The Space Between Words

by Michele Phoenix

When I gave her a hug, she whispered, “Lovely to see such a beautiful young couple off on an adventure together.”

  “Oh . . .” I pulled away and glanced at Grant. “We’re not a couple—”

  “Nonsense!”

  Grant feigned deep interest in an announcement pinned to a corkboard, but I could tell from his frown that he’d heard Nelly too.

  TWENTY-THREE

  WE TOOK OUR TIME LEAVING THE CATHEDRAL, STOPPING to read the plaques and admire the art. I couldn’t help but wonder, as we passed the impressive woodwork in the quire, if Charles or his descendants had had a hand in carving any of it, if his family had walked on the tiles under my feet or occupied the pews where Grant and I sat when we’d finished our tour.

  “I was so sure we’d find something here,” I said.

  He nodded. “Me too.”

  “I guess we found Nelly instead.”

  “And maybe she’ll dig something up . . .”

  Though he’d meant to sound positive, there was defeat in his tone. “That’s the problem with gut feelings,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “No guaranteed outcome. Just a whole lot of hope.”

  We sat silently for a while longer, then Grant said, “Maybe all we were supposed to find on this trip to England was evidence that Charles survived.”

  “I guess I should be satisfied with that.” But I wasn’t. And I knew Adeline wouldn’t be either.

  A woman’s voice came over the loudspeaker system, intrusive despite her softly modulated tone. She invited those present to pause wherever they were and join her in reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the language of their choice. What little bustling noise there had been in the nave stilled to absolute silence as visitors stopped walking and recited the words in unison.

  I saw Grant glance at me and realized my lips were moving, mouthing the prayer I’d grown up saying with my classmates at the beginning of every school day. I bit my lip to stop myself from reciting the rest of it.

  The disembodied voice continued to speak once the recitation was over, pleading for God’s mercy on a broken world and entreating us to live faith-filled lives despite the uncertainty and violence surrounding us. There were amens murmured all around us at the end of her prayer, then the tour guides and tourists went back to their business. An elderly couple not far from us remained kneeling for several minutes, and neither Grant nor I spoke until they left their pew.

  “You know the Lord’s Prayer,” he said.

  “Eight years under Headmistress Heaton’s thumb.”

  “Catholic school?”

  I nodded. “Best education in town. We said the Lord’s Prayer before class every day.”

  I tried to remember the exact wording of the line that had stood out to me as we’d listened to the reading over the cathedral’s loudspeakers. “‘Open our hearts that we may see you at work in the world.’”

  “Right. I caught that too.”

  I really didn’t want to get into the topic—it felt too broad and intimidating to tackle—but the grand serenity of our surroundings prompted me to speak my thoughts. “I guess I’ve seen a lot of humans at work in the world, but not a whole lot of divine intervention.” When Grant said nothing, I added, “Look at the Huguenots. Just believing the way they chose and getting exterminated for it.”

  “By a king whose faith wasn’t all that different from theirs.”

  “I would have abjured,” I said, sure of my conclusion. “I’d have been the first person to raise my hand and say, ‘Okay—I give. Call me Catholic, call me Buddhist . . . whatever it takes to spare me and my family.’”

  “But the Baillards didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t they?” I asked after a brief hesitation. “Surely it was something more than stubbornness. Even the hundreds—thousands—who fled to England. To Canterbury. They could have kept everything if they’d just . . .”

  I shook my head and let my gaze travel along the pillars and arches of the cathedral’s nave. “Losing everything—their possessions, their children, their country, their lives—for a God who didn’t seem to step up to protect them.”

  “What was it Adeline said? In the last few pages we translated.” Grant frowned, searching his mind for the words we’d read again just a few days ago. “‘For all its scars and strife, this world still speaks the beauty of its Maker.’”

  The sound I made was cynical. “That’s awfully optimistic from a woman facing a violent death.” I remembered my friend. “But Patrick probably would have agreed with Adeline.”

  “He was an optimist?”

  I nodded. “Through and through. He used to drive us crazy singing ‘What a Wonderful World’ in the worst possible Louis Armstrong impression.” Grief tugged at my resolve again. I shook it off. “Anytime he saw something beautiful—mountains, a sunset, puppies, for Pete’s sake—he’d launch into a full-out performance.”

  “Good song.”

  “Great song,” I agreed. “And he really believed it. Wonderful world. People are good if you discount the rotten apples. Yada yada.” I heard the edge creeping into my voice as I contemplated his fate and tried to tamp it down. I felt myself frown. “How could the Baillards, from Pierre down, believe God was working in the world and be witnesses to . . . to the kind of violence that can only be pure evil? It’s so—I just don’t get it.”

  Grant cleared his throat. “I don’t get it either,” he said. “But as much as it confuses me, it also . . . I don’t know. I look at Connor and hope they’re right.”

  “And I think of the Bataclan and can’t believe they are.”

  “I guess—” Grant seemed to catch himself. I turned so I could see his face. He was watching the elderly couple who had been sitting near us during the time of prayer. After speaking with a priest at the front of the cathedral, they were making their way to the exit now.

  “You guess . . . ?”

  He nodded toward the couple. “They get something from believing.” He paused, then quoted Adeline again. “‘The peace I feel despite my fear can only be from God.’”

  I knew what he was getting at, but I dismissed the implication. It was all well and good to assign beneficial side effects to a belief in a higher power, but I was still living with the pain of his failure to intervene.

  I found it hard to concentrate for the rest of the day. We met Mona and Connor at the bus stop a while later and spent some time walking around the city, then we had dinner in a quaint, historic pub on The King’s Mile.

  Connor slept for a while during our bus ride back to Howletts, then Grant carried him to the car for our drive back to the Burham B&B.

  “No message from Nelly yet,” Grant said, phone in hand, as he folded himself into the driver’s seat of the Peugeot.

  We drove the fifty minutes home mostly in silence. With Mona dozing in the back, it fell to me to point to the left side of the road when Grant automatically turned into the right lane.

  “You’d think it would feel more normal by now,” he muttered.

  “It takes more than two days to undo decades of habit.”

  He shook his head. “Has it really only been two days?”

  I laughed. “Could make a person miss the slower pace of renovating a barn.”

  “You doing okay?”

  I looked at him, confused by the question. “Sure.”

  “It’s been a long day—a long couple of days—and with your injury so recent . . .” He paused, then said, “Let’s stay home tomorrow.” Glancing at Mona and Connor in the rearview mirror, he added, “No use staying in a rural B&B if we’re never there to enjoy it.”

  Much as I liked the thought of staying put for a day, I felt disappointment stirring.

  “What do we do if Nelly doesn’t call us?” I asked, voicing the concern I’d felt since leaving Canterbury.

  Grant was silent for a while. Then he said, “She’ll get back to us. And until then, maybe we can try to find more Bible pages like the Ballards’. Want to give it a shot i
n the morning?” He glanced in my direction. “Only if you’re up to it.”

  As much as I distrusted hope, I felt a vestige of it still motivating our search. “You can go ahead and assume that I am.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I READ A MAGAZINE IN THE SITTING ROOM DOWNSTAIRS after breakfast the next morning while Grant went out back with Mona and Connor to get his nephew set up for another ride. Then he joined me with his laptop and sat on the couch next to the Victorian chair I occupied.

  “So,” he said, lifting the lid and opening a Google page. “What do we search for?”

  Over the next hour, we tried every conceivable combination of words like Huguenot, France, England, Bible, pages, tradition, and divided. I got Mona’s laptop from her room and entered my own combinations, clicking on the first several search results each time and finding nothing related to what we were hoping for.

  “I fell off the pony!” Connor yelled, bursting in through the front door and striking his usual superhero pose. There was mud in his red hair and up the left side of his body.

  Grant looked up. “You did what?”

  “He fell off Gretel,” Mona explained, coming in behind him. “Our resident pirate got a little carried away with a Blackbeard battle reenactment and slid right off her back.”

  “He realizes Blackbeard traveled on a ship, not horseback, right?” Grant said.

  “We’re going to the river to float paper boats.” Connor paid no attention as Mona tried to get him out of his muddy pants. “Wanna come too?”

  I looked at Grant. The invitation sounded like a welcome reprieve from a fruitless search.

  “Up you go!” Mona said, swatting his behind.

  Connor leaned back as his mom took his hand and pulled him toward the stairs. “Wanna come too?” he said to us again, straining against her.

  I closed Mona’s laptop with a resolute click.

  I suspected Grant had deliberately left his phone behind as we trekked off to the stream that flowed between the B&B and the neighbor’s land. It felt good to be forced to live in the simple present, unable to check for messages from Nelly or run searches for documents related to Adeline’s past. We made paper boats, some more seaworthy than others, and raced them downstream. Then Connor decided he needed to build a dam, and he and Grant took to the challenge with gusto as Mona and I sat on a bench nearby, shivering in the cold.

  We talked about Connor and his extraordinary enthusiasm—which Mona called “happiness on crack”—then the conversation turned to more serious things.

  “So . . . ,” she began, “how have you been sleeping the last few nights?”

  I glanced at her, surprised by the concern in her tone. “Why do you ask?”

  There was gentleness in her smile. “The walls are thin, and your bedroom’s next to mine.”

  I knew exactly what she was referring to and hung my head. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No need to be.”

  “I hoped no one heard.”

  “Nightmare?”

  I nodded. “I had them a lot those first few days after the . . . after Paris. The screaming, thrashing-around kind. But lately it’s been more the terrified, cold-sweat variety. I don’t know why last night’s was so . . . I’m sorry I woke you up.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’m a mom. I’m used to getting woken in the middle of the night. I was just worried about you, but when I didn’t hear anything else for a while, I figured you were okay.”

  I remembered the dream vividly. The face of the young man I’d seen standing behind the fence of the Jungle refugee camp in Calais. The one with the pleading eyes and vulnerable stance. I’d seen him transform from pitiful to menacing in my nightmare. His eyes turned red and fiery. His body expanded and broadened as he tore through the chain-link fence and charged me, wrapped an iron grip around my neck, and threw me to the ground. He hovered over me, heavy and suffocating, and hissed, “This is for Syria” in French as the knife he held above my heart slipped deeper into my chest.

  I woke up screaming—a hoarse, pained, panicked scream that ripped my mind out of the blackness of terror and into the predawn quiet of my bedroom in the B&B. I never went back to sleep.

  “Were you reliving the Bataclan?” Mona asked gently.

  I shook my head. “Not really. It was just—a face. And fear.”

  “I’m sorry, Jessica.”

  “It was the man from Calais,” I admitted, wondering if identifying him would steal some power from the dream. “The one we saw behind the fence as we were driving by the Jungle.”

  “The little boy in the green shirt?”

  “He wasn’t a little boy in my dream.”

  I realized in that moment how thoroughly the attack had warped my perception. It didn’t matter that the boy had been trapped behind chain link, probably hungry and cold, waiting for a chance to experience freedom. All I’d seen was the color of his skin, the texture of his hair, the shape of his face—and that had been enough to morph him into the terrorist who had haunted my nightmare.

  “You must see them everywhere.” Mona’s empathy was an almost palpable force. “The men who attacked the Bataclan.”

  “I can’t control it.”

  “I’m guessing it’s absolutely normal.” She reached across to grab my hand and gave it a firm squeeze. “I know you’ll figure it out in time. Get it all straight in your mind again. But for now . . . ,” she said, earnest and sure, “with all you’ve been through, I think you’re doing great.”

  That made me laugh, though I heard little levity in the sound. “Every so often I start to think that too. Then I get broadsided by a memory or a dream or a sound that feels like Paris and . . . I may be doing a bit better, but I’m still a long way from doing great,” I conceded. Even that mitigated statement felt like an affront to those who’d died.

  “If it happens again and you need some company, come find me, okay?” Mona said, releasing my hand and turning to watch Grant and Connor hard at work on their dam. “I’m a world-class nightmare wrangler.”

  “Connor?”

  “When all the lights come on in my bedroom in the middle of the night, I can assume that a little body is about to crawl into bed with me and tell me to sing Barney to him.”

  “The dinosaur?”

  “‘I love you, you love me . . . ,’” she quoted. “Seems to calm him down. So I sing the song and I pray for him. By then, he’s usually fast asleep again.” She smiled. “I’ll do the same for you if you need it.”

  “Well, I’d be up for Barney, but I’ll pass on the prayer.”

  “Keep the purple costume, scrap the deity?”

  “At least I’m sure Barney’s a man-made thing.”

  She was silent for a moment. “And God?”

  “I don’t know—maybe real, but more likely some form of Great Delusion.”

  That seemed to take her aback. “You don’t really believe that,” she said after another moment of silence. Her voice held no condemnation.

  “The Bataclan,” I answered. “ISIS. September 11. I’d be a fool not to believe it.”

  “Connor. The bed-and-breakfast. You.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t follow.”

  Mona turned toward me on the bench. “Here’s what I figured out a few months after Fred left us,” she said. “God layers good over the bad.”

  “Is that a verse or something?” A hard edge had crept into my voice.

  “I wanted to blame God for what Fred did. And trust me, I gave it my best shot. But two years later, with a bit of a step back, I understand better that Fred did that. Fred and his juvenile ideals. Fred and his impulsive and selfish pursuits.”

  “But God didn’t stop him. If he’s really God, he could have. Isn’t that guilt by omission?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” She sighed deeply, then added, “Sometimes I think there are things we’re just not meant to understand from a human perspective. But . . . I guess I’m beginning to see the stuff I coul
dn’t when I was neck-deep in the bad. The good stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ignoring the bad. The abandonment, Connor’s trauma, the fear of losing everything . . . Leaving us was Fred’s choice, and it was devastating. But there is still good in my life. There’s a lot more good than I realized.”

  “And that makes it okay that Fred walked out on you?”

  “No, but it makes it survivable—laying blame where it belongs and measuring the good. Especially measuring the good. If I hadn’t married Fred, I wouldn’t have Connor. And if Fred hadn’t moved us here, I wouldn’t have known France. I wouldn’t have met you.” She nodded as if reaching the same conclusion all over again. “God layers good over the bad. It’s what he does. And the more of the bad life dishes out, the more good God dishes out too. We just get so blinded—legitimately—by what hurts that we can’t see the good brightening the darkness.”

  “What about those who don’t get to see it?” I mumbled before I was able to stop myself, echoes of the attack thundering in my mind. “What about those whose lives get stolen by the bad?” I took a deep breath. “If God would just stop it before it happened, he’d spare himself a step in the process.”

  Mona looked at me, sadness and understanding on her face. “I just think it’s easy to blame God for the stupidity of humans. The cruelty too.” She saw my involuntary grimace and laughed. “And I’m also guessing you’d rather talk about anything but this,” she said.

  “I would.”

  “Great, because there’s something else I need to say to you.”

  “Oh boy.”

  “Listen, I don’t get you to myself very often, so I might as well make the most of it, right?” She watched Connor and Grant dragging a fairly large hunk of rotted tree toward the creek. “I need to apologize.”

  “Mona . . .”

  “What I said about you and Grant, back in Balazuc . . . It wasn’t about you.”

  I looked at her, shaking my head. “No, you were right. I didn’t want to admit it, but—you were absolutely right.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  I frowned, confused and a bit uncomfortable.