Plot Summary:Between Midnight and Morning-A Novel by Beverly Mitchell Dodd
When she turned eighteen, Lena left her home, her family, and a religion that had caused her much fear and despair. She told the man she loved and married that she had freed herself from the painful past. She did not mention those moments when the fear and despair still haunted her. Then the unthinkable happened, and Lena found herself trapped again in that place, unable to cross to the light of the future, unable to penetrate the darkness of the past.
Excerpt 1:
"Niagara Falls, Lena?" he was saying. "Everything is frozen there."
"It doesn't matter now. We can't go."
"Why the hell not?"
"You're not supposed to be here."
"What are you talking about?"
"I've had this dream many times."
"Wait till we're in a steamy hot tub. You"ll see then where I'm supposed to be. You ready to go?"
"No. Don't you remember? I looked when you turned, and I saw, even through the snow. How could you not have seen?"
"That must have been the dream, Lena."
"No, this is the dream."
Exerpt 2:
She twisted the diamond Mark had given her back and forth on her finger. The beautiful music Maureen Faber had taught her to sing, the music that made her weak and vulnerable, that made her want to cry, was summoning her now. If she followed its beckoning down the aisle to the altar, she wondered if a miracle in her mind would take place. Finding the answers to the questions she had asked her Sunday school teacher years ago might seem unimportant then. All she might feel would be the rush of peace that comes with surrender.
Excerpt 3:
Behind her, through the rest of the house, descending winter twilight meshed into a dense barrier. Fire shadows from the fireplace leaped across the walls that surrounded her. This was some middle place in which she was caught, she decided, a chasm which prevented her from crossing to where her son was or from penetrating the barrier behind.
And on Christmas Day with her family, she realized the possibility that she had always been caught here, perhaps before Maureen Faber had become ill and died, in childhood even, sitting on a braided rug, numb with fear of the Rapture having taken place, or before that, perhaps in birth itself.
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