Her Name in the Sky

by Kelly Quindlen

They kiss each other’s lips, and Hannah feels the spring of creation in her body and blood.

She does not look up at the Crucifix.

She sweeps the back of her hand across her forehead and remembers, with the force of a stone slinging down into her belly, that she had been dreaming about God.

“Yeah,” she says, and then she has the comforting sense that she is in a story, that she is correctly playing her part, that she has brought her personal touch to the role of Girl. She looks at Wally, at how he fits the role of Boy in his own way, with his fern green eyes and his square jaw and his hint of cologne, and she feels good.

Hannah has learned the oldest secret on earth, has connected herself to the long human story, has taken her place in the pattern of human unions.

In the anxious silence of a hospital chapel, with one small candle to light the darkness, five teenagers hold hands and pray.