The Air We Breathe (21 page)

Stung by the past.

“Sweetie, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Then whose? God’s?” the girl rubbed her face in her scarf. “I don’t understand. Why did He take my dad? Why did He let me get kidnapped if He was just going to save me? It all hurts so much.”

She began to cry again, quietly this time, shoulders bobbing up and down. Claire touched her knee, hidden beneath the huge black coat. “I killed my children.”

Molly’s head snapped toward her, pale eyes even icier with fear. “What?”

“You knew my son was dead. Caden. But he wasn’t my only
child. I had a daughter. Amelia. There was a car accident. I was driving. I turned left and pulled out in front of a truck I didn’t see because of the way the sun was shining. The other driver was going too fast, too. Both my children were killed. And I lost the baby I was pregnant with. Her name was Alexis.

“I’ve asked myself all the questions. What part of it did God make happen? What part of it did He simply allow to happen? Did He set the sun to blind me to oncoming traffic so I veered into the truck’s path? Did He know the crash was coming because speeding and windshield glare happen in a fallen world, and He sat back and allowed it because doing so would bring His purpose to pass? Was it some combination of both or an entirely different reason?

“I have no idea, Molly, but here’s what I am sure of. I know God is good. I know His ways are perfect. I also know only He gives and takes life. No one else has ultimate control of that. So it doesn’t matter why or how the accident happened. My children’s days were fulfilled, their purposes accomplished.

“And even though I know that, it still hurts. There’s no way around it.”

Claire exhaled slowly, kneading a tight, bulging spot low on her belly. She pushed in, felt the baby’s entire body shift, fluttering upward. “Here,” she said, taking Molly’s gloved hand and holding it to her stomach. The baby responded, bumping against her touch.

“Boy or girl?” Molly asked.

“We’ll find out April thirtieth. Or thereabout.”

“You miss your other children?”

“Every single day,” Claire said. “With everything I have.”

“Yeah,” Molly said.

The baby kicked again. Claire squeezed her fingers. “Yeah.”

M
OLLY
M
ARCH
2009

When she told Tobias she wanted him to take her to church the next morning, he nearly crowed with delight, like Peter Pan, grinning and tossing his knit cap into the air. “Oh, wicked. We can walk down together. Or I’ll drive, if you want. Can’t say the car will warm up before we get there . . . Oh, shoot. It’s my grandmother’s mass.”

“What?” Molly asked.

“Every year my grandfather has a mass said for her, on a Sunday near the anniversary of her death. I always go. I promised him, when I started attending the Baptist church. Dad didn’t care about me going any other day, just that one.”

“I’ll go to the mass.”

“Nah. Don’t worry about it. Maybe we can find a service tonight, if we call around quick, or one really early. Not here, but maybe in Duncan. There’s a couple bigger churches there.”

“No, really. I want to go.”

“Seriously?”

Molly nodded.

“Well, all right,” Tobias said, shrugging. “If you say so.”

“I do.”

“You ever been to a Catholic mass before?”

“A couple times. When I was a kid.”

“Okay then. Just want to be sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. I’ll pick you up at quarter to ten.”

She thought she should wear a dress, but didn’t have one. Didn’t have anything but a couple pairs of jeans and her favorite corduroys, none of which she would have worn to services, even if she went only with Tobias. But with his family, on such a special day? She sighed, wondered what he would be wearing. She could call him, ask.

Yeah, right.

Louise was out with Mick. The
uncle
part had been dropped in Molly’s mind since the engagement; she just couldn’t fathom having an uncle and stepfather rolled into one. It gave her a creepy feeling.

In her mother’s bedroom she slid open the mirrored closet door and pushed through the hangers, found Louise’s skirts in the back, all three clipped onto one hanger. Molly didn’t remember her mother ever wearing any of them. Two of them buttoned and zipped and would never fit, but one of them was linen, yellow with gray flowers, and had an elastic waist. She grabbed it, carried it into the kitchen and took a serrated steak knife from the block, poked the sharp tip through the fabric inside the waistband, and sawed. Hooking the elastic with her finger, she scrunched the linen to one side, sliced
through the exposed elastic and tied it to make the waist small enough to fit her. In her bedroom she paired the skirt with a gray cable-knit sweater. They looked silly together—the summery bottom with the bulky winter top—but the sweater was the only thing she had that even remotely matched.

She ironed the skirt and hung it on the inside of the closet door. She did have tights—on cold days she wore them under her jeans—and held both the black pair and the ivory pair up against the patterned fabric. Neither went well, but she decided on the black, and her black mules.

Her mother and Mick came home; she heard them fumbling in the other room, tripping over something while trying to find the lamp on the end table. Boxes, probably. For all Louise’s zeal over moving, most of the boxes sat half filled and half stacked around the apartment. Molly didn’t know why she had stopped packing and taping and labeling, and didn’t ask.

The silences had grown longer between them, Louise seemingly avoiding her. Or maybe she just imagined it, her mother simply preoccupied with Mick and the new life finally coming to her. Molly didn’t want to spend too much time wondering but pushed the worry away, like she’d been trying to do with the fact she wouldn’t be sitting on the sofa watching television church for an hour tomorrow morning before wandering into the museum to open the door to no one. She’d have to tell Louise before she left. Or maybe she’d just leave a note.

Tobias picked her up outside the side entrance, like she’d asked him to. He must have driven around the island several times, because hot air brushed by her as she opened
the passenger’s side. She was glad, as she hadn’t wanted to wear her mother’s bulky coat, had put on gloves and a scarf but no other outerwear. She sat, closed the door, and then tried to wiggle into a more comfortable position on the seat. Couldn’t. She had closed her skirt in the door, but before she had a chance to free herself, Tobias pulled out onto the street and started toward the church. She belted up, her knees trapped—one against the door, the other against the one—knobby bones grinding painfully with each bump and turn.

“You look nice,” Tobias said. He wore his everyday jeans with the faded thighs, a frayed hole here and there—whether intentional or simply from overuse, Molly didn’t know. He wore his everyday shoes, black and chunky and creased, like boots cut short, dark laces specked with gold. And his hat. His coat was flung in the back seat. He wiped his damp forehead, shoving his hair up under the hem of his hat.

“Are you hot?” Molly asked.

“I’m good. Unless you are. Then I’ll turn it down.”

“If you want to.”

“Molly,” Tobias said, “I’m asking you.”

She shrugged. “I’m okay. But you’re sweating.”

“I’d sweat in a blizzard.”

They drove to the church without any more talking, Molly sensing something different in Tobias, something tense and uncertain. She’d never seen him that way before. Was it going to mass with his family, or her presence in the car? She traced the outlines of the flowers on her skirt with her finger. When he parked, she nearly jumped from the passenger seat, stretching her cramped legs, glanced down. The bottom of her skirt was wet with dirty road slush. Tobias came around and draped his jacket over her shoulders.

“I don’t—”

“Just take it,” he said.

She didn’t slip her arms into the sleeves but held the zipper closed with both hands from the inside. They walked around the front of the building, a small white chapel with curls of loose paint dangling from the clapboard here and there, latex caterpillars waiting to be scraped away in the spring. Molly had hoped for a stone building, like St. Catherine’s, pointed and arched and grabbing at the sky above. The front, however, had an uncovered porch constructed of old New England stone, and carved into each of the steps’ risers was a different biblical word or phrase. She climbed them, reading—
prepare
,
repent
,
believe
,
redemption
,
salvation
,
praise
,
do justice
,
love mercy
,
walk humbly
,
eternal life
. The Ts in both
salvation
and
redemption
were damaged.

In an awkward moment Molly tangled with Tobias as he tried to reach from behind and open the door for her. “Sorry,” he said, moving aside quickly and giving her space to enter the building, maybe remembering the day the King fell over.

She stepped onto carpeting. Not the low, flat cardboard kind usually found in places where many people walked. This rug, plush and blue, squished under her feet like seaweed, trapping the dampness of the ocean in its fibers, releasing a puff of saltiness with each of her footfalls. Tobias motioned to a full pew, and Molly recognized his brother, Frank, and both parents. She’d seen them plenty through the window, and Frank had delivered food to the museum more than once. The grandfather was there, too, on the end, narrow-shouldered and long-faced, like Tobias, his hair shiny black and waxed to his head. Tobias hugged him, both men slapping each other on the back before parting, and the family
scooted down the row, making room for them to sit. Molly claimed the first seat, on the aisle, keeping the warm coat around her.

The pews had kneelers attached to them. Tobias knelt for a moment, crossed himself, but Molly didn’t move. The chapel was not only small but plain. It had no crucifix above the altar, no colored glass in the windows, no saints peering around at the hundred-person congregation. There were candles, though, flickering in red votives.

She wanted to go home.

“Tobias . . .”

He glanced up from his hands, folded in his lap, pointer fingers extended, tips touching, the rest of his fingers folded down between one another. “Are you okay?”

“I think I need to—”

The organist blasted a chord through the sanctuary, then another. She announced the hymn and everyone stood. The processional paraded down between the seats, one altar boy and a baby-faced priest, both with Sketchers poking from beneath their robes. Tobias whispered, close to her face, “Are you okay?” and she nodded because the desire to flee had somehow been carried away with the organ’s voice. She fumbled around for the missal, but Tobias handed her his, and she mouthed the words of the last verse and then sat again.

The priest—Father Gino, Tobias had told her yesterday,
“Pops likes him. Gets him out of church in forty-three minutes and has a good Italian name”
—mumbled through the mass, tripping over words but plowing forward, as if he had somewhere to be before the end of the hour. Molly followed along the best she could, her fingers splayed in the leaves of the missal, keeping the pages marked so she could flip between
the readings and the songs. Standing, sitting, kneeling—it had all seemed less complicated as a child.

“‘Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.’”

The words stirred Molly as the congregation recited them together. They reminded her of similar words somewhere else, not from her visits to St. Catherine’s, but where? Then it came to her; it was in one of the New Testament books, she couldn’t remember which, had very little memory for chapter and verse, but it was in there. A centurion, a servant, an astonishing faith.

She closed her eyes, let the Spirit consume her. What believer didn’t think—
know
—Jesus could heal? Molly had experienced healing on many levels, she thought, but now she inventoried those moments—when the broken became whole, when the fear receded and peace overtook, when for a never-long-enough time belief was total and unconditional—and knew all those moments had been surface moments. Only the first level. Only dealing with the immediate, like an argument with her mother or an odd person in the museum who made her nervous. It never went deeper, to the places she really needed it.

She didn’t want it to.

She was scared. Her healing would come with a probing, painful cutting away. She could picture it in her mind, hear Christ’s knife scraping the rot from the bone. Because that’s where it was, in her bones, all sunk in and deep in the marrow. She would have to allow God in there if healing was to come. She would have to listen to Him say the word, watch Him snip away the sutures with which she had hastily, tightly, bound up the past. She’d need to peer into each one of those gaping wounds, put her finger into them, confront
them, and let them close up in the long, slow way these types of hurts close.

And she would begin today.

I’m ready, Lord. Say the word.

Communion began, and people shuffled sideways from between the rows and into the aisle. Tobias’s family squeezed past them; he shifted his knees into hers to make room, and she swung her knees out of the way, too. They sat together for, well, not long, barely two lines of whatever song the organist sang, and there was a gap in the Communion line. Molly stood and slipped into it.

“Where are you going?” Tobias whispered, coming up behind her. “You’re not Catholic.”

“I know.”

“Molly, you don’t even—”

“I can see what to do.”

And she could. Right hand under left. An
amen
and pop the wafer into the mouth. Just touch the wine to the lips and don’t take a huge gulp. She took the bread not from the priest but from a regular guy dressed in a wrinkly plaid shirt and navy jacket, gold buttons etched with anchors. No tie. She couldn’t bring herself to chew the white circle so plastered it to the roof of her mouth with her spit. It stuck there, a small amount flaking off when the woman with the cup tilted it up too far, flooding Molly’s mouth with wine. She swallowed, the wafer soggy but still stuck. She tried to keep her tongue away from it, but couldn’t help rubbing at it every so often, checking to make sure it was there, even though she could feel it.