Saint Agnes
I
Lou woke at three because the cat was standing on her chest.
It did this most nights. Usually she pushed it off and went back to sleep. Tonight she lay with its weight on her sternum and its tail across her face and found that she was already awake. She had been awake for some time. She had been lying in the dark looking at the ceiling with her eyes open. She didn't know how long. Long enough for the cat to decide it was morning.
She had seen it again. Not in a dream. She hadn't slept enough to dream. It came whenever she closed her eyes, and sometimes when she didn't: a small pale light, very far down, in the eyes of a woman sitting in her passenger seat. Behind the woman, folded in the dark where the back of the van should have been, something with too many limbs, resting.
She pushed the cat off and sat up.
In the kitchen she drank a glass of water standing at the sink with the light off and looked out at the car park behind the building. The van was down there under the streetlight with frost on its windscreen. There was a paper bag folded small in the cup holder and crumbs on the passenger seat. She had swept them off Morgana's coat at a red light, without thinking, the way you'd do it for anyone.
You still owe me for Phoenix.
She'd said that. Out loud. To a demon.
Plus interest.
Lou put the glass down very carefully in the sink.
She stood there for a while. Then she went to the drawer by the stove where she kept the takeaway menus and the batteries and the keys to nothing, and dug down to the bottom of it, and found the little prayer card her mother had pressed into her hand at her confirmation thirty-four years ago. It had a picture of the Virgin on one side and the baptismal promises printed on the other, in English and in Tagalog. The corners had gone soft as cloth.
She read them out in the dark kitchen. All of them, both languages, every I do said out loud, the renunciations first. Her voice sounded very strange in the small room at three in the morning. The cat sat on the counter and watched her with its tail around its feet.
When she had finished she felt a little better and very stupid. She put the card in the pocket of her pyjama top instead of back in the drawer.
She called her mother at ten, because it was Sunday and she always called her mother at ten on a Sunday, and because if she didn't her mother would call her at ten past and ask what was wrong.
Her mother asked what was wrong anyway.
"Nothing, Ma. Didn't sleep."
"Why didn't you sleep?"
"I was out late."
"Out where?" She could hear her mother settling into the chair by the window, the one she'd sat in for every phone call since Lou's father died. "With who? You don't go out."
"With a friend." Lou rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. She had slept two hours. Her mouth was doing things without asking her. "Morgana."
There was a pause on the line.
"The singer?"
Lou closed her eyes.
"The singer," her mother said. "My candle singer. Lourdes. You went out with my candle singer?"
"Ma."
"I tell everybody. I tell Father Arsenio. I tell the ladies after the nine o'clock. I asked for a candle, my daughter lit it at Saint Agnes, and the singer came back." Her mother was delighted. Lou could hear her smiling. "How is she? Is she taking care of herself? Is she eating?"
Lou thought of her in the van, eating bread from a paper bag like it was the first bread anybody had ever baked.
"She's eating, Ma."
"Is she good? Is she being good now? No more drugs?"
Lou opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling.
"She's good," she said.
She didn't know if it was a lie. She sat with the phone against her ear while her mother talked about the nine o'clock Mass and the new priest's homilies and her neighbour's grandson, and tried to work out whether it had been one. She couldn't. She thought that perhaps that was worse.
"Tell her I pray for her," her mother said at the end. "Every night. Tell her."
"I'll tell her."
That night she drove to Saint Agnes at two in the morning.
The main church was locked at that hour. The side chapel wasn't. It never had been, as long as Lou could remember: a small stone room off the north aisle with its own door onto the side street and a light that never went out. Her mother had brought her here as a child on the first Friday of every month and made her kneel for twenty minutes in front of the gold sunburst on the altar. Lou had spent the twenty minutes counting the panes in the window. There were forty-one.
She went in. It was warm and smelled of wax. The gold sunburst stood on the altar under its small white light, and nobody else was there.
She sat in the back pew with her coat on and her hands in her pockets, and the prayer card was in one of them, and she didn't know what to do.
She had come to pray. She had thought, driving over, that she would sit down and it would come back to her: the words, the posture, the feeling of being heard that she had walked away from fifteen years ago and never really missed. She sat there. Nothing came. She looked at the gold sunburst. She tried to start the prayer her mother had taught her first, the one to the Mother, and got three words in and stopped, because she had said it on Saturday, fast and silent, in the van, at the thing in her passenger seat, and her mouth didn't want it anymore.
What came instead was a verse.
She hadn't thought of it in thirty-five years. Sister Imelda had made them learn it in the sixth grade, and copy it out ten times, and Lou had hated it because she hadn't understood it. She understood it now. It came up out of her like something surfacing from deep water.
And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.
She sat with it. It explained everything. It explained the apology on the couch, and the way the woman had said thank you about the candle, and the bread. It explained why Lou had liked her. That was exactly the point of the verse. That was what it was for.
She thought about the thing in the van, the light in its eyes.
She thought about the woman's face afterwards, when she'd asked are you going to hurt me and the woman had said not on purpose. It was the worst answer anyone had ever given her. Lou had thought about it all day. A thing that wanted to fool her would have said no.
She looked at the gold sunburst for a long time.
Then she took out her phone and typed with her thumbs, slowly, in the warm wax-smelling dark.
She looked at it for a long time. Then she put the phone back in her pocket without sending anything.
II
The text came after twelve days.
Naru had stopped counting at nine and started again at ten. For the first week she checked her phone the way she'd once checked the window for the sun. Then she made herself stop, and then she checked it anyway. She couldn't feel Lou. The city was too big, and Lou was a single flicker somewhere in it, and the want of six million other people lay over her like snow. Every morning Calvin's dawn came to her, small and warm, and every morning there was nothing else. She knew that was how it should be. Lou had never been hers to feel from a distance. It didn't help.
She didn't call. She thought about going to the van. She thought about it more than once, and stood at the door with her coat on, and took it off again. It wasn't hers to decide. She had shown Lou what she was, and now Lou would decide what that meant, and Naru would sit in the penthouse with the blinds up and wait for it, however it came.
On the Monday she asked Theo why the money for Phoenix still hadn't gone out. It had been sitting with her accountant for four weeks, waiting for someone to sign off on an old invoice. Theo made one call, and it went out that afternoon.
When it came it was an address and a time.
Saint Agnes. Side chapel, door on Kell St. Thursday 1am.
She read it in the kitchen standing at the island. She read it twice. She knew what it was.
She didn't know what would happen to her.
There were stories about this, older than the churches. They were in the parts of her that had been crushed down to almost nothing, but some of them were still there, the way bones are still there after the flesh has gone. Holy ground. Places where faith had soaked into the stone for long enough that something like her shouldn't be able to cross the threshold. She didn't know whether they were true. She didn't know what was true about herself anymore, in this body, in this world. She had never tried.
She typed ok and sent it before she could do anything else.
III
Lou was on the steps.
It was very cold, the kind of December cold that sits in the stone and comes up through your shoes. Lou stood on the top step under the light over the side door with her hands deep in the pockets of her coat and her breath going up white in front of her. She didn't come down. She watched Naru get out of the taxi and cross the street, and her face didn't move at all.
Naru stopped at the foot of the steps.
"You know what this is," Lou said.
"Yes."
"You can say no."
"I know."
Lou stood aside from the door. She didn't open it. She stood beside it with her hands in her pockets, so that she could see the threshold.
Naru climbed the steps.
She could feel Lou's want, close now, every part of it pulled tight as a wire. Naru had felt fear in people before, and she knew it was there, but this was something past fear. It was the want of someone who has decided to find out and doesn't want to know. Lou wanted her to walk in. Lou wanted her not to be able to. Both at once, with the same force, so evenly matched they held each other perfectly still.
The door was heavy oak with an iron ring. Naru put her hand on the ring and pulled, and the warm air came out to meet her, wax and old stone and something sweet that might have been incense from Sunday. She looked at the threshold, a worn step of grey stone with a groove down the middle where a century of feet had gone over it.
She thought of the bottom, the light left on down there. If anything in this place was going to know what she was, it would know. If anything here could reach down into her and touch that light, it would.
She stepped over.
Nothing happened.
She stood just inside the door with the cold at her back and the warmth in front of her and waited. It didn't come. She didn't burn. Nothing pressed on her or pushed her back. She looked down at her own hands and they were her own hands, the marks on the knuckles, the fingers a little red from the cold. The deep lay under her as it always did. The light at the bottom of it was on. The thing beside it lay in the silt and did whatever it always did, and if the place had noticed it, it gave no sign.
She looked up at the altar. A gold sunburst stood on it under a small white light, and at its centre was a disc of white bread, so thin the light came through it.
She listened.
She had known for a long time that she wouldn't hear Him. She had known it the way you know a house is empty. She listened anyway, there, in the one place in this whole city where she'd have expected Him to be if He were anywhere, with the bread in its gold and the little red lamp burning beside it. She listened the way she had listened on the floor of the Marlowe, the first night, with a new body pressing on every side.
The chapel was very quiet. That was all.
Behind her the door closed. Lou had come in. She was standing on the inside of the threshold with her back against the oak and both hands out of her pockets, flat against the wood behind her, as if the door were the only solid thing in the building.
"Okay," Lou said. Her voice wasn't quite steady. "Okay."
They sat in the back pew. Lou sat at the far end of it, with an arm's length of polished wood between them, and kept her coat on.
For a long time neither of them said anything. Naru looked at the window over the altar, a tall narrow arch of small panes with the dark showing through. She counted them without meaning to. There were forty-one.
"My mother says she prays for you," Lou said. "Every night. She told me to tell you."
Naru didn't know what to say to that. She said nothing, and Lou seemed to expect it.
"I have questions," Lou said.
"I know."
"I don't know if you'll answer them."
"Some of them."
Lou nodded. She looked straight ahead at the altar, not at Naru, and when she spoke again her voice was low, the voice people use in churches without deciding to.
"Is she in Hell?"
Naru had thought about this, in the twelve days. She had thought about it more than anything else.
"Not the one I was in," she said. "That one's only for us. Nothing human goes there."
"Then where is she?"
"I don't know." Naru looked at her hands. "I think I used to know where people went. A long time ago. I don't anymore."
Lou took that in. Naru felt her take it in, and felt it settle in her somewhere, not comfortable but not the worst thing either.
"The candle," Lou said.
Naru waited.
"My mother asked for it. I lit it here. I sat right there." Lou nodded toward the rack of votives by the side altar, the little glass cups in their iron stand, most of them dark, a few still burning. "Two in the morning. An hour. And then she came back, and it wasn't her." Lou's voice did something and she stopped and waited for it to go back to normal. "Did we do that? Did we bring you?"
Naru looked at the candles.
She didn't know what had opened the crack she had come up through. She had felt it the way a drowning thing feels the first thread of current from somewhere above, and she had gone toward it with everything she had, and she had never once asked where it came from. She didn't know if it was a candle, or a man's hands on a chest counting, or nothing at all, or something she would never understand. She didn't know.
She didn't say anything.
Lou looked at her. Then she looked away, and Naru felt her decide not to ask again. It wasn't relief. It was the decision of someone putting down something too heavy to carry and leaving it on the floor where she could still see it.
"Sister Imelda made us learn a verse," Lou said after a while. "Sixth grade. Second Corinthians." She said it to the altar, flatly, the way she'd once said Phoenix on a leather couch. "Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light."
Naru looked at her.
"That's what you'd do," Lou said. "Isn't it? If you were what my mother says you are. That's exactly what you'd do. Be nice. Say sorry. Pay me for Phoenix." Her hands were in her lap now, holding each other. "Eat bread like it's a miracle. Let me like you. That's how it works. That's the whole point of the verse."
"Yes," Naru said.
Lou turned and looked at her.
"Yes," Naru said again. "That's what I'd do. That's what I've done."
She didn't remember most of it. It was in the part of her that had been crushed down to almost nothing. But she knew it the way she knew the shape of the deep, in her core, under everything. She had been kind before. She had been beautiful and kind and close enough to touch, and the people she was kind to had followed her into the water.
"You're right not to trust it," she said. "I can't tell you it's different now. I can't prove it. If I tried to prove it, that's exactly what I'd say."
Lou stared at her.
"You're not going to argue," she said.
"No."
"That's..." Lou stopped. She looked at the altar, then back. "That's the worst thing you could have said."
"I know."
"No, I mean." Lou put both hands over her face and pressed them there, and Naru heard her breathe out through her fingers. When she took them away her eyes were wet. "I mean that's the only thing you could have said that I'd have believed."
Neither of them said anything for a while.
"Is He real?" Lou asked.
She asked it very quietly. She was looking at the gold sunburst on the altar, at the thin white disc in the middle of it with the light coming through.
Naru looked at it too.
"He was," she said.
"Was?"
"I haven't heard Him." Naru turned the words over before she let them go. "Not for a very long time."
"How long?"
"Longer than there have been churches."
Lou didn't say anything. She sat with her hands holding each other in her lap and looked at the altar, and Naru felt something in her go very quiet, the way a room goes quiet when someone in it has stopped breathing for a moment. Then Lou breathed again.
"Do you hate us?"
"I did. For longer than you could imagine."
"And now?"
Naru thought about the pool, the bakery, a room full of paper, two thousand people in the dark holding their wounds up toward her.
"Both," she said.
Lou nodded slowly, as though that were something she understood.
"Who are the other two?"
"That's theirs to tell."
"Are there others? Like you?"
"Yes."
"Here?"
"Don't ask me that," Naru said.
Lou looked at her. Whatever she saw in Naru's face, she didn't ask again.
She was quiet for a long time after that. Naru waited. She felt something gathering in Lou, slowly, building from somewhere under everything else. It wasn't fear. Naru had felt enough fear to know. It felt more like embarrassment, which was so unexpected that she turned to look.
"In the van," Lou said. She was looking very hard at the altar. "I said you owed me. For Phoenix. Plus interest."
"Yes."
"Is that..." Lou's ears had gone dark red. "Did I make a. You know. With you. A deal."
Naru stared at her.
"Because I read the baptismal promises," Lou said, very fast, "out loud. In my kitchen. At three in the morning. Both languages. The cat was there."
Something came up in Naru's chest. She pressed her hand over her mouth to keep it in, because it was a church and because it was one in the morning, and it came out anyway, a sound into her palm that was half a laugh and half a sob and mostly the first. Lou turned and glared at her, ears burning, and that made it worse.
"It's not funny."
"No," Naru said through her fingers. "It's not."
"You're laughing."
"I'm sorry." She took her hand away. Her eyes were wet. "No. You didn't make a deal with me. That isn't how it works. You'd know. You'd have to say yes to something, and know what you were saying yes to." She looked at Lou. "I wouldn't do that to you without asking."
"How do I know that?"
"You don't."
Lou looked at her for a long moment. Then the corner of her mouth moved, very slightly, against her will.
"Did it help?" Naru asked. "The promises."
"I felt better."
"Good," Naru said, and meant it.
After a while Naru got up.
Lou watched her without moving. Naru walked down the side of the chapel to the rack of votives by the side altar, the little glass cups in their iron stand, most of them dark. There was a brass box beside it with a slot in the top. She found a note in her coat pocket, folded it once and pushed it into the slot, and it made almost no sound going in.
She took one of the long thin tapers from the tray, lit it from one of the few candles still burning, and held it to a fresh wick until the wick caught. The flame was small and blue at the bottom and gold at the top. It leaned a little toward her in some draught she couldn't feel, then straightened.
She didn't kneel. She didn't know any prayers. The words Lou's mother had taught Lou belonged to Lou and her mother and the woman they were addressed to, and Naru had no right to them. She stood there in front of the small light with her hands at her sides.
She thought of a girl of nineteen in a borrowed dress, dancing until four in a city where nobody knew her, taking the bus home in the blue light with her shoes in her hand. She thought of the girl on a bathroom floor ten years later, curled around herself, wanting only to have been seen as more than the thing they had all decided she was. She thought of the moment that girl had let go, softly, like a hand opening in sleep.
She had all of her. Every memory. She would carry them for as long as this body lasted, and perhaps after.
The candle burned. Naru stood and watched it, and didn't ask anyone for anything.
IV
Lou watched her light it.
She sat at the end of the back pew with her coat still on and her hands in her lap and watched the thing her mother would have called a demon stand in front of the votive rack in Saint Agnes at one in the morning. She watched it put money in the box and light a candle. She could see only its back: the dark coat, the hair down over one shoulder, the narrow shoulders. When it took the taper from the tray she saw its hand, and the small dark marks across the knuckles, and the way it cupped the flame to keep it from the draught, the way anyone would.
It had walked in. Her mother would have said it couldn't. Sister Imelda would have said it couldn't. Lou had stood by the door with her back against the oak and waited for it not to be able to, and it had stepped over the worn stone as if it were any doorstep anywhere, and stood in the warm air, and looked up at the altar. Then it had stood very still, listening, for so long that Lou had begun to understand it was listening for someone. She had watched it listen, and watched it not hear anything, and watched its face.
She didn't know what she had seen. She didn't know what was standing at the votive rack. She thought she might never know, that this might be the rest of her life now, not knowing.
She got up.
Her knees were stiff from the cold. She walked down the side of the chapel and stopped beside it in front of the rack. It didn't look at her. Its eyes were on the little flame, and its face in the candlelight was only a face, tired, a woman's, wet at the eyes.
Lou took out her purse. She found a note and pushed it through the slot in the brass box. She took a taper from the tray and lit it from the new candle, and held it to the wick in the cup beside that one, until it caught.
She didn't know who she was lighting it for. She didn't know if anyone was listening. She had come here to find out, and she had found out that she didn't know, and it seemed to her, standing there with the taper in her hand and the smell of hot wax and the forty-one dark panes over the altar, that this was perhaps the only true thing anyone had ever learned in a church.
She blew out the taper and put it back in the tray.
Then she went back to the pew and sat down. She didn't sit at the far end. She sat close enough that when the other one came back and sat down beside her, their shoulders touched through two thick winter coats.
Neither of them moved away. On the iron stand by the side altar, the two new candles burned side by side, a little apart from the rest.