Midnight Mass (Camren)

CHAPTER 6

It wasn't until the drive home that it came.

The idea.

Camila had again drifted off, after making me promise to help her put up the Christmas tree once we got home. Once she started snoring, I figured it was safe to turn off the Christmas music she'd put on and listen to my audiobook again.

The narrator was relating the story of Theseus and the Labyrinth of Crete, and as I thought about the labyrinth itself, I began to think of other iconic symbols in mythology. Celtic knots and crosses and triskelions and spirals. And then I thought only about spirals as I drove down the wet but mostly empty highway, and then it came to me why I struggled with jealousy over Anton, even though I'd let go of my jealousy over Shawn.

Life is a spiral.

As long as we lived, we would keep moving forward. But on a spiral path, getting closer to your destination meant periodically passing the same things—emotions, issues, character flaws—over and over again, the way a person walking up a spiral staircase would continually find himself facing north every ten steps or so.

My jealousy was my north, and perhaps I was wiser than the last time I had encountered it. Perhaps this time it would be easier to master, and then when I inevitably faced it again, it would be even easier...

But my mind didn't stop there. Because I realized that this didn't just apply to individuals. It applied to institutions too. Like churches. Like the Catholic Church, actually. Because historically, the church had its own spiral, times where it had been forced to modernize or adapt, great leaps forward in humanitarianism and philosophy, and giant leaps back with dogma and persecution.

The Church didn't need me to tell it how to change. It already knew how, because it had done it so many times before.

The Catholic Church doesn't need a prescription for reformation, I composed mentally, wishing I were at my laptop and able to type this out. The Church only needs a call to awaken...

Oh my God. Had I really broken through the barrier of my dissertation's conclusion? Could I finally write this motherfucker?

Excited, I sped up the truck and glanced at the clock. Only a couple hours until home. And then I would start kicking this rewrite's ass.

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"I thought you said we'd put up the tree together?" Camila said, her arms folded.

I was on my way out the door, and I'd stopped to give her an absent-minded kiss—rookie mistake. Because then she'd noticed my laptop bag stuffed full of snacks and deduced that I was planning on being gone the whole night.

I ran a hand through my hair. I hated disappointing her—Camila loved Christmas the way most people loved babies—fiercely and sometimes irrationally—and we'd put up the tree together every year since we'd been married. On the other hand, every minute I stood here arguing with her was another minute wasted, when I could be tapping out the words that would finally bring this cursed thesis to its end.

"Can we put it up another evening?" I asked, trying to sound penitent and genuinely eager. (I was neither.)

Her lower lip bowed into something dangerously like a pout. My heart lurched at the sight, but then my brain chanted write write, finish finish, at me, and my heart stopped with the guilt.

"It's the day after Thanksgiving," she said. "That's the day Christmas trees are supposed to be put up, but if you want to wait..."

"I do, thank you. I promise the minute I finish this thing that we can put up seven Christmas trees, okay? We'll put up as many as your mom has at Pickering Farm." I dropped another kiss on her unmoving lips. "I'll be done with this thing so soon. I swear."