Thomas found it first and brought it as if it might be contagious, both palms open, thumbs not touching the cover as though contact could be read later as blame. "Under the fourth pew," he said, not quite meeting Gabriel's eyes. "Where Mrs. Doyle kneels when her back allows. It must be someone's… notebook." Not the word he meant. A hesitation dressed as innocence. Then Thomas left, relieved to have transferred the weight to the person the town believed could hold anything without shaking.
It was the sort of object that insists on being noticed even when it is closed: dark leather worn to a low shine, the corners feathered by a hand that has practiced anxiety, a red ribbon marker slit into the gutter like a vein deciding where to end. The cover was unadorned except for the shallow impression of a thumbprint that had pressed there often enough to become geography. He set it on the sacristy table as one sets down something alive that should be sleeping. He told himself he would open it only far enough to learn an owner and return it unmarked. He told himself there would be a name on the inside cover, a practical name followed by a practical address. He told himself many things he could not make true.
His fingers disobeyed. The leather gave with the reluctant mercy of things that have kept their secrets long enough. No name. Only the tight march of handwriting on the first page—black ink that leaned forward as if intent could alter time. He meant to look away. He did not. The first line was not a line but a sentence kneeling in the middle of the whiteness without apology:
He stands at the rail with a rope inside his voice; the sea listens because it recognizes one of its own.
The breath that left him then did not return in the same order. He read again, slower, as if carefulness could change content. The page carried a date. Four months prior. Four months before the day he first saw the red coat like a wound refusing bandage. Four months before the voice through the lattice. On that date he had blessed nets and spoken to a dying woman about a gentle God. On that date, somewhere in the town, someone had written about a man at the rail with a rope inside his voice. No names. The safety of symbols. And the trap of them.
He turned a page. And another. The sentences rose as if they had been waiting for air. Some were a single line like a blood stripe: I will sit at the back where he cannot see what I ask from God. Others opened like a door and forgot to close:
The church is a throat. The confessional is a mouth that has been told it must be small. I will bring my voice to it like water to a stone. I will learn the shape of him where words pass and cannot touch.
He told himself to stop. That this was trespass. That confession requires a priest and paper requires no one, and the one is his vocation, the other is a theft. He looked anyway. The dates. That was what undid him. He watched the numbers like a man watches a storm clock: three months before, six weeks prior, ten days prior, ink that traveled ahead of light. There were words for things that had not yet taken breath at the time of writing. There was the kiss, not named, never named, but outlined in language like a body traced under a sheet; there was the red coat withheld and then granted; there was the confessional becoming less furniture and more weather; there was mercy rehearsed as if the mouth could learn it before it mattered. He felt the table tilt or perhaps his hands leaning too hard. He pressed his palm flat to steady it and found he was steadying himself.
A fragment, underlined, dated two months before the night the candle broke and the world did not:
We will stand at arm's length and discover that arms are not units of distance but of hunger. There will be a sentence neither of us can finish; it will finish us instead.
He closed the book. He opened it. A priest does not look away from what asks to be absolved. Another page, the ink darker, the pressure of the hand deeper, as if the writer had been arguing with the paper.
I will not touch him first. If he is made of oath, let the oath move. If he does not, then I have prayed to a shadow and must teach myself again to like the dark.
Did she plan this? The question arrived without punctuation, then again, with it, angrier: Did she plan this? He did not like the word plan. It made every breath into a blueprint. It made his failures into architecture and her waiting into a calculation measured in pews and candles. He turned another page to escape the word and fell into one he liked less.
Fire beneath the cross. Not as a metaphor. As heat. The booth will breathe like a living thing that must be fed. I will starve until the last possible second. I will name hunger holy because holiness and hunger use the same alphabet.
The date loomed on the top right corner in a hand unwilling to be ashamed. The date was before. Weeks before. He sat down because standing began to seem like arrogance. The chair complained softly; wood knows when it has been asked to hold more than a body. He ran a thumb along the red ribbon and found that it fit exactly into the notch left by years of use. A ribbon does not lie. He pictured her closing the book each night with precise care, the red line tucked where the future had already been written. He saw himself inside her pages like a figure cut from an old map and glued to a country that did not match its coast. He thought of the first verse he had loved in seminary—In the beginning was the Word—and felt for the first time what it might mean to be on the wrong side of it: not speaker, not preacher, not even listener. Object. Word-made-flesh in someone else's grammar.
The pages began to divide themselves into two kinds: those that wanted him, and those that warned him. He could not tell which he preferred. On one: He speaks of mercy as if it costs him blood. I want to pay the debt he will not admit to. On another: If I destroy him, let it be without spectacle. I have been destroyed by less. Interleaved among them, sudden precise images that refused to source themselves: a gull's bone, the taste of iron after lightning, a thumb-shaped ache at the base of a throat. He found himself searching the script for his own habits and found them. The touch at the rail. The way he disguised trembling as ritual. The habit of leaving the west hinge unoiled to hear who enters. The book had been paying attention with an intimacy that outpaced God.
He carried it to the window because rooms do not change light, and he needed light changed. Outside, the courtyard wore afternoon like an apology; rain set a silver skin on the stone. He pressed the book to the sill, the damp cold against his fingers like a sacrament for which he had not dressed. The next page had waited to wound.
Red is not my favorite color, she had written a month before he had seen her first. It is the color that will speak for me when my mouth is tired. He will follow it the way the sea follows the moon: not freely, not against his will, or something else. The in-between word men do not like because it robs them of heroism.
He closed the book. He kept it closed. He held it like a child holding a bird—firm enough to prevent the panic from crashing into glass, kind enough to keep the heart inside from breaking itself against the palm. In the next room the clock spoke softly, then harder, then with the authority of a chime that has signed treaties with Sunday. He thought: she left it here. He thought: she dropped it. He thought: she meant for me to find it. Each explanation wore his fear at a different angle. Each explanation implicated him in a way the law had no blessing for.
He returned to the sacristy table and set the notebook atop the folded purificators, the black leather obscene against the starched white like a bruise thinking about blooming. He told himself he would not read another line. He read another line. He told himself a priest may violate privacy to save a soul. He told himself he did not know whose soul was in question and that perhaps privacy had violated them first.
He found the entry that made his throat sting—not because it was cruel, but because it had understood him beyond his ability to negotiate: He wants to be good more than he wants to be true. He will want me to help him choose goodness. I am tired of being chosen for other people's safety. The date was the week before he had asked her not to come again. The week before she had said no with a gentleness that humiliated his hard words.
He remembered the night of rain when the church learned of the new weather. He remembered the confession line that dared to confess curiosity. He watched his hands in memory, shaking as they lifted the chalice. He had called that tremor temptation, or love, or failure. The book called it by simpler names. He is cold. He is hungry. He is alive. There is dread in simplicity. He had trained himself to love complexity because complexity can be persuaded. You cannot bargain with a word like alive.
He skimmed, because skimming promises innocence, as if not every letter were an accomplice. Dates. Always the dates, his mind returning to them like a dog to a door it knows opens onto a courtyard where its name is spoken. Entries a month before the cliff. A draft of a prayer he had not yet said aloud. Lines about a candle bowing—written before the wax had obeyed. He wanted to find a discrepancy, proof that the book was not a mirror but a mask. He did not find it. He found, instead, a page titled The Visitations with no words beneath—only the date three weeks hence and the ribbon cut to a point as if to pierce the future. He pictured the bishop's mouth making official compassion. He pictured the room where decisions pretend to be made on paper but are made instead in faces.
Another page, halfway back, titled in a hand so steady it frightened him: His fall. Nothing under it. The terror was not in the blankness. It was in the assurance of the title. In the certainty that there would be words to fill the void. He wanted to believe the title had been written to exorcise fate by naming it. He could not make himself believe anything that tidy.
He closed the book again. He did not open it. Not right away. He sat for a while with the object-ness of it, the simple fact of weight, the human muscle that had flexed and clenched to make the letters. The book became—against his will—her hand. He could not decide whether he wanted to hold it or to put it down so hard the table remembered. He rose and walked the perimeter of the room as if he could walk the perimeter of thought. The mirror watched and did not comment. His own face looked like a rumor no one wanted to repeat.
He hid the book. He did not mean to; he discovered he had done it after the motion completed itself, as a man finds his hands in prayer and does not remember how they arrived. Beneath the third drawer's false bottom, where he kept the emergency host and the letters he could not answer with honesty, the book nested with the treacherous ease of a thing that belongs wherever it is placed. The urge to lock it away fought with the urge to return it exactly where Thomas had found it—fourth pew, left side, second notch from the aisle—so the world could resume its preferred ignorance. In the end, he chose neither. He left the drawer closed and stood with his palm flat to the wood as if feeling for warmth.
Evening arrived, taking its time. He had to preach again in two days. He had to visit a woman whose daughter would not forgive her and a man whose son would not speak. He had to answer the sacristan who would ask, "Did the owner come for the lost book?" The answer would have to be a form of truth tinctured to prevent harm. He practiced it silently. Someone will come, he rehearsed. Or: It belongs to the church. Both lie if one takes language seriously. He had learned to take language seriously only when it refused to serve him.
The knock at the rectory door came as a courtesy to suspense. He did not jump. He knew before he turned the handle who stood on the other side. There is a gravity between certain names; doorbells are only theater. She looked as she always did, except that her composure had been ironed harder than usual and the crease in it ran from eye to mouth. She did not ask whether he had found a notebook. She said, "You have it," and in that statement there was an attempt at mercy he did not know how to receive.
He did not ask how she knew. He stepped aside because the evening was cold. The room accepted her as if rooms learn favorites. She stood with her hands folded, not in prayer but in a discipline prayer had taught. He opened the drawer without performing, lifted the book, and held it in both hands. Not offering. Not withholding. A scale weighing itself.
"I shouldn't have read it," he said, and in the honesty of the sentence a small terror loosened its teeth.
"You couldn't not," she answered. No triumph. Only the steadiness of someone who has watched storms and learned their schedules. "It isn't my diary," she added, perhaps to save him from a kind of vulgarity. "It's… the only way to survive memory."
"Some of it," he said, "was written before." The before did most of the speaking.
Her mouth moved toward a smile, then refused the distance. "I write the weather I feel coming," she said. "I write the prayer before I know if I'll have the courage to say it. I write about the catastrophe to keep it from happening all at once."
"Did you plan it?" The question, at last, unhooded. It sounded smaller when it reached the air. Childish, almost. Yet it had been running laps inside his head until sweat blinded judgment.
"I planned to tell the truth when it arrived," she said. "If that is planning, then yes."
"You wrote about the kiss," he said, and then wished for a word not born to simplicity.
"I wrote about hunger," she corrected, and the book on his palms agreed by becoming heavier. "And I wrote that I would not touch you first. I think I kept that."
He set the book back on the table. The wood made a sound he could not interpret. "There are titles," he said. "Blank pages. The Visitations. His fall." He could not stop the tremor in the last word from betraying him. He hated the tremor for being honest.
"They make a space for fear," she said quietly. "When fear has a page, it doesn't have to take the whole room."
"And if the words come to fill them."
"Then they were true." She looked at him as if looking were labor and she had to pace herself. "Or we made them true. Which is worse? I don't know."
He thought of scripture's beginning again and wanted to laugh not because anything was funny but because the world was opulent with irony. In the beginning was the Word. And now here in his sacristy a different genesis: in the beginning was her word, then her breath, then his shaking hands. He felt blasphemous. He felt precise. He felt watched by the very pronouns.
He did not ask her to burn it. He wanted to. He wanted the flames to cleanse something a fire could not find. He wanted ash where sentences had been, so he could blame grayness instead of ink. He also wanted the book kept, because destruction would let him pretend the future could be unwritten by lighting a match. He had learned too much about matches.
"Keep it," he said finally. Command and gift disguised as permission. "Keep it where I cannot hear it."
She took the notebook. She did not press it to her chest as a woman might in a novel written for people who enjoy safety from another century. She held it at her side, as a worker carries a tool she trusts. "Do you hate me for writing it?" she asked, as if the answer might determine the weather for a long time.
"I don't know," he said. Then the truth that frightened him, that he had feared since the first line he read and recognized himself without flattering adjectives: "I don't regret that it exists."
She closed her eyes briefly, the way people do when a blow kindly chooses not to land. "Then we will be punished anyway," she said without drama.
He almost laughed again at the mercy of that sentence. "By whom."
"Everyone," she said, as if listing the names would be impolite. "And ourselves, most thoroughly."
After she left, the room regained its old arrangement, which is to say it pretended to. He moved through the motions of evening as a man moves through a ruined house, turning teacups upright as if manners could resurface. He washed his hands and forgot to dry them. He lit the small lamp and put it out again. He knelt, stood, sat, as if positions could confess in his place. When he finally looked at the table, the mark the book had left on the purificators remained—a faint bruise where leather had pressed linen. He touched it as one touches a relic and then pulled his hand back, ashamed at his own superstition.
Sleep came like a trespasser who had learned the floorboards well. He dreamt of pages written in salt, the words dissolving at the edges and reforming with each wave. He dreamt of himself as a pronoun that refused to settle: I, he, you, Father, man. He woke just before the bell and lay there with the bright hunger of dread. The book was gone. The sentences were not.
The day behaved itself. The town practiced ordinary. Yet everywhere he walked he saw the world interleaved with margin notes. The widow's kettle steamed: mercy is the correction of heat. The fisher boy's wet boots squeaked: forgiveness is walking home in a sound louder than shame. He delivered communion to a woman whose fingers trembled and thought, bread is the body of a sentence that refuses to end. He startled them in his own mind. He feared he had caught her disease: the one where metaphor climbs the walls until it learns to reach the roof.
In the afternoon a letter with the diocesan seal arrived. It contained what letters always contain: the voice that tries to be a room. It asked after his health. It asked after the parish. It asked nothing that could not be answered with a stately lie. At the bottom, a hand that was not the bishop's wrote, Our vicar general will be traveling your way after Epiphany. The page smelled faintly of rain, though it had been carried by a boy whose pockets smelled of bread. He folded the paper flat and did not put it with the others. He held it, briefly, over the lamp as if to test whether heat would take it eagerly. It did not. He set it down unscorched. Not every fire is yours.
At vespers he stood in the nave and listened to his own voice braid with Thomas's. He watched from the corner of his eye for red and found it, a darkened ember near the back that did not demand air. He knew the notebook was somewhere in the town, perhaps on a table, perhaps inside a drawer with a broken hinge, perhaps in the pocket of the coat that insisted on being the subject of every sentence where the sky surrendered its subtlety. He felt the book's gravity even at a distance, like a second moon the sea obeys without understanding how many masters water can suffer.
Later, alone again, he stood at the confessional and rested his forehead against the frame. The wood was cooler than his skin and therefore honest. He spoke aloud, because sometimes the only way to keep a thought from becoming scripture is to let the air have it. "Am I your character," he asked the darkness, "or only a man asked to live inside someone else's courage?" The question did what questions do when they respect themselves: it stayed. He thought then of an answer the book might write for him, and the dread in the imagining felt like a hand on the back of his neck that was not unkind.
He did not resolve anything. This, he considered, might be the only resolution worth trusting. He returned to the sacristy and took out a scrap of paper, the sort used for lists: candles, oil, lilies when the season is kind. He wrote a single line on it, not addressed, not signed, and left it where a person could find it if the world wanted fairness. Do not abandon honesty. He had read those words, or something like them, in a different hand. He had cut them out and hid them under the base of a lamp without realizing he had already agreed. He left his own copy visible. He blew out the lamp and the paper lifted in the small wind like a bird deciding whether flight is a sin when night is this near.
He lay in bed and counted the breaths until the bells. He thought of beginnings—this one and the older one that dares to start with a word. He wondered if, by reading, he had changed the shape of their ruin or only learned its edges. He wondered if writing makes a future or simply refuses to let one surprise you. He did not arrive anywhere. The clock moved. The sea said its one sentence with a different accent and then the same, as seas do. Somewhere in town a woman put a book inside a drawer and closed it with a sound that felt like mercy to her and like exile to him. He closed his eyes. The darkness wrote him in a language he would not be able to translate in the morning.