“I just came to use the chapel,” Michael Doherty said, stepping inside. “I’ll only be about half an hour. I need to get out of the fray for a little while.”
Sister Gabriel smiled and nodded. Michael Doherty did this every once in a while. They were used to him. He was used to them, too, and wouldn’t try to make them talk when he knew they weren’t supposed to. He followed Sister Gabriel down the hall to the center section and bid her good night as she turned to the right to go to her cell. He turned to the left and made his way to the chapel.
Usually, when Michael Doherty went to this chapel, he sat front and center so that he could look at the wall-size stained-glass window that had been given to the order by a benefactor in 1987. It was one of the most powerful depictions of the resurrection he had ever seen—not good art so much as effective art—and it always made him feel lifted up. Tonight, he moved instead to the side, where a large picture of the Blessed Margaret Finney had been set up under a small crucifix. He sat down in a pew at the front and rubbed at the little finger of his right hand. He had cut it trying to do something to save the child, grabbing for something on a tray, he couldn’t remember what. The cut was long and thin and hurt like Hell. He stretched out his legs and looked the Blessed Margaret Finney straight in the eye.
“Margaret,” he said, “sometimes I wish I wasn’t so educated. Sometimes I wish I could be like that woman who came to my office this morning and believe in physical miracles. Sometimes I just wish I didn’t have to spend nights like tonight.”
He closed his eyes and put back his head and thought about it all, the way he had thought about it when he first decided to enter the seminary, the things that had convinced him. The lame will walk and the blind will see, he thought, and it was true. It just wasn’t true the way they wanted it to be, the skeptics and believers both. Nothing went poof. No instant cures rained down from the sky or blossomed out of pairs of praying hands. The blind will see and the lame will walk and they did—because in every place Christian civilization had touched, the progress of medical technology had been startling. It was nice to say that medical science had done it only in rebellion against Christianity, as a friend of his had told him when he’d tried to explain all this, but the fact was that a hundred years ago, most of the world had been made up of societies hostile to science. Why had it all happened here? It was a weak argument and he knew it. It didn’t begin to answer the questions he asked on nights like tonight. It was still the only argument he had and he held to it, because it was the only way he could explain the emotional part. The emotional part was solid. It harbored no doubts at all.
It was cold in the chapel and he was feeling sleepy. He had a parish to look out for and a few dozen parishioners who were going to need his help. He had only so much time to spend hiding from the world like this. He opened his eyes and said, “Well, Margaret, I’m going to go back to work. That’s why I’m so in favor of having you declared a saint. You were always going back to work.”
He grabbed ahold of the kneeler rail in front of him and started to stand up, and that was when he noticed it. Actually, that was when he didn’t notice it, the pain in the little finger of his right hand. The pain had been there, a sharp stabbing thing, since he knew the fight for the child was lost. It had probably been there before that, but unnoticed. He looked down at his hand and blinked.
There was nothing there.
No line of red.
No blood smeared against the skin.
No ridge of skin jutting up from the cut.
Nothing.
Father Michael Doherty looked back up at the picture of the Blessed Margaret Finney and then to the crucified Christ above her and started to smile.
He could have been mistaken.
He might never have had a cut at all.
He could have imagined the whole thing.
Imagined or not, he was never going to tell a single soul on earth what had just happened to him.
They would never believe him.