CHAPTER SIX

GRACE LUTHERAN’S ANNUAL Christmas Concert comes to a bumpy end with a frenetically-paced Joy to the World and the cellist’s sheet music fluttering to the floor like a downed pigeon.

Kate glances from her son to her daughter in the white-frocked choir. While Brace’s tenor blends with the other men, Samantha’s high-powered soprano blasts the congregation in unfocused bursts. Much like her moods lately, it oscillates between timid and shattering. At least Brace managed to keep a straight face while Samantha sang, “How Beautiful are the Feet,” even though it had provided no end of hilarity when she tried to practice the solo at home, and ended with a screaming match.

The lights come up and the congregation stirs. Kate can now get a better look at Wicasa Bluff’s newest resident sitting two rows in front of the Larson pew. With shiny dark hair layered like a morning show host, Lucy Van Buren resembles her mother, Bridget, thirty years younger. But it can’t be of course. Bridget is grey-haired, shorter now, and she sits hunched up next to her only living kin.

Kate bites back the sweet satisfaction of knowing that Lucy has returned in defeat, cocky tail retracted, to verify that Kate might have made better choices. But the delight soon descends into a queasy sadness for Lucy that hasn’t fully subsided since Kate first saw her on the sidewalk.

After the director bows and presents the choir for applause, the crowd departs their pews. Kate watches as Lucy turns and says something in her mother’s ear, to which the older woman nods and taps her own cheek. Lucy kisses it, stands, and smooths down the folds of her black velvet dress. She walks to the now-retired choir director to shake his hand. The regality with which she once carried herself is less flippant, a chin-up groove Lucy’s worn into a style so genteel she could be any of the PTA moms in this church. According to the articles Kate had read about ex-gay programs, the graduates emerged like hermetically-sealed produce, irradiated of sin by God’s holy light. They were sexless looking, tone-deaf animatrons in buttoned-up oxfords, not fashion plates wearing a string of pearls and a Clinique counter makeup job. But then, Lucy had always been a master of disguise.

Kate stands and clambers out of the pew, nailing Erik’s foot in the process. She weaves upstream, past the congregants pushing toward the greeting hall with its punch bowls and cookie trays. Each time she thinks she’s caught Lucy’s eye, Lucy turns away, greeting an acquaintance from the past with a dentist-whitened smile and kind words.

And then Kate hears that voice and it is the same, if a little throatier, a bit less Midwestern.

Please tell them I was with you, Katie.

You told them it wasn’t me that set the fire, right?

Katie, you’ll back me up, won’t you?

Kate halts, letting the crowd slowly push her back toward the snack tables. She retreats toward Erik, who stands munching away with Brace.

“Good job, honey,” Kate says to the breeze. Erik and Brace shrug, mouths full.

AFTER SUNSET, DIAMOND-bright halogens pierce the crowded greeting hall. Kate percolates with restlessness. It’s as if she’s in the high school auditorium again after graduation—hoping to escape her family, looking for her classmates, wondering what trouble they could get into on the main drag or atop the bluffs. She tucked her husband into a chat with Mark and his partner Ray to keep them away from Senator Larson, though she’s not entirely sure which party she meant to protect. However, she is confident that her chat with Claudia and Bert lasted long enough to at least release her for the rest of the evening. Too bad her yoga partner Anita gave up church for Netflix, what with all the gossip desperately in need of sharing.

As she passes the south atrium, Kate senses a lone silhouette from the corner of her eye and stops. There, at the glass panels that rise from the floor and curve upward to form a roof, a woman gazes outside into the knit of maple and conifer, her long black coat folded over one arm. Tonight, the clouds have abandoned the moon, and the proudest of snowflakes sparkle along the church’s south lawn like constellations.

Despite the woman’s sophisticated attire, Kate recognizes that thoughtful stance and two decades simply fall away. Young Katie was never sure if Lucy meant to pose like that. Mom had always said, “that girl’s just starved for attention.” And Katie had always wondered why adults were so miserly with said attention. If anyone had earned it, it was Lucy. So, whether it was for show—a silent plea or proposition—or not, it worked. And still does.

Kate’s heart flutters, but she takes a calming breath and ventures into the dimly lit atrium, past rows of red, white, and chartreuse poinsettia. It’s cool in here, and she hugs herself, smoothing her biceps. The disconcerting burble of trickling water rises from plug-in Zen fountains like a leaky tap.

“Okay, Lucy.” She taps her foot and offers up a conspiratorial squint. “What are you up to?”

“Ah. Mrs. Larson.” Lucy side-eyes her, betrays only a slight smile. “Getting reacquainted with the weather. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I’m familiar with snow.” Kate supposed a hug was off the table. “Actually, I meant with Sojourn Reclaimers. That’s a joke, right?”

Lucy fully turns to her, eyebrow raised. “Excuse me?” The close-up sight of that same crooked smirk and those mischievous black irises that were always searching, reading, deciding, nearly overwhelms Kate.

As Mark had said, time and gravity have begun to conspire against Lucy, same as everyone else. When her smirk wavers, the lines remain. It’s still a wonderful face though, one of a kind, with high cheekbones and that same sculpted upturn of nose. Underneath the makeup, there glows the same warm blush. That face still reminds Kate of the pretty teenager she once hung out with on the Leap, but also foretells the handsome matron Lucy will become when that cocoa hair gives way to encroaching silver filaments. Maybe it already has; it’s difficult to tell in this light.

“This sure isn’t the Lucy I remember,” Kate says quietly. “The girl I knew didn’t need to fit into their Barbie doll ensembles.” She glances toward the main room. “She was beyond Barbie.” What the heck was in that punch? “And Ken.”

“Maybe I wanted a little security.” Lucy nods as if considering this for the first time.

“Hello, silly, there’s a lesbian couple in town with three kids, a house and plenty of security.” But this isn’t entirely true. The women live in an apartment, and foster children are always being ripped out of their home. And actually, one of them does dress like a Barbie. “Mark and Ray are very secure.” Probably.

Kate sighs. It’s been forever, could she have remembered their relationship all wrong? “It’s just that, well, high school, and what happened—”

“Yeah.” Lucy clicks her tongue, “I’ve wanted to apologize about that for a long time.”

“I should go.” Lucy pinches her smile in that god-awfully polite way people do when acknowledging someone across a gas pump. She begins to unfold her coat.

After years of watching her children learn how to emotionally manipulate, how to protect their egos, Kate can see the mechanics.

“Never mind. Tell me about this Sojourn thing. Is that like AA where you have to find every woman you’ve known and force your apology?” Kate doesn’t mean for it to have an edge, but it does and her sarcasm echoes through the room.

A few people glance over into the atrium, their lips puckered. It could be from tart cranberry punch, or it could be from gossip. Do they still remember Lucy? The vandalism? The romantic pronouncements of a teenage lesbian? The old shame, a stale sadness, comes over Kate like an overcast sky.

Lucy lowers her voice, squinting. “Honestly Katie, I thought you, of all people, would understand what Sojourn’s about.”

“Your mother-in-law? I saw you on TV. No, wait—it’s okay. She’s right about marriage. It’s biblical.” And whispers the last word like its magic.

Kate scoffs. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You clearly have no idea what I think about gay marriage. I got dragged to that rally.”

The mirth that once brightened young Lucy’s eyes appears cruel now in the shadows, takes Kate aback. This person is a long-lost twin of Lucy, the one who let the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the door.

Bridget Van Buren stands outdoors, where the end of the walk meets the parking lot. The woman’s hands raise in frustration. Lucy extracts a key fob from her coat, points it out the window and car lights flash in the distance. Bridget walks off toward them.

Kate speaks faster. “I don’t even—listen, I have no right to judge you after all this time, but this ex-gay thing masquerading as—I dunno—responsibility? It’s totally irresponsible.” She points at the ground. “There are gay kids growing up here. And they see you. Don’t you remember what it was like for us?”

Lucy twirls the long coat onto her shoulders and shrugs into it. The scent released from her jacket—earthy, pungent, intangible—brings a flood of memories, memories of longing. She heads for the atrium’s glass door and is out into the night, the coat flowing behind her legs like a cape. The three-quarter moon blues the snow and the tall conifers absorb everything else into their pitched shadows. Including Lucy.

Kate swallows. Her mouth is dry, the zipper down her back biting, itching. She cried about this for too many years. She can’t cry anymore.