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Part One:

The Kingdom of Heaven

Ada

            When I first met you

            I cut your hair on my front porch

            with plastic scissors.

            I was afraid

            to press cold metal against

            your head, so soft and

            trusting, and your hair

            smelling sweet like new green leaves

            and the soap your mom

            put in the shower.

            So I borrowed my sister's

            plastic pair and it

            came out so bad I

            didn't want you to see but

            you stood in the yard

            and smiled and said

            "I like it, I really like it,

             I really like you."

Simon

Ada started hearing the voices on a Sunday. That's why I didn't worry at first, you see. Sundays are days of reflection for us, and sometimes when someone is reflecting they can hear things within themselves and not know where they came from. People tell me all the time that they hear things while they're praying. So you see, I thought she was just being very spiritual.

I thought it was a moment of peace.

            It was November, a month for cold, clinging beauty. We'd walked from our car to the church that morning through a cluster of frozen trees whose branches were heavily strewn with icicles, remnants of the ice storm the night before. The church looked like something out of a Gothic novel, towering over the rigid branches like a nightmare. It would've been the perfect day for a funeral.

            I was halfway through the Eucharist when Ada stood up. I'd just finished the part of the service where I retell the story of the Last Supper, when Jesus took the bread and the cup and gave us a way to remember him together. I said, "Amen." And then, as I looked up to turn the page of the prayer book, I saw Ada standing alone at the front of the church, her eyes unfocused, confused.

            I paused for a moment, unsure of what she was doing. A few people were looking at her with half-hearted interest, but the rest either didn't notice or simply assumed that she had been moved, in her devotion to Jesus, to stand. Most people don't question the rector's wife as a rule; she could probably have begun chanting ancient Buddhist poems as I preached, and no one would have said a word. I waited, and when she didn't seem to realize I was pausing for her, I kept on with the service, leading the congregation in the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.

            Finally, when an usher touched her arm to signal that it was her turn to move to the altar for communion, she seemed to snap back to consciousness. Looking vaguely embarrassed, she walked up, folded her hands into a little bowl, and received the wafer from me with a hesitant smile. I smiled back, and forgot all about it until the car ride home.

            But she was the one who brought it up, as we climbed out of the car and tottered on icy pavement to the house the parish had given us a year ago. "That sure was a strange service," she muttered, her face turned away from me. "I really need to start getting a little more sleep."

            "What was with you today? It was like you forgot where you were."

            "I did." I opened the door, and she slid hurriedly past me, flinging her scarf on the end table. "I think I really might have forgotten."

            Ada and I actually met in a church, an old stone monstrosity in Michigan, where we're both from originally. She had just come home from college at Concordia University, where she was a junior, and I was starting what seemed like my millionth semester at Eastern Michigan. I'd been forced to alternate semesters between taking classes and dropping out to work in order to save up for tuition, so I was getting kind of sick of the whole thing, and feeling sort of hopeless, like I'd been standing in a long line that never seemed to move.

            It was midnight mass on Christmas Eve, and between the regular parishioners and the Easter-and-Christmas-only Christians the whole church was packed to the gills with men in suits and women wearing long strings of what may or may not have been real pearls. There were candles everywhere, and when I looked down the aisle and saw Ada receiving communion at the altar, she was ringed in soft light- celestial, encircled in that quiet glow like a slender, girl-shaped Saturn. I'd seen her around the church with her parents- her father was on the vestry, her mom taught Sunday School, and she herself has been an acolyte for a couple years in her teens, though I hadn't been a churchgoer back then. She was known for her temper, for her tendency to argue loudly with church leaders over what they believed, and for her insistence that children who behaved poorly should be thrown out of the church.

We'd passed each other numerous times during services, and I suppose I'd harbored a general feeling that she was a reasonably interesting, and not entirely unattractive, type of person. But I'd never seen her like I saw her that night: a woman reflecting the radiance around her, magnifying it with something inside her, something intangible. I don't know that, if I'd seen a photograph of her on someone's desk, I would have thought of her as beautiful. But in person, there was something in the way she spoke, something in her speech or her eyes or the way she moved her shoulders, that was different than anything I'd ever seen before, or have ever seen since.

Then, I thought it was the spirit of God.

Now, though, I'm inclined to wonder if it wasn't something altogether different.

            After Ada's strange behavior that Sunday, everything seemed to return to normal. She didn't seem- I don't know, it was like she hardly even remembered it had happened. She never mentioned it after that first momentary discussion, and it didn't seem, at the time, to be anything outside of Ada's usual spectrum of strange behavior. I mean, this was a woman who argued with the garbage disposal, who sang aloud to herself on the subway, who once ate an entire pecan pie in one sitting. One moment of confusion was hardly a pattern.

            Ada was always, I admit, a quirky woman, and I realize how dangerous it is to describe her as such, as though she were a character in an indie film- bob-haired, heavily make-uped, smoking in bathrooms, hiding dark secrets with lively banter and clever tricks. But this isn't how I want you to see her at all- she was ordinary looking, and had long hair, and only once tried a cigarette, back in college. Really, it wasn't so much that she was odd- it was that she was able to do things that other people always wanted to do but couldn't, say things that everyone thought but few vocalized. Sometimes I'd joke that I'd married a seven-year-old, a charge that always brought forth protestations of my own infantile hobbies and habits: baseball cards, Saturday morning cartoons, dominos. But it wasn't that she was childish- it was that most children, when they grew into adults, developed an adult way of being, a grown-up exterior. And Ada never did. Once she saw a dead bird and cried for two hours. She liked to eat Milano cookies for breakfast, dipping them into her hot coffee and then letting the soggy sweetness dissolve in her mouth. She loved to wrap our cat Lucy (short for Lucifer, her perverse idea of a joke) in a blanket and take her outside to the yard, let her stare around at the outside world with huge, dazed eyes.

             Do you see? See how easy it was for me, for our congregation, to forget about it, to assume that nothing would change, that what we knew about Ada was already carved in stone, unchangeable as God himself?

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