From Shadows to Starlight

Sunday Best

Chapter Eighteen

“It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has." --Henry Ward Beecher

Sunday Best

Alana ran through a dark maze alone. Someone chased after her. She couldn’t see her pursuer, but she could hear their footsteps echoing in the blackness. She kept running forward, but her legs felt wooden, and she couldn’t run fast enough. Then she realized with horror that she was headed straight for a dead end, a blank stone wall. She backed against the wall and covered her eyes, afraid to see her pursuer’s face…

“Alana? Alana? You really need to wake up! We can’t be late for church!”

She opened her eyes. The nightmare was gone in an instant, and there was her cousin standing next to the bed. Was it really morning already? She yawned and turned back over, closing her eyes again.

“Please wake up, Alana,” Cerise was saying, though her voice was muffled by the layers of sheets Alana was hiding under. “Say…do you still remember when we were little and your family would stay over, and we would wake up at the crack of dawn, and have pillow fights? We’d get feathers all over the floor, and we would wake up our parents, and then they’d be cross and we’d have to clean up, but it was worth every bit of it, wasn’t it?”

Alana blinked. She did remember that; playing with Cerise had always been her favorite part about staying with her relatives. She threw off the covers, jumped out of bed, and grabbed her pillow, tossing the other to her surprised cousin.

“En garde!” She laughed, and soon feathers were flying as they raced around the room, barraging each other with the pillows. All of a sudden Raimond and Amelie ran into the bedroom.

“What on earth?” Raimond exclaimed, laughing.

“Girls! What are you doing?”

Alana and Cerise dropped the pillows and tried to stop giggling.

“I’m sorry,” Cerise said, unable to erase the grin from her face. “This is my fault for mentioning…”

“…All those pillow fights you had as girls. It’s nice to see you’ve both matured so much since then,” Amelie chuckled. “Now you both need to get dressed and ready to go to church. Alana, you should be able to borrow one of Cerise’s dresses. Hurry along now, you two! All these feathers will be waiting for you to clean up when you get home.”

It was painfully early, before six even, and Alana had only slept for a few hours, but after the pillow fight and the good hard laugh she felt ready to begin the day. After taking a bath and putting on one of Cerise’s dresses--a crisp white one with blue flowers on it--and arranging her hair, Alana joined her relatives downstairs for breakfast. She barely had time to finish a cup of tea and a croissant with jam before they had to rush across the street to the church.

“We have to be there first, naturally,” Cerise explained. “Father has to prepare for his sermon, and mother and I are in the choir. We have to practice once more before the service--you can come and watch if you like. Maybe you’d like to join the choir too, sometime.”

“I’ll think about it,” Alana said. She would ask Erik about it later. He would probably be thrilled with the idea, and maybe then he would come to church too. She wondered why he wouldn’t come today; he hadn’t given her a real answer, as he often didn’t. Why was he so secretive all the time?

Alana followed her aunt and cousin to the choir room. Now the church looked bright and welcoming, not like last night, when its halls had seemed a dark, forbidding labyrinth. Soon the choir arrived, and she watched as the men and women warmed up and went through some of the hymns they were preparing to sing. Their voices sounded pleasant enough, but though she had only been taking lessons a short while, she noticed a few issues with some of the singers, problems she’d had that Erik had quickly corrected. He could certainly instruct the choir on how to be the best singers they could possibly be. Maybe…no, leading a church choir was not something Alana could picture Erik doing.