In the morning they fight again. Peter is running late for work and is shorter with her than usual, and her tolerance, worn down by the tension of yesterday, is even thinner now. He leaves with the fight unresolved, and when she gets to work she feels sick from the conflict. It is only by the time of her morning break that she wonders if the sick feeling is more than frustration at their argument. When the smell of her colleagues’ coffee sends her running to the toilet, she catches herself thinking, half hopeful, of what this might mean.

Nothing comes, but the nausea she continues to feel is bad enough to send her home. Her boss agrees that she looks pale, and so she drives home, getting back just before lunchtime. Not feeling very hungry, she makes herself a cup of soup and toast, and then wonders what to do with her afternoon.

The thought to ring her sister comes to her a little unexpectedly. She seldom rings her siblings, except for birthdays or other special events, and they ring her still more rarely. But, once she has thought it, the thought clings, until she finds herself dialling Sarah’s number and waiting for her to answer.

When Sarah answers and Alana starts speaking, she can hear, in the silence between replies, that Sarah does not understand why she has called, and inside each pause Alana wrestles with the conflicting urges on one hand to hang up and cry and on the other to tell Sarah what is really on her mind – that which she has only partially begun to admit to herself.

“Who is it?” asks a child’s voice in the background.

“It’s Aunty Lani,” says Sarah. “Do you want to say hello?”

“Yes,” says the girl. There is a rustling as the phone is handed over. “Hi Aunty Lani,” says the girl.

“Hello Annabelle!” says Alana. “How are you?”

“Good.”

A pause. “That’s good. Have you done anything special today?”

“Um…yes.”

“And what was that?”

“Um…well, we looked at…Mummy and I opened the Advent calendar.”

“And what did you get today?”

“Um…there was a chocolate and…um…a picture of a fairy.”

She still can’t quite pronounce her r’s. She says the word, fair-we. Alana smiles.

“Was there? That sounds lovely, Annabelle.”

“Yes.”

A pause.

“I’m looking forward to seeing you at Christmas,” says Alana.

“Yes,” says Annabelle. “Did you know I’m getting a bike for Christmas?”

“No, I didn’t. How exciting.”

“Yes.”

Another pause.

“Annabelle,” says Sarah’s voice in the background, “we need to go soon, sweetie.”

“I’ve got to go now, Aunty Lani,” says Annabelle.

“Okay Annabelle. Can I talk…”

“Bye Alana,” Sarah calls from the background.

The phone clicks.

Alana stares at the kitchen clock as it flickers and flashes in silence.

Go to Day Eighteen

“Can I tell you a story?” asks Alana, when they are in bed.

He is lying down and Alana, seated upright, is looking down at him as she often does on the occasions that he is sick and she is caring for him. But tonight Alana’s expression is different; it looks more silent, more pensive, like she has run ahead in a race and is now waiting for him to catch up. Only he is sinking into the bed, no energy to run, no consciousness of the race.

“What’s the story?” he asks, slowly.

“I read it yesterday,” she says. “It’s from the gospel of Luke – the story of Elizabeth. John the Baptist’s mother.”

Peter pauses. “Why do you want to tell me that story?” he asks.

Alana shrugs. “It was a nice story. I thought it might encourage us.”

“I’m a bit tired, Lani,” he says. “I might just go to bed.”

She frowns. “Okay…”

“Don’t be upset,” he says. “I just…I’m not in the mood for stories tonight.”

She looks away.

“Lani,” he says.

“Just go to sleep,” she says.

For a while they lie in bed, neither sleeping nor saying anything, until Alana feels that the silence is about to explode and finally breaks it.

“I know you don’t understand it,” she says.

“Understand?” he asks. “Understand what?”

“Going to church. And reading the Bible. You think it’s stupid.”

“I didn’t say that,” he begins.

“You didn’t need to,” she says. “I just…need some hope. You want me to sit back and believe that it’ll be okay. Why should I believe that? What can I trust in to tell me it’s okay? Us? You?”

“Lani…”

She has sat up and turned on the lamp. Peter sits up too.

“No,” she says. “I hate it when you say my name like that – like it’s a complaint. Not when we’re fighting. Not like that. Don’t patronise me. And don’t apologise,” she adds, when she sees Peter go to speak. “I want you to hear me before you apologise.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’m listening.”

Alana is silent.

“What is it?” he asks. “I’m listening.”

Alana shakes her head. “No, you’re not,” she says.

She turns off the lamp and lies down on her side, her back to Peter.

After a time of not sleeping, he gets up and goes into the living room. When he wakes up, having fallen asleep to the TV, he returns slowly to bed. Alana mumbles; he tells her to sleep. They do not speak again until morning.

Go to Day Seventeen

The service closes with an offer of prayer for anyone who has been “challenged by anything in tonight’s service”. There will be people available at the side of the church, they say, for anyone interested. Alana looks at Peter, asking with her eyes if they should go forward. Peter hesitates, but Alana nods reassuringly and takes his hand, and soon they are walking to the side, where a small group of people are already gathering, sitting in pairs or groups of three, heads bowed, mouths whispering. Peter looks around him. There are two people, the girl who read the Bible and a man about the same age as her, sitting to the side. They smile at Peter and Alana as they approach.

The room feels warm to Peter. It is a muggy night and he is sweating. The building does not appear to have any fans and the open windows do not seem to make much difference. His skin prickles a little. They sit down.

“How can we pray for you?” asks the girl.

Peter looks at Alana. What can they say, he wonders? They have never met these people before. Why would he tell these strangers what he has not even told his closest friends? What even is there to tell?

“Well,” says Alana, eyes looking into his, then away. “We’ve been married for six years, and we’re trying…”

Peter swallows. His head feels dense and thick, as though enclosed. Alana’s mouth keeps moving, her lips somehow opening and closing without sound – at least, not enough sound to push through the wall, a strange, dull membrane pressing over his ears, over his skull, his forehead, his eyes. The girl and boy both smile at them; eyes smile above mouths, and mouths continue to pray, hands assisting the motion of wind around them; and always the membrane presses down, thick with silence, heavy with sweat. Lord, we ask…Snatches of words, of sentences escape, through the membrane, into ears, like a frog absorbing water, and then out they push, in the circularity of the room. Lord we ask…lift up to you…ask in your name…hear our prayer…Alana looks up and smiles. Somewhere, on a face nearby, Peter smiles too, lips mutely, squarely following commands that his brain somehow knows, in spite of himself, to give.

And then they go home, Peter only vaguely aware of the steps they take out of the church and into the car, mind only half conscious of the road he is driving on, processing only the sensations of headlights sliding through the night sky around them and the hum of the car engine and the pregnant silence of Alana beside him.

Go to Day Sixteen

Sing aloud, O daughter Zion;
shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!
The LORD has taken away the judgments against you,
he has turned away your enemies.

Who, Alana wonders, are her enemies? She can often see them clearly in her mind’s eye: those whose faces and voices she recirculates in her head, mouths sneering, hearts laughing, words condemning who she is and what she has achieved.

The king of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst;
you shall fear disaster no more.
On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:
Do not fear, O Zion;
do not let your hands grow weak.

She looks, almost instinctively, down at her hands, at the chewed ends of her nails, then looks back up at the girl who stands at the front, reading the Bible to the congregation. The girl’s enunciation is perfect, her voice strong and growing stronger. Alana wonders if she too could speak strongly like that.

The LORD, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing
as on a day of festival.

A festival, she thinks, a real festival – when people rejoice instead of arguing. When they rejoice together. What, she wonders, would it look like for God to rejoice over her with gladness? She cannot quite picture it, but the thought of it makes her warm for a moment.

There are other thoughts, too, playing in her mind: the vague sense of hope that has started to build up in her this week; the feeling that perhaps her prayers are being answered; the faint indicators in her body that make her hope more; the fear that it may not be true; the fear that she should not, cannot, tell Peter, at least not now…

The warmth of the moment before has turned faintly, imperceptibly, to a kind of clamminess. She sits and does her best to listen, not think.

I will remove disaster from you,
so that you will not bear reproach for it.
I will deal with all your oppressors
at that time.

Briefly, Alana’s mind flits to an image of her sister and her mother. She pushes it out the instant she recognises it, but there it was, quick but undeniable. She glances down again at her hands.

And I will save the lame
and gather the outcast,
and I will change their shame into praise
and renown in all the earth.

Once, at Christmas, she was playing with her niece. They were playing Connect Four and Annabelle, as always, was winning the game in the most complex of ways, bamboozling Alana with rules that she was quite confident never existed. When, finally, Alana managed to win a game, Annabelle had started to display one of her more impressive sulking fits, so Alana started tickling her to distract her from the sulk. And at first it had worked; Annabelle, despite calling out for her to stop, laughed gleefully and writhed around on the ground beside the coffee table until, with one particularly swift jerk of her head, her forehead collided with the table leg and, within moments, her laughter had been replaced by tears and the slow seeping of blood down her brow. As Sarah had wiped her daughter’s face and held an icepack to her forehead, she had looked at Alana and said, “Honestly, Lani, I thought I could leave her with you for at least a few minutes.” And then she had looked back at Annabelle and said, “Does it still hurt, darling?” And Alana had left the room and sat alone until Peter had found her and tried his best to say that Sarah had not meant it the way it had sounded. When Alana had finally found the courage to go back, her mother had found her and said, “Sarah’s really upset, Lani. You need to talk to her.” And somehow it had all just kept spiralling and spiralling, seemingly beyond all remedy. She can scarcely remember now how it had ever been resolved, and feels sick now at the thought of it. She tries not to think about it, turning her eyes again to the Bible reading girl.

At that time I will bring you home,
at the time when I gather you;
for I will make you renowned and praised
among all the peoples of the earth,
when I restore your fortunes
before your eyes, says the LORD.

As the reading finishes, Alana notices that the warmth and the clamminess have both dissipated, but somehow the words cling to, a little awkwardly but inescapably. The Bible reader takes her seat; Alana’s eyes remain locked in middle distance, focused seemingly on something that she cannot see.

Go to Day Fifteen

“Lift up your hearts.”

“We lift them to the Lord.”

“Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.”

“It is right to give our thanks and praise.”

Standing, they face the front of the church where three Advent candles flicker in their wreath beside the two still unlit ones. The voices rise around them. Peter puts his hands in his pockets. Alana’s voice sounds louder than usual.

“All glory and honour be yours always and everywhere, mighty Creator, everliving God…”

Peter’s mind processes the words at the same time as he takes in the surrounding room. It is, on the face of it, a traditional church building: lead-light windows containing pictures of saints and Bible stories, carved wooden pulpit and (unused) choir stalls; in almost every way like the small-town Anglican churches where he spent his childhood and which they would visit sporadically throughout their first few years of marriage. The church where they were married looked like this. The church where Alana’s niece was baptised looked like it too. But there are differences: the data projector replacing prayer books; the lower age of the congregation; the casual dress of the minister; the confident tone with which the liturgy is proclaimed…

“We give you thanks and praise for our Saviour Jesus Christ, who by the power of your Spirit was born of Mary and lived as one of us…”

He looks at Alana; she turns her face slightly towards him, catching him in the corner of her eye and smiling briefly.

“By his death on the cross and rising to new life, he offered the one true sacrifice for sin and obtained an eternal deliverance for his people…”

Thankyou, she had said, after they had come home last week from the evening church service. I’m really glad we went. I think it was good for us to go.

He hadn’t known what to say, and so he had said, Yes, it was good to go.

I feel a lot more hopeful, she had said. I prayed about it, and I think it’s going to be okay.

Of course it is, he had said, and kissed her. It’s going to be fine.

“Therefore with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we proclaim your great and glorious name, for ever praising you and saying…”

I read the story of Hannah again, she had said. God can answer our prayers. He knows how much we want this.

Yes, he had said, yes, he does.

“Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.”

The floorboards are wooden, Peter notices, and there is no carpet. He gazes at the floorboards and breathes.

Go to Day Fourteen

One day he had come into the living room to find Alana crying. She had been on the phone to her mother and something had been said to shake her equilibrium, words said perhaps with the best of intentions but with the worst of consequences. At first Peter had tried, as he so often did, to fix what he saw as misaligned, only remembering too late that this was never the best way to handle things.

When they had quietened down and were no longer shouting, no longer defending their own positions, he had looked at Alana and said something he remembered once her asking him to say when she was upset.

“It will be okay,” he said, not quite knowing what he meant by that.

She had paused for a moment and then said, “Will we?”

At first Peter was shocked by the change from talking about it to us. There was a vague churning inside his stomach.

“What do you mean?” he had asked, his voice choking slightly.

“You know what I mean,” Alana had replied, with a strange coyness that he did not quite understand. “We’re…okay, aren’t we?”

“Of course,” he said, then hesitated for a moment. It was hard, this tiptoeing around the topic, naming things with it and we, always in the shadows, never in the open. Then he looked at her and said, “It takes time.”

For a moment Alana had not responded, looking at him uncertainly, as if he had changed the topic or else surprised her by locating precisely what she had meant. He could not tell from her eyes which it was. Then her eyes had become fixed again, their two trains of conversation realigned, and she had said, “Does it?”, adding, “It doesn’t for everyone. It didn’t for Sarah and Greg. And we’ve been trying. I just don’t want to think…”

He had paused. “Just give it time,” he had said once again. And then their eyes had met and he had lightly smoothed over her fringe with his hand. “Okay?”

And she had nodded slowly, saying, “Yeah, it’s okay.”

But it had not been okay. The next morning she had woken with an emptiness in her stomach and had lain in bed looking at Peter, not knowing what to think or to feel.

The feeling had passed, as it often did. They had had a better day, and not long after that she had spoken to her mother and the hurt of the conversation had, for that time, dissipated. But it had a habit, that feeling, of coming back, and when it did Alana felt that she was washed out to sea, without a compass, without a map.

~

When they get up, they eat breakfast in the back garden and talk about the heat that is in the air and how they need to water the garden to keep it from wilting too much. After breakfast Alana sits in the living room reading the children’s Bible. He cannot read the look on her face. He does not join her but stands for a while watching as she keeps reading, unaware of his presence.

~

Later that morning, when he is watering the plants, she comes out to him and stands with him for a time, asking about the garden and the state of the trees. Then she asks, “Do you feel like going to church tonight?”

“Maybe,” he says slowly. “What made you think of that?” It has been some time since they have been to church.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess it’s just Advent and I’ve been reading my old children’s Bible. It seemed like it might be a good thing to do.”

“We can go,” he says. “We can go tonight.”

“Good,” she says, “I’d like that.”

He continues to water the plants while she pulls out some weeds. Later, she goes inside and puts away the toiletries she had bought the day before. She picks up the packet of tampons, taken out yesterday and now sitting unopened in the bathroom, and puts them away in the cupboard, pausing for a moment and staring vacantly at the mirror.

End of the Second Candle. Go to the Third Candle.