The Hound of Heaven
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
-From “The Hound of Heaven” by Francis Thompson
By the time Nora gets up, the sun is already high, and her bedroom is hot in spite of the window air conditioner sputtering and chugging away. She turns it off to hear the sudden silence, then the sound of the waves and the morning screeches of the kestrels in the trees behind the house, their brash, abrupt calls. She takes a quick shower and, hair wet on her neck, steps onto the stair landing outside the door of her second-story apartment. She sees the water of the bay, over the roofs. The sight of its glint, of the sunlight on the waves, reassures her. At home a blizzard may be raging in the Maine town where her father lives, driving snow making travel impossible—if TV and internet, those messengers from another world, can be believed—but she is here on the island, where it’s 85 degrees in January.
Wearing shorts and tee shirt over her swimsuit, she drives her old Camry northeast on the two-lane road that circles the island. Her plan is to drive up to the point and park, then hike to the beach to snorkel. After work last night she had drinks with John, one of the cooks at the restaurant where she works. He said she should call before she left for the beach today, but she wants to go alone. She has been with people too much. Too much conversation, always talking, always having to laugh at someone’s jokes, and John would bring weed and she would smoke it with him, and then who knows what else. Today is about the water and the sky, the fish. Today is Sunday.
So strange, to think that this is Sunday. It’s exactly the same as every other day here. Two donkeys amble by the side of the road, glancing at her through long, dusty lashes. She tries not to think of other Sundays, tries not to let herself feel like this version of Sunday is wrong. But some part of her remembers Sundays of her childhood, sitting next to her father every week, the comfort of that quiet ritual. And she can’t forget a shadowed, dark room, the chapel at the Abbey, with light slanting thinly in through narrow strips of colored glass. The room darker after the sunlight outside in the Abbey’s hay field, where she had been tossing bales into the back of a pickup driven by Sister Anne. A row of women in black robes on the narrow pews, heads curved over their pale hands. Nora sitting just outside the scrim of wood looking at them, wanting to be with them in there next to the altar rather than here on the seat outside. Their voices joined and rose above them in song, twisting together to make something real, a thin blanket made of music. Some part of her remembers the feeling that there was no other world beyond the one she was in, nowhere to go except there in the small wooden chapel, looking into an empty space in the center of her that glowed with light.
She focuses on the corner ahead, keeping the car to her side of the road. Over this rise is the bay, bright and glittering. The sunlight makes her head throb. There are few cars in the small gravel lot. She parks and, looking into the rear view mirror, rubs sunscreen on her face and the tops of her shoulders. She pauses for a moment, looking at her face. Last night John said, “It must be hard, being you.” They’d been sitting in the nearly empty restaurant, on the open patio, a torch next to them flickering. He’d been staring at her, at her face. She didn’t want to ask what he meant, but she thought she knew: His eyes looked hungry and a little sad.
Nora adjusts her backpack over her shoulders and steps onto the rocky path. Through thin trees the water is shades of blue, from turquoise to indigo. Several boats are anchored on the deep side of the small island called a cay. She watches a man on one of the boats adjust his mask, then jump into the water. She finds a protected place on the narrow rocky beach, on the far side of the point. She eats half a sandwich and takes a long drink from her water bottle. Stepping carefully into the water, she feels the rocks beneath her water shoes. She spits onto her mask, smoothing the saliva over the surface, and puts the mouthpiece between her lips. It was hard for her the first time she did this, months ago when she arrived at the island; it seemed wrong to think she could breathe while her face was in the water; wrong to not breathe through her nose. She’d been sure the mask would fill up with water, it just wouldn’t work. Goggles had never worked when she tried to use them in the lake in Maine. But then it did work—and she forgot she was breathing, forgot that the mask was even on her face. No one else is in sight now, just a few yellow tubes above the water, farther out toward the cay. She adjusts the mask, takes a breath, and swims.
Instantly she is brought to that other world. Everything is different. Clear water ripples around her, sunlight falling in wavering patterns over seagrass, which gradually gives way to sand. This world is quiet and muted, the only sound her breath rasping through the tube. A school of silver minnows swarms around her; she sees them but doesn’t feel them. They are not afraid of her, and she is not afraid of them. They’ve been at her feet, all along, unnoticed. Then she is alone but for a pale blue angel fish below, stabbing at a rock for food. She takes a deep breath, reminding herself that, though her face is in the water, she can breathe. There is no time here, no rush. A yellow tang fish to her left waves slowly through the water. She is brought to a place that is both strange and familiar. And so beautiful she wonders why she does not live here always.
The silence at the Abbey was like this silence, the changed sense of time also. She lived there for two summers just after college; she nearly made it her life. Her father visited her at the Abbey. She remembers him standing outside the men’s guest house jamming his hands into the pockets of his winter coat, looking at her in confusion. Piles of snow around him. He didn’t get it. He had brought her to church every Sunday when she was small, he had taken her to CCD classes and he’d bought her white dresses for her First Communion and Confirmation, but he didn’t understand why she would want to do this. “Is it some mother replacement thing you want here?” he’d asked. “Mother Superior replacing your own?” Nora’s mother had died when Nora was a little girl.
“It’s not that,” she said. How to explain the pull of the Abbey, the sense that she was a puzzle piece finding her place here, fitting in in a way that was right. How to explain that it was a different life here, but it made sense. When working at the Abbey she knew what the sunlight falling on the fields was for, she knew what mornings were for. Her actions, her every breath, pointed toward a meaning larger than herself.
“A beautiful girl like you...” her father said, gesturing helplessly. As if the fact that she was pretty made her sacrifice greater than those of the others, greater than that of Sister Adelaide, with her skin. Or Sister Maria, with her weight. As if the satisfaction she could give to a man, a husband, should be the meaning of her life.
And in the end maybe he was right: it was too much of a sacrifice for her. She pulled away, like a magnet detaching itself, to swim free in the world. The decision was made in a day and could not be argued with. She couldn’t explain to the Abbess, or to herself, why she was leaving, but she needed to get away. Her father was relieved, and so was she: she could do what she wanted, be who she wanted. Her life was her own again. She bought herself some mascara and a slinky dress, she went dancing. She breathed deeply, she cried often. She could follow a dream, go to one of the most beautiful places on earth, find a job. Skype with her father once a week. It was like a break-up, Nora thought. She broke up with the Abbey, to choose the world. She had broken up with Jesus, with God, run away to the most beautiful place in the world, but sometimes she feels God isn’t letting go of her so easily.
There is a small Catholic church in the larger town on the other side of the island. Nora drove there once to take a look. A small, neat building, with a steeple and cross. She hadn’t gone inside. The cross, and what it stood for, was somewhere else for her, in another time and place. She was afraid if she went in she would feel cheapened, tawdry. It would be like dragging a cell phone into the water with her: out of place. Or as if after a divorce she was still hanging around her ex, wearing sexy clothes and flirting with him. Instead she sat in her car, feeling the heat deepen and gather around her as she stared at a cluster of young palm trees near the building. A small one leaned toward a taller one, as if seeking its shade.
The current near the cay is strong, but she is a good swimmer and familiar with the spot. She pushes through to the left, where she will travel with the current to circle the island counter-clockwise. Close to the small island she stands on the sandbar to catch her breath. Pushing her mask up on her forehead, she is back in the world again: the sunshine, the call of voices from people ahead of her on the island, the wind, the low purr of a boat farther out. She slides back into the water, pushing diagonal to the current.
Then all is as before: the stillness, the peace of light rippling through the clear blue. The skin of her legs glows faintly, white where the light strikes it. Off to her left in deeper water a sea turtle, tan with brown patterning, lumbers its way to the surface, its heavy body oddly graceful. It is alone, like she is, and she has the sudden thought that the turtle is living not in the world of the ocean, any more than she is, but in its own world, which is totally unlike her own. It swims away purposefully, as if it has no doubt where it needs to go. She feels as if she should follow it, as if it is leading her somewhere. After a few moments she knows she is being silly—the turtle is not God. She can feel the push of the rip current now, and turns around. She needs to swim hard, pushing against the current again to return to where she can let it carry her.
The sense of being underwater, the slow movement and sense of timelessness, stays with her through the afternoon and into the evening. It lingers in her thoughts at work as the restaurant becomes busy. She is a hostess, helping out with orders and checks as needed, but her primary job is to greet people, looking pretty and welcoming as they enter the doorway and stand under the thatched roof of the patio, confused by the flickering light of the torches, the evening air washing over them through the open sides. She greets them, her smile warm. She gives them menus, gives them hope that their orders will be taken, their drinks set before them, the clear, garnet, or amber liquids trembling in the glass. She remembers the afternoon light in the Abbey shining through the narrow glass windows like the light through a tray of drinks, glittering, mysterious. Both the stained-glass windows and the drinks promised future redemption, a changed existence.
She is thinking of what it would be like to be the turtle—slow, powerful, living in that quiet beauty for decades, for a hundred years, or longer—when she realizes she has lost a customer’s credit card. After a brief and intense search, it is found under the credit card machine. Relieved, Nora helps clear tables. Someone waves at her from a table, another check to be rung up. She wonders if the turtle looks for redemption, if it has a sense of the future, of hope. She thinks not; she thinks it lives in the now, the beautiful dreamy always-now. When she brings the bill back to the table, the man at the table lifts up the paper, looking for his credit card. “Oh, sorry,” Nora says. She’s done it again.
At last the flow of people stops, and the last pizza, Cuban slider, and spicy French fries are delivered. Nora turns down the wicks on the torches, extinguishing their light. Someone in the kitchen turns the music system off. In the sudden quiet she hears the ocean, the sound like a heartbeat, and feels a breeze touching her face, her bare arms, as if it has been trying all evening to get her attention.
Sitting behind the wheel of his Jeep parked behind the restaurant, John takes a joint from his shirt pocket and lights it. He takes a hit and passes it to Nora. She puts it to her mouth and breathes in, holding. He drives past the stinky mangrove swamp onto a narrow, twisting road out of town. Nora rolls down her window to feel the wind rush across her face, hear the tree frogs sing in rising and falling crescendos as they sweep past. A few miles out of town they turn into the beach parking lot. It is dark and empty. They park the Jeep, duck under the chain across the gate, and run down the path, past the bath house. All empty, all dark but for the stars thick and bright above them, but for the moon. The sand is soft under their feet.
John pulls his shirt and shorts off and runs into the water. “Come in,” he shouts, his voice faint above the crashing of the surf, but Nora stands still. Palm tree branches twist above her in the wind, the waves crash on shore. The night is alive, turning circles around her. There is life all around her, life outside her, life that will go on without her. Life that exists whether or not one American girl stands on a beach, insignificant, with tears running down her face.
She sinks down on the sand, arms wrapped around her knees to hold herself together in the commotion of the night. It is 2:00 a.m. Two thousand miles away, a bell is ringing. Nuns are pulling themselves out of their narrow beds, pulling their habits on. She imagines herself there, half-dreaming as she walks. The dreams would fall away as she entered the chapel. Nora closes her eyes and wills herself there, in the candle-lit chapel, in a silence that is full of presence until the voices of the women rise around her. Their voices in chant speak to the Presence, and it hears them, and it speaks back.
õ
Later they lie on the sand, their highs fading. John reaches over for his shorts and pulls the plastic bag from the pocket, but Nora shakes her head. He trails a finger down her arm. She doesn’t respond. She is staring into the sky. Why, she wonders, if the stars are not alive, do they seem to move and flicker as if they are? If everything in nature has a purpose, what is the purpose of that? Is it just to catch her eye, here on earth, to draw her gaze upward? After a moment she becomes aware that John is raised up on one elbow, watching her. “What?” she asks.
“You know, you drive me crazy,” he said.
It was as if the night had spoken to her, the night that was alive, and said what it was thinking. “I’m sorry,” she says softly. She is afraid to say more, afraid of what he will say in reply. “I drive myself crazy.”
“All that beauty,” he says, “so close at hand, and I can’t have it.” He touches her hair with his fingertips. “I can be close to it, I can touch it, but I can’t have it.” He drops his hand as she stares. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to scare you.” He stands. “One more dip,” he says, and walks into the waves. She sees his arms rise above the water, lit by moonlight.
The sound of the surf is incessant, comforting and disquieting both. Nora is remembering her father’s question about the Abbey. She had wanted to ask him why he’d taken her to church all those years, why he’d made her go to CCD those mornings when she didn’t want to, if it wasn’t all real, if he didn’t believe. And if he believed—if he knew that Jesus was the Son of God, that he had given his life and risen from the dead, then how could her father not see that she had to throw everything away and follow him? When she left the Abbey, when she drove down the rutted gravel road in her old car, she thought she was making the common-sense and correct decision, but sometimes she wonders if she hasn’t accidentally thrown away something valuable, something irreplaceable.
Nora sits up. A sweet smile of frangipani comes from somewhere behind them, and a nighthawk makes its staccato, impatient sound. The stars are still bright and thick. She thinks of the turtle rising up so slowly, its flippers waving. The palm tree branches are arms, gesturing against the sky. The world is calling to her, talking to her. There was a time when she thought she could understand what it was saying. Maybe she should be in Maine, huddled indoors watching the snow pile up instead of here, trying to decipher this language she doesn’t speak. She wonders if she will always feel as if she is in the wrong place, if she will never be satisfied, even by all this gorgeous, useless beauty.
John is next to her, drying himself off. He holds a hand out to her, and his face in the shadowed darkness is kind. “Let’s go,” he says.