If I went back to bed, I wouldn’t get up. I had to keep moving. Maybe I should have never left to pursue anything other than what I’d been given at home. Was I being punished? Did I even believe that God punished?
I glanced at the pages scattered across the tiny kitchen table: my notes, work, and research. It all seemed futile. I tried and I worked and I tried and I wrote and I did what I thought was best—and now my cousin was sleeping with my husband? She wanted to claim my family as hers?
My emotions spun out of control—I blamed myself, blamed Bill, blamed Renee, and then of course blamed God himself. Bill was despicable. He wandered through life fulfilling his needs and then settled on my cousin? Rage coursed through my body like fire.
I finally dressed and with haste pulled my hair up, wrapped myself tight in a coat, and burst outside to find my breath.
I walked the streets like the dove from Noah’s ark in search of mooring but finding only water, endless miles of ocean and nowhere safe to land. It was of course all my doing, the ruin in which I found myself. What did I think would happen if I left Bill with the perfect Renee? What did I think would happen if I chased peace and health across an ocean?
I had destroyed my own ark.
For hours I wandered through London—the first city I’d ever really loved—twisting through alleyways I’d never seen, around squares that ended where I started, in parks of deep green. It was late afternoon by the time I paused on Westminster Bridge over the River Thames. The sunlight both rosy and golden, the bloated and magnificent moon hanging in the sky behind me while the false moon of Big Ben loomed before me. When darkness began to filter through, evening leaking into the edges of the river, I walked with determination to the Abbey. The arched windows of the sand-castle cathedral glittered in the twilight, their stained glass beckoning me to view their glory inside. It would close tomorrow to prepare for the June coronation, and I needed to find refuge before the doors shut me out.
I slipped in. A service had just begun. The sanctuary surrounded me like a Gothic forest, the buttresses winging down over the crowd of over five hundred people. I took stock: altar boys in white carrying burning candles, priests in black at the front of the altar, and the black-checkered floor leading me toward a pew on the left side.
“The Lord be with you,” the priest said from the front of the church, his words echoing with a reverberating bellow.
“And with thy spirit,” we responded as one.
I stayed, and the service felt both familiar and cleansing, a ritual that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, a sanctity. When the lights were shut off for the homily, only candlelight and torches and twilight saturated the sanctuary. When the Eucharist was over I was the last to linger, alone in a pew with thoughts that would not settle. Eventually I rose to return home and collapse into bed, the grief as heavy as concrete.
I wept for all the loss I had never acknowledged, all the pain I’d held in reserve: my marriage, my dreams, my career, and my health. To acknowledge their demise meant to mourn them, and I hadn’t been ready.
The next morning I began my wanderings again, prowling through the city like a stray cat. I didn’t want Bill back. Not now. Almighty, no! But the betrayal in my own house felt as sick as any illness that had sent me to bed.
It was unseasonably warm, the sky a cloudless and intense blue. I draped my coat over my arm and put one foot in front of the other. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t read. I could merely walk and feel.
This time I found myself at St. Paul’s perched on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in London, where I might be closest to God or myself or whatever great sorrow moved within me. It was an Anglican church, and I’d seen the old black-and-white photos of it surrounded by smoke from the bombings of the 1940 blitz. The great dome of the cathedral built in the 1600s, a round mountain of man’s tribute to God, had survived. Men had stood all night, passing water buckets and fighting to save what now stood as my sanctuary, and I climbed to it with knees shaking, entered with the remnants of my torn life trailing behind.
This time the church was empty, my footsteps echoing under the vast dome as I approached the altar. The English baroque style was a sharp contrast to the Gothic spires of the Abbey. There was too much for my eye to absorb—gold and winged archways, jewels and embellished carvings, and stained glass everywhere as the scenes of Christ’s life unfolded before me. Sunlight spilled from the windowed dome overhead, falling upon me, the floor, the pews, and carved statues. Ropes held me back from approaching the gold and marble altar, three candlesticks on top—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The dark wood pillars on either side were twisted, leading my sight upward, past the arched stained glass of Christ on the cross, higher still to the dome, where marble angels looked heavenward as if to remind us we were being guarded and loved.