Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

They took walks in the December mountains. They told each other's lives like stories. She dared him a dozen dares and he took them on for her, taking off his clothes and sitting screaming in the icy stream while she laughed and clapped, rushing to him with their blanket and drying him gently like some astonishing new proof of God. He jumped off rocks and climbed trees, clambering slippingly among the wet branches, losing his footing, cutting his chin, triple-scratching the top of his head, and arriving forty feet above her, where at last he could answer her question and tell her what the view was like from up there. Neither did he mention his fear of heights, nor the swimming world below him, where her face seemed to bob and waver like a watery moon.

A season of tests and provings. To Gabriella Castoldi it was the unlikeliest thing; her experience of passion had taught her mistrust, and as she did not believe that she was beautiful or truly gifted, she first imagined Stephen Griffin's loving as something with the tender insubstantiality of a dream. It would pass in its own time. But when the days ran on and the strange sweetness of his presence lingered longer, Gabriella found herself waiting for the moment when he arrived at the door. He had left his kisses in her imagination, and they lived like exotic roses, blooming wild.

Five days before Christmas, when the people of the town had begun complaining that the sunny weather had robbed the season of its spirit, Gabriella lay across the body of Stephen and decided she had to break the back of love.

If it would break.

Nothing that is good in the world can last long, she believed, and the sweetness of those days and nights in the cottage had brought her to a frightening vulnerability.

She lay where Stephen could not see her face and she told him that he must go back to Clare.

“You must go back to your job,” she said.

He said nothing. He touched the top of her head and stroked her hair.

“I have no job,” he said.

“You have. You will get it back.” She was still not looking at him. “Then you will be going to your father for Christmas.”

“I have sent him a card. I told him I was going to ask you to come.”

“I won't,” she said, and then, while moving her right hand slowly across the pale softness of his belly in a gesture that would lodge in the underwater sand of his memory, she took a firm blow at love and said, “I am leaving. I am going back to Venice.”

Silence. Her back was to him. When Stephen spoke, his voice cracked like glass in the blind air behind her.

“How long will you be … Will you be …” He didn't want to say coming back, he wanted the small room hope needs to survive.

“I don't know,” said Gabriella, “I have to go. For now. I have to,” she said, weeping onto his skin, kissing it gently like a farewell, and wondering why she felt the brutal necessity of testing love, of bending its back towards breaking, and trying to bring on before time the grief she imagined was inevitable.

Slowly she ran her hands down the length of his legs in last caresses. Then she turned over and saw the vanquished ruin of his face, and without telling him that she already suspected that she was pregnant, or that she could not herself dare to imagine as true and durable the love he was offering her, she reached out and touched his wet cheek and said, “Stefano, make love to me.”

It was Christmas Eve when Stephen drove across the country once more to the house of his father. A misting rain was falling and the still unrepaired rubber of his windscreen wipers smeared it on the glass like fingers at the blood of a wound. He peered forward, but drove into unseeable country, his heart leaking the disconsolate acid of lost love. Three times he was stopped at Garda checkpoints, where big-shouldered men wore the rain like a stain on their backs and dripped it from the brims of their caps, leaning down to check the Christmas drivers for drunkenness. Stephen told one of them he did not drink, but his words came out warped with emotion and he was Breathalyzed all the same. When he was closer to the city, driving down the last part of the motorway into the four o'clock darkness, he almost crashed, as in a disturbed dream, into the white flanks of a wild horse.

In all, there were nine of them, galloping like a bizarre vision across the thrown lights of the cars and taking off down the motorway ahead of him. They flashed across the darkness, charging before the headlights into Dublin. For a mile the horses kept to the motorway. They trotted past the lights that changed green before they got there and disappeared, like ghosts of themselves, into the places where had once been fields.

Stephen drove the first car behind the horses and thought of Gabriella. He had already realized without shock that when you give yourself completely to someone else you see the world through their eyes, and easily imagined her own delight at the strange wildness of the scene. But then, when the horses took off to gallop to the left along the toll road to the airport, he turned right and felt the leaving of Gabriella like phantom pain in a lost limb.

When he arrived, the house lights were on. He found his key and walked across the wet lawn and was on the point of opening the door when Philip Griffin did it before him.

“Stephen,” he said, briefly looking into the space where the woman was not with him and, with the strange awkwardness of those facing unfamiliar mechanics, reaching suddenly forward to embrace his son.

Together, after ham sandwiches and Mr. Kipling's mince pies, Philip and Stephen Griffin drove to Midnight Mass, which was at ten o'clock. Earlier that afternoon, on the numbing tide of his third painkiller, Philip had slipped £600 between the railings of Stephen's Green, and had gone home hoping to see in his son's expression something of the fair justice of God. He had now deposited £5,387 in the green place of the city centre. He had never put the money in the same place twice, nor had he ever gone back to see if it was gone.

The Griffins drove into the city beneath the lights of Christmas. They did not speak, but instead passed small comments on the lights, the traffic, or the rain, making use of that ancient code like spies burdened with the secret vulnerability of the world. They arrived at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament and hurried across the black weather into the organ music and the rising hum of the Rosary. They knelt and said nothing. They were two men missing women, and until the priest arrived they stayed on their knees and were, like everyone else, lost in the privacies of their own personal longing and beseeching, silent voices ascending to unknowable heaven.

The Mass began. The priest was an old man. He had said Christmas Mass in eighteen parishes, including three in Africa, and, like Philip Griffin, fully expected this to be his last. He said the prayers slowly, as if journeying back on each one into the memories of the past. And when he came to the small stand of the pulpit for the sermon, he looked down at the faces of the congregation with the serene and beatific expression of a man who has at last made peace with himself.

“I wish each of you a happy and joyful Christmas,” he said, and then swallowed his breath and lost the rest of his sermon, realizing he had reached the tranquil and easeful end of words, saying nothing, just holding out his hands for a long moment in front of him, as if passing to everyone an invisible gift of joy.

To the surprise of his heart Stephen Griffin received it. He felt a strange and spreading lightness, and by the time he was sitting and watching his father go to receive Communion, he discovered he had somehow been gifted a piece of white linenlike optimism. He rose and passed his father coming back along the aisle. He took the host in his mouth for the first time in years and felt it taste like the memory of goodness. He returned and knelt down and prayed for his mother and his sister in the prayers he did not know were the echoes of his father's. Then the Mass was over and the old priest left the altar a last time. The Griffins stood up at the same time, moving from the church with the melted Communion still lingering like grace and their spirits joined with something rare and fragile as faith.