The Prayer
By Lindsey Thordarson
The spring Helen came back from the monastery was the same spring the farm saw twin foals born in the upper pasture. Jed said it was a sign that the sisters would come together again, because for him things always happened in twos, like the two dogs Jed lost to the traffic on Bald Peak Road as a child, or the winter Ada sprained both her wrists falling from the front porch steps. “We’ll have two children,” Jed used to say when they were first married. “A boy and a girl.”
“Twos,” Ada said, listening to her sister unpack a suitcase in the spare room. Once again, Jed was right—two bad winters in a row; two years between her parents’ deaths. Events echoed, repeated. Helen was back. But Ada knew she would never have that second child. They had their girl, and that was enough.
It had been six years. Ada felt Helen’s presence in every room of the house. The sound of the closet hangers sliding on their bar grated her ears as she peeled potatoes at the kitchen sink. Helen left her book on the living room coffee table, its spine cracked—something that made Ada cringe. Even her smell, a smell Ada could remember from when they were younger, filled the spare room. Helen always managed to smell bright, like thyme or ground coriander, like something Ada couldn’t name. But Ada carried the smell of her worry—dusky, sad, a smell she caught when she leaned over the sewing machine or lifted her arm to reach for something in the cupboard. She wore rose perfume to cover it.
The potatoes burned. Helen appeared in the kitchen without warning, startling Ada into spilling gravy on the counter.
“I’m sorry,” Helen said.
Ada gave a tight-lipped smile. “Joanna, bring me a towel, please.”
Joanna was Jed and Ada’s only daughter, small for a six-year-old. She was sitting at the table, her dark eyes watching Helen’s every move. Reluctantly, she got up to pull a clean towel from the kitchen drawer.
Jed came in from feeding the horses and washed his hands at the kitchen sink. A line of sweat striped his back. Steam rose from a casserole dish full of baked potatoes that Ada carried to the table, followed by a plate of fried zucchini and pork tenderloin. “Sit,” she said. “Eat.”
This is an excerpt of “The Prayer”