“Dear friends in Christ,” Clare said, in a voice that rang over the stone and carried to every corner. “On this most holy night, in which our Lord Jesus passed over from death to life…” She went on with the invocation and then invited everyone to pray. He ducked his head. Everyone else seemed to know the words. Then the skinny guy backed away and brought the tip of the huge candle down to the bowl, lighting it. The white-robed people, all of whom had plain white tapers stuck in cardboard disks just like his, lit their candles from the big one. Then they touched candles with the folks sitting nearby, and next thing he knew, the guy sitting next to Russ was lighting his candle and gesturing for him to pass it on. The fire flowed forward, a wave of tiny lights surging to the front of the church until the whole space was illuminated.
Pretty impressive. He turned to look at the fire that had started it all and caught Clare just as she glanced toward his pew. Her eyes widened, but then she and the others were all marching up the aisle and there was a lot of fiddling with the big candle and the skinny guy singing about rejoicing. He went on and on about the candle and the light and the night being a Passover.
Then Clare said, “Let us hear the record of God’s saving deeds in history,” and the congregation got to sit down. After that, there was an endless string of Bible readings, the choir singing a psalm, and a prayer, one right after another. Russ felt like a kid again, trapped in the Methodist church with his mom pinching him whenever he squirmed. He amused himself by tipping his candle from one side to the next, laying out the melted wax in patterns, until Clare walked to the pulpit and began her sermon.
“And so the Day dawns,” she said. “You cannot stop it, no matter how much you might want to cling to the ordinary and the mundane. The day breaks, the mourners come, the stone is rolled away. ‘Why do you seek him here, among the dead? Go, he is living.’ And everything is changed.”
He knew he was imagining it, that there was no way she could see through the darkness and the light all the way to the back row, but it felt as if she were talking to him. Only to him.
“How frightening to embrace life, when one expected cold stillness. Scary. But none of us can stop it, and we’re wrong to try. We become used to deadening who we are and what we feel, but now the stone is rolled away. We cannot wrap the linens around ourselves again. No one ever promised that transformation was easy, but we are called to have courage. And faith.” She smiled, radiating light, and he could feel his heart cracking. “I want to walk the road with you, equally amazed, and see what we can make out of a world so new and so different.”
There was more, much more, three people baptized, and everyone vowing to renounce evil, and then the white-robed assistants pulled down black cloths that had been covering the cross at the front of the church and everyone shouted “Alleluia!” like it was a big party. The lady to his right took pity on him and handed him an open book, pointing out where they were in the service, and he realized it wasn’t that they all had memorized the words, it was that everyone read from the same book.
He didn’t go up for communion. He sat while the rest of his pew shuffled by, and he knelt when they did for the prayers, and he stood when Clare shouted, “Go in peace! To love and serve the Lord! Alleluia!” Then he waited, while the people around him hugged one another and rattled on about their Easter Sunday plans and left by twos and threes.
Eventually, there were only two left. He sat while she pulled off the heavy satin drape she had donned before celebrating the Eucharist, folded it, and laid it crossways over the altar rail. He sat, and she walked down the aisle, taking her time, and slid into the pew, next to him, as if meeting him in her church after midnight was a usual part of her routine.
Then he noticed her hands, half covered by her white linen robe. Shaking. “So. What did you think of the great vigil?” she said.
“It was beautiful. Long, but beautiful.”
They sat for a moment. Then she said, “You’re interested in developing your faith life?”
“That sounds like something they teach you to say in Ministers Monthly magazine.”
“Yeah. Well. It’s not the done thing to ask someone what they’re doing in your church.”
“I came to see you. To talk.”
“I thought I covered everything in that note.”
“You know what really killed me about that Dear John letter? You signed it ‘Love, Clare.’ ”
She looked down at her lap. “That’s a common way of ending a letter.”
“Yeah. Right.”
She glared at him. “You’re a man in love with his wife, Russ.”
He pointed toward the altar. “And you’re a woman in love with her boss.”
She looked at him blankly, then hiccuped up a laugh. “I guess you’re right.”
He turned to face her. “Clare, I love you.”
Her laughter vanished. Her eyes widened. “I can’t believe you said that.”
He pushed on. “And you love me, too.” She pressed her hands over her mouth. She shook her head. “You can’t make that disappear by writing me a letter. Were you listening to your sermon? I was. You can’t make yourself dead again when you’ve come alive. So you’re scared. Christ knows, I am, too. But like you said. We have to have courage.”
She bent over, breathing deeply.
“Clare?” He tried to see her face. “Clare? You’re not going to faint, are you?”
She let out another short laugh. “No.” She sat up, took a breath, then stood. “Come here.”
He grabbed the cane he used to help him get around in his walking cast and followed her up the aisle, across, to a place where the pews had been cleared away. He could see from the water damage that this was where the roof had given in.
“This is the window that Mrs. Marshall gave in her mother’s memory. It’s hard to see at nighttime, but you can make the details out.”
He looked at it.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the Ketchems. About what went wrong for them, and for Allan Rouse. I think they all saw something they wanted, something they were tempted by, and they said, ‘I deserve this.’ ” She looked up at him. “I don’t want to make the same mistake.”
He reached out and took her hand in his. “I’m not trying to talk you into an… an affair. I don’t want to be unfaithful to my vows.”
She smiled, a shaky, crooked smile. “Me, neither.”
“There’s something in me that recognized you. Right from the start. The parts of me that always felt alone, the parts of me that I always kept hidden away, out of sight-I could see that you had them, too.” He smiled a little. “Sorry. I’m not saying this very smoothly.”
She stepped closer. “I never asked you to be smooth. Just to be yourself.”
He had to close his eyes for a moment, to get himself under control. “That’s just it. I know I can tell you, ‘This is who I am.’ And your answer will always be-”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t want to fall in love with you,” she said. He tightened his grip on her hand. “I’m sorry.” Her voice was on the edge of crying.
“Oh, love.” He let his cane clatter to the stone floor and pulled her to him. “Why?”
She tipped her head back to meet his eyes. “Because we’re going to break our hearts.”
He wanted to reassure her, but what could he say? She was right. So he rocked her back and forth and they clung to each other, while the candles burned down and the sad-faced angels held out their glass promises. For he doth not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men.
Julia Spencer-Fleming
Julia Spencer-Fleming is an American novelist. She lives in Maine with her husband and 3 children.
