Except for a water bottle and Tre’s rattle, I was empty handed. I had no expectations, but I was willing to be moved if God sent me a sign.
The climb up the staggered steps opened an increasingly higher and wider view of the mountainous landscape, lit with pale, slanting rays of sun and defined by deep shadows. And this magnificent view stretched as far as I could see.
I walked around the imposing stone walls of the church with my hands in my pockets, my thoughts on Father Delahanty, the priest who’d come to Kind Hands only to be murdered within his first week. He had asked God for forgiveness, but his final words were some kind of confession to me.
I’m here for you, Brigid. God has a plan for you.
How did he know? Was he speaking to God and for Him?
Or was he just crazy and deluded?
God. Are You here? Got anything for me?
I walked to the edge of the stone staircase and looked down the mountainside to where St. Catherine’s Monastery nestled between the clefts and crags, on a flat patch of stone far below.
St. Catherine’s is a working monastery and a holy place. St. Catherine’s remains are entombed there, miraculously intact after her beheading in the fourth century. It is also the site of the burning bush from which, according to the Old Testament, God called Moses to lead His people out of Egypt.
I joined the throng of backpackers on the downward climb from Mt. Sinai to St. Catherine’s Monastery. I placed one foot in front of the other, making my way down the thousands of hand-chiseled stone steps, every single one of them reminding me of the steps that had been the death of my baby girl.
A college-age boy with a backpack tapped my shoulder and asked me to take his picture with Mt. Sinai in the background. After I did it, he asked me where I was from. Had I come to Sinai alone?
He couldn’t have made a worse choice for a pickup.
I said, “Sorry. No English,” and pulled the edge of my hood down so that it didn’t just cover my bald head, it deeply shaded my eyes.
I was a tourist in a place where I didn’t belong. There was nothing for me here.
My driver was waiting for me at St. Catherine’s.
I had a plane to catch.
Chapter 60
MY LONG day had started with a sunrise climb up and then down 3,750 steps carved into Mt. Sinai by penitent monks from St. Catherine’s Monastery in the seventh century. I hadn’t found peace or resolution or revelation, but I hadn’t quite given up.
Now, as the sun set on the Middle East, my plane landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. I was met by Nissim, a driver in a polished Lincoln sedan, who took me to my hotel in the modern section of Jerusalem.
My plan was to steep myself in Jerusalem’s Old City and the holiest sites of its three major religions. I’d been told that God’s divine presence never left the Western Wall and that this site, as well as the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, had been visited by millions of pilgrims over the last two thousand years.
If I couldn’t revive my faith in God in Jerusalem, it was truly lost.
At seven the next morning, Nissim picked me up at my hotel, and we set out for the Old City. Nissim had been a tank driver in the Six-Day War, back in 1967. He was a grandfather, a soldier, and a tour guide who claimed to know every niche in every wall of the Holy City.
We spent the day at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which had been built over the sites of Christ’s Crucifixion, burial, and resurrection and enclosed five stations of the cross.
While standing in the church’s atrium under the open sky, Nissim told me about the succession of kings, pharaohs, emperors, caliphs, and sultans who had conquered the Holy City, and about the religious wars, the Crusades; stories of saints and pilgrims; the destruction of this church in AD 1009; and the disputes over reconstruction up to the present day.
It was a glorious story, rich in detail, woven with passion for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I appreciated Nissim’s animated telling of it and the history I walked through within the walls and under the domes and across the stones walked by multitudes.
But I didn’t feel anything shift inside me: not my skepticism, nor my raging fury at God.
At day’s end, Nissim drove me back to my hotel, on Yafo Street, a four-lane, traffic-choked thoroughfare that cut through the business district. There was no parking in front of the hotel, and in the spaces beyond the no-parking zone was a bus stop, and a municipal bus had pulled in to let on passengers.
Nissim pulled around the bus and the half dozen cars in front of it and parked the Lincoln at the far end of the block. He opened the back door for me, and I told him I’d see him in the morning.
I walked back down Yafo and was mounting the steps to the hotel entrance when a concussive boom cracked through the air, lifting me off my feet and hurling me against the wall of the hotel. Glass shattered and fell on and around me like icicles in a winter hurricane. I was stunned from the impact. I couldn’t breathe.
What had happened? What the hell had happened?
As if a switch had been thrown, cars drove up onto the sidewalk, crashed into streetlights and buildings, collided with other cars. Pedestrians ran through the street, a monochromatic scene of chaos drawn in the charcoal gray of dusk, cut by headlights shining at crazed angles.
I smelled bitter smoke.
But I couldn’t hear a thing.
Chapter 61
SMOKE ROILED through the air, and crowds of terrified people stampeded down Yafo Street.
I was deaf and nearly blind from the smoke, and I realized that a bomb had gone off. A bomb.
Nissim had parked his car a block north of the hotel. Was he alive? Did he need help?
My legs were weak, but I pushed back against the wall and inched up until I was standing. I kept one hand on the wall and stepped down into the pandemonium on Yafo. I peered through the dense smoke, hoping to see to the end of the block, but my eyes were immediately drawn to the remains of the bus we had pulled around only minutes ago.
The explosion had gone off inside it and had surely been deadly. The warped metal crackled with fire as smoke poured up through the void where the roof had been.
And then the bus exploded again.
I saw the back of the bus erupt in flames. I turned my face to the hotel wall, flattened myself against the granite as the silent, roaring heat blew across my back and neck and hands.
When the blast subsided, I turned toward it and ran.
I skirted the flaming bus and kept going through the body-strewn street, which felt much like the killing fields in South Sudan. I was choking on smoke and tears when I reached the car at the corner of the block. Was it Nissim’s Lincoln? I hoped not. I hoped that he had pulled back into traffic before the explosion.
Please.
I walked to the street side of the car and saw Nissim wedged between the car door and the frame. It was him. I knew his white curls, now soaked with blood. His left arm, with his wedding ring on his hand, protruded from the door frame, and he was motionless.
Still, I called his name.
I reached through the shattered window and put two fingers to his jugular. He had no pulse.
“I’m so sorry, Nissim,” I said.
I stepped away from the car and saw a man half under the car behind Nissim’s sedan, lying in blood, his arms covering his head.
I went to his side, but he was gone. When I looked up, I saw a small body in the intersection that could only be that of a child. His legs had been blown off, and his blood was still running into the gutter.
God? What is this? What do You want me to see?
Ten yards away from the man and the child, a young woman struggled to sit up. Her right forearm was gone, and her blood was spouting onto the pavement.
“Please lie down,” I said. “I’m a doctor.”
The woman’s breathing was shallow, and her heartbeat was quickly pumping her life away.
I grabbed at my waist for my handbag,
thinking I could use the shoulder strap as a tourniquet. Then I remembered that I had locked up my bag in my room this morning. I wasn’t wearing a belt, and neither was the woman in the street.
A strip of tire was lying nearby, and I needed it. I went back to the woman whose arm had been crudely amputated by the explosion and tied off the ragged wound with the rubber strip. I spoke to her in words I couldn’t hear as red and blue flashers lit up Yafo Street. Firemen, police, medics, and bomb squads were coming into the devastated area.
An ambulance braked next to me, and two medics jumped out of the back. One spoke to me. I pointed to my ears and said, “I can’t hear.”
Would I ever hear again?
The medic’s partner stooped over the woman I had just tried to save. He shook his head no and made a thumbs-down motion.
The woman with the tire tourniquet was dead.
Chapter 62
COLORED LIGHTS spun and flashed in the bomb-riven night. Three of Yafo’s four lanes were closed, and the bus and surrounding sidewalk had been cordoned off. The walking wounded, even those desperately seeking loved ones, were ushered beyond the tape.
I shouted to a medic, “I’m a doctor!” but I was walked firmly to the cordon and sent away. I made my way around the obstacles and down the street to the hotel, where I found the lobby crowded with injured and panicked people. I took the stairs to my room, and first thing, I downed a minibottle of scotch from the honor bar. Then I stripped off my clothes and got under the sheet.
I lay on my back, absolutely still, and as I stared up at the ceiling, I thought about dead people.
Karl’s cold, dead face leapt into my mind, and so did the lifeless body of my precious baby, dressed in her christening, then burial, gown, wearing my cross and chain around her neck.
I flashed on the hundreds of dead at Kind Hands, or maybe it had been thousands—the babies, the BLM soldiers, Father Delahanty, and Colin—and the bulldozer pushing dirt over mass graves. I thought of Nissim, who had survived wars only to die on the street today.
Then something like a gust of wind rushed over me, clearing the thoughts from my mind.
My view of the past was gone, the dead people were gone, and I was seeing in two dimensions at once, as I had when I was both inside the airplane from Rome and flying outside it.
I was not insane. This was not delusionary. I was aware of the bed beneath me, the sheet draped over me. My arms were outstretched to the sides of the mattress, and my ankles were crossed. At the same time, my mattress and I were floating on a clear, sunlit, glass-colored sea.
It was simply amazing and completely real. As my raft and I bobbed on this blue-green water, I had a thought. If only I could stay here forever.
If only.
Just then, the air changed, becoming thick and oily with the stink of gasoline. There was a concussive ka-rump of an explosion, followed by a loud whoosh. The water had transformed into a dancing wall of flames surrounding me on all sides.
I think I screamed. I sat up and tried to get away from the inferno lapping at the sides of my raft of a mattress, singeing my skin and my bristly hair, but there was no escape. Fire was all around me, everywhere.
I collapsed back down onto the mattress.
I accepted this death. I wanted this consummation.
And then a new breeze brought another sea change.
The smoke thinned, and the dense blackness of it coalesced into marbled gray. Thunderheads formed at the height of the ceiling. Lightning sizzled and snapped.
I watched, transfixed by the swirling storm. A drop of water fell on my forehead, then on each of my eyes, like the softest of kisses. Another drop fell on my left hand, and my right, and then the drops came down in the thousands, the millions, merging into freezing-cold torrents.
I heard the hiss of doused flames. A mist rolled across my body, and, just as suddenly as it had risen from the sea, the fire was gone. Just gone.
The air brightened, and a warm breeze dried my face and the sheet still covering me. I remained motionless, suspended in place on my raft, which rose and fell, rocking gently on the waves.
Overhead, the gray sky diffused into a luminous blue veil, which became a pure-white ball of light enclosing me at its center.
I was overcome with awe, and I sensed His presence.
There was a feeling of warmth in my chest and a wordless voice in my mind. It was as if I was in a waking dream.
Brigid. This is your life. It belongs to you.
Chapter 63
I HEARD, with my deaf ears, those nine resonant words.
And then they were gone. The ceiling was plaster, not divine light. I was dry, and my skin was not burned.
I had not been sleeping or dreaming or hallucinating. The vision had come to me from outside my own mind, and I had been shocked and amazed at every turn.
I replayed the words in my mind.
Brigid. This is your life. It belongs to you.
I lay almost paralyzed on the bed.
I recalled the vision I’d had when I’d flown from Rome and had seen the beautiful Italian town beneath me. A baby carriage had rolled out into the street, under the wheels of a car. Hadn’t that baby’s mother called out to God?
Hadn’t she begged Him for her child’s life?
I saw the bird God had placed in my hand. I watched the small bird rise up and join the multitudes. And I heard the echo of God’s message to me: Can you care for your bird?
Weren’t millions of prayers going up to God now and in the last minute and the next? God, save my child. God, don’t let my wife find out. God, where are my car keys? Make the ball land on red. Lord, please let me get to class on time. God, bless my home, my marriage, my cat, my team.
The image of floating on a calm sea, the fire blazing across it, the cold rainstorm, and the words of God had, one by one, come over me. It was easy to interpret.
God was telling me that my life was both heaven and hell on earth. It was mine to live. He loved me. But my life was my responsibility. All mine.
He had shown me the way again. Take care of yourself, Brigid. Get Me?
I was suddenly sick all the way through. The bed didn’t move, but I felt as though I were falling nine floors to my death. The sense of falling was not a vision. It was abject shame and mortification in reality.
I had questioned God.
I had thought that I was so special, I could hold God to account. And why? I had never been promised, ever, that life would be safe and have a happy ending for myself and those I knew and loved, if only I had faith in Him.
A realization broke through my shame like a bright light. I did have faith. It had been shaken because I questioned it. But the fact that I was still asking God “why” was proof that I believed in Him.
I loved Him. I had never stopped.
As I lay there in the big bed, my skepticism and rage evaporated. I felt as though I’d been brought back to life, but for what reason? I had no idea.
I still didn’t understand why people had to suffer, but God had made it clear that it was not for me to judge.
I was alive. I had to use my life well while it was still mine. I was on my knees, thanking God with the whole of my heart and soul, when my cell phone rang.
I heard it.
My hearing had returned and, with it, the clamor on the street outside the hotel, men shouting, horns blowing, heavy equipment scraping up metal.
And my phone.
Hardly anyone had my number. But Sabeena had it.
“Sabeena?”
“Are you all right?” she asked me.
“There was a bomb,” I said.
“Brigid, I know. I saw the pictures on television after you texted me from Ben Gurion. I’ve been trying to reach you all night.”
“I was near the explosion. I lost my hearing. But it just came back. My driver died.”
There was a long silence.
“Sabeena?”
“There was a suicide bomber on the bus,” she
said. “Thirty-two people died, and many more are in the hospital. Brigid?”
“I’m here.”
“That’s a problem. Get the hell out of there.”
“Where should I go?”
“I know where I would go,” said Sabeena.
I’d gotten my answer from God. My life came without guarantees. I had to stop running and go back to what had driven me so far from home.
I needed to look into myself.
Part Three
Chapter 64
I WAS sweating hard under my coat and so anxious that my stomach hurt.
When I got to the customs inspector’s window, he asked me to lower my hood. Then he compared my passport photo to the actual me, standing in front of him.
The pictures didn’t match.
My face was gaunt, and my head was shorn. I had deep circles under my eyes, and my hooded coat had only added to my appearance as a suspicious person planning to blow up a plane.
I was taken out of the line by two armed guards, brought to a small, windowless room where my bags were unpacked again, the linings pulled apart, my electronic devices turned on. I was shunted into a second room, and this time, I was strip searched. I was struck by the wretched memories of the last time I’d been publicly stripped, but I complied.
When the female guard told me I could put my clothes back on, I said, “My husband and baby died suddenly. I went to Jerusalem to pray. I was on Yafo Street yesterday when the bomb blew up.”
She scrutinized my expression, looking to see if I was telling her the truth. She nodded. I was cleared for flight.
The only remaining empty seat was in the middle of a three-person row in the midsection of the plane. The overhead rack was full, so I balled up my coat, and when the man on the aisle stood up, I did my best to pack myself and my belongings into and under the narrow seat.
While we waited for takeoff, the news came over the individual media players in the seat backs. I don’t speak Hebrew, but I understood enough. Hamas was taking credit for the bomb. The death toll had risen to forty-five. Pictures of the dead flashed onto the screen. One of them was of the woman I had tried to save with a strip of tire. One was of the precious five-year-old boy who’d had his legs blown off. And then there was Nissim.
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