was his first pastoral assignment, his first big test. His congregation had been stricken, and he hadn’t found the words he needed to offer succor, and she wasn’t helping him any.
They had been married less than a year when Clara discovered her pregnancy. And now they were here, serving a congregation way out on the southwestern Minnesota prairies, strangers to the small town of Lone Mountain and strangers to each other. Lone Mountain: the name of the place like a pebble dropped into a well somewhere inside Clara, some deep pool she couldn’t see yet, where ripples were spreading. But Logan had told her he didn’t want children. Hadn’t he made himself clear? She had forgotten a pill or maybe two; she was always forgetting things.
THEIR TALK AT DINNER at first only circled the murder and suicide, like blackbirds blown hither on a windy day, unable to find rest. Over a beef roast she’d cooked so dry it stuck to the roofs of their mouths, they discussed funeral arrangements, the way the church would fill because Sheriff Will Gunderson had been deeply feared and respected. Both the victim and the killer were members of Logan’s church. Would Seth’s father want his boy’s funeral to be held the day after, and if so, would anyone come? They didn’t talk about how close Clara had come to being murdered. Did he daydream about my death? she wondered. Would it have made his life simpler?
Eventually the quiet between them became oppressive, and her throat thickened. When she looked over at Logan, his face was blurry.
“Why are you crying?” he said.
“Me?” She touched her face, surprised to find tears there. “I don’t really know,” she said softly, and then it became more difficult to breathe. In her second trimester sudden tempers bloomed up in her like cumuli over open plains. Once the tears started, she couldn’t stop them, and they built and built until she bent over there at the table with her face in her hands, weeping.
Logan came around the table and leaned over her chair. He cupped his hands over the fullness of her belly, pressed his chin to the top of her forehead. How she had longed for him to hold her like this. Underneath the bitterness of his sweat she smelled a hint of his true grassy scent, at once faint and sweet. An earthy smell that made her feel safe from the moment she met him. “Don’t be sad,” he said. “There isn’t anyone who can hurt you. Not anymore. Isn’t any reason to be frightened.”
She shook her head. She interlaced her fingers with his and drank down her tears. He didn’t know. He didn’t know how a monster story was supposed to work.
Logan patted her hair and gathered up their dishes to take to the sink, leaving Clara alone at the table. The conversation was over.
Why do people do the things they do? Of course, the first thing Clara did after Logan climbed the stairs for bed was let Soren back inside. She would not leave something to suffer.
LATE THAT NIGHT CLARA woke to an eerie calling. Only two days after Seth shot himself, she heard his ghost crying out under the stairwell and the sound of it shook her to the core.
“Help me,” cried a child’s voice, a whispery echo in the hollow drum of so much space, a sound that plucked her from sleep with little icy fingers along her neck and spine. Over and over those two words climbed the stairs and glided under the door to find her in the bed. And it was not his voice exactly she thought she was hearing, not the rasp of a boy nearing manhood, but the child inside him, still recoiling from what he had done. This was the voice of a murderer’s ghost, some otherworldly summons. Help me.
No good comes from hearing such a thing when you live in an old stone parsonage at the edge of town. Clara reached over and jabbed Logan in the kidneys, but he only grumbled in his sleep and turned over. In the newness of her marriage it shocked her how alone she felt most nights with another human being lying so close beside her. The view out her window showed a steep hill freckled with rimed tombstones the color of polished bone under the moon.
She burrowed into her sheets, pretending she wasn’t hearing anything at all. Six months pregnant, she was surprised how well her body took to it.