When Kelly nods, the woman looks sceptical, then sighs, mounts the stairs to the choir loft and sits down in a pew on the opposite side. She takes off her coat but keeps her hat on. If she recognizes Kelly, she makes no sign of it.
Classic cradle Anglican,
Kelly thinks.
Probably considers me an interloper. And sitting up here a desecration.

She looks to be seventy, maybe even eighty. What would it be like to have that much behind you, Kelly wonders. That little ahead? But she should talk. She'll be sixty in just three years. She can't get used to that. It surprises her, every time she remembers it. She doesn't care what the magazines say about sixty being the new forty. Sixty is sixty. You can't call yourself middle-aged any more, once you've hit sixty. Sixty is the start of old.

Just then the woman in the green hat looks at her, and catches her staring. Kelly averts her eyes.
Please make more people come
, she prays silently. Doing the service with just Simon would be one thing. But she hates the thought of having to share it with this third party.
That must be my Christian sentiment for the day.
She smiles down at her lap, wondering if the woman across the aisle is thinking the same thing about her.

And then more people do arrive. There's an old man—another Sunday morning fixture. Lloyd somebody? He seems to know Julia, if that's her name. Sits down beside her and says something that gets a smile out of her. Then young Melanie, who lights the candles on Sunday and directs communion traffic. She comes in with a man who looks like he could be her father. They both nod to Kelly and sit on her side of the choir loft. Five of them, then.

The vestry door opens. Simon emerges, robed in purple and carrying a white linen cloth and a brass bowl. He puts the bowl down beside the lectern, folds the cloth over the altar rail, checks his watch and smiles around at the little group. “We'll give it a minute,” he says, then turns and heads back into the vestry.

The brass bowl is full to the brim with black ash. Far more than the five of them will need. Kelly wonders where it came from. Years ago, when All Saints still had a Sunday School, the kids used to save their Palm Sunday palms then bring them back just before Ash Wednesday to be burnt. The priest would add oil to the ash to blacken it, dab it on their foreheads at a special morning service, then send them off to school with signed certificates to prove they hadn't been playing hooky.
Those certificates will soon be collectors' items
, Kelly thinks.

Poor old All Saints. So bustling and smug when she first started coming. It's sad to see Simon's purple robe, the fresh white linen and polished brass, all for just the five of them. What happens to churches that get emptier and emptier until nobody comes at all? There was one downtown that was gutted then filled back up with condominiums. But that was a huge building, and All Saints is small. Maybe it could be reborn as some kind of funky boutique or café. More likely it will be knocked down so another Starbucks can spring up in the empty lot.