Gilly shouted “Mom!” from her seat in the front pew.
Her face was contorted with fear, but before I could react to her, I felt a punch to my shoulder. I dropped, reached out toward Gilly, and heard, as if from a distance, the second of two sharp cracking sounds.
I toppled backward, grabbing at the altar cloth, pulling it and everything on the altar down around me.
I fought hard to stay in the present. I tried to get to my feet, but I was powerless. The light dimmed around me. The screams faded. I was dropping down into a bottomless blackness, and I couldn’t break my fall.
Chapter 119
ZACHARY GRAHAM signed off from his call to the international desk at the Times and exited the media van. His cameraman, Bart Buell, was leaning against the hood.
“You ready?” Bart asked. “It’s starting to break.”
“Follow me,” Zach said.
They went back the way Zach had come, up Via della Conciliazione, cutting around St. Peter’s Square, waiting in line for the small elevator to discharge its half dozen passengers and for the next group in line to get in.
After five or six minutes, Zach and his cameraman were riding the creaking lift up fifty feet to the top of Bernini’s colonnade, with its full view of St. Peter’s Square and the backdrop of Vatican City.
The two men blocked out their shot, and while Buell erected the setup and tested the equipment, Zach went over his notes. When he felt good to go, he put on his shades and peered out into the blazing sunshine bouncing off the ancient cut stones of the venerable buildings and the extraordinarily beautiful dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.
The people in the square were in a spiritual frenzy. The millions moved as one, looking almost like a single-celled organism under a microscope. The sounds coming from the crowd, the shouting, praying, and keening, were like nothing Zach had ever heard before.
These people had wanted to see and be blessed by the beloved Pope Gregory. Now they were waiting to be blessed by his replacement.
Who would it be?
Would Brigid be elected the head of the Roman Catholic Church? If so, she would have powerful enemies inside the Vatican and without. Would she ever be safe?
Zach tried to make out the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel, at the far end of the square. When a conclusive vote was confirmed, the ballots would be burned, and the rising white smoke would signify that the Church had elected a new pope.
Zach asked his cameraman, “Do you see that?”
The cameraman was zooming in with his long telephoto lens when Zach’s phone buzzed. He slapped his shirt pocket and retrieved it. The caller ID read Brigid.
He pressed Receive.
“Brigid, I think I see smoke. I have to go on air right now. We may have a new pope. I’ll call you back…Who is this? Gilly? You’re breaking up, Gilly. Take a breath. Say it again. What’s wrong?”
The undulating rumble coming from St. Peter’s Square took on volume and pitch as the wisp of smoke thickened and rose in an unmistakable column. Cheers and weeping became a thundering roar.
Zach crouched down and pressed his phone hard against his ear.
“Gilly?”
“Zach!” the little girl cried. “It’s Mommy! My mommy was shot!”
Chapter 120
THE JUBA Line bus from Juba Airport to Magwi was the same bus I’d taken so many years ago. The chassis had been repatched and painted over, and the sign in the front window reading God Is Good had been replaced with a new sign, same message.
The people of South Sudan had little except their faith in God, but they still had that.
In contrast to the torrential rains that had been drowning Magwi when I’d last been here, this was drought season, and so the air was dry and the heat oppressive. Brown dust blew away from the wheels of the bus and swirled in golden vortices around the trunks of parched trees.
Gilly pulled at my arm as the bus slowed.
“Is that him? Is it, Mommy?”
Kwame’s old, brown junker was parked by the bus shelter. My grin was so wide, my cheeks hurt. I couldn’t wait to see him.
The hydraulic brakes squealed. I held Gilly back so that the men and women and children and chickens and the one goat could leave the bus. We stepped down to the ground, and finally I had to let my daughter go. She ran toward the old Dodge, and the driver’s door opened.
I couldn’t make sense of what I saw. The driver wasn’t Kwame. I gasped as I realized that the man wearing the panama hat, black pants, and black shirt with white collar was Father Delahanty, the priest I had met at Kind Hands. I had given him his last rites and heard his confession, even though I was a doctor at the time. I had been with him when he died.
I knew then that I was dead.
And Gilly?
Please, God, no.
I thought hard, desperately trying to remember the moment of my death. I kept walking, gripping my old leather bag, feeling the weight of Gilly’s backpack, strapped across my shoulders. When I got near the car, Father Delahanty reached out his arms to me.
“Ah, Brigid. I’ve been waiting to see you.”
I couldn’t say the same, but I hugged him. He was as substantial as ever. He smelled good. His eyes sparkled. He was so-alive.
I asked him, “Is this God’s plan for me, Father? The plan you were always rattling on about?”
“What do you think?” he asked me. He was grinning like a fool. “Brigid, get into the car. Do you know where we’re going?”
“I guess you’ll tell me.”
“You have a very dry sense of humor,” he said.
“And an enormous confusion about what the heck has happened.”
I got into the backseat with Gilly, and she turned her bright, always curious gaze to the countryside, the goats tied to trees, the meager shops lining the streets of the town. Beyond the town, the long dirt road cut through the open plains and over the dusty hills. It all looked solid and real.
I was hardly surprised when we pulled up to Magwi Clinic at sunset. The clinic was lit up from within, and I heard the loud hum of the generator. This had been a very good place for me. Perhaps Gilly could be happy here, too.
As I got out of the car and looked around, I took in the tent village under the red acacia trees outside the clinic, much bigger than it had been before. I heard babies crying and the braying of donkeys and saw a new structure beyond the tent city and opposite the clinic.
It was a church with the name Jesus Mary Joseph, Magwi, on a hand-painted board affixed to the siding. The doors were painted red, symbolizing the phrase To God through the blood of Christ.
My eyes welled up. Tears spilled over. And when I heard my name, I turned. I recognized her voice before I saw her, and there she was.
Sabeena, her hair wrapped in colorful fabric, was running down the steps from the clinic, and two tall girls were running right behind her. Sabeena, Jemilla, and Aziza all reached Gilly before they reached me, and they hugged her and danced her around as if she was a long-lost sister as well as my baby girl.
Sabeena screamed my name again, and when she got to me, she almost knocked me off my feet with her full-body hug.
“Oh, Brigid, I’ve missed you so much. Come inside. Albert has been cooking all day. Father Delahanty,” she called over my shoulder, “you come, too. Dinner is served.”
Were we all dead, living on a parallel plane alongside the living? I said, “Sabeena, I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry. You are off duty, doctor.”
I began the climb up the steps to the long porch, my mind racing in circles inside my skull, my arm around Sabeena’s waist. We had just reached the old screen door when a horrible racket cut through the night sounds of babies wailing, young girls laughing, insects chirping.