He had wheeled himself back to Henry as fast as his chair could carry him, and then he had tried to look calm and unworried as Henry dawdled over the closets and drawers and gathered together the scraps of clothing Brendan needed. “Not in the suitcase,” he’d told Henry sharply. “Use that plastic bag.” They’d slipped through the halls, out the door, and into the parking lot, and he’d prayed that anyone looking out the windows might think they were going for a walk, that the row of oaks shielding the vans would conceal them, that the van would start, that the lift would work, that no one would run shouting after them as they drove away.
He hadn’t prayed so much in years. Consciously, guiltily, he had employed what his abbot used to call linear prayer. Prayer that moved the way things move in the world: point to point, step by step, effects following causes and building into a plan — his abbot had spoken of that as something to shed, to be replaced by the deep prayer that sank wordlessly into the mystery of the world. “We have been given everything,” his abbot had said. “But we fail to understand that. Deep prayer is the way we recognize that we already have what we seek.”
But deep prayer wouldn’t get him a van or set him on the road, and so he’d resorted to the kind of prayers made by old women bowed before banks of candles. Pleas, promises, bargains — they were undignified, almost sordid. They were hardly any better than Wiloma’s superstitious rituals, and yet for the moment they appeared to have worked.
In part, he knew, they’d worked because he’d laid the ground for his disappearance. He hadn’t known when he was going, but he’d spent the week saying good-bye to his companions. “My niece is taking me home for a visit,” he’d said — which, until a few hours ago, might easily have been true. He’d said good-bye to Ben and to Charlie and to Kevin; to Judson, who hadn’t recognized him or anyone else in thirteen years, but who had once played gin rummy with him every day; to Parker, who rasped his words through an electronic box in his throat. He hadn’t managed a farewell to Roxanne, which he regretted, but he had let go of the rest of the Home.
Twenty-nine years, he thought, tilting uncomfortably as Henry took a corner too fast. Twenty-nine years of a routine as regimented and reassuring as that of Our Lady of the Valley. He could still remember his first days at the abbey, when he’d watched forty men file silently into the church and begin the chants of the Office, bowing and rising and singing in unison. When he’d entered the Order, in 1927, the old rules had still been in effect. The monks wore the old habits, brown for him and the other lay brothers, white draped with black for the choir monks. They lived by the old schedule, chanting matins in the dark of the night and then the other hours as the day unrolled, celebrating Mass after terce, working outside between none and vespers, retiring just after dusk.
In those old days before the war and the reservoir, before he’d sailed to China, every minute had been full to overflowing and the ten years he’d been granted had passed like a long and busy day. In his memory it was always mid-April there, a month his father had hated for the mud and the frenzy of work but which he had come to love within the abbey’s sheltering walls. The gray stone of the buildings shining palely as the sun rose over Hollaran Hill and illuminated the morning mist, the haze of green in the orchard as the branches broke into bud, the reddish shoots of the peonies breaking through the winter mulch along the warm south wall — the colors were sharp at dawn and gentled as the day progressed, and when it rained the pond to the east of the garden was black and tranquil. Ducks paddled in the dark water and laid their eggs in a tangle of juniper. He had worked in the kitchen after he first took his vows; a few years later he’d been assigned to the greenhouse and the garden. The flowers that graced the altar each day had been his.
There was no garden at St. Benedict’s, and he wasn’t allowed in the kitchen. His years there had passed like a single sleepless night, but still he’d had discipline, routine, certain meals appearing at predictable times, and a sense of community if not of common purpose. It had been like joining another Order: that of the old and crippled and confined. He and his companions had not taken formal vows, but they’d practiced them all the same.
Poverty — they owned nothing; chastity — the women lived in a separate wing and mingled with the men only at meals. Obedience — the administrator ruled their lives more firmly than any abbot. Stability had been easy, they lived and died in the Home. And then there had been fasting — who could eat the food? — and the discipline of silence: to whom could one talk in the endless nights? Corporal mortification had come without effort, courtesy of their decaying bodies, and although Brendan tried to don street clothes each day, many of his companions lived in bathrobes as shapeless as habits.
The van sped past Cobbs’ Hill as Brendan thought about the life he was leaving behind. Thousands of people had stood on that hill in their Advent robes, his friend Judson had said, back when he could still speak. A century and a half ago, they had stood there waiting for the Second Coming and prepared for their own ascensions. All day and all night they stood, waiting for a miracle that never came. And when the ground didn’t open and swallow the sinners, when the saints didn’t leap from their graves, the faithful had climbed down from that hill and trudged home brokenhearted.
“They held their arms over their heads,” Brendan remembered Judson saying. “As if they were going to start flying any minute.” Judson had held his own arms in the air as he spoke, his pale blue bathrobe dropping away from his wrists and his eyes sharp with amusement. For thirteen years now he’d been as good as dead, and on the grass where the faithful had once crowded hip to hip, a group of teenagers were sunning themselves and tossing bright plastic disks to their dogs.
Henry drove past the hill, past the park, down the ramp that led to the highway, and nothing happened. Perhaps they haven’t noticed yet, Brendan thought. Perhaps they don’t care. One old man vanished in one old van, which surely the people at the Home understood had been borrowed, not stolen, and would be returned. The tires hummed on the pavement, and Brendan saw billboards, road signs, digital clocks flashing white numbers, cranes, drains, a half-built bridge, cars, weeds, chicory growing in blue profusion, litter, grass, sky, storefronts, the back of a church, a lit cigarette spinning end over end, a dog running behind a fence, a flock of pigeons rising all at once, a canoe strapped to the roof of a truck, rocks, gravel, trees, clouds.
Lord, he thought. Thank you for springing me. And he was about to be grateful for the ease with which they’d escaped when Henry turned left at the snarl where the highways intersected.
“Wrong turn!” Brendan cried. They had to go east, not west, along the path of the Erie Canal to Massachusetts. Henry was driving too fast, and they were not even launched on the Thruway yet, and already they were lost. Brendan’s wheelchair was parked behind Henry’s seat, and he couldn’t lean forward far enough to tap Henry on the shoulder. His left hand flapped uselessly in the air. “You’re going the wrong way!”
“I have to make a few stops. Pick up a couple of things before we head out.” Henry turned on the radio and hummed along with the tune that suddenly filled the van.