CATHEDRAL, Patrick Sean Lee [most popular ebook readers .txt] 📗

that she’d destroy the pages. Saving Isabelle? Couldn’t be. She had no idea I was at the lodge, certainly no thought about my award winner. I saw her eyes narrowing at dinner as she tried to connect my name to my book. Still, she expressed her hatred of it. Perhaps in the next few steps she’ll tell me. If I don’t slip and fall again. The trail suddenly shoots upward at a sharp angle.

“Almost there,” she says instead with a little huff of breath as she leans forward, dragging me along behind her now.

I look upward at the hill and cringe. This one makes the one we were on an hour ago that dropped precipitously down to the creek bank look like Goliath staring down at David.

“You weren’t kidding back there, were you!”

“Come on, come on, you can make it. Thirty more feet is all.”

I try to keep my pace steady and strong, and I tighten my grip on her hand. If my legs scream for me to stop, my hand in no way agrees. The hand wins out.

I am out of breath by the end of those thirty feet when we get to the top. There it is again, that blasted lake. We are beneath an overhang here where the trail ends like an incomplete sentence. I glance up at the dark granite jutting out ten feet above us, and then out across the placid water. As lakes go, I suppose this one is prettier than Toluca or Calabasas. Well, yes, hands down. Peaceful at any rate. You don’t need a ticket to come to this lake, either.

Far off to the left across the shimmering water stand the twin boulders where the main trail comes to its abrupt end…and there’s the shelf of gray rock where a few days ago she sat crumpling up the pages.

“It’s all so awesome, don’t you think, Matthew Ash? See the darker blue of the water out there?” she says pointing, not even a little out of breath.

“That’s where Sammy landed when I was thirteen. I was standing with my younger sister right there.” She raises her voice a tiny bit at there, raising her hand a tad and pointing at the slab of rock at the shore. “I was thinking he’d chicken out, but he didn’t. He jumped straight out, pinching his nose, and when he hit the water it was like a bullet! It made me suck in a deep breath the way his body knifed in.”

“I take it he eventually came up,” I say with a chuckle.

“Oh yeah. I remember the look on his face.” She laughs. “It was like shock. Ice water shock. I don’t think anyone could gasp for a breath the way he did when he shot up like a cork.

“Come with me.”

Isabella now leads me down to the shore, lying well beneath the outcropping. She sits, and then pats the rocky sand next to her. I sit a bit closer to her than I probably should, and inside I’m smiling. She draws her knees to her chest, leans forward and wraps her arms around them, intent in her gaze at the water that is as still as desert sand. Neither of us speaks for a while, until she turns her head to me.

“Do you see it, Matthew?”

“See what?”

She turns her head back to the water and is silent for a few seconds. I really don’t care to take my eyes off her, but I finally look out onto the water. Just water I’m thinking, nothing earthshaking or even particularly interesting. Finally she points straight out.

“There. A spirit right below the surface.”

I raise myself and peer out where her hand points. I squint. Perhaps a tiny bit darker, but that’s change of depth, nothing more. I’m pretty certain she’s letting her imagination run amuck, caught again in the peaceful reverie of this, her favorite spot at the lodge. I don’t want to burst her bubble, but I must say something.

“I’m sorry, Isabella, I don’t see anything but water.”

“Of course you don’t.” She turns to me and laughs softly. “But you will. He’s there.”

 

Beginning To

 Isabella

 

 

Matthew must think I’m crazy.

He might be right if that's what he thinks.

By the time we’d gotten halfway up the back trail, I found myself listening to his soft voice with growing attention. I learned quite a lot about his career as a writer, from his first days out of Columbia when he hoboed around back on the east coast, until he finally settled in Chicago “out west”. I laughed at that. But that’s where the idea for that terrible first novel struck. In a Catholic church, sitting alone, bemoaning the fact that he was next-to-penniless, with no clue as to what he should do with his life. A priest walked in, noticed him in his morose state, and approached him. He said that he listened to the guy politely as he dug for details, but was guarded in his replies.

“I simply wanted to be alone with God,” Matthew said. “He was very nice, but persistent.”

A short time later, a woman walked in, genuflected and crossed herself, and afterward took a seat in a pew far away. The priest seemed to be getting nowhere with Matthew. He blessed him, and after that casually wandered off to “bother the woman.”

God wasn’t listening—at least he wasn’t answering—and so Matthew left the church and went back to his flat.

“I kept flashing back to the priest and the woman,” he said. “Wondering, you know. Did she respond the way I wouldn't? Warm up to him? Allow him to ‘counsel’ her?

“Do you think I’m a little perverse, Isabella? I mean thinking that?”

“I suppose that depends in which direction your wondering took you, and how far down that trail you wandered,” I said half-jokingly.

“To the abbey in Monte Casino,” he replied. “I sat down that night and typed the first sentence of Saving Isabelle. In a way I regret having named her that.” He laughed softly and winked at me. His face; the way he apologized with that wink, I found it rather cute in a strange way. Now I wish I hadn’t. Sort of.

“Me too.” I told him.

“It took me a year, but I finally finished the book. I sent queries off to probably a hundred agents, who summarily rejected handling it…until Marian. The rest is history.”

 

We took the main trail back down after an hour of sitting and talking on the shore beneath the overhang. As we approached it, he admitted that his knee was killing him. And so what do I do? I became his crutch. It was slow going, but I was glad to help, because, everything else aside, he’d fessed up, at least about that.

Struggling down the trail, I told him about Brad. A lot about us. How our relationship brought me here to begin with to make some sort of decision—which decision, I’m now certain, had already been made before I left Santa Monica.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Do I believe that? I think he’s fallen for me. Truly, being sorry that Brad and I are, for all intents and purposes history, goes against the facts of the situation we find ourselves in here at the lodge.

And this Ally girl. He seems to despise her vacuous presence in his life and home.

Yes, I am crazy. If that’s what Matthew thinks, he’s right. But seriously, there is no one else here that I can relate to. Talk to, except, maybe, Bernie. Father Bernie. Daddy in absentia. As kind and loving as Bernie is, I couldn’t possibly confide in him. I came here to think, and now here I am thinking out loud to maybe the last person on earth I should be thinking out loud to. That qualifies me as crazy.

I have to admit, I’m starting to like the guy.

Ally

 

Matthew

 

I sat in the tub for an hour soaking my knee, my head bouncing back and forth from thoughts of Ally to Isabella. What a contrast. I don’t want to think of that girl, but she’s in my house, in my bed, in a strange, detached way, totally in my life.

She has to go. And so I grit my teeth and decide that, Isabella entering to take her place or otherwise, Ally must leave. I’ll…should I call her and give her the good news, or wait until I return?

Call her. Get it over with.

I dry off and leave the bathroom. To my right, outside the window, I see with a twist of my head that the sky has turned from white-spotted blue to a depressing gray. Back home the first sprinkles would soon follow, and then a steady downpour that might last for days on end. Here I see a tiny, intermittent dance of white that swirls suddenly when a gust of wind throws them into the dormer. I wonder if Frank and Michael are on their way back yet. Maybe not. If that’s the case, perhaps they’ll stay with friends down in Denver. I doubt that. They’re from Ohio I think Frank said. Surely they wouldn’t know anyone from Denver.

Who cares?

I turn away from the glass that is already starting to frost up at the corners and set my eyes on my phone over on the desk. Get it done, Matthew.

I tighten the fluffy white towel at my waist and begin to cross the room. Daniel’s piano signals an incoming. The screen lights up.

Ally.

I sweep my finger across the screen to answer. Ally starts right in.

“Matt you need to come home right now I’m sick of Maria and her constant cleaning while I’m trying to make my breakfast and I’m tired of her always asking me if I need anything when she knows perfectly well that if I need something I am perfectly capable of getting it myself and if she doesn’t stay out of our room...” she begins.

I think of Michael and how sad it is that he could only ever be her bosom buddy. I’d love for him to steal her away from me. “Slow down, Ally. One thing at a time. Try that again,” I say very nicely.

Allison remains silent for a second, and I know she is wracking her brain. Finally she has it all worked out and picks up where she left off. “Matt. Maria is getting on my nerves. I nearly threw her out today and told her not to come back.”

“Because she cleans the kitchen while you’re in there?”

“Yes. For starters.”

“What time would that be?”

“I don’t know,” she says with a great