My Name Is Not Easy (57 page)

When he looks up to the mountains, Luke feels suddenly dizzy: Even the mountains are rolling back and forth, back and forth. Like huge ships on an angry sea.

Good Friday,
Father Mullen thinks.
Good Friday.

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• • •

Th

eir ears fi ll with a sudden rushing silence that makes Donna feel a terrible loneliness, all of a sudden, like she’s standing on God’s runway, watching the last plane leave. She feels left behind again, even though she can still feel Chickie’s hand. She wants to run after somebody or something.
Don’t
leave! Don’t leave me!

She lets go of Chickie’s hand and sinks to the ground.

“Oh.” Breathing the word soft as a sigh.

And Chickie knows, feeling Donna’s fi ngers slip from hers, knows suddenly and certainly that there’s nothing else to say, nothing left in the whole wide world save the sound of that one word, rising up from Donna’s chest like a spirit departed.

Oh.

Th

eir fi ngers tingle as the blood rushes back into their hands.

Oh.

Th

ey both see it at the same time: Sister Sarah, lying on the ground, clutching her chest, motionless.

Luke had watched her fall, fl uttering down onto the still-rolling ground, weightless, as if gravity had departed from
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her skinny old body, her bones at last as light as bird bones.

He’d seen the fl ickering of her habit, watched Sister Mary Kate fl y down beside her, saw Father Flanagan running, running, his robes fl apping. And he imagined, for just a second, that the whole world was littered with the black-and-white robes of nuns and priests falling, dropped from the sky like fl ies or fl ags.

Th

e ends of his nerves are still jangling with the electricity of it. Even in the center of this sudden stillness, his blood still buzzes.

Th

e sound of things returns, piece by piece, but his head feels stuff ed with cotton, noises arriving slowly as if from a great distance: the staccato of scared girls, the squawking of the youngest ones, the sudden shriek of Sister Mary Kate’s voice, sharp as gunshot.

“Help! Oh help me!
Please!
”

Sister Mary Kate is kneeling down on the ground next to Sister Sarah, and the pain in Sarah’s body is squeezing her face shut tight. Tight as an old fi st.

Father Flanagan is still running, his heart pounding in his ears, remembering suddenly just how far they are from everything civilized. Hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, if there is one left. For a second he even wonders if there really is any help left anywhere.

One of the boys could have carried her alone—it wouldn’t take two adults together, but they did it that way anyhow.

Sister Sarah and her skinny old body, as hollow as an empty seed husk.

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Luke goes cold inside, watching Father and Sister Mary Kate and all the kids, the way they move, everything fl owing as if in slow motion. Like he’s there but not really there, the same way he felt when they told him the news about Bunna’s death, that time.

Sister Sarah is gone. You don’t have to look at her to know the truth of it. You can feel it in the air.

It’s how the earth decides,
he thinks.

Th

ey are walking in behind the slow string of nuns and priests and kids, moving cautiously as if afraid to disturb the ground again. Inside, the school looks ravaged, like somebody big ran through all the rooms swinging a two-by-four. Books spilled out of bookcases, windows broken, everything out of place, everyone scurrying everywhere, even into the nuns’

quarters. Th

ey’re so shocked by the sight of it all that nobody thinks about where they’re supposed to look or not look.

Th

e strangest thing is Sister Mary Kate’s rattail comb, standing upright in a cracked jar of cold cream, right there in the middle of the fl oor of her room like an alien fl ower.

In the cafeteria, there’s broken glass and spilled food everywhere, but Chickie’s glass of milk is still standing on the table, balanced on the very edge as if one sneeze could send it crashing to the fl oor.

“I’ll be darned,” Luke says, looking at it. “I’ll be doggoned.”

Amiq thinks of the Saint Christopher medal, swinging from the edge of a shelf in the empty bathroom, and he won-236

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ders whether it fell off into the sink, slid down the drain.

And a thousand miles south, on a remote beach on the southern edge of the northernmost state in the country, Father Mullen watches the ocean rise up over him, a great rushing wall, a ceiling of liquid dark cement raining down.

Riveted to the ground, he watches it sweep over him as inevi-table as night, watches as though he’s watching from a great, unbridgeable distance.

Gone.

It was a heart attack. Th

at’s what the whispers say about Sister

Sarah, and this seems right somehow
, Donna thinks. As though Sister had planned for it in that stern, deliberate way of hers.

Th

ey bury her at the church graveyard in the woods behind the school. Th

e church was the only family Sister Sarah had,

Father says.

Perhaps Sister Sarah had been an orphan, too, just like me,
Donna thinks.

Th

ey stand in the middle of the graveyard in the woods by the school—a smooth and grassy patch at the tail end of winter. Green things poke up through melting snow, and off through the trees somewhere one little bird tests her song against the crisp air.
Sister Sarah would like it here,
Donna thinks. Th