Page 112 of If Looks Could Kill
Nothing.
And then the noise of the bakeshop faded away.
Tabitha, dear one. You don’t need to be told what to do.
Not with words. Bypassing words. Transcending words.
Yes, I do, I insisted. I am in over my head here.
Liquid quiet.
Why did you come to the city in the first place?
To help people.
And who needs help?
I need help, I said. Everyone needs help. The need is so great, it will drown you.
I know.
Yes, well, Pearl needs help. And I don’t know how to help her.
Again, the question.Why did you come to the city in the first place?
Because you told me I needed to find your lost daughters. And bring them home.
Tears stung my eyes. You have too many lost daughters, I told him. As though God should have looked after them better. Remembered where he put them.
I know.
I sat with it, my surprise at the heartache, and set down my coffee.
This wasn’t the severe God I’d met at the pulpit of my childhood church, nor the boisterous, jovial God of the Salvation Army street parade. This God was… what, exactly?
Wounded with the pain of an entire world. The bottomless pain of countless millions through countless years. I marveled at it. I stood at a distance, with bowed head.
But that was the point, I realized, of the Cross. Wasn’t it? The wounded God? I hadn’t thought of it that way before. I thought the Cross wasthen. Not now. Not, perhaps, forever.
Even so. Too many lost daughters, I reminded him, and nothing I could do about it.
“Are you all right, lovey?”
I blinked my eyes open to see Marianne gazing down at me in concern. She now had a pink frosting smear on the bosom of her apron.
“I’m fine,” I told her. “Thank you for asking.”
She didn’t seem convinced, but she patted my shoulder and bustled off to her work.
She’d burst the bubble. It was the horrible moment when a streetcar or a crowing rooster wakes you from a beautiful dream, and you know you’ll never get it back.
I closed my eyes again. Please come back.
Bring them home.
If I found Pearl, would home welcome her, after what she’d become?
What about Freyda? I’d helped find her. And Cora. We got her out. Didn’t that count?
