Free Clearer in the Night by Rebecca Croteau Page A

and—lights under bushels. We’re called to share our gifts.”
    I nodded. “I wish I could make it work. There’s nothing like being with the kids, and helping them turn such big things into understandable concepts. But I need to pick up another shift at the coffee shop, and I won’t have time to prepare for the class. The kids deserve better than that.”
    She’d studied me for a moment, and then smiled. “What if I can find a way for you to use this gift, and get paid, too?”
    “The church can’t afford to pay a salary, I understand that, I wouldn’t want them to.”
    “That’s not what I have in mind. Let me make some phone calls, okay? Check in next week.”
    I’d agreed, because I doubted it would come to anything. But when the pastor put her mind to it, she could move mountains, and three days later, Sarah Mitchell called me. She was another woman at church, but not one of the group that Mom was friends with. I liked her right away. She ran a preschool in town, and had been looking for a substitute teacher. Between my experience, and the recommendation from our pastor, Sarah not only decided to pay me to do something I loved, she also paid for the required coursework hours for me to get certified.
    And, most importantly, I still had two jobs where, if I just up and disappeared one day, it would be okay. There were people there to fill in the empty spaces. No one was relying on me. That was important.
    I called my pastor to say thank you, and she’d smiled right through the phone. “You just keep using that gift,” she said. “That’s the most important thing.”

    My phone told me that it was six forty-five. Parents wouldn’t start dropping their kids off for another half hour, at least, but I knew Sarah would be there already. I caught the next bus into town, and was at the door fifteen minutes later. I let myself in, and went back to the office.
    As expected, she was there, bent over paperwork, but she looked up when I came in. Her eyes lit up, and she wrapped me up in a hug before I could warn her that I was sweaty. She gripped me so tightly that she probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. “I’m so glad to see you. You look alive.”
    I laughed. “At last count, anyway.”
    “Sit down.” She gestured at the chairs in front of her desk; I took one, and she took the other, instead of going back behind the big, wooden monstrosity. It had been her dad’s, she said. She felt connected to him when she sat at it. He’d died when she was a teenager; she didn’t give me pity eyes when she talked to me. “Tell me what happened.”
    “I was out for a run—”
    “That’s not what I mean.”
    She looked at me knowingly. I hated knowing eyes even more than pity eyes. No one had said it, out loud, ever, but it was common knowledge that Sarah was ten years sober, and I didn’t doubt for one second that that was one reason why my pastor had put us together. Sarah knew my life, and she never once told me I had to change, or do things differently, or anything. But she sat and listened a lot. I didn’t tell her much, but she listened anyway. Listened closely to what I didn’t have to say out loud.
    “I was out,” I said. Out was a kind of shorthand, one she’d figured out quickly. She’d gone out, too, before. For different things, but with the same result. “I decided to walk home. And then things got fuzzy. I don’t remember. I was out for days, I guess. The doctors think I was sick and didn’t know it. But I’m okay now.”
    “Were you drinking?”
    “No, of course not. I don’t drink.”
    “Drugs?”
    “Sarah. Come on.”
    “People don’t black out for no reason, Cait.”
    “There was a reason. I had a virus.” If you tell the same story, over and over, it starts to stick in your brain. It starts to feel real. Maybe, if I told this one over and over, I would forget about the monster that had torn me up. That would be good. Very good.
    “Were you safe?”
    “Always am.”
    Sarah