Saint Anne, Forgive the Night

She lit it the way her grandmother had taught her — one match, no second chances, the sulfur smell gone before the wick caught. The votive from Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré was small enough to cup in both palms, cream-coloured, the wax already faintly concave from the last time she had needed something she could not name at church. The flame steadied. She set it on the nightstand.

Then she opened the drawer.

The silicone was cool through the thin cotton of her nightgown sleeve as she carried it the short distance. She set it beside the candle without looking at either object directly. The two of them together on the nightstand — the saint and the other thing — made a sentence she had no language for. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the wall instead.

The cold outside was the particular cold of February in this city, the kind that pressed against the window glass and made the whole room feel sealed. She could feel the chill at her ankles below the nightgown's hem, the flannel warm above, her own warmth trapped inside it. The fabric lay across her thighs like a decision she hadn't made yet.

She had been thinking about this since before supper. Since, if she was honest, before she had called her mother. Her grandmother's voice had come through her mother's voice during that call, the old cadences, the particular way the women in her family said the name of the shrine as if proximity to it still counted for something even over the telephone. She had said goodnight and set the phone down and stood in the kitchen for a long moment, aware of a warmth low in her stomach that had nothing to do with grace.

The candle flame did not move. The room was that still.

She knew she would not confess this. She had known it before she lit the match. The knowing was its own heat — the guilt arriving ahead of the act, folding into the wanting, becoming indistinguishable from it. This was the part she could never explain, even to herself: that the candle made it worse and she lit it anyway. That her grandmother's faith and her own body occupied the same small room and she had put them there deliberately.

Her left hand rested open on her knee. Her right hand lay still in her lap, against the flannel, feeling the warmth her body had already made.

She drew one slow breath in through her nose. The exhale came out longer than she had intended, unfolding into the candlelit air, and the flame shivered once — barely — as if it had heard her.

Her knees were together. The nightgown lay smooth and heavy across them both.

She looked at the candle. The wax saint. The other thing beside it.

Her right hand pressed, just slightly, into the flannel. Through the fabric, through the warmth she had been holding there without acknowledging it, she felt her own pulse — one beat, then another — and her knees, not yet parting, shifted the smallest degree apart.