Tenebrae

by Aliset

I open my eyes to utter darkness. Water drips and the air smells like dust and rock. Somewhere, someone is calling “Father...Father...” Looking for a priest, then, as the bombs rain down upon us. Not a bad idea, searching for a priest in the middle of all the fear and shadows of the Blitz. Wish I'd thought of it.

My ribs hurt and pain clears the memory just a bit. It's Vincent who calls...and he's not looking for a priest. He's looking for me. I'm Father.

“Over here,” I manage to wheeze, trusting that he can hear me.

And he does. “How are you?” Vincent asks.

I can tell some part of him already knows the answer. I wasn't joking when I told him some months ago that he had the soul of a doctor. If so many things had been different, he might have gone above and become a true healer...but things are not different and there's no point in wishing them so. Vincent has only the knowledge I've managed to teach him, and it will have to be enough. “I've been better,” I say and Vincent manages a dry chuckle.

Either I try to move or he tries to shift me, but whatever happens, pain thins everything to grey line. Vincent is concerned, warning me not to sleep and when I threaten to quote Virgil at him, it wrings a laugh out of him. He's scared, but he has hope. His Catherine is on the other side of the rocks and rubble that enclose us and if my interactions with her are any indication, she will never give up on him, on us.

Funny that I didn't realize that before. Margaret, you were right. I was a foolish old man....

***

“It's quite a world you have here,” Margaret had said, that last day before she passed. “I never thought....”

I smiled at her. “Who would? There are times I don't quite believe it myself.”

There was a ghost of her old shrewdness in her gaze. “Every time you look at Vincent, I bet,” she said. “Jacob, how...what happened to him?”

“I don't know,” I replied. “I've speculated over the years, but all my theories never matched the reality.” I shrugged. “It just became easier to stop wondering.”

“He's been good for you,” Margaret said. “You were never that patient before.”

“I never had to be, before.” I flashed a grin at her and took her hand, seeing not the bruises from her last round of chemotherapy, nor the paper-thin skin of age and illness, but how she had been when we first wed. God, we were so young then....

Margaret drew her shawl around herself. “So, Jacob. You must tell me all the gossip.” And that was so like the Margaret of old that I started laughing. We used to fight over the paper in the morning---she would dive for the society section and I'd try to get the front page out from under the mess she made of it. So many brief memories of our marriage. “That girl Catherine,” she continued. “She's something special to Vincent.”

I nodded, remembering Catherine's declaration of love as she'd left me on the subway platform to return home. “She is,” I acknowledged.

“And you don't like it,” Margaret said. At my surprised look, she tilted her head and smiled. “Come now, Jacob. You are pretty easy to read. What's the matter? Has she been bad for Vincent?”

“Oh, no,” I replied. I couldn't damn her like that, not after what she'd done to save me. “She's a very...nice person.”

“So what is it? They're marvelous together; a fool could see it and you're surely not a fool.” Her mouth pursed, not willing to let up a bit.

“I don't want him to get hurt,” I said finally.

Her hand touched mine. “You can't prevent that, Jacob. Pain is the price we pay for loving.”

She fell silent then and I thought of all that had gone between us---decades of separation that needn't have been and now... she was dying. In a few days or less, Peter had said, she would be gone.

“Don't be a damned fool,” Margaret said, her smile taking the sting out of the words. “You must find a way to let him know you understand. Promise me that, Jacob.”

Promise her? I'd have promised her the moon and stars once...still would, even now. “I will,” I said.

***

“Vincent,” I gasp. “I understand more than you think about your Catherine.” In my mind's eye, I see Margaret as she had been that day, stepping out of the cab, yellow dress and red cloche bright against her dark hair. She was a vision. And I realize, as the air thins and greys around us, that I do understand. I haven't told him that enough. I've grumbled and fussed and warned, but in the end, he loves her. And she loves him. If there's pain in it for him---and I'm still not sure there won't be---it is, in the end, their choice to love.

My story finished, Vincent leans against me, the eternal guardian. His gaze in the dimness is turned inward...searching for the threads of his connection to Catherine. The connection that bound them since their first meeting and that alerted her to our danger. What would it have been like, I wonder, to have had that connection with Margaret?

“It wasn't meant to be for us, Jacob,” Margaret says, just off to my right. Her yellow dress is the only bright spot in the dimness. I open my mouth to say something, but Vincent speaks first. His voice is more raspy than usual with the dirt and the dust in the air. “The air is getting thin, but we'll be out of here soon. Try not to talk.”

Vincent's right, of course---the air had been growing foul probably for hours before he decided to tell me. What a front he's been keeping up, being strong for both of us. What a leader he'll make one day. Perhaps today. Or the next day. I know how badly I've been injured---one of the downsides of being a doctor, I suppose. No matter what happens to me, though, the community will be strong and protected in his hands.

“Now, Jacob, don't press the boy,” Margaret says. “He's got his own path to lead, just as we did.”

Vincent looks down at me, an expression of dawning hope. “They've returned.”

THE END.



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