Immersion

She dreams of her daughter's dark, sleek head bowed, almost as if in prayer, as she concentrates on her dive.  Ellen dreams she can stop Celia, call her back from the side of the pool, tell her it is too late for swimming.  Twilight has come, and there are shadows creeping across the lawn.  The water beneath her daughter is no longer a sparkling blue.
 
Visitors have streamed through Ellen's house every Wednesday afternoon for almost nine years, ever since the accident, ever since Celia was twelve years old.  They stand reverently at the glass that separates them from Celia, who lies curled on her side in the overly large hospital bed, and they whisper their prayers.  Celia's eyes are wide open and awake.
 

Ellen knows that these petitioners are not thinking about how her daughter no longer takes the front steps two at a time or how she can no longer run with grace and ease chasing a soccer ball down a long yellow field with her two younger brothers Nathan and Noel trailing far behind.
 
Ellen knows they are not seeing the girl who sang in a voice that would rise up like a small brown sparrow in effortless flight as she helped set and clear the table each morning and evening, who did her homework lounging lazily across her bed, who giggled with her best friend Alison as they sat on the front steps in the late afternoon sunshine while sharing a box of chocolate wafer cookies.
 
Ellen knows these earnest people, these pilgrims as Joe calls them, are thinking of Celia the way they think of Christ.  They are filled with the image of the Pieta--a young broken body, sculpted in smooth, cold stone, draped across a mother's lap--when they look at her crippled daughter.  Ellen hates them for that.  Her daughter is warm to the touch.
 

While washing Celia, brushing her hair, or changing her nightgown, Ellen often thinks of that time years ago, long before Celia's accident, when she understood the inescapable, primary, and unrealizable step necessary for her own redemption.
 
That night, after her  miscarriage, the nurses walked quietly down the hallways while Ellen continued to stare at her reflection in the large glass window across from her bed.  She wouldn't be able to sleep until they brought her the small plastic cup filled with brightly colored pills.
 
She thought of the nurses as angels, and she thought of those pills as her only salvation.  When she took them, she would be able to close her eyes.  She knew she would be surrounded by darkness, but she would no longer be terrorized that the shadows will suffocate her, intoxicate her, penetrate her.

Joe came early to the hospital the next morning.  He brought Celia, who wore her First Holy Communion dress.  When Ellen woke and saw her daughter standing at her bedside, she immediately closed her eyes.  She couldn't bear the harshness of the pure white light which always surrounded her small, seven-year-old daughter.

Joe told Ellen to have faith.
 
 
On Good Friday, two months after Celia's thirteenth birthday, she begins to bleed.  The sheets are stained red.  On Celia's hands, feet, and side, there are large, gaping wounds.  The priests come.  They will make a determination.

"Why?"   Ellen asks. "Why?"

Joe kneels at the foot of his daughter's bed and thanks God.  Ellen stands beside him and weeps.  She thinks of all the things she would have told Celia.  She would have told her daughter that a woman's body can create miracles, that each month she would be reminded of this possibility, that this day is sacred.

But now there is nothing left to tell Celia.


"She's always with her Jesus. She is adoring Him, waiting on Him, serving Him, and He is blessing her.  Her life is a prayer," Sister Sabine says as she, a frail, eighty-year-old nun, places a vase of wild flowers on Celia's bedside table in celebration of Celia's twenty-first birthday.

Ellen, of course, believes none of this.

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