“I have been asking myself that question every day now, for the past few weeks. I used to ask it in an entirely different context. Jane, are you ready for the new world? Are you ready to start again? Are you ready to leave this very comfortable place, to take up burdens that will be heavy in ways that you can’t even imagine? Are you ready to be worthy of that place. Are you ready for your second chance?
“You know, I never was really sure. You will be angry with me when I tell you that I always wanted one more day, another chance to talk to the angel, another opportunity to gather up my courage and make sure that I could handle it. It’s almost a relief, to know that I’m not going to see it, now. Almost, but not quite, because I really did think I was finally ready. It was all in me, everything I needed to step out and be worthy of the new grass and the new trees and the new mountains and the deep new sky. I thought I could see everything, the shape of the leaves, the colors of the new, wonderful birds — colors not ever even seen before. It was probably stupid, to think I could contain it in my mind, to know it at all before it was here, and maybe this vanity is just barred me from it. It’s easy to think that. It’s always easier, to think the worst thing. Jane, you’re fat. Jane, you’re a whore. Jane, you’re disgusting. Jane, you’re too ugly, inside and out, for anyone to love you. You hardly even have to try, to think like that. Jane, a whale has a better chance of swimming up your ass than do you of entering the new world.
“Lately I’ve been asking myself another question. Are you ready? It sounds the same, but actually is different. Are you ready to leave this horrible place? Are you ready to be freed from the chamber? Are you ready to go away from here? It should be an easy answer, I know. But I am held by other questions. I worry for our errand, whether we ever properly defined it, let alone completed it. All these sleeping children — I know what they are dreaming about — I envy them and sometimes I am angry at them and sometimes I even feel a hatred toward them. I hope it is just the sickness in me that makes me want to bite the baby or kick the toddler — when I am thinking Why not me, these feelings are the answer. Weren’t we supposed to do something with them and with ourselves? We kept saying that we would. Remember what Vivian said? We were all saying it, in our own way. We kept sounding like we meant it. I worry that we all just sat around, after a while, trying to enjoy a ride that was never meant to be fun, that when the obvious was presented to us we stared and stared at it, and pretended it was not there, and that when we thought we were improving ourselves and making a model of what was to come we were only playing a stupid game.
“Again, it’s so easy to think like this. Somehow this bed makes it easier. I asked the angel for a bed that would help me think, that would push my mind out of its usual ruts, and yes there are these special buttons, and the clasping mittens that give you that wonderful massage, but lying in bed was ever an activity for the morose, the languid, the lazy depressives. I got a glimpse, the other day, not in a dream, not in vision. I wasn’t even looking out the window. You know I lost the feeling in my toes about five days ago. Now they don’t hurt like they did, but I have to check, every so often, to make sure they’re still there. You remember Dr. Walnut, no doubt, and how his toes rotted to little stubs, how they were black and hard on the outside, red and tender in the middle. I have a fear of that. I lifted up the sheet to look and my toes were there but so was this other thing.
“I had a feeling — my toes were there and I was so grateful to still have them, and out of that I had this feeling that everything was right, that everything had gone just as it should have. How about that? I am a pretty sensitive girl, and I have a good memory. I took another look at things, and yes I felt the sadnesss and the rage, the cold grief, but then it was sort of… farther away, and this other feeling was still there. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about rotting toes or broken promises or orphaned sleepers, or about the lost world, and all those people under the water, but I could think about them and still I had this feeling like everything was all right. Maybe it is just a vessel in my brain, all blocked up and causing trouble, or spreading lies in my head. I don’t think so.
“So here I am, lying down here in front of you. Look, my toes are still here.” She wiggled them under the sheet. “I can’t feel them but I can move them! Look, I am ready. I am all right, all fine, all… done. How about you? That is the lesson for today, the little bit that I can tell you about this afternoon, before you go back to your patients or your own illness. And before you go I want you to try it for me. I want to try to make you feel it, because I am sure that it is the very next step. Are you ready? John and Elizabeth and Rob and Connie, I know you’re out there. Close your eyes with me and pray.”
Jemma closed her eyes, too, along with the fifty people crowded into the room. She saw differently with them closed, but it was just as plain: the botch in every body. She thought she could feel it, the strain in the minds as they tried to feel what Father Jane was feeling. Here and there someone let out a little peep of a groan. It was so quiet, but only Jemma marked it when Father Jane stopped breathing, and for many minutes no one but Jemma knew she was dead.
83
“Do you think she’ll come?” Jemma asked Calvin.
“She always comes,” he said. They were waiting for their ride to school, a woman named Deb who drove a yellow taxi. Their mother had hired her months before, to solve the problem of driving them to school in the winter, after a failed experiment with a carpool — she’d entered them in it enthusiastically, but pulled them out quickly when she realized she was expected to drive other people’s children into town. Now it was September, in the middle of a late heat wave, and there was no snow anywhere, but their mother liked the arrangement too much to have canceled it on account of good weather, especially during times like now when she had retreated into her darkened room to sleep and sleep. Jemma, not very far penetrated into the third grade, was eager to get to school, not least because she feared the wrath of her new teacher, Sister Gertrude.
“Let’s get the bikes.”
“Don’t be stupid, Jemma.” She put her head out the door to listen for the distinctive rattle of Deb’s taxi. The hot, wet air made her gasp a little. It was quiet, except for the birds, whose song seemed muted by the heat and humidity, and who walked slowly over the lawn, as if they were too exhausted by the weather to fly.
“We should get Mom,” she said a little later. Her brother shook his head.
“You try and wake her up,” he said. Jemma was afraid to do that, but after five more minutes of watching their empty driveway her anxiety pushed her down the hall and around the corner to the foot of the stairs and their parents’ door. It was closed, of course, and radiating the sense of forbidding that it sometimes did, so Jemma was sure that if she touched the doorknob she’d get a shock that would blow her across the hall, clear through the picture window in the living room, over all three ravines to land, dead and smoking, on Beach Road. She stared at the knob for a moment before she reached for it slowly, and let her hand hover just an inch from it before grabbing it. She got a little thrill, a tingle at the base of her spine, but no shock. She turned it, thinking it would be locked, but it wasn’t. The knob turned, but the catch did not disengage. She was about to turn it further when she heard Deb’s horn.