it open. Inside, plastic cups shaped like thimbles nestled in red velvet lining. He took out the cups along with a canister of wine and a thin tube packed with crackers. “Would you like to join us?” he asked Clara.
“No,” she said, crossing her arms.
The pastor filled the small cups with wine, his hands shaking so that some spilled on the nightstand. She saw that he was preparing her father to cross over, to go somewhere she couldn’t follow. It shouldn’t have mattered, the stale wafers, the bitter wine, but when the pastor said, “This is my body, broken for you,” snapping the wafer in half and placing it on her father’s tongue, the old man exhaled lightly, his eyelashes fluttering. And when he said, “This is my blood, spilled for you,” and tipped the cup past her father’s cracking lips, he shut his eyes and his breathing deepened, as though the wine were spreading inside him, cleansing impurities. Clara looked away, her eyes full.
The young pastor visited twice a week, and Clara found herself timing her day so that she would be home when he arrived. Sometimes, when her father was sleeping, they went into the kitchen and talked.
“The closest I’ve come to religion is reading Rilke,” she told him one afternoon. “ ‘For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror,’ ” she recited from memory.
“ ‘Which we still are just able to endure,’ ” he continued, surprising her, “ ‘and we are so awed because it serenely disdains / to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.’ ”
Clara cupped her face in her hands, leaned toward him. “You know the Duino Elegies?”
“I read them in the original German the year I studied abroad. I adore Rilke.” He was quiet for a moment, considering. “Rilke says that we live out our lives in the horizontal.” He drew his hand slowly along the surface of the table, “but every now and then, even in an ordinary life, we touch the vertical.” He lifted his hands from the table, spread them. “We get some glimpse of heaven. Faith is like that. Most of the time, I don’t sense God. I stumble through my days as blind as the next person, but every now and then I touch the vertical.”
Somewhere during this recitation, Clara had touched his hand unconsciously after he lowered it to the table, and she held on. They had both blushed when they realized, and even then she hadn’t let go.
AFTER THEY RETURNED FROM the hospital, Clara lay in bed waiting for the baby to rise as a fish does from the depths. Why was she so sure this child was a boy? The boys cause the most trouble, the widows told her. Logan sighed in his sleep beside her, tired out from the drive, but Clara was stirred up. Gusts of wind and rain shook and rattled the house. The north window flexed inward like a membrane, and outside the bare maples scraped one another.
Mother. Clara’s first ghost, her childhood imaginary companion. In the wind she heard her mother trying to get home through the snow. The snow was coming, a winter out of time. Clara’s eyes grew heavy, lulled by the sound of falling water. She shut them for a moment, but somewhere distantly a door banging open and shut woke her. The wind moaned long and low, and it was so cold in the room she wanted only to nestle under the covers, spooned against her husband. Her left hand hurt, the missing fingers stretching out in the dark, regrowing from the nubs. The pure pain of it popped her eyes open.
She was here in the room, having arrived with the storm. Clara heard her before she saw her, the sound of dripping, a board groaning. She had plugged a night-light into the wall so she wouldn’t have to stumble around if she needed to use the bathroom, but the bulb crackled and went out. In the new darkness, Clara sensed her near the bed, a deepening of shadow. Logan turned over in his sleep, muttering incoherently. The floorboards creaked again, a sound like a sigh. Clara pushed up against the headboard, shut her eyes to banish her. The nerves in her hurt hand bristled.
“I’m sorry, Mother. You’ve been out there the whole time, and now you have a new companion in the suicide corner, don’t you? Did he wake you up from your sleep? I heard about you, Mother. I know your story now.