A Girl Named Anna, page 23
“I arrived the next afternoon, dressed in my robe, like he said. I had only been in his office a couple of times before. I remember it was very cool, and the smell of new leather and clean carpets was so strong it gave me a headache as soon as I entered. He was sitting at his desk, and when the door was shut behind me, he bid me to take a seat, not to be scared. Father Paul had a way of telling you something that made you feel both calm and terrified at once.” Mamma’s voice has dropped so low I have to strain to hear it. My stomach spins.
“He told me...” Her words catch in her throat, as if each one is stuck in mud. “He told me that I had been brought to him, to the church, for a purpose.” She wets her lips. “That my purity and commitment demonstrated the role I was destined for, and that the Lord had chosen me to be a vessel for the church’s mission.” A vessel. The word hangs heavy in the air, cumbersome and odd. “He...he came around the desk.” She hesitates, rubs the heels of her hands on her knees, and I know she’s reliving it entirely. “He pressed the palms of his hands into my shoulders—I can still remember the feel of them, pinching my neck, the smell of his aftershave, the sweet cloves on his breath—and he asked me if I knew what he meant.” Mamma looks mortified, her gaze fixed on a floorboard in front of her. I could tell her to stop, tell her not to say any more, that I know what she’s trying to say. My mind skips forward, but I wrench it back. I need to let her carry on. I need to hear it from her.
“He told me...” She swallows. I hear the gulp of saliva, thick in her throat. “He told me that it was my duty to bring new life into the church.” Each word seems as though it might make her physically sick. She shakes her head. “I still didn’t understand. Mason and I had been married barely a week, and we hadn’t...we hadn’t yet had...the relations of a man and wife.”
Despite the strangeness of this situation, a blush crawls over her cheeks, and I know my own are blushing too. She shields her face from me. How strange; how completely out of body, to be hearing this from her now, when even talk of kissing would have been prohibited between us before. I want to block my ears, to beg her to stop. It feels cruel to let her carry on. But she presses her hands to her cheeks, driven to let the full revulsion of the scene play out.
“Father Paul’s hand dipped between my legs, and when I faced him, he had this look in his eyes, glazed and wide, and I knew. It was a look I’d seen on the pigs in the yard, in my daddy’s eyes after a day of drinking, when he’d come home hard and mean, and look at me oddly, before roaring for me to go to my room, where I’d lock the door and hide.”
“Mamma, no,” I say, desperate to offer her the sanctity to end this here. But something has been unleashed in her, and she can’t, or won’t, stop.
“When it was over, I couldn’t help but cry.” Her voice grows hoarse, and I see a tear trickle down her cheek, an echo of the memory. “Father Paul told me I should be overjoyed that I had been singled out for such a position, to bear the children of the Lord’s chosen representative on Earth. But secretly I didn’t feel so certain. Surely, surely the thing we had done should be only between a husband and wife. Wasn’t this a sin?” Her hands wrap around her stomach, closing in on herself. “He bid me come to him, almost every day, to repeat what we had done. But then he went away, to oversee the building of a new church in Mexico. He would often do that—travel to check in on his various chapters, staying perhaps a month here or there to oversee the launch of a new one. He had properties all over the world where he stayed in luxury at the church’s expense. But this time he was gone almost a year, and while he was away, I found myself expecting.”
I try to hear her words, but I am thrown into confusion.
A child? For the first time, a glimmer of hope surfaces.
“I didn’t know what I was supposed to do,” she says. “Mason was my husband. I had to honor that bond. Wasn’t it the will of The Lilies ‘to grow our family like the flowers of the field’? And Father Paul had left no instructions forbidding Mason the relations a man expects of his wife.
“She was a lovely baby—everyone said so. I would have sworn that she was a gift from God.” Somehow, despite the horror that has gone before, a small smile plays on her lips—sunshine peeking through clouds. But as quickly as it appears, it dissipates. “Except for Father Paul. When he finally returned from Mexico, he could barely even look at her. There was no way she could have been his, and he knew it. He declared an edict, forbidding husbands and wives to have relations, saying it was the will of the Lord for us to remain pure in deed, as well as word. Only that edict didn’t apply to his relationship with me. He began again, right where he left off. I tried, I prayed so hard that I could bear his child—in the hope that it would finally release me from my duties to him—and a little over two years later, I finally found I was expecting again.”
Now I feel as if I’m seeing double. The twists of the story seem to confuse rather than clarify. What happened to these phantom children—and is one of them me?
“This pregnancy was different—I knew straightaway, even from only having had the one. Something just felt off. I couldn’t explain it. And then one night, when I must have been about six months along, I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night with terrible pains in my stomach, and when I looked down there was blood everywhere. And I knew. I knew.” The pain in her voice is so raw I can feel it.
“Oh, Mamma...”
“I felt sure this was a sign from God, telling me what I was doing wasn’t right. Mason knew that the child was Father Paul’s, but he had been brought up in The Lilies. He believed Father Paul had a direct relationship with the Lord, and whatever he decreed was received from Him. And besides, even if he didn’t agree with it, what could he do? Father Paul’s word was absolute. But, for the first time since I joined, I was beginning to lose faith.
“It was nearly Easter, the church’s most important festival, because the Easter lily itself is a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. There was a ceremony held at midnight—the whole church was lit by candlelight, and the congregation processed through it, each with a lily in their hands, placing the flowers in the river and watching them float away, before wading into the water to be cleansed. I used to think it was beautiful,” she snorts. “But that year, Mason and I fought. I had made up my mind. I wanted to leave, to get out of the church and start a new life, just the three of us. My body and my soul were broken, but I thought, perhaps, this was a chance to make everything right. I refused to go to the ceremony, told him to take the baby and go on his own.” For a moment she is silent, lost in the memory of that night. When she speaks again, it’s as if her insides have been pulled out. Her voice is ragged, hollow. “I would give anything now, to be able to take that back.”
A bad, bad feeling worms its way inside me, and I steel myself against what is coming next. “Father Paul came to tell me himself,” she says. “I was waiting up, but I must have fallen asleep on the couch. I woke up to the sound of him banging on the door. They’d been in a crash, coming back from the ceremony. The car hit directly into the driver’s side. They had been trying to overtake him, and smashed right into him on a blind corner. Mason had been killed. But she was alive.”
Like the pulling back of a curtain to let in the first glimmer of dawn, I watch the tip of her head rising. Mamma’s body stiffens, and as she turns her gaze directly to me.
“Anna was alive.”
ROSIE
It’s barely dark when I get home from Chesterfield. I open the front door and the house comes alive. Dad has Madama Butterfly on at full volume, singing along as he maneuvers the vacuum cleaner through the living room. I catch sight of Rob’s feet, sticking over the arm of the sofa; his thumbs going tap, tap, tap on his cell phone. Mum’s in the kitchen; the clatter of pans.
At dinner she rubs my arm. “You look tired, sweetheart. Is everything okay?”
I think of burying my head in her chest, letting her stroke my hair, like she used to when I was little. The moment is here—I could snatch hold of it, tell her everything. And then I see her pull at a streak of gray in her hair, tuck it behind her ear. Was it there a few weeks ago? What will telling her do? Cause more arguments. More upset. She’ll ban me from doing anything further; or worse, dismiss the whole thing completely. Leave it to the professionals, Rosie, she’ll say. We’ll never know.
And so I jerk my shoulders, up, down. “Just exam stress.” I force a tight smile, take a mouthful of peas. “Not long to go.”
Later, ignoring the drone of the TV and Dad shouting out the answers to a quiz show, I play back Michael’s story, pulling it apart just as I did with Keira on the train home. If I can get to The Lilies, I feel sure I can follow the trail to Emily. Keira told me not to do anything stupid before we parted ways at the station. But she knows exactly what I’m planning. And she knows my mind is made up.
* * *
In the morning, I make a show of getting ready for school, threading my backpack over my shoulder before Mum can realize it’s lighter than usual. I duck into the nearest coffee shop, exchange my uniform for jeans and a sweater and stuff it into my bag. The train to Slough is barely half an hour. I have netball first thing, then a free period, then break. I’ll be there and back before anyone realizes I’m gone.
When the train pulls up at the station, I’m struck by the urbanness of it all. From the way Michael described it, I imagined The Lilies only existing in some sort of rustic farmland, far away from people and places; not nipping to the supermarket for their weekly shop. I’m surprised further when I arrive at the address I found on their website and discover that The Lilies’ UK headquarters are nestled within a fairly commonplace stretch of residential roads.
But all that is stripped away when I see the building itself. It is starkly white—even on a beige day like today it gleams—and is striking in its simplicity, lacking the ornate windows and spires of a typical English church. It can’t have been built more than fifteen, twenty years ago. Fifteen years ago: after Emily?
What do the neighbors think, with it plonked there in the middle of them? Or perhaps, I realize with a chill, perhaps they’re all part of it. I whip around, half expecting to see someone in a white robe walking out of their front door.
I scan the frontage for something to confirm that I’m in the right place—a name or a banner—and can’t avoid a tiny prickle of hope that I’ve got it wrong, that I can just say forget it, I didn’t find them, and give up. But as soon as I walk up to the high arched door, I see it. Carved into the wood, its leaves curling down the center of the door, is a lily.
I press my hand to it, feeling the grooves of the pattern rise and fall beneath my fingers, willing the lily to give away its secrets. The wood is cold to the touch, tells me nothing.
Standing on the precipice, I am seized by a sense of vertigo. A wind has picked up, threading through the trees that line the pavement and dampening my cheeks with a wet drizzle. Until now I’ve never really thought about what I’d say, what I’d do, once I got to this point. I’ve been propelled only by the furious need to get here. Now, all Mum’s warnings whirl around me like phantoms in a nightmare: all the crazies, all the dangerous people she’s been worried about me getting mixed up with; surely, surely this is exactly what she means?
No. I shake my head, and the thought away with it. I can’t turn back now. I put my ear to the door, listening for voices inside; perhaps a service under way.
And when I hear nothing, I push it open.
Inside, it’s eerily quiet. The white walls bounce light across the room, highlighting rows and rows of empty pews. Encouraged by the emptiness, I take a tentative step forward, freezing instantly as the sound echoes into the air. I look down to find the floor is made entirely of white marble, shining in its spotlessness. Working each footstep slowly from toe to heel, I make my way across the room, breathing in the tart chemical smell of cleaning fluids. Like a hospital waiting room. Or a morgue.
With every step I feel my pulse quicken, my vulnerability increasing the farther I get from the door.
In many ways, it’s just like the churches I remember from our infrequent visits as kids: the occasional wedding, the once-in-a-blue-moon trip to a carol concert. There’s an altar at the front. And an upright piano to the side of it, painted white. And casting a dappled shadow over the room is a huge stained-glass window, each jewel-toned panel polished crystal clear. When I look closer, I see it’s a depiction of Christ on the cross, a spurt of lilies wrapped around his ankles and trailing up the cross. They’re clearly not ones for subtlety.
Feeling bold, I move faster, brushing my fingers against the tops of the pews as I try to think of how I could possibly extract the answer I am looking for. My foot slips on the polished floor, and I find myself clasping the air, my hand jerking in front of me to get some purchase. It lands with a clash on the piano keys, a cacophony of notes ripping through the silence, and I freeze in horror as I wait for an army of Lilies to storm in.
The notes evaporate into the ether. No one comes.
I spy a door off to the side and slip through it, finding myself in a window-lined corridor. Outside is garden, bare but for a couple of trees, and to the left of that a small graveyard with a cluster of tombstones like a toddler’s gap-toothed smile. I wonder with a gray dread if it’s possible one of those belongs to Emily. Beyond, right to the back of the garden, I can tell there’s some sort of stream, and it makes me think of the ceremonies Michael talked of, their strange “purification” rituals. And then with a start I realize there are people in it.
I quickly duck my head down below the window ledge, and creep backward away from it in a crab-like crouch. My shoulders butt up against what I think is a wall, only I realize too late it’s not a wall at all, but a door left ajar, and I find myself falling, back first, straight through it. I clamp a fist against my mouth to stop myself crying out.
When I pull myself to my feet, I find I’m in a study. Unlike the rest of the church, here it’s not white at all, but more like an old gentlemen’s club. The bovine reek of expensive leather hangs in the air, from the dark brown sofa in the corner and the swivel chair pushed against the oversize hardwood desk. The walls are lined from floor to ceiling in wood paneling, hung with black-and-white photographs. Photographs, I see as I step toward them, of The Lilies.
At first, I can’t tell what the distinction between them is. Each one shows a group of people, huddled together with the briefest of smiles on their faces. They’re all wearing the same thing: loose-fitting white robes that hang to their bare feet, their arms clasped in front of them just like we’re told to do in school pictures. I scan their faces eagerly, convinced I’m going to spot Emily among them, but there are barely any children, and none of them are my sister.
In the center of all of them is the same man, his smile the brightest and biggest of all. Unlike the others, he’s not wearing a robe but a suit, and in his hands, he clasps a copy of the Bible, a cross etched on its cover. This must be Father Paul. I can make out his ponytail, just like Michael described. I wonder how many secrets that satisfied smile is hiding.
In one of the photographs, I follow the line of his feet down to the center of the frame, where I make out, printed in even sans serif type, the name of a city, and a date. Jerusalem, 1991. Searching, I discover all of them have a similar stamp, the locations and years changing with the faces in each one: Oaxaca, 1995; San Francisco, 1988; Rome, 2009. They must be the locations of The Lilies’ churches. I scan the room, trying to find the one labeled “Georgia.” There it is, deep in the right-hand corner: Georgia, 1999. The year before Emily was born. I press a finger to the glass, marking each face, trying to search out the woman from Michael’s photo. But it’s too hard: both Michael’s printout and this photo are too obscure. Besides, in their robes they all look alike.
Frustrated, I turn away and focus instead on what the rest of the room may hold. There’s a bookcase, filled mainly with religious texts and various copies of the Bible, along with tracts that have obviously been plucked from some sort of “top books to look educated” list: volumes of Shakespeare, Dickens, Keats. None of them revealing anything that could tell me about Emily. A filing cabinet holds various bills and receipts: lighting, heating, none of them untoward.
Which only leaves the desk. Blood pumps in my ears as I step toward it. I think of the people outside. I don’t know how long their ceremonies last: at any moment they could stop, find me here. Every second I hesitate brings me closer to being discovered.
The surface itself is meticulously clear, as I would expect from the little I know about The Lilies’ scrupulous manner. One of those fancy pens that comes in a silver holder sits at an exact angle. Next to it, a brass paperweight the shape of an egg bears the engraving, Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see the Lord. The second I touch it, I leave the filmy depression of my thumbprint on it, and instantly regret it. There’s a bone-handled letter opener, out of its sheath, and I think about pocketing it, just in case, but then my eyes drift to the drawers that run down both sides of the desk. I tug at the first, then the next, then the next, my movements getting sharper and more frantic as I realize with a quickening heart that they’re all locked.
I scan the room, looking for somewhere a key could be hiding, but it’s all so sparsely neat I can’t begin to think. I run my fingers along the books, hoping, in the wildness of my imagination, that one will turn out to be a hiding place. I feel along the inside of the filing cabinet, hoping to find a groove I’ve missed, pull back the pictures, searching for a key taped to the back, and I am just about to give up when I feel it: an unmistakable bump. Carefully, so as not to leave a mark, I peel the picture from the wall.
Taped to the back, a piece of yellowing Sellotape on each corner, is a folded piece of paper. I look back again at the photograph and my breath shortens: it’s the one from Georgia. Again, I scour the faces of the women in the photograph, trying to seek out my woman in navy. There’s one next to him, next to Father Paul, her head slightly bowed as if trying to avoid the camera. It could be her, but then again, how would I know for sure?
