Rise

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  “Because we all need it,” Richard said. With everyone watching, the cell leader squatted down in front of April and took her hands. His brown eyes met hers. “April, you tried to tell me what had happened to you, and I did a bad job of listening. But I need to know what you saw and heard. I need to know what happened to you. We all need to know it. These things weren’t just for you.”

  April nodded slowly, and went to the canvas with an almost wooden step. She picked up a paintbrush and started trying to visualize what she would paint—

  And then abruptly laid it down and turned. “I can’t. No. I’m sorry, Richard. I can’t do it.”

  He frowned—his expression still compassionate, but concerned. “April, I know it must be hard. But we are One.”

  She shook her head. “But this isn’t for all of us. What happened. I mean, it is . . . but I can’t give it to anyone else. I shouldn’t. It’s too sacred for that.”

  “April . . .” A warning tone had entered his voice. She saw disapproval—and on Mary’s face too, and some of the others. “I don’t understand,” Richard said. “To hold back what the Spirit has shown you—to keep it from the Oneness—that’s selfishness, April.”

  She might have crumbled under that, but for the stubborn determination rising in her. And frustration at his inability to understand.

  Reese spoke, surprising them all. “I understand.”

  “What?” Mary asked.

  “I understand,” Reese repeated. “She isn’t being selfish. Listen, I walked on the edge of exile for a while. Almost followed in the footsteps of those who cut themselves off, like David and Jacob did. And I wouldn’t trade the Oneness for anything. But I learned something in that fire too—and through the whole journey. Some things are not all about the group. Some things are just about you.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Mary blurted, but her expression seemed more troubled than the discussion warranted. “David would have said that.”

  “Actually,” Reese said quietly, “David said the opposite. When I was sure the Spirit was leading me, he said I was a troublemaker. But I wasn’t wrong. Those who trusted me were right to trust me. David tried to use our ways against me.”

  April listened and felt, as Reese spoke, a threat.

  She went cold.

  The threat was coming from Richard.

  Hands shaking, she stuffed them in her sweater and moved away from the easel. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t show you what happened to me. Maybe there’s a reason I can’t really even talk about it. Maybe it’s meant to be kept secret.”

  A knock at the door—loud and abrasive—rescued April from having to say more. “That’s Shelley,” she said. “We have to break up this meeting anyway.” Her eyes pleaded. “Richard, something’s going on here that I don’t understand. You’re scaring me. And I can’t talk about this.”

  His eyes clouded, and she knew she’d hurt him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Let’s answer the door,” was his only response.

  Chapter 3

  Julie should have been the last person Andrew Hunter expected to see when he arrived home from work, but she was not. True, she had not communicated with him in fifteen years; true, she had told him back then that they were through forever unless he was willing to join the cult as she had; and true, the police had officially pronounced her dead. Eyewitnesses said she had been shot. But Andrew knew that no body had ever been found, and he knew the other eyewitness report—the one that hadn’t made official record.

  That Julie had been shot, and killed, but also that she had been raised to life again. By a light. By something totally inexplicable.

  Thanks to Chris Sawyer, Andrew had gotten his daughter, Miranda, back. He’d been doing his best to father and get to know her, assuring her that her mother was all right without promising her too much. But he was sure Julie would show up.

  And when she did, he wasn’t surprised.

  She was waiting on his front porch as he pulled up after work. He’d picked up Miranda from school and dropped her and a friend off at the friend’s house, so he was alone.

  He was glad for that.

  He recognized Julie immediately, despite the years that had passed. Her face was a little more lined, her figure a little fuller, but in essentials she hadn’t changed a bit. She was sitting on his porch swing—one he’d been meaning to put away for the winter—with her hands clasped in her lap, just waiting. Her blue eyes alighted on his car the moment he pulled up, but she didn’t move. Just waited for him to approach.

  He spoke first. “Hello, Julie.”

  “Hello, Andrew.” She bit her lip. “I guess this is a surprise.”

  “Not really,” he said. “Miranda’s with me. I thought you’d be along.”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “You didn’t think I was dead?”

  “I had good information that said otherwise.”

  “Maybe we need to talk about a few things.”

  “Maybe we do.”

  He unlocked the front door and pushed it open. “Please. After you.”

  She got up and entered the house gracefully, heading for the living room as though she knew exactly where to go. He sat, but she did not—just stood beside a free-standing lamp as though she was going to turn it off.

  She turned. “First off, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  He cleared his throat and tried to hold his voice steady. “For what, exactly?”

  “For everything, Andrew.”

  He cleared his throat again. “Considering how things ended between us, I think we should try to communicate as clearly as possible. Make sure nothing’s getting lost in translation. Don’t you?”

  “Okay.” She breathed out, rubbing her hands together. She wore a wool sweater and a long, multicolored skirt, and she looked young and as beautiful as ever. His throat was throbbing. He waited.

  “I’m sorry for the decisions I made. I’m sorry that I didn’t trust you. I’m sorry that I believed Jacob over you and that I let his fearmongering affect my mind and my heart so strongly. I’m sorry that I decided a fear-ruled life was best for me and for our daughter, and I’m sorry that I acted out of fear toward you. I’m sorry that I saw you, and treated you, as the enemy. I’m sorry for shutting down early on, and for all the half-answers and the half-truths, and I’m sorry for everything I led you to think—and for the way I left. I’m sorry for that more than anything. I never should have gone. I never should have abandoned you. I never should have believed the community was more important than you were. That Jacob and his teachings mattered more than our family.”

  Her eyes were glistening with tears when she finished and looked right at him, waiting for a reply.

  He wasn’t sure what to say. “Wow. You’ve really thought things through.”

  “I’ve had a lot of time to think.”

  “I tried to reach you for fifteen years.”

  “I know.”

  “I never remarried. I never even divorced you.”

  “I know.” Tears slipped from her eyes in the lamplight. “And I’m grateful.”

  “Do you want to come back?” Andrew asked. “Are you grateful because I kept a life you could come back to?”

  “Is that why you did it?”

  “Yes. I gave up faith in you a million times. Told myself it was a lost cause. Told myself I should move on—that I was practically morally responsible to move on. But I couldn’t shut the door. I couldn’t close off the possibility of you coming home. Which means you have one more thing to apologize for.”

  But his tone broke on that last line—broke because he let it. So she could hear the emotion he felt and understand that this time, he wasn’t really asking for a confession.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Tell me you’re sorry for dying,” he said, “and shattering all of my hopes, even though it was only for a little while. That news broadcast slammed the door I’d been holding open for a decade and a
half.”

  “I’m sorry for dying,” she whispered. “But not too sorry. You’ve heard of life from death?”

  “It’s a concept that gets touted. Mostly in speeches.”

  “Well, it’s real. I did die, Andrew. I really died. I was shot. The news wasn’t wrong.”

  “And yet here you are.”

  “And you knew I was still alive—you said so. How?”

  “A little bird told me. Someone saw you . . . raised to life.”

  “And you believed them?”

  “I saw some crazy things. Made believing in resurrection not so hard to do.” He stood and held out his hand. “Besides, when you’ve been holding a door open for fifteen years, it’s not so easy to accept that it’s been closed on you.”

  Julie took his hand. Her skin, the slender fingers, the warmth . . . it all felt so familiar.

  Like something from another lifetime.

  They stood there in the lamplight, holding hands, and then he dropped hers.

  “We can’t just go back, can we?”

  “A lot of life has happened in the meantime.”

  “But you’re here because . . .”

  “I want to start over. And because of Miranda.”

  He almost winced. “If it wasn’t for Miranda . . .”

  “Andrew, look at me.” He did. Her eyes, so blue, were deeper than before—more alive, more sincere. This was not the woman who had lied to him and then abandoned him. Not the woman who had succumbed to deception and then deceived him in turn.

  “I would have come back anyway,” she said. “Just for you. Just to find out about that door.”

  “I don’t really know why I held it open.”

  “Because you’re a good man, Andrew Hunter. I don’t really deserve you.”

  He couldn’t argue with that.

  But his heart was starting to believe she had come back.

  And that made him happy.

  * * *

  Richard cornered April while she was back in her room, going over the journals again. “Can I buy you dinner?” he asked. “Fish and chips?”

  “That’s Nick’s favourite,” she said. “Yeah. Sure.”

  She hated the way her hands shook as they walked side by side through the cold evening air toward the pub down on the wharf. Hated the way she felt herself shrinking from the tall black man at her side, like he was—someone else.

  Like he was her father.

  Like she was desperately hoping the conversation tonight would go well so that she wouldn’t have to face the consequences of someone else’s angry mood and uninhibited tendency to react in rage.

  But that wasn’t Richard. That had never been Richard.

  Telling herself that, over and over, didn’t stop her hands from shaking.

  They were seated in a rustic booth in the corner of the pub, under dim lighting, and the waiter brought them drinks while they took off their gloves and hats and settled into the warmth without talking. April’s eyes stayed on the table surface, polished wood, until Richard cleared his throat and she dared look up at him.

  His brown eyes were kind.

  “I felt all that fear on the way here, you know,” he said. “No use in pretending your hands are just shaking because you’re cold.”

  “I’m sorry.” She stuffed her hands in her lap. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “I do. I asked you to invade your most private experiences and bring them out publicly for all of us, and I didn’t check with you first. It was wrong. I’m sorry. If you felt threatened, that’s my fault.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Richard, I know you wouldn’t hurt me. I feel like a kid again, and I thought . . . I thought I was past all that.”

  “Sometimes wounds are layered. You don’t have to apologize if something I did peeled back a layer and exposed more hurt.”

  “Thank you.” She took a deep breath and tried to settle herself. “It’s not just that, though. I don’t know why I can’t tell you what happened. I love the Oneness. I’ve spent most of my life sharing everything. So why do I feel like I would lose something if I tried to put what happened into words?”

  Richard frowned, deep in thought. “Maybe . . . maybe because we’re thinking about it wrong.”

  “Come again?”

  “You told us what happened. Bertoller pushed things too far, you asked the Spirit to come, and a fire broke out and devoured everything except you and Reese, and David because Reese was shielding him. A fire that was the Spirit.”

  “Yes,” said April. “But that doesn’t really begin to describe it. You know that; that’s why you keep asking and Nick steals my sketchbooks.”

  Richard chuckled. “He does, huh? I’ll have to talk to him about that.”

  “Ask him about stealing orange juice cans out of the freezer, too. And eating them.”

  “Will do. In your sketchbooks . . . you’ve been sketching the fire?”

  “Yes. Trying to see it again.”

  Richard nodded. April felt the last of her tension release, and she was in the presence, not of a threat, but of an old friend—one she loved and trusted. For an instant, it was like becoming One all over again.

  “So,” Richard continued, “you told us what happened, and yet we all feel like a piece is missing, and you can’t express it. I think I might know why. Tell me something, April. The fire that started in that cemetery—did it go out?”

  April started to say “Of course it did,” but the words died on her tongue.

  “No,” she said. “No, it didn’t. It’s still burning.”

  “Inside you.”

  “Yes.”

  The word came out as a whisper.

  “That’s why you can’t talk about it,” Richard said. “Because one of two things might happen: it might get out of control again, or you might extinguish it.”

  He was right.

  “How do you know that?” she asked. “You’re right—but why do you know what’s going on inside me better than I do?”

  “I think that’s giving me too much credit. I just figured out how to put it into words. I can feel some of what you’re feeling, you know.” He winced. “I’ll never forget the look on your face this afternoon.”

  “I’m sorry, Richard. You didn’t deserve it.”

  “I did, though. And I needed it. It was a warning. I’m going to do my best to pay attention.”

  “What’s going on, Richard? With me? Can you tell me that?”

  She searched his face in the dim light, more grateful than she could say for his presence and his friendship and his wisdom. Even if he couldn’t really help her now.

  “You’re a great saint,” he said. “The Spirit showed me that when we lost you the first time. There’s something in your paintings, and just in you—you’re important, April. I think the fire has something to do with that.”

  “But I don’t understand. I’m just me.”

  A memory came to her: the woman from the cloud who had visited her in the cave, who had been starved to death by the enemy six hundred years earlier because she too was a great saint. Teresa. She had said, “Not one of us knows who we are.”

  “And I don’t like it,” she went on. “Everybody wants to be somebody. But being somebody, and not knowing who? And being totally out of control? Not fun.”

  “Maybe the problem is that we are all somebody, and we need to know who we are, but we’re not really prepared to handle that information.”

  She smiled. “That doesn’t help at all.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “And what about you? You and your voice of authority. All that craziness you did during the battle. I think that all makes you a great saint too.”

  “Maybe,” Richard confessed. “I don’t really know.”

  “I wonder if we ever get to find out. Now that the battle’s over.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “What do you mean by that?”

  “The fight changed all of us. Now we’re back at peace.
Does that mean we just go on living our quiet little lives and never finding out any more of what’s really in us?”

  “I doubt it,” Richard said, pointing at her. “Because the fire is still burning in you. And fires have a way of growing.”

  She shifted on the hard wooden bench. “That is not a comfortable thought, Richard.”

  “Sorry, but I didn’t say it to make you comfortable.”

  She sat back, letting memory play, while Richard gave their order to a waiter she was too distracted to really see or hear. “You don’t think it would just break out again?” she asked abruptly.

  “The fire?”

  “Yes.”

  He asked the question slowly. “You don’t have to answer this . . . keep anything secret that you need to. But in the cemetery: did it begin in you?”

  “Yes,” she said, forcing her voice to be stronger than a whisper and not shake. It seemed important to be brave about this, bold.

  She wasn’t sure she’d realized it up until this moment, but yes. The fire had started burning in her, and then out through her, and then all of the destruction had come.

  Richard’s eyes were troubled. “Then if it’s still burning, it might break out again. Yes.”

  “It killed people, Richard.”

  “Arguably only people whose time had come to die.”

  Her breathing was starting to come faster. “That doesn’t make me feel better.” She stood suddenly. “I think I need air.”

  He let her go, and she stood outside the pub, listening to the creak of the docks and the beat of waves, looking up at the moon in the cold air. She could see her breath, but it felt good—good to be out here, good to be cooling off. Her breath was still coming too fast, but the longer she stood there, gazing out at the moonlit water and the tall trees of masts clustered in the harbour, the calmer she felt.

  What was it? The fire?

  You know, a voice said.

  But she ignored it.

  Out here, in the cold, she had no choice but to ignore it.

  The food would be getting cold, and Richard was probably polite enough to wait for her, so she talked herself into going back inside and rejoining him.

  She felt all right now.

  Everything was under control.