Chapter Two
Frankie is singing along to something only she can hear, one earbud still in from the concert, her feet on my dashboard, and I should tell her to put them down but I do not, because it is raining and the night has that hush to it and because, for once, everyone in my car is safe and accounted for and I am not in the mood to be the one who corrects.
Julian is in the back seat with his long legs folded into the space behind me, reading on his phone with the screen dimmed. He has not spoken in twenty minutes. This is not unusual. Julian speaks when he has something to say and is silent when he does not, and I have learned to tell the difference between his thinking-silence and his hurting-silence by whether he is reading or staring at nothing. Tonight he is reading. He is fine. Or fine enough. Fine is a relative term in our house.
Our house. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen with a window over the sink that faces the brick wall of the building next door. I found the listing two years ago when I needed a place big enough to share and cheap enough to afford and far enough from anything that felt like church to let me breathe. The ad said 3BR, hardwood, coin laundry, three doors down from the park. I signed the lease that afternoon. The hardwood turned out to be laminate and the park turned out to be a concrete square with one rusted bench, but the rooms were big enough and the light in the mornings came through the front windows with something close to kindness, and I took it.
Frankie moved in four months later. She answered the roommate ad I posted at the coffee shop on Alder, showed up with two garbage bags of clothes and a speaker the size of a shoebox that she set on the kitchen counter and connected to within thirty seconds of walking through the door. She was twenty-two then, all elbows and deflection, a girl who could not hold a silence long enough to hear it. She slept with the speaker on. I bought earplugs and said nothing. I recognized what she was drowning out, even if I could not name it for her. You do not have to know a person's wound to know they have one. You only have to watch the way they move around it.
Julian came three months after Frankie. He was between sublets and she had met him through friends of friends at some gathering neither of them could quite describe later. He carried his things in a single trip: two boxes of books, a duffel bag, a coffee maker that was better than ours. He set the coffee maker on the counter beside Frankie's speaker and said, I'm quiet, I clean up after myself, and I will never ask you to pray about anything. I laughed before I could stop myself. He looked at me with that careful, watchful expression he has, the one that is half warmth and half assessment, and I knew he understood exactly why that sentence was the right one to open with. He had seen the flinch. People like us always see it in each other.
People like us. The ones who came out of something. The ones who built a life on the far side of whatever the something was and furnished it with caution and strong opinions and a loyalty so fierce it sometimes looks like anger, because anger is the shape loyalty takes when you know what it costs to be cast out. We are a household. I will not call us a family, because family is a word that still carries too much freight, but we are something: three people who found each other the way stray animals find each other, by scent, by instinct, by the shared understanding that the world is a place where people get put outside and the only decent response is to keep the door open.
I keep the door open. That is my one fixed rule, the thing I built when I tore down everything else. No one gets put outside. No one gets made to stand in front of a room and apologize for being human. No one gets told their love for the wrong person is the reason the roof is falling in.
The rain thickens on the windshield. I turn the wipers up a notch. The concert was loud and long and not really my kind of thing, a band Frankie loves in a venue that smelled of beer and sweat and the particular sweetness of too many bodies in a room not built for them. I went because she asked. I always go when she asks, the way I always go when Julian needs someone to sit beside him on the anniversary of a date he never mentions but I keep in my phone, the way I always say yes when either of them needs a thing that costs me nothing but presence, because presence is what I can give, and giving it is how I prove to myself, every time, that I am not the people I came from.
The people I came from.
Here is the memory, pushing up through the concert noise and the rain and the smell of Frankie's shampoo and the gentle glow of Julian's phone in the back seat, arriving the way it always arrives, without invitation, without warning, as though it lives in some shallow aquifer beneath my ordinary thinking and needs only the slightest shift in pressure to breach the surface.
I am twelve. I am standing at the front of the sanctuary at Grace Covenant Church on a Sunday morning in October, and the pews are full, and every face I have known since birth is turned toward me, and I am about to do the thing the pastor has told me I must do if I want to be right with God.
Her name was Leah. She was my best friend. We had been inseparable since second grade, two girls who walked home together and shared sandwiches at lunch and told each other the truth about everything, the way children do before they learn that the truth is a thing other people can use against you. Leah's family did not go to church. Her mother smoked on the porch and laughed too loud and let us watch movies the elders would have called worldly, and I loved her house the way I loved breathing, without thinking about it, as a thing that was simply and obviously necessary to being alive.
Someone reported us to Pastor Davis. I never learned who. An elder, a parent, one of the women who watched from the kitchen doorway during potlucks with their arms folded and their mouths set in that thin line that meant someone was about to be discussed. Whoever it was told the pastor that Miriam Vasquez was spending too much time with the Farrow girl, that the friendship was becoming a corrupting influence, that worldly associations would compromise my witness and my walk.
My walk. As though faith were a floor routine, a series of compulsory figures performed before judges with scorecards, and one misstep, one friendship with the wrong girl, would cost you the whole score.
Pastor Davis called my parents in. I was not present for that conversation, but I saw the result in my mother's face when she came to my room afterward: the particular shame of a woman who has been told her child is failing and who believes, because she has been taught to believe, that the failure is hers. She sat on the edge of my bed and told me that I would need to stand before the congregation on Sunday and repent of the friendship publicly. That I would need to say Leah's name, and renounce the association, and ask the church's forgiveness for allowing a worldly influence into my life. She said it gently, because my mother was always gentle, even when she was doing terrible things. She had learned gentleness the way I would later learn fury: as a survival strategy in a place where the wrong tone could bring the whole structure down on your head.
Sunday came. I stood at the front. The pews were full. I could see Mrs. Henderson in the third row, her hands clasped in her lap. I could see Elder Thomas, who had once given me a peppermint after a Wednesday night service and who now watched me the way a man watches a horse being broken. I could see my father, upright and still, his face the face of a man who believes the medicine is bitter but necessary and who expects his child to swallow it without grimacing.
And Pastor Davis beside me, one hand on my shoulder, the grip firm but not painful, the voice low and measured and full of that terrible patience that men like him mistake for love.
Tell them, Miriam. Tell them who you have been keeping company with. Tell them you are sorry. Tell them you will not do it again.
I said Leah's name. I said it into a room full of people who had decided that a twelve-year-old's love for her best friend was a sin to be confessed, and I watched something in me go out, like a pilot light, quiet and final. I said the words. I asked for forgiveness from people who had done nothing to earn the right to grant it. I stood still while the pastor prayed over me, his hand on my shoulder, and the congregation murmured Amen, and it was finished, and Leah and I never spoke again, because how do you look at someone after you have stood in a room full of adults and said their name as though it were a disease you were recovering from?
That is the god I know. The god who makes a child betray her friend to prove she belongs. The god who calls tenderness a corruption and who uses shame the way a farmer uses a fence: to keep the herd in line, to make sure no one wanders far enough to see that the pasture is a pen. I know that god to the bone. I know his voice, his methods, his particular trick of disguising control as concern. And I reject him with every atom of myself, not from ignorance but from intimacy, the way you reject a person you once loved who turned out to be someone else entirely.
I do not believe in him anymore. Or I believe in him the way you believe in a locked room you escaped from: he is real, he is back there, and you will never go back.
The rain is heavier now. I turn the wipers to full. Frankie pulls out the earbud and props her bare feet higher on the dash, wiggling her toes against the defroster vent, and says, "That drummer, though. That drummer." She is grinning, loose and easy, the concert still running through her like a current. I smile back, because she is twenty-four and sometimes her happiness is enough to borrow.
Julian looks up from his phone. "He was competent."
"Competent. Julian. The man was a god."
Something in me twitches at the word, the small reflexive flinch I cannot seem to outgrow no matter how many years I put between myself and that sanctuary. Julian catches it, because Julian catches everything, and meets my eyes in the rearview mirror for a half-second, a look that says I see you, I'm not going to say anything, you're fine. I love him for the look. I love both of them for the way they let me be angry without asking me to explain the anger, the way you let a person carry a scar without asking them to undress and show it to you every time you notice them wince.
I drive. The road is wet and dark and the headlights carve a narrow corridor through the rain. Somewhere ahead the highway bends and the evening deepens and three people who found each other by accident or instinct or grace (a word I cannot use, a word that still tastes like the god I fled) are heading home in a car that smells like concert sweat and Frankie's shampoo and the last cold air of autumn coming through the cracked rear window Julian always insists on.
I do not believe in grace. But I keep the door open. And maybe that is the only prayer I have left: the refusal to do to anyone what was done to me.
Frankie
The drummer had a tattoo on his left forearm, a snake eating its own tail, and I watched it move every time he hit the snare and I did not think about anything else for two straight hours and that is the whole point of music.
Not thinking. Not anything else. The sound so big and so close it fills you like water fills a glass, right to the brim, no room left for whatever was in there before. I stood in the front three rows with my hands up and my eyes closed and my phone recording a video I will never watch, and the bass hit so hard I could feel it in my teeth, in the soft parts of my jaw, in the place behind my sternum where the quiet lives when I let it, which I do not, which I never do, which is the whole reason I am here.
The concert was my idea. The concert is always my idea, or the bar, or the late drive to the diner on Route 9 that stays open until two, or the party at someone's apartment where I know maybe one person and the music is too loud and the drinks are warm and I stay until I am the last one there, until even the host is yawning and looking at the door. I am the one who suggests. I am the one who fills the calendar. If there is a blank space in the week I will find something to put in it, because a blank space is a silence and a silence is a room I will not walk into.
There are things I know about myself and things I do not look at. The things I know: I am twenty-four years old. I live with Miriam and Julian in a house three doors down from a park that is not really a park. I work at a coffee shop four mornings a week and pick up catering shifts on weekends. I have a face people call pretty and a laugh people call infectious, and I use both of them the way a magician uses patter, to keep you looking at the hand that is moving so you do not notice the hand that is still.
The things I do not look at.
My phone has three apps open at all times: a music app, a podcast app, and whatever social feed is moving fastest that week. When I wake up in the morning I reach for it before I open my eyes, because the interval between waking and sound is the most dangerous interval I know. In that gap, which lasts maybe four seconds, the quiet rushes in like cold water through a crack in a hull, and in the quiet I can hear something that I have spent my whole adult life making sure I never have to hear clearly. A hum. A low, constant, sourceless hum, like the sound a house makes when everyone has left it, like the tone a screen gives off just before it goes dark. It is the sound of me, unaccompanied, without input, without distraction, and it terrifies me.
I do not know what it is. That is not a lie. I know it is there and I know it scares me and I know that silence gives it room to grow, and that is enough. That is enough to keep me moving, to keep the earbuds in, to keep the screen bright, to keep saying yes to the concert, the party, the late night, the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. I fall asleep to other people's voices because my own, alone in a quiet room, would have nothing to say that I want to hear.
Miriam and Julian do not ask. This is the contract of our house, unsigned and understood: you do not make anyone explain themselves. Miriam has her anger and the flinch that crosses her face when certain words land wrong. Julian has his sister and the anniversary he does not mention and the way he sometimes goes very still in the middle of a sentence, as if a thought has found him that he cannot outrun and he is waiting for it to pass. I have my noise. We each carry our thing and we do not ask each other to set it down and show it, because showing it would mean holding it up to the light, and in the light it might turn out to be the thing we are most afraid it is.
The rain is doing something complicated to the windshield. Miriam drives with both hands and a focus that makes me feel safe even though safe is not a word I think about much, because thinking about safety means thinking about its absence, and its absence is the quiet, and the quiet is where the hum lives. I pull out my earbud and put my feet on the dash, which she hates but will not correct me for, not tonight, and I let the concert replay in my body. My ears are ringing. The ringing is a kind of company.
"That drummer, though. That drummer."
Julian says, "He was competent." Because Julian cannot let anything be simply felt; it has to be assessed, weighed, measured against some standard only he can see. I do not mind. His precision is another kind of noise, another presence in the car, another voice to listen to instead of the hum.
I lean my head back against the seat and close my eyes and let the ringing and the rain and the hiss of the tires on the wet road layer over each other. This is as close to peace as I get: surrounded by sound, surrounded by people, the silence pushed back to the edges. If I could live in this, in the in-between space after the concert and before the night, where the noise has not quite faded and the quiet has not quite arrived, I would. I would pitch a tent here and never leave.
But the concert is over. The band has packed up. The venue is closing. And in an hour I will be in my room with Miriam and Julian asleep on the other side of the walls, and the house will be quiet, and I will reach for my phone, and I will find something, anything, to put in my ears before the silence finds the crack and pours in.
My mother used to say I was afraid of my own shadow. She said it as a joke, when I was small, when the fear was still funny, still something a child would grow out of. She was wrong about the shadow. It is not my shadow I am afraid of. It is whatever the shadow is standing in front of, the thing behind me that I have never turned around to look at. The thing that hums.
I press my bare feet against the warm vent and watch the rain streak sideways across the glass and I think about the drummer's snake, the one that eats itself, going around and around in a circle that has no beginning and no end, and I think that is maybe the truest picture of my life anyone has ever drawn: a creature in constant motion, consuming itself to stay busy, never arriving anywhere, never stopping long enough to discover that the mouth and the tail are the same.
We are on the highway now, the big road, the one that cuts through the hills. I can see the lights of other cars moving through the rain like slow fish in dark water. Miriam has the wipers on high. Julian is reading again. Nobody is talking. The silence is creeping closer, and I open my mouth to say something, anything, to fill the space before it arrives.
"We should do this more. We should go out every weekend."
"You say that after every concert," Julian says from the back, without looking up.
"And I mean it every time."
He smiles. I see it in the rearview mirror, the small, real smile he gives when he finds something genuinely funny as opposed to the larger, practiced one he gives when he is being social. I collect his real smiles. I collect Miriam's too. I collect all the evidence I can find that the people in my life are glad I am in theirs, and I store it up against the hum, against the quiet, against the four-second gap between waking and sound when nothing stands between me and whatever I have spent twenty-four years refusing to hear.
The rain thickens. The road shines. I close my eyes and let the ringing fill the space and tell myself I will find a podcast before bed, a long one, something about true crime or history or anything with a human voice in it, a voice that is not mine, a voice that will carry me across the silence to the other side of the night, where morning is, where the coffee shop opens at six and the espresso machine roars like a small engine and the world fills back up with sound and I am safe, I am safe, I am safe.
Julian
The drummer was competent. This is not a slight. Competence is undervalued. Competence means you have practiced until the difficult thing has become invisible, until the audience stops seeing the labor and sees only the result, and there is a dignity in that, a quiet discipline most people mistake for talent. Talent is what you have before you begin. Competence is what you earn by showing up again and again until your body knows the answer before your mind asks the question.
I think about competence because I am reading an article on my phone about cosmic background radiation and the echo of the universe's first light, which has nothing to do with drumming and everything to do with the way I think, which is by analogy, by connection, by the compulsive construction of bridges between things that should not go together but do if you hold them at the right angle. Nell used to say I could connect anything to anything. She meant it as a compliment. She was eight and I was twelve and she had asked me why the sky was blue and I had explained Rayleigh scattering and then, because I could not stop myself, linked it to the reason her goldfish looked orange and the reason old photographs turn yellow and the reason the sunset on the night our grandmother died was the most extraordinary shade of red either of us had ever seen. She sat on the floor of my room with her knees drawn up and listened to the entire explanation with that expression she had, the one that was half wonder and half the sly delight of a child who has found an adult willing to take her seriously.
You always know the answer, she said.
I did. I always knew the answer. This was the deepest thing between us, deeper than blood, deeper than the shared bedroom in the small apartment and the parents who prayed over every meal with an intensity that made the food go cold: I was the one who could explain. She asked, and I answered. She brought me the world in pieces and I assembled it for her, fact by fact, connection by connection, a patient and tireless translator between the bewildering everything and the eight-year-old girl who wanted to understand it. Why does the moon follow us when we drive? Why do my ears pop on the airplane? Why does the lake freeze from the top down and not the bottom up? Why, why, why, and I answered every time, because answering was what I was for, because her trust in my knowing was the thing I was proudest of in the whole of my small life.
Then she got sick.
I will not rehearse it. I have rehearsed it enough, in the years since, in the long and meticulous accounting I keep of the facts: the diagnosis at nine, the treatments that worked and then didn't, the hospital rooms with their chemical smell and their relentless fluorescent patience, the year she lost her hair and the year it grew back wrong and the year it did not grow back at all. Our parents prayed. Our church prayed. The pastor came and anointed her with oil and laid his hands on her thin head and said the words, and the elders came on Wednesdays, and the prayer chain was activated, whatever that means, and God, if He was there, did not answer, or answered in a way that looked from the ground exactly like silence.
Nell died at fifteen. I was nineteen. I was in my first year of college, three hours away, and I drove home when my mother called and I sat beside the bed in the hospital and held her hand while the machines kept their indifferent count of the things she was running out of. She was thin and bald and more beautiful than anything I have ever seen, a word I use carefully and mean exactly. Beautiful. In the way that broken things sometimes are, in the way that a leaf held up to the light reveals a structure too precise to be accidental and too fragile to survive. She was held up to the light. The structure was revealed. It did not survive.
In her last days she asked me questions. Small ones, at first: practical things, logistical things, the questions of a fifteen-year-old girl who is dying and wants to know what the nurses are writing on the chart and whether the morphine will make her dream. I answered them all. I was still the one who answered, and as long as she was asking I had a purpose, and the purpose was a rope and I held onto it with both hands.
Then she asked the other one.
It was a Tuesday. Late afternoon. The light in the room was the color of weak tea, coming through blinds that someone had tilted wrong. She had been dozing, and she opened her eyes, and she looked at me with a clarity that the morphine should not have permitted, a directness so clean it was almost accusatory, the look of someone who needs the truth from the one person who has always given it.
Julian. Will I still be me?
She did not ask if there was a heaven. She did not ask if it would hurt. She asked the thing itself, the real thing, the question that sits at the bottom of every other question anyone has ever asked about death: will the person I am survive the thing that is happening to me? Will I wake up on the other side, if there is another side, and still be Nell? Will I know myself? Will I know you?
I had no answer.
I had read the philosophy. I had read the theology. I had read the neuroscience and the arguments from consciousness and the thought experiments about teleporters and replicas and the ship of Theseus, and none of it, not one page, not one argument, had given me a response I could hand to a fifteen-year-old girl on a morphine drip who wanted to know if she would still be herself when the machines stopped counting.
So I lied.
I said, "Yes." I said it with every muscle in my face arranged into the expression of certainty, the expression she had trusted since she was eight, the one that meant I know the answer and here it is. I said, "Yes, Nell. You will still be you." And she believed me, because she always believed me, and the belief settled over her face like a blanket pulled up to the chin, and she closed her eyes, and two days later she was gone.
I have never forgiven myself for the yes. Not because it was wrong, necessarily, but because I did not believe it. The boy who always knew the answer gave the biggest answer of his life without knowing if it was true, and the only reason he gave it was love, and love is not an epistemology, and a comforting lie told to a dying child is still a lie, or at least it lives in the territory adjacent to lying, in the country where the people who cannot bear the truth dress it up in kindness and call the costume real.
What I believe, what I have believed since the machines stopped and the pastor said She is with the Lord and my mother wept and my father, for the first time in my life, sat down on a hospital floor and put his head in his hands and said nothing: there is no god worth the word who would let a child suffer like that and die at fifteen. The suffering was not a lesson. It was not a test. It was not some celestial training program designed to build character in the survivors. It was a girl, my girl, the one who asked me why the sky was blue, coming apart cell by cell while the people who loved her begged the sky for help and the sky said nothing.
This is not an argument I arrived at lightly. It is not adolescent anger, though I was an adolescent when I began it. It is a position I have examined from every angle, read every counterargument against, held up to every theodicy and every consolation philosophy and theology have to offer, and found wanting. I do not sneer at faith. I understand its appeal. I understand the need to believe that the suffering has a purpose, that the arc of the moral universe bends, that there is a hand on the wheel. I understand it the way you understand a language you once spoke and have since lost: I can hear the words, I can parse the grammar, but I can no longer make the sounds.
Miriam rejected God because the god she was given was cruel. I respect that. Her anger is personal, targeted, earned by specific injury. My objection is not personal in the same way, or not only personal. It is structural. It is the claim that a universe in which a fifteen-year-old girl suffers and dies while people who love her pray for her healing is a universe in which the word good cannot mean what the believers say it means when applied to the being who made it. Either God is good and not powerful, or powerful and not good, or not there at all, and every option leaves the same girl dead on the same hospital bed at the same age with the same question unanswered.
Will I still be me?
I do not know, Nell. I said yes and I did not know then and I do not know now, and the not-knowing has become the room I live in, the house with the view of the empty hospital bed and the morphine drip and the Tuesday light coming through the blinds at the wrong angle. I still answer questions. I answer Frankie's when she asks why the milk curdles in acid or why the moon looks bigger on the horizon. I answer Miriam's when she asks about the history of some church practice she is trying to understand so she can hate it more precisely. I answer the questions that come to me in the middle of the night, in my room three doors down from the park, lying in the dark with a library book open on my chest: questions about cosmology, about ethics, about the nature of consciousness, about everything except the one thing I was asked to answer and could not.
I carry her. I do not mean this as a metaphor. I carry the specific weight of Nell in a specific place, behind my sternum, where it presses when the air changes or the light comes through a window at the wrong angle or someone says a name that sounds like hers. I carry the unanswered question and the lie I told and the family's useless prayers and the empty chair at the table that my parents never removed, because removing it would have been an admission, and they are not ready to admit, and I am not ready to forgive them for the prayers, and none of us are ready for anything, and so we go on, and I build arguments in the dark, and Nell asks her question, and I have no answer, and the universe does not care.
Frankie says something about going out every weekend. I smile, because she is trying, because trying is her version of surviving, and I recognize the attempt the way I recognize Miriam's anger and my own precision: strategies of the damaged, shelters built from whatever was at hand. Frankie builds hers from noise. Miriam builds hers from loyalty. I build mine from arguments. We are three people in a car on a wet road, each carrying a wound we have learned to live around, and the strange thing, the thing I would not have predicted, is that living together has made each wound slightly more bearable, not by healing it but by making it less solitary. There is a comfort in being known by people who do not ask you to be well.
The rain is heavy now. Miriam has the wipers going at full speed and the headlights are carving two weak tunnels through the dark. We are on the highway, the long stretch that cuts through the hills, and the road is slick and shining and other cars are out here with us, other people moving through the same evening toward their own particular destinations, carrying their own particular freight. I close my phone. The article about cosmic background radiation will wait. The echo of the first light will still be there tomorrow. Everything endures except the things that matter most.
I look at the back of Miriam's head, at Frankie's bare feet on the dashboard, at the rain on the glass, at the dark hills sliding past, and I feel something I have felt a thousand times, the old, helpless reflex: the impulse to explain, to connect, to build a bridge between the thing that is happening and the thing it means. But tonight I let it pass. Tonight I sit in the back seat of a car with two people I love in the way that damaged people love, which is carefully and fiercely and with one hand always on the door, and I let the rain be only rain, and the dark be only dark, and the question be only a question, the one I have been carrying since I was nineteen and will carry, I suspect, until whatever comes after carrying.
Will I still be me?
I do not know, Nell. But I am still here. And I am still, helplessly, formulating answers.
The highway bends. The hills close in. Somewhere ahead of us, on this same wet road, other cars are rounding other curves, and the dusk is thickening into night, and the rain has no opinion about any of it, and we drive on, three people in a car, three doors down from everything we have lost, heading home through the dark.