The tour concluded with a visit to the bookstore, which looked like an unexceptional gift shop, crowded with books and fudge and prefabricated figurines of Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus. But the ladies behind the counter, the first women he had seen all morning, were straightforward and friendly, and they welcomed him with a cheerful Kentucky twang.
“You’re not going to want to leave, that is what I predict,” declared the older of the two, a large woman with bright blonde pigtails affixed to both sides of a round face. “People come down for the retreats thinking just to stay for maybe two days, but some of them come back and back and back, they find it so restful.”
“Oh yes, it’s just wonderful here, we love it here,” agreed the other, a luscious young thing in tight jeans and a pale blue tank top. “I heard you saw Father Timothy this morning; we’ve been real worried about him, he looks like he’s just wasting away and no one can get him to eat a thing! He’s real confused, too.”
“He’s very frail,” Kyle said, trying to acknowledge her concern without assuaging it. “I’m going to see him again tomorrow.” It was a trick he had worked on for years: Don’t sound like anything is too dire, but don’t offer hopeful assurances either, even tonally. In a pediatrician’s office these guarded pronouncements rarely extended to concerns past the effects of a flu shot. It had been a long time since he had had to withhold so much professional judgment around questions of life and death.
“Well, God willing, you’ll be able to help him, ’cause he is real special to me and Leeanne,” asserted the round-faced woman. “Here, let me ring that up for you.” She reached over and took the two books he held out of his hands. “The Seven Storey Mountain and The Sign of Jonas, anything else I can get for you? You didn’t want any fudge or cheese?”
“No, thank you.”
“That’ll be thirty-two fifty-three.”
Kyle paid and then headed to the infirmary, where he spent the rest of the day acquainting himself with its limited resources and doing internet research about dementia in the elderly and its associative symptoms. He downloaded several articles about Alzheimer’s disease and nutrition. He studied Father Timothy’s files and put a call in to Dr. Murrough, who returned it immediately—that hernia surgery wasn’t scheduled till the next day—and got him to fill in the blanks on Father Timothy’s medical history. Then he waited and read, uninterrupted; there were no further patients that afternoon. At 5:30 Kyle called it a day and went back to his monk’s cell to unpack his few things before dinner.
The room was spare and silent. He sat on the bed and considered taking his phone out to the designated area underneath the trees next to the parking lot, so that he might call Van and tell her about this place. The image he carried in his head, of her and Maggie going about their daily routines in the kitchen and the backyard and the park, seemed distant and irrelevant. Or maybe it was he who was irrelevant. A sudden panic jolted through him. This affectless cell was substantial in a way that he was not. Why had he come here? What was he looking for? Time and space opened around him like an empty balloon. The thought that God might make an appearance and explain a few things to him shot through his mind as a complete, terrifying absurdity. What was the use of faith itself, when it went hand in hand with the knowledge that God wasn’t going to show up? The longer he stared at the phone, the less he felt like making any move to communicate to anyone at all, much less his wife. And now, ever, and again, there was Alison crawling around the corner of his brain. Making out underneath the bleachers. Cool night air. The memory of joy, of first young love.
He looked at his watch. It read 5:52. Dinner was at 6. He had eight minutes to kill. His mind was restless, refusing to look at itself, but also refusing to be silenced. His roving attention landed on the paper bag on the bed and was caught with the quick efficiency of a hook landing firmly in the mouth of a trout. He picked up the small package and tilted it forward, allowing the two books inside to slip into his hands. The Seven Story Mountain and The Sign of Jonas. He had bought them both almost out of a sense of duty, wanting to let all these nice people know that like everybody else who made a pilgrimage to this monastery he was mightily impressed with the famous monk. He glanced at Seven Story Mountain and rejected it because that was the one everyone read. The cover of The Sign of Jonas presented a photograph of a monk in those robes—which had come to impress him more and more with their straightforward beauty—striding across a lonely landscape. He opened the book and started to read.
Five minutes later, he set the book down, his eyes smarting. The voice of the writer, landing with astonishing clarity across the years, smote him. “I have a peculiar horror of one sin,” the monk wrote. “The exaggeration of our trials and of our crosses.”
Kyle stared at his hands. He felt his heart move.
eleven