This is where I found her. In His church, my church, one early winter’s morning not long ago, curled up on a pew, weeping. She had no coat, and her dark hair was wet and white-patched with snow; her clothes, a pair of Levis and a sweat shirt with the logo of a community college across the river, were soaked through. The storm outside was not a blizzard, but close enough. The poor girl could have frozen.
“Hello,” I said that morning, dark still, but bright, too, from the snow on the ground, in the air. The church windows were mostly clear (except for some small stained glass panes, the Virgin Mother, the baby), and tall and wide, made to look out on God’s splendor up here on the hill. They were filled with winter’s image. Shadows draped the chapel; I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a little frightening—this girl, what could be seen and not.
She didn’t answer me. Her eyes—that particular jewel color of some people with dark skin, topaz and circled in black—glowed with her tears and something else, I would know later. She shivered and sucked on the collar of her sweatshirt.
“Hola,” I said. “Que pasa,” I said. My Spanish was limited, mostly high school lessons and phrases we used to say to sound cool: que pasa; que vola; comprendes? Back then it was mostly us white kids in classes; the migrant workers came to town alone for the field jobs in the summer, or if they brought their kids, school was out so we didn’t see them much. And while we locals all went to the public pool to cool off and swim, those other kids went to the quarry. That was their place, an unwritten agreement, broken now and again when some of our boys got a little drunk or high or bored and drove out there to make trouble. I was never a witness to this, but that’s what I heard, and I had no reason to doubt the stories. I knew my schoolmates; I knew their bad habits. It isn’t all that different today, I’m told. The troublemakers breed I suppose.
But this girl. Coatless and wet, she was in my church, my home (I have rooms behind the chapel) and she needed help, I could see. Warm, dry clothes, maybe food, a place to sleep, possibly.
I gave her all of these things. And on that first day, a Monday, she stopped crying, but she said nothing. She took the hot bath I drew for her and ate the eggs I made and wore my flannel nightgown fresh from the dryer and slept on the couch in my office under a blanket. I worked around her, did my books and read my Bible and drafted my sermon like I did on every Monday. I would try to push through an entire first draft if I could chase the inspiration left over from Sunday service and the previous week’s observations: a car stuck in the snow, a conversation overheard at the post office, black squirrels under the trees. I never knew when something would click, something would take hold. I had to sit at my desk, pen at the ready, journal open, write one sentence and the next, start and start again. On this particular Monday the words were hard coming. Outside, it snowed and snowed.
Tuesday morning, the girl was awake before me. I smelled coffee and toast as I sat up in my single bed (bought on mail order when I was newly alone), as I whispered my day’s greeting to God. Shadows and low golden sunlight touched the corners of my room and my stomach spoke to me. I slid into my slippers and robe and made my way to the kitchen.
I’ve always loved this room, my kitchen. Always meaning the two years I have been the pastor of this congregation, and the twelve years before that when my husband Oliver was. I am not old, just forty-three, but I am a widow, a senseless drunken driving accident having taken my husband from me—from us, his congregants, the town—just down at the bottom of the hill where he’d driven one late night to get the milk I’d forgotten from Jack’s Super up the road. I was already in bed by then, like usual. I had left Oliver in his chair in the living room as I often did those last months, watching the news and muttering, smoking, filling his glass. The sirens made me look up from my novel. Oliver was gone barely a half-hour by then, I wasn’t worried, not yet. Someone would always slow him down, stop to make small talk or big talk (he was a man of God, after all) and Oliver, even on these muttering, drinking nights, took time for others. One siren then another, and I picked up my phone on the bedside table and switched it on. Back then I would turn it off at night, night calls only brought bad news and bad news was Oliver’s business, not mine. Back then. A flood of texts filled the small screen, the volunteer fire brigade’s chain of response: one car accident. bottom of the church hill. Jack’s Super. ambulance.
And still, even with all of these clues. Let’s just say that some things were beyond my imagination.
•
The girl spoke that morning, but try as I might, I couldn’t understand her. We sat in my favorite room with its yellow-painted walls and shining appliances and windows that looked out towards the nearby woods. The squirrels made circles in the snow, foraging, searching. Behind my chair on the wall, golden haired Jesus stared upwards, framed in plastic. This was Oliver’s choice, his favorite Jesus image; I’m sure you know it. Blue eyes, white skin. I always thought Jesus would be dark-skinned, given where he was born; I preferred to think of him that way. I knew very little about genetics then (and still) but I understand now that things don’t always come out as you think they might, as you think they should. With my back to the wall, I didn’t have to look at the golden Jesus, but I kept him there to honor my late husband. This room, my yellow kitchen, is where Oliver came to me still, where we communed sometimes in the early dark of the morning, in the late dark of the night. “I miss you,” I would say. “Me too, you too,” he would answer. I swear that he would.
The girl talked and talked that Tuesday morning. She looked over my head at golden Jesus and smiled. “Concepción,” the girl said among the words and sentences she’d let fill in the air around us, between us. Concepción. The word in her language was prettier than in ours, like most words are, I’ve noticed. I thought it must be her name. They had names like that, didn’t they? Things we didn’t usually call our own children. (I don’t mean me here, I don’t have children. We never did.) Concepción. Angel. Jesus.
“¿Ingles?” I said finally, after I’d eaten my toast and had my coffee. After I’d grown tired of nodding and smiling, nodding and smiling. As you do.
“No,” she said, smiling back at me, shaking her head. She looked happier than she had when I found her. Perhaps it was the warmth. She ate her own toast dry; drank tea with milk, lots of milk. “Not much,” she said. And I knew she meant not at all. She was just being polite.
“I like her,” Oliver said.
•
Although I told her it wasn’t necessary, the girl helped keep house, dusting and mopping and scrubbing the tub, those things I mostly let go now that I lived on my own, now that I had a job. My taking over the congregation was not something I strived for, nor even actually applied for. I was qualified, Oliver and I went to seminary together after all, but when the board asked me to stay on, to step into the role of pastor, it was not because of my qualifications. It was because they knew me, I was from here. Thirty years ago my folks moved us to New Hope, so I’ve been years here. Not as many as Oliver and his people—generations buried in the cemetery overlooking Market Street—but enough that people consider me a local. I imagine that’s why they gave me this job. With me, they knew what they were getting. (So they thought.) And I, too, accepted out of a same sort of familiarity, a certain sense of complacency, an unwillingness to start again, start somewhere else. And because Oliver was here, still, too. I don’t believe in ghosts, but he was here still. Of this I’m certain.
Concepción and I navigated the first week with a series of hand gestures and lots of pointing and nodding and speaking slowly. We began, ever, ever so slightly to understand one another. I think this must be at least in part because I listened to her, really listened. This isn’t my strongest suit, listening (I know, that’s a troubling confession from a person of the cloth) but something in her voice made me want to hear what she told me, to avoid my habit of believing I knew what was going to be said, to think I knew what would come next. And, too, Spanish is a language that makes sense to me, unlike some I have heard. Czech for instance, the language spoken by the landlord of our first apartment when we were newly married and finishing our degrees; Dutch, what my great grandmother spoke when she came to visit us from the Netherlands one time before she died. I began to recognize some of Concepción’s words. Almuerzo. Hace frio. Tengo sed. Cucina. Buenas noches.
She called me Alicia, another word that was prettier than the one I used: Alice. And when I called her Concepción, she would laugh and laugh, and put her hand on her belly. I didn’t know what was so funny, but I laughed along with her. It feels good to laugh. Who would deny that? Sometimes in the yellow kitchen I would hear Oliver laugh with us.
•
Sunday, then, and Concepción was among the few in the pews. I would like to think that it was the snow, nearly a foot and more predicted, that kept people away, but that would not be entirely accurate. We are a small town, New Hope, getting smaller all the time. And we are a town of many churches, five besides mine. Competition is stiff. You might think our lowering attendance had something to do with my being a woman, and perhaps it did some, but even when Oliver was alive our numbers dwindled.
I smiled at my congregation, welcomed them into the warmth of the chapel, the warmth of His love. That was my theme that day, something about warmth and love. It seemed appropriate when outside the temperature was dropping and the roads were turning to ice. People listened (I think) even as they fiddled with the hymnals, stared out the windows to the trees thick with snow and the black squirrels beneath them. Only Concepción watched me as I sermonized, her eyes glowing, her hand on her belly, and it was then that I understood what I hadn’t yet. The girl—because she was that, a teenager and no more, surely—was pregnant.
•
“You’re pregnant,” I said to her when the service was over, after everyone had climbed into their cars and driven down the hill toward the icy highway. We were in the yellow kitchen making tea. I hoped that Oliver might visit me then, might give me some guidance. Concepción smiled at me, her whole face aglow, but she did not understand, I could tell. “Embarazada,” Oliver, close by, whispered, reminding me of the ridiculous Spanish word. Embarrassed. Pregnant.
“Si,” she said. “Yo se,” she said. And laughed. Always—except for that first day when she cried in my pew—Concepción was inclined toward laughter I couldn’t help but notice. “Te lo dije. Immaculada Concepción.” And it’s true, she had told me. But I’d misunderstood. I understood now, this time, but only her words. The rest baffled me.
“Como te llamas,” I said.
“Maria.”
“Maria? ¿Porque?” But that was as far as I could go. Porque. Why. Why didn’t you stop me from calling you Concepción? Why didn’t you tell me, really tell me? Why do you think this is an immaculate conception? Why are you here?
“It’s all right,” I heard Oliver say. “It will be fine.” And the kettle whistled and Maria Concepción prepared our tea and she smiled at me and her eyes looked golden and the snow started up again and we sat in the yellow room listening to the radiator clank and hiss and deliver its warmth.
•
“Who is this girl?”
I had to consider my words carefully. I was prone to lies, a habit from years past when Oliver’s sadness grew so thick, when his drinking became a problem. But it was a habit I was trying to break. It exhausted me sometimes to always ask for God’s forgiveness for such things. It occurred to me that one day His forgiveness might not come.
It was our monthly board meeting, and despite the snow and the cold, we had a quorum. Three of them and me. We sat around the conference table, the radiators rattling around us. Snow melted in pools from the boots of the men; the only woman besides me had slipped out of her galoshes at the door.
“Her name is Maria. Maria Concepción,” I said. “She came from across the river. She helps me in the house, she cleans the chapel.” True, this was all true.
“Is she legal,” one of the three asked. I won’t tell you their names or details; I don’t want any trouble. I knew what he meant, though. New Hope is nowhere near a border. We sit in the middle of the country, close to the wide river that cleaves the land in half. And yet, some of my neighbors struggle with the idea of who comes and who stays, with the promise of a wall still unbuilt, with a yearning for a country that never was as they believe they remember it. I am trying to be delicate here. These are my neighbors.
“Of course she’s legal,” I said. And this was not a lie. All humans are legal, the way I see it. Whether Maria had documents or no, I wasn’t so sure. But to me, that didn’t matter. Still, I understood why it might to them. We all saw the news. We remembered the boys in the quarry when we were just kids, the others more recently. We heard about what happened two towns over at the Iglesia Hispaña when they took all of those people away as they left the service. Fathers, mothers. Children.
“She used to be Catholic,” Oliver said to me, his first time in the board room with us. I repeated it. “She used to be Catholic,” I repeated, and added, “But she has doubts.”
Now this was a lie, or perhaps not. I had never asked Maria Concepción what her faith was. But I knew this lie or truth would work in her favor with the board. They always kept tally: how many of them, how many of us? It was a matter of numbers. It was a matter of acquisition. It was a matter of sides.
•
“You may stay,” I told Maria Concepción. “As long as you want.” We were moving her things (flannel nightgown and robe, jeans and sweatshirt, a new winter coat, three dresses, very stretchy yoga pants and oversized T-shirts, a Spanish-English dictionary, fluffy slippers with cat faces over the toes) into my bedroom so she could have the real bed. Her belly and back needed comfort my office couch couldn’t give her any longer, big as she was becoming. I didn’t mind. Oliver had taken to visiting me in the office as well. In fact, this move was his idea. “Give her your bed,” he’d said to me that morning when I’d come in to the room to bring her tea, saw how she winced and struggled up from the sagging cushions.
“Gracias,” Maria Concepción said to me, and took my hand. She opened my fingers and kissed my palm. “I will repay,” she said.
“No, no,” I said. We made the bed up between us. She folded the corners of the sheets and tucked them in tightly, hotel style, military style. Where had she learned that? “Nothing to repay,” I said, and slid a pillow into its case, plumped it at the head of the bed.
“Yo insisto,” she said.
•
The next morning was a church day and our numbers had grown. The pews were filled with Spanish speaking men and women, children. I didn’t recognize them, although there was something familiar in their faces; like perhaps we had met briefly once, or passed close to one another. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, and after a while I started my sermon (coincidentally about community and welcome) and stopped thinking about it. Maria Concepción sat in the middle of them all, and I saw how these new congregants yearned toward her, how they touched her shoulder, her head, and later, when we gathered for coffee and cake, how they rubbed her belly and kissed her palms. Her topaz eyes glowed and glowed.
“Well, well,” Oliver whispered to me. He was in the assembly room now, with the rest of us. I stood near the coffee urn and felt him close, but I didn’t know what he meant. “Well, well, what?” I said. But he didn’t answer.
“Do you know these people?” I asked Maria Concepción later when we sat in the yellow kitchen, eating leftover sponge cake and drinking milk. She looked up from her place. There were crumbs in the corner of her mouth. I reached across the table and brushed them away.
“People?” She dabbed her lips with a napkin.
“Today,” I said, “at the service.”
“No,” she said.
I leaned back in my chair, took a sip of milk, looked at Maria Concepción. Her belly seemed to have grown considerably in just a couple weeks’ time. It pushed up against the edge of the table. She looked over my head at golden Jesus on the wall.
“They seem to know you,” I said. And she nodded, still gazing at the portrait.
“Yes,” she said, and yawned. I sat listening for more, but that was all she gave me.
•
“I think it might be true,” I told Oliver one night when I couldn’t sleep. Two more weeks had passed, and even more people came to the church each Sunday. Standing room only, and everyone (not just the Spanish speakers) wanted to stand close to Maria Concepción. The few families and widows and widowers who had attended services since way back when, during Oliver’s tenure and after, the ones who used to scatter themselves over the pews as though they wanted the chapel to look fuller, bunched together in the first few rows behind Maria Concepción. The board members jockeyed for space in the pew next to her. I saw her smile and glow at them when they reached toward her; saw how she guided their hands to her middle. “Why can’t it be true,” I said. “Stranger things have happened.” Oliver and I used to say this to one another often in his last months when the perilous tilt of our country and the world beyond filled me with wonder, him with dread. “Stranger things.”
“Yes,” he said, and I waited for more, but it didn’t come. I turned over on the couch, listening to the radiators and Maria Concepción’s quiet snoring in the next room. Outside I heard what sounded like a car; I saw the pass of headlights throw columns over the ceiling and walls. The church stood high on a hill, away from everything, what would a car be doing up here at night? By the time I got to the window, it had turned back onto the drive. It looked like a black sedan. I thought I saw the silhouettes of two people, but I couldn’t tell for certain. The car moved down the icy drive toward the highway below, its taillights glowing red. Nothing to worry about, I thought.
“Stranger things,” Oliver said.
•
The following Sunday the parking lot was full; people squeezed together so everyone could fit inside. It was nearing Christmas. I know that is quite the coincidence, but it is true. The winter’s day brought more snow, and an ice storm was promised by midnight. I looked out the kitchen windows toward the trees and the logging road beyond. I had begun to wonder if anyone cared what I said these days, or if they were all just here because of Maria, because of what she brought to us. We never spoke of it again, not she nor I; I told no one (besides Oliver) what she claimed. I never heard her tell anyone else.
I left my spot in the small room behind the chapel, that place I stood each Sunday and gathered my thoughts, where I watched people shuffle into their pews, where I could see and not be seen. I went back into my yellow kitchen and drank a glass of cold water to clear a small tickle I had in my throat. Out of the window and among the trees, I thought I saw a man. Was that a man? Oliver? Of course my heart went there, but I knew it wasn’t Oliver. Oliver was not an apparition, after all, he wasn’t a ghost. He was a voice. A knowledge. More than that, although I can’t explain this, he was not a vision. The man in the trees was there and then gone, and I heard the sound of an engine before I saw a car moving along the logging road.
“It’s time,” Oliver said to me. And I went to speak my piece.
“Jesus said, ‘What is impossible with man is possible with God,’” I said, looking out at the packed pews and people standing in the aisles. There were more new faces. Toward the back of the room stood a couple of burly blond men. Maria Concepción, sitting on a cushion in the front pew, smiled at me and nodded. “Amen,” she said.
“Amen,” the room responded.
•
The ice came earlier than was forecast. The last of the congregants had barely made it to the highway when the sky turned the color of slate and the fluffy, wafting snow turned to furious pellets of sleet. They battered our windows and pinged on the roof. Maria Concepción and I sat in the yellow kitchen. She stared over my head to golden Jesus on the wall behind me. I thought her eyes had lost a little glow, but perhaps that was the darkness coming in from the outside. “¿Como te sientes?” I asked. How are you feeling? She smiled at me, but not quite as usual. Her lips trembled and tightened. That’s when her water broke.
“Dios,” she said. “Ohhhh, dios…” It came out part moan, part prayer.
“It’s fine, just fine,” I said. I was up on my feet, then down on my knees near her chair. I put my hands on her face. “Look, look at me,” I said. She did, but her eyes were wild with fear. I helped her up and to the bedroom, cooing what comfort I could think of in Spanish, in English. “Calmate,” I said, “You’re all right.” I had no idea what I should do.
•
When Oliver told me in his last months that he was afraid of the ways of our world, that he felt, despite his work, his job, unable to help anyone anymore, that he felt futile and impotent, I didn’t listen. Rather, I suppose, I listened, but I didn’t hear. It wasn’t the first time, exactly, that his doubt and despair got the better of him. He was prone to sadness often. It was part of what made him so good at what he did: empathy. Or so I thought. I am not saying that his death wasn’t accidental; I don’t believe it was intentional. But I also think that when he saw it coming—the drunken slide off the church driveway across the highway and against the tree beyond—he may have welcomed it. “Listen,” he’d said to me before he went out that night, an icy one just like this one. He stood in the doorway to the bedroom. “Hmm?” I said. I didn’t look up from my book right away, and when I did, finally, he was already gone.
•
“I’m listening,” I said to the doorway. Maria Concepción was crying and laughing and murmuring. I could not hear what she was saying, but it wasn’t her words I was listening for anyway. Oliver, I needed Oliver. He would tell me what to do. He would tell me.
I’d already called for the ambulance, I knew to do that much, and I heard the sirens somewhere, not particularly close. The roads were treacherous, I knew, they would have to go slow. I had my hands on Maria’s knees; we’d moved to the bed. She pushed back up against the headboard and made a low moan, and in that instant, her baby was born. You hear these stories sometimes of quick and easy births, and you wonder if they are true—or perhaps it’s just me who wonders, never having been a mother, never having wanted to bear a child. But let me tell you that in this case, the story is true. There he was, covered in the muck of his mother, connected still but squirming and ready for breath. And it was as though Maria Concepción had practiced for this moment. She reached for the child between her legs and pulled him gently to her, careful of the cord. She ran her finger around in his mouth, she patted him and he cried. I brought towels and hot water, because that is what they do in the movies, on television, and she took these from me and when the water had cooled some, Maria cleaned her child delicately.
“He’s beautiful,” Oliver said, finally, finally. And it’s true, he was. Not in the same way as his mother was beautiful, dark and glowing. Instead, his hair was curly and golden, and his eyes, when he opened them, I knew would be blue.
“Don’t cry,” Oliver said to me. I didn’t know that I had been, but I had.
When the knock came on the door of our rooms, I went to it, ready to let the paramedics in. Only it wasn’t the paramedics. It was a man I’d seen earlier at the back of the chapel. Big and blond. With cold blue eyes.
“We’re looking for Maria—” and he said a last name I hadn’t heard before. Behind him was a black sedan, idling in the parking lot. Another blond man sat in the driver’s seat.
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know that name.” This was not a lie.
“Close the door,” Oliver said.
I stood staring at the man. He looked mean and hard as solid ice. He stared back at me. Those eyes. Those blue, blue eyes.
“Come on now,” Oliver said. “Close the door.”
“Yes,” I said to my dead husband, and the ice-cold man looked confused, surprised. “You can’t be here,” I said to the blond man, because in that instant I believed that was true. Whatever would happen later didn’t matter just then. Not in that immaculate moment.
“Close the door,” Oliver said once more.
I did. From the bedroom down the hall came a small whimper, a quiet laugh.
“Yes,” I said to Oliver again, “Yes, I heard you.”
Patricia Ann McNair’s essay collection, And These are The Good Times was named a finalist for the Montaigne Medal for most thought-provoking book of 2017. The Temple of Air, McNair’s story collection, received the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Finalist Award. Her work has appeared in various anthologies, magazines, and journals including American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Superstition Review, Word Riot, Hypertext, Prime Number, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and others. McNair also writes reviews for the Washington Independent Review of Books. She is an associate professor and director of undergraduate programs in creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and is Artistic Director for Mining the Story, a writers’ retreat at Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts in Mineral Point, Wisconsin.
