The priest leaned back in his chair and considered his response. Anna’s face gave him reason to take her seriously. He didn’t ask her name. “Let’s see …” He thought for a moment longer. “Okay, Miss.” The priest rearranged himself in the desk chair and Anna smiled briefly when he addressed her as “Miss.” “When you were a child, did you ever play with dominos? Did you set them in a line and topple them? Stack them? Push them over?”
“Yes.”
“Of course. All that time spent putting them right, aligning them just so, and then with such a little push everything falls.” Anna nodded. “Think of your life as a long line of dominos, yes? A chain of days and years. Every domino is a choice. This one is where you went to school. Here is the man you married. Here’s the house you moved into. Here’s the roast you cooked for Sunday supper …” The priest mimed setting up dominos with his hands. “Our lives are cause and effect. Even the smallest choices matter. One domino hits the other, and then the next and the next.” The priest tapped the first invisible domino with his index finger and with that, the whole imaginary regiment pitched forward. Anna could almost hear the clink of bone-colored Bakelite as the array unzipped. “It’s God who doles out the dominos. It is we who set them in line and tip them over. We have no control over the particular lot we’re given. But we can choose how to arrange what we have. And we can choose to start over, when everything’s been knocked down and broken. Do I believe in predestination? No. A foreordained eternity effectively puts me out of a job.” He tittered and smiled at Anna, who tried to smile back.
It was a simple, sincere analogy built for a child. A kind truth spoken kindly, a kind man who spoke it. The tears she’d waited on all day finally welled in her eyes.
But as much as she longed to believe what the priest had said, she couldn’t. Accidents that are fated to happen simply will. She’d wanted him to convince her otherwise. He’d come the closest of anyone.
The priest looked at her with sympathy. “Now,” he continued, “can you tell me about the bruises?” Anna sniffed but didn’t respond. He cleared his throat as he opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a file. He thumbed through the pages as he spoke. “I want to help you. But,” he continued as he pulled a sheet of paper from the file, “I’m not sure that issues of doctrinal theology are among your most pressing concerns at the moment.” His paternal voice was so soothing that it shattered her. “Perhaps it might be wisest if you consulted a professional.” He passed the paper to Anna. It was a list of local English-speaking psychiatrists. Doktor Messerli’s name was the fourth from the top. “Or, if you’d rather, I can call for you …”
Anna shook her head though without great conviction. No, no, no.
The priest was waiting on Anna to continue when a knock on the doorjamb caused both of them to turn and look. It was a tall, gaunt man with wide-set eyes. He looked over Anna’s head without acknowledging her presence and began complaining to the priest about church music, organ repair, the choirmaster, the choir, and, in the end, the priest himself who hadn’t answered an email of compelling urgency quickly enough. The man spoke impatiently; his voice was haughty and imperative.
The priest scowled at the man, who Anna assumed was the organist, who was tapping his foot and pulling a face of his own. The priest returned his gaze to Anna with continued sympathy. “I’m so sorry. Please. I’ll only be a moment. Would you like some tea? I will bring you some tea.” Anna blinked and the priest rose and left his office. She could hear him grousing at the organist as they walked down the hall, the click of their shoes on the floor growing less audible the farther away they walked.
Anna waited until she couldn’t hear them anymore and then rose from the chair and left the office and slipped out of the church with the same sad ease she so often slipped out of her clothes.
So there it is. And there, just there, it was.
She walked back the way she came, past the high school, through the slim lip of city park above Stadelhofen, over the walkway, and down the swooping, skeletal staircase into the plaza in front of the train station, moving south toward the opera house and the lake.
She didn’t even think twice once the idea occurred to her.
It was a number she’d never called. What time was it? It was just past three in Zürich. In Boston it was nine in the morning. She sat on the steps of the opera house. The phone rang twice before he answered.
“Stephen Nicodemus.”
She hadn’t rehearsed what she was going to say. There’d been no forethought to this call. It happened so quickly it was compulsive. She cleared her throat and pressed forward. “Stephen.”
“Yes?”
“It’s Anna.”
“Anna?” She’d surprised him, that was clear. “Anna!” He repeated her name with brightness. Anna’s heart lightened. “How are you?” His emphasis was on the “you.”
“I’m …” She wasn’t going to tell him how she was. She spoke through an imaginary smile. “I’m okay.” There was relative truth in that. Now or never, Anna. Say what you came to say. “I’ve been thinking about you. I wanted to call and say hello. You know?” If he did, he didn’t say so. “I miss you.”