Chapter 8

 

“What were you thinking?” Andrew shouted. “How could you let her come here when Miranda is like this? Did it even occur to you that she would trigger her trauma? She was there in the fire! Hell, she caused the fire!”

Julie had not moved from the armchair where she’d been seated when April ran. Andrew had gone to Miranda, comforting her, taking her back to bed. He had been with her more than an hour before coming back to the living room, and Julie was still seated in the same place, the same position, hands clasped in her lap, eyes downcast.

“I came back here hoping we could talk. I thought we could make something work. I just don’t know now, Julie. I just don’t know.”

He collapsed into the couch across from her, looking exhausted.

“Where were you all day?” she asked.

“That has nothing to do with anything. Why did you let that woman in here?”

“She’s a friend, Andrew. She saved Miranda’s life, as you know perfectly well.”

“I know Miranda walked out of the fire holding her hand . . . her and some other woman with them. I don’t know anything else.”

“You said she caused the fire.”

“I don’t know why I said that. That’s . . . what it seemed like. Like she was the source of it.”

“She’s full of the Spirit,” Julie said.

“What, like you?”

“It’s not manifesting in the same way, but yes.”

“So this Person living in you is also a raging fire? The kind that killed multiple people and burned a cemetery to ashes? Great.”

“Andrew, I’m sorry this isn’t simple. I wish it was. But please . . . I want this to work.” She swallowed hard. Her eyes were shining. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

“I came back for Miranda. She needs me. Obviously.”

“I wouldn’t have let anyone harm her, Andrew!”

“She was screaming when I came into the house!”

“You’re the one who told me she’s not okay. She wasn’t screaming because there was a real threat.”

“That girl looked like a threat to me.”

Julie just stared at him. “Then I’m sorry. Maybe we can’t make this work.”

He shook his head and raked his hair in frustration. “So why was she here?”

“To ask me about resurrection.”

“Is that going to happen a lot?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll tell people whatever they want to know when they come.”

“Great. My wife the freak show.”

“Andrew.”

He looked up at her, and the pain in her face stopped his heart. “I’m sorry. I don’t want it to be like this either. I want to fight for her, Julie. I want to fight for both of you. But right now you look an awful lot like a threat.”

“I understand,” she whispered.

“I went to my mother’s.”

“Oh. How is she?”

“Dead. I was at the mausoleum. You used to know my mother was dead, Julie.”

This time she laughed. He smiled. What else could he do? What else could either of them do?

She said, “Well. Not all the dead people I know are dead anymore.”

He barked with laughter. “Could anyone else on earth give that comeback?”

“I don’t know. Andrew, I want you to be with me. I want to be on your side. I want that more than anything. But I can’t deny what happened to me, and I can’t deny what’s living in me now. I can’t. It’s not a choice.”

“I understand,” he said. “I really was at the mausoleum. Thinking about all this stuff. Thinking about what you’re supposed to do if your wife has been shot to death and resurrected by some power you don’t know anything about.”

“Did you reach any answers?”

He reached out and took her hand. “I guess you start by thanking that power. Or at least by not assuming it’s an enemy. I’m glad you’re alive, Julie.”

She closed her fingers around his.

* * *

On the ground outside the window, shaking with cold but grateful for it, April felt the change in the atmosphere and smiled, her lips tight together against the frost gathering around them. She’d stayed, shaking as much with fear as with cold as Andrew shouted and the shouts played across her memories like a broken instrument. Stayed because she couldn’t leave Julie alone with a man who was so angry. Because she knew what that was like. Because someone needed to be there to intervene if that was necessary.

And because she still needed answers she didn’t have.

Had she, as she’d heard Andrew say, caused the fire?

It had begun in her.

She had prayed . . . in the place of peace she’d remained in since encountering the Spirit in the deep of the waters in the bay, she had lifted her head with confident courage and asked the Spirit to come. And he had come—as fire. Beginning deep inside her, and bursting out from her to consume the cemetery and the enemies of the Oneness. She had felt it as power and life, and she had taken Miranda’s hand—and Teresa’s, she remembered—and stepped out through the fire still burning with confidence, with courage, and with peace.

Where was that peace now?

Why had the fire turned her from confidence in the Spirit to fear of it? How had she become a stranger to herself, to the Oneness, and to the Spirit who gave them life?

She admitted to herself, there in the cold, that she was terrified the fire would break out again. It kept trying. The growing heat, the passionate response—to things like death. And to whatever was wrong with Miranda. And every time she had done all in her power to keep it down, snuff it out, stop it from happening. Control it somehow.

But what else was she supposed to do?

She knew, from her childhood, what it was like to be out of control. What happened when violence simply broke out and raged on. The Spirit, through the Oneness, was supposed to be her shelter from all of that. Not a repeat of it—a repeat ten thousand times worse than the childhood nightmare could possibly have been, because her nightmare had been a relatively private one, and the Spirit filled the whole universe.

The heat had died far down now, and snow was drifting in the air—it was getting too cold to keep sitting here. Wishing the couple inside the house luck, she rose and headed for the street where she had parked Richard’s car. She was fairly sure Andrew and Julie really loved each other. That they weren’t like her parents had been, even if tonight’s fight had been ugly and loud. The little she knew of their lives told her that their love should have ended long ago, but it had not; it had survived all that was thrown at it.

She hoped it would survive this too.

* * *

When the plague at last had worn itself out and the countryside began to heal, to rebuild, and to live again, the death toll was devastating. Every family had lost some of their own, the elderly and the children proving especially vulnerable. The abbey in Via del Sol was far from immune; they had lost nearly half their sisters in the final count.

But when they looked back, not one of the sisters felt that death had truly won. At the last, the victories outweighed the losses—or at least proved that death was not the only force in the world that required reckoning with. More than two hundred children who came to their doors in the year that the abbey functioned as a hospital survived. Of these, many had lost their families and did not go home again; most became One. They spread out and formed smaller communities throughout the country, ministering to the villagers and country folk who were still just trying to regain their feet and their hearts after the end of their world as they had known it.

Carmela lived, though she lost her eyesight—a consequence of high fevers that Teresa was not able to bring down.

The last thing she saw, she told Teresa, was that first painting of the Spirit. The one Teresa had done in the midnight hour when Niccolo lay at death’s door. “It is my comfort,” she told Teresa often. “It lies before my eyes always. A vision that gives me joy and strength.”

“I would that it had given you healing also,” Teresa answered as they sat together in the garden under a warm spring sun, amidst lush new growth that Teresa could see and Carmela could not.

“Who is to say it did not? I feel as one whose life has been snatched from the door of the netherworld and given back to her. Perhaps this vision had a part in doing that.”

Even a greater grief, however, was that Niccolo had stopped painting. Teresa tried to convince him to take up the art again, but “I have lost my heart for it,” he told her, and that was the end of the argument.

Ten years passed and Niccolo became a young man, handsome and strong, a servant to all. He travelled the countryside and joined the various Oneness communities as long as he liked until wanderlust took him again. Everywhere he went he was a favourite, and Teresa heard tales of the wonderful things he did.

But things were not right if he was not painting.

She had never forgotten her dream. Niccolo had a great purpose, a heroic one. But he would not reach it if he did not take up the brush again. Of that she was certain.

One more grief equalled that, and it stayed settled in Teresa’s heart where she spoke of it to no one: that Franz Bertoller had been driven from their presence a lost man, unredeemed, and she had never done anything to help him. The look in his eyes had never ceased to haunt her.

So when his message came, her heart was more ready than it should have been to receive it. They had unfinished business, her soul and his. And she was frustrated by her lack of impact on Niccolo, who was meant to learn her gift and take it to far greater heights and who instead spent his time riding horseback from place to place, being a charmer and a favourite and making everyone happy but her.

Mother Isabel might have told her to turn the request down, to respond to Bertoller’s message with a polite refusal. But Mother was gone too, quietly succumbed to old age a year hence.

His message was short.

 

I regret to write that the plague has come to my own country. I have not forgotten the efficacy of your work in combating it. At present I have made of my home a hospital much like the one you once tended at the abbey. Help is lacking. I request your presence to show us the way, to tend to the dying, and to paint visions that heal.

Yours as ever,

Franz Bertoller

 

He included none of the appellations of nobility, and that simplicity was the final thing to make up her mind.

In any case, even if she could refuse him, how could she refuse the dying?

She began to make preparations almost immediately. The journey would take ten days by horse; she would ride as quickly as possible, sheltering for the nights with the Oneness cells along the way. Preparations took longer than they should have, perhaps—she did not admit to herself that she was stalling, though inwardly she knew it.

Niccolo was out on one of his journeys, and she hoped to convince him to come along.

To revive the gift she knew he still had.

To help the dream on to fulfilment.

He had been gone some time; surely he would come home soon. The bond between them was still strong; though at times she thought he kicked against it, he always came home eventually. And Teresa knew that she was the real reason he did.

Four days passed, and she knew she could not continue to delay. She had run out excuses to linger. She stood in the abbey looking out over the looping road as the sun set and the moon rose in the sky, deciding in her heart to leave come morning’s light.

“Just a little faster, Niccolo,” she said to the road. “Ride just a little faster, and you will go with me.”

But he did not come.

And she could not keep the lord in his foreign country waiting any longer, nor the dying in his house.

* * *

Andrew picked up the phone and hung it up again three times before he finally dialed and sat waiting, clutching the phone to his ear. He breathed out, trying to calm himself as he twisted the curled cord around one hand.

The phone rang only twice before someone picked it up. “Dr. Clancy’s office,” said a professional female voice.

“Er, yes,” Andrew said, “I’m calling about making an appointment.”

“Are you already a client here?” asked the voice.

“No, I . . . I’m not calling for me. For my daughter.”

“Is she over the age of eighteen, sir?”

“No. No, she’s just fifteen.”

The voice was unflappable, even as Andrew stumbled over his words and felt like a fool. “May I have your name, sir?”

“Andrew Hunter.”

“And your daughter’s name?”

“Miranda. Miranda Hunter.”

“All meetings with the doctor are confidential. But can you give me a reason why you want your daughter to come in for counselling?”

He cleared his throat. “Your ad in the Yellow Pages said Dr. Clancy specializes in trauma counselling. My daughter’s been traumatized.”

“Under what circumstances, sir?”

He turned that over in his head. Where to start? There was the cult . . . she had grown up under Jacob’s strict rule. Who knew what all had gone on there. Julie had told him a little bit about the man named Clint who had come in and introduced some kind of witchcraft to the community. And the Oneness—he didn’t know all the factors there either; how the Oneness had gotten involved with the community and what Miranda had seen or heard. He did know a man had been killed and Julie had been, for a little while at least, a suspect. She was still involved in the court case. And of course, Julie herself had been shot—and then resurrected. And Miranda had hitchhiked back to the community and been picked up by Chris, and then had nearly been killed by a madman as a sacrifice. And then she had walked out through an incredible blaze holding the hands of a woman who was on fire and another woman who, according to his memory, was a ghost.

Oh, and she’d also been introduced to her father for the first time in her fifteen years of life.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled into the phone.

“What was that, sir?”

“I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat. “This was a bad idea. I don’t think you can help us.”

He hung up. Hung his head in his hands. Raked his fingers through his hair.

This was too big.

Just too big. Too much. Too many factors he didn’t know how to begin to explain, let alone tackle. Really, it was no wonder Miranda was regressing and acting like a kindergartener. He would too if he were her age.

Shoot, he almost wanted to now.

Two answers presented themselves, and he didn’t want to look at either of them closely.

Julie was upstairs, taking a very long time about getting a shower. Miranda was at school. Calling a psychologist had been a dumb idea, but for a few minutes it had sounded like a way to make something of a start.

The trouble was, he realized, that psychologists only knew how to deal with human minds and emotions, and so much more than that was involved here.

Two answers.

One, call Chris. Sit down with the young man whose phone call had brought Andrew back into his daughter’s life in the first place and ask him for help, even though he was Oneness and his “help” was going to take him deeper than ever.

Two, try to somehow make contact with the Person who was apparently living inside of Julie.

Go straight to the root of the whole problem, essentially.

He laughed out loud at the idea.

Calling Chris might well lead to the same end, but at least the Oneness were human. Or they started out that way, anyway.

A voice in the back of his mind reminded him that Julie was also Oneness. True, he answered, but at the moment communication with Julie was a little strained, and anyway . . . she was different.

That was why April had come here. Because Julie wasn’t just like the rest of them.

He wondered if, when the words “for better or for worse” were written into traditional marriage vows, the powers that be had had any concept of what cults and charismatic leaders and killers and demons and spirits could do to a marriage.

“I’ve hung in there this far,” he muttered. “What’s a little more crazy in the grand scheme of things?”

Upstairs, he heard the shower shut off, quieting the noise of the pipes in the walls. He wondered what she’d been doing for the last forty-five minutes. Julie had never been high maintenance—well, not fifteen years ago, at least. She probably relished the time shut away from him to think. Maybe pray. Or whatever it was she did.

His hand was resting on the phone.

He picked it up and dialed another number.

There was no sense in pretending this whole situation was just a normal part of human experience, just a bump in the road that time and mutual effort could get them over. He needed help.

The Oneness was the only place he could think of to ask for it.

* * *

Julie came downstairs with her hair wrapped in a towel, her whole body still relaxed and her limbs heavy from the coma-inducing effects of the hot water. She couldn’t remember the last time she had just luxuriated in a shower like that. The community had drawn its water from its own well and heated it using precious energy produced mainly from their own windmills and solar panels—and frugality was a virtue in all things.

She could hear Andrew talking in the kitchen and drew close to the door, curious.

She felt love swell in her eyes as she anticipated seeing him. Love and gratitude. He was a good man. He was doing so much for them. She could hear the near-desperate tone in his voice, the humility—it only took her a moment to realize who he was talking to. That he would go to the Oneness and ask for help moved her heart. And gave her hope.

Maybe, after all, Andrew would become One.

And then, maybe, he would learn what the Spirit was. Would share her passion. Would help her figure things out.

Maybe.

But there was a hardness in his tone, too, a defensive wall she’d felt every time she tried to talk to him about these things. And she knew there was no guarantee the hardness would change.

Sometimes, increasing pressure only made hard things even harder. Sometimes, adversity made hearts impenetrable.

“Please, Spirit,” she whispered.

And she let the Spirit interpret the request.

“Can you hold on?” she heard Andrew say. “There’s a call coming in.”

She stepped into the kitchen doorway as he said, “Hello?”

His face went white.

She reached for the door frame to steady herself as his words made clear what the person on the other end had said. The conversion was hurried, and it ended with Andrew already halfway to the door, hanging the phone up as he grabbed his coat and keys.

He didn’t have to say the words, but he did.

“She’s gone. Miranda’s gone. They said she ran away.”