Love Without Borders
Chapter Two
The car smells like the show. Beer and fog machine and the particular sourness of a crowd that has been standing too long in a room without enough air, all of it caught in our jackets and our hair and the upholstery of Micah’s old Accord, which already smells like coffee grounds and the pine air freshener that stopped working in September but still hangs from the mirror like a small green corpse. Quinn has her window cracked two inches despite the cold, and the night air coming through the gap is wet and sharp and carries with it the faintly metallic taste of coming rain.
“I can’t believe they played that last one,” Quinn says from the back seat. She is leaning forward between the headrests, her chin almost on Micah’s shoulder, vibrating with the leftover energy of someone who has been dancing for three hours and cannot yet be still. “That bass line. Did you feel that? I felt it in my teeth.”
“You feel everything in your teeth,” Micah says. “That’s because you grind them.”
“I do not grind my teeth.”
“You ground them through an entire night guard in six weeks. The dentist called it impressive.”
“The dentist was flirting with me.”
“The dentist was horrified.”
Quinn swats the back of his head, lightly, and Micah does not flinch, and I watch this from the passenger seat with the particular affection I reserve for the two of them, which is different from the affection I feel for anyone else in my life because it is the affection of the understood. We found each other. That is the simplest way to say it. Three wounded people who ended up in adjacent rooms in a house on Garfield Street, and who recognized in each other the specific quality of people who have been through something and are not going to explain it over drinks.
Quinn moved in first, then me, then Micah. The house belongs to a woman named Doris who lives in Florida and charges us rent that is low enough to be suspicious and high enough to feel legitimate, and the three of us share a kitchen that smells perpetually of whatever Quinn burned last and a bathroom with a showerhead that Micah has fixed four times and a living room where we sit most evenings doing nothing together, which is the best kind of doing nothing, the kind where you are not alone but you are not required to perform. I have lived with roommates before. I have never lived with people who do not need me to be okay.
This is what they give me. Permission to not be okay. Permission to come home from work and sit on the couch and not smile and not explain and not pretend that the day was fine when the day was not fine, when the day contained some small, ordinary trigger that sent me back to a pew in a church I have not entered in nine years, and the going-back left me hollowed and furious and needing to sit in a room with people who will not ask me what is wrong because they already know, in general, what is wrong, and the general is enough.
Tonight, though, tonight was good. The show was loud and dark and the kind of crowded where your body stops being yours and becomes part of a single organism that moves to the same beat, and I stood between Quinn and Micah and let the music press against my ribs and felt, for two and a half hours, nothing but the sound and the sweat and the floor shaking under my shoes. This is what music does for me. It fills the room so completely that there is no space left for the other thing, the thing that lives in quiet rooms and empty churches and the silence after someone says the name of God.
We are on 17 now, heading south toward the Thruway, and the highway is dark and mostly empty, the Sunday-evening lull that happens when the weekenders have already gone and the locals have not yet come out. Micah drives the way he does everything, with a contained competence that does not advertise itself. His hands are at ten and two. The Accord is doing sixty-three. He checks his mirrors in a rotation so regular I could set a clock by it, and the steadiness of this, the simple reliability of a man who will not swerve, is one of the reasons I can sit in this car and let my guard down a quarter of an inch, which is all I ever let it down, which is more than I let it down for anyone else.
Quinn is talking about the guitarist. She is always talking about the guitarist, whoever the guitarist happens to be on any given night, because Quinn collects obsessions the way other people collect stamps, in short, bright bursts that burn hot and die fast. Last month it was a bartender at the place on Elm. The month before that it was a podcast about unsolved disappearances, which she listened to at such volume through the bathroom wall that Micah threatened to cancel her internet. Quinn consumes. She takes things in, and the taking-in is its own point, a constant motion of acquisition that keeps the machinery running without ever producing anything she has to keep.
I love her. I want to be clear about this because what I am about to think about is not about Quinn or Micah or the show or the highway. It is about the church, and it is always about the church, the way a burn scar is always about the fire even when the fire has been out for years. The scar does not forget. The skin does not grow back the way it was. And certain things, certain small, ordinary things, send me back to the burning with a speed that still surprises me, nine years out, nine years clear, nine years of not stepping inside a church or opening a Bible or saying the name of God without the particular taste of metal in my mouth that means the fury is rising.
Tonight it was a woman at the venue. I saw her in the line for the bathroom, a woman my age, maybe a year or two older, wearing a thin gold cross on a chain so fine it was almost invisible against her collarbone. She was washing her hands. She looked up and our eyes met in the mirror, and she smiled, the easy, open, unremarkable smile of a stranger in a public bathroom, and I smiled back, and then I saw the cross, and something inside me closed like a fist.
She did not see it. She dried her hands and left, and I stood at the sink for a full minute, gripping the porcelain, staring at my own face in the mirror, feeling the old heat move through me, the heat that is not anger, exactly, but the thing anger becomes when you have carried it so long it has fused with your bones. A cross. A two-inch piece of gold jewelry, probably bought at a mall, probably given to her by a grandmother or a boyfriend, probably meaning nothing more to her than habit and sentiment, and it sent me back twenty years in the space of a breath.
The church I grew up in was called New Covenant Fellowship. It met in a building that had been a hardware store, on a street in a town I will not name, and from the outside it looked like nothing. No steeple. No stained glass. A cinderblock rectangle with a metal roof and a parking lot full of minivans, and inside, under fluorescent lights that gave everyone the complexion of a corpse, a hundred and forty people who believed they were the only ones in the county who had the truth.
Pastor Keith. I do not say his name often. I do not say it out loud. But I think it, the way you think the name of a thing that hurt you, testing whether it still has charge, and it does, always, like a wire you keep touching to see if the current has stopped. Pastor Keith was a large man with a beard and a voice that could fill the cinderblock building without a microphone. He preached for an hour, sometimes ninety minutes, and the sermons were not sermons so much as trials, each one a meticulous prosecution of some failing the congregation had committed or was about to commit. He had a way of looking at you while he spoke. Not at the room. At you. His eyes would find you in your seat and hold you there, and in the holding was the message: I see you. I know what you have done. And God, who sees more than I do, is less patient than I am.
My parents loved him. My mother loved him with the fervent, unquestioning devotion of a woman who needs to be told what is true because the alternative, the terrifying openness of having to decide for herself, is more than she can bear. My father loved him with the grim satisfaction of a man who has finally found someone stricter than he is, someone whose standards make his own severity look gentle by comparison. Between the two of them and Pastor Keith, I grew up in a house and a church where God was a searchlight and every shadow it found was a sin.
I learned the rules early. Cover your body. Guard your thoughts. Do not question. Do not doubt. Do not want anything the church has not approved, and the list of approved things is short: obedience, gratitude, submission, silence. I kept the rules the way a prisoner keeps the rules, not because I believed in them but because breaking them had consequences I could see inflicted on others, and I was afraid. I watched a woman named Diane stand before the congregation and confess to an affair while her husband sat in the front row and Pastor Keith read from a list of her sins in a voice that shook with righteous disgust, and I was eleven, and I understood, watching Diane cry, that this was what happened to people who failed the searchlight. They were dragged into the beam and held there until the congregation had seen enough.
I was not Diane. I did not have an affair. I was a child, and then a teenager, and my sin, the sin for which the searchlight eventually found me, was smaller and more ordinary and, in a way, more damning, because it was the sin the church feared most: I doubted.
I was fifteen. It was a Wednesday night Bible study, the kind where the youth group sat in a circle on folding chairs in the basement and Pastor Keith’s wife, Linda, led us through whatever passage had been assigned that week. I do not remember the passage. I remember the question. We were talking about hell, about the people who would go there, about the billions of souls in the world who had never heard the name of Jesus and who would, according to the theology of New Covenant Fellowship, burn forever for the crime of having been born in the wrong country. And I raised my hand. I did not raise it to rebel. I raised it because I was fifteen and the math did not work, and I believed, in the last shred of my innocence, that raising your hand in Bible study was how you learned.
I said: “What about the people who never got a chance? What about the babies?”
Linda looked at me the way you look at a dog that has bitten a guest. Not angry. Worse than angry. Disappointed in a way that contained the seeds of something harder. She said, gently, with the particular gentleness that is the church’s way of loading a gun, that God’s ways are not our ways, and that the heart that questions God’s judgment has already begun to turn from Him.
That was the Wednesday. On Sunday, Pastor Keith preached a sermon on the sin of doubt. He did not use my name. He did not have to. He looked at me seven times. I counted. Seven times his eyes found me in the third row, between my mother and my father, and held me there, and the beam of the searchlight was so hot I could feel it on my skin, an actual physical heat, a flush that spread across my face and neck and settled into my chest like a coal. My mother’s hand tightened on my knee. Not in comfort. In warning. Sit still. Bear it. This is what you brought on yourself.
After the service, three women from the prayer team came to me. They stood around me in the fellowship hall with their hands on my shoulders and prayed over me for twenty minutes, praying the doubt out of me, praying for my heart to soften, praying for the Enemy to release his hold on my mind. I stood there with my eyes closed and their fingers pressing into my shoulders and felt the last thread of something break, the thread that connected me to the possibility that these people might be safe, that this god they served might be kind, that the building I stood in might be a place where a fifteen-year-old girl could ask a question and not be treated as a threat.
The thread broke. And what filled the space it left was not emptiness but heat. A furious, specific, clarifying heat that said: This god is not good. This god watched them do that to you and called it love. This god is a searchlight and a gavel and a cage, and you do not owe him your fear, and you will not give him another day of it.
I left three years later, the week I turned eighteen. I left the house and the church and the town, and I did not leave the way Daniel left his family, with a note on the counter and a plan in place. I left the way a person leaves a building that is on fire. I left with what I could carry and I did not look back and I have not gone back and I will not go back, not to the building and not to the god inside it, the god who is, as far as I can tell, the same god every church serves, however much they dress him in different clothes, however much they soften his voice and call the softening mercy.
I know this is not fair. Micah has told me this, gently, in the way he tells me things he knows I need to hear and will not accept. He has said that not every church is New Covenant Fellowship. He has said that the god of Pastor Keith may not be the god of the universe. He has said it with the measured, even-handed care of a man who does not believe in any god at all but who respects the question enough to separate the possible answer from the damage done by one particular wrong one. And I hear him. I hear the fairness of it. And I cannot get there. The burn is too deep. The scar tissue is too thick. When I hear the word God I do not hear a philosophical proposition. I hear Pastor Keith’s voice and I feel his eyes and I feel the hands on my shoulders and the coal in my chest, and the fury rises, and I let it, because the fury is the only thing I trust more than the wound.
This is what people do not understand about leaving a church like that. They think you leave the building and you are free. You are not free. You carry the building with you. You carry the searchlight and the folding chairs and the cinderblock walls and the voice of every person who told you that your questions were a sin, and they set up camp inside you, and on certain nights, in certain moments, when you see a gold cross on a stranger’s collarbone in a bathroom mirror, the whole camp lights up and you are fifteen again, standing in the fellowship hall with hands on your shoulders, feeling the god you were given press down on you like a stone.
Micah turns onto the Thruway entrance ramp. The car tilts slightly on the curve, and Quinn sways in the back seat, humming something from the show, her voice tuneless and happy. The windshield is beginning to spot with rain. Light, intermittent drops that the wipers are not yet needed for, but Micah turns them on anyway, the lowest setting, a slow, measured sweep that clears the glass every few seconds. He is watching the road. Quinn is humming. And I am sitting in the passenger seat with my hands in my lap, feeling the fist in my chest slowly unclench, the way it always does, eventually, when the trigger passes and the present comes back into focus and I remember that I am twenty-seven years old and no one is praying over me and the searchlight is off.
It is off. I turned it off. I keep it off. And if there is something in the dark that the searchlight was never actually pointed at, something patient and different and nothing like what I was taught, something that has been trying to reach me through a door I bricked shut at fifteen. Well.
I do not think about that. I have trained myself not to think about that. And the training holds, most days. Most days it holds.
The rain picks up. Quinn stops humming. The road opens ahead of us, wet and dark and ordinary, and I watch it unspool and feel nothing I have not chosen to feel.
Quinn
I cannot get the song out of my head, which is fine, which is good, which is the entire point of going to a show in the first place. Fill the head. Keep it full. The song sits where the quiet would be and the quiet is not something I want to sit with right now or ever, honestly, because the quiet is where the thinking happens and the thinking is not my friend.
I hum the bass line, the one that rattled my teeth, the one that made the floor of the venue feel like it was breathing. Micah glances at me in the mirror with that look he has, the one that is equal parts amusement and something softer, something I would call concern if I were the kind of person who let people be concerned about her. I am not that kind of person. I am the kind of person who hums a bass line in the back seat of a car at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night and means it as a wall.
The show was good. The show was very good. I stood at the front because I always stand at the front, because the front is where the sound is loudest and the bodies are closest and the lights hit you full in the face, and in that crush of noise and heat and pressure there is no room for the thing I am always trying not to make room for, which is myself. I danced. I sang along to songs I did not know the words to, making up lyrics, shouting them into the general roar, and for three hours I was not Quinn the mess, Quinn the problem, Quinn the girl whose name is shorthand among her old friends for a good time that went too far. I was just a body in a crowd, anonymous and loud and wonderfully, blessedly lost.
This is what I do. I fill the room. Whatever room I am in, I fill it with noise, with motion, with whatever is available, and the filling is not a hobby or a personality trait; it is a survival strategy so old and so automatic that I can barely remember the girl who first developed it, though she must have been young, because by the time I was fourteen the machinery was already running smooth. The trick is simple. Keep moving. Keep the music on. Keep the glass full or the smoke going or the conversation loud enough that the silence cannot get a foothold, because the silence is where I live when I am not careful, and the person who lives there is someone I have spent ten years trying not to meet.
I have a drink in my bag. A flask, technically. Silver, dented, filled this afternoon with whatever was in the bottle on top of the fridge, which I think was bourbon but might have been rye; the distinction matters to people who drink for the taste, and I have never been one of those people. I drink for the same reason I go to shows and keep the music loud and talk too fast and laugh too hard: because the alternative is sitting still in a quiet room with no one between me and the inside of my own head, and the inside of my own head is a neighborhood I do not visit voluntarily.
I have not taken a drink from the flask tonight. I want to name that. Three hours at a show and I did not drink, not even the beers Quinn-from-a-year-ago would have bought at the bar without thinking. I am trying. The trying does not look like much from the outside, and Micah and Naomi do not comment on it because they have learned that commenting makes me skittish and skittish makes me bolt, and bolting is what I do best, and when I bolt I do not come back for days, and when I come back I am worse. So they let me try in my own way, in the small, private, unglamorous way of a person who carries a flask and does not drink from it and counts this as a victory because she knows, from experience, how many nights she has not been able to count it, how many mornings she has woken on a couch she does not recognize with a headache like a nail and the taste of something chemical in the back of her throat and the slow, sickening realization that she has lost another night to the machine.
I am twenty-four. I have been running since I was fourteen. The math is easy. Ten years of filling every silence, numbing every feeling, drowning every quiet moment in whatever was available: alcohol at first, then weed, then pills that a boy in my sophomore class sold out of his backpack, then a period I do not talk about and will not talk about and have packed away in a box inside a box inside a room I do not enter, and then, slowly, unevenly, with many setbacks, a pulling-back that is not sobriety because sobriety is a word for people who have admitted what they are, and I have not admitted what I am, not out loud, not to Micah, not to Naomi, not to the parade of therapists my mother sent me to between the ages of sixteen and twenty, each of whom sat across from me with a notepad and a gentle expression and waited for me to say the thing, and I did not say the thing, because saying it would have required sitting still long enough to know it, and sitting still is the one thing I cannot do.
Here is what I know about myself, which is as much as I will admit on a Sunday night in the back of Micah’s car with the rain starting and the highway unrolling and the song still humming in my head like a friendly parasite. I know I am afraid of quiet. I know I am afraid of being alone in a room with no sound, because in that room, in that silence, there is a version of me that I have spent a decade outrunning and she is not someone I want to be with. She is the girl who sits on the bathroom floor at three in the morning and feels everything she has been holding off all day come crashing in, the grief and the shame and the vast, formless terror of being a person who exists in a world that is too loud when it is loud and too quiet when it is quiet and never, ever, the right temperature.
Micah knows some of this. Naomi knows some of this. They know what they have seen: the nights I come home buzzing and can’t stop talking, the mornings I don’t come out of my room until noon, the week last March when I disappeared and Micah drove forty-five minutes to find me asleep in my car in the parking lot of a Walmart, my phone dead, my shoes missing, my face streaked with mascara I did not remember putting on. He did not ask what happened. He drove me home and made me toast and sat on the couch next to me while I ate it, and we watched a show about penguins, and he did not say a word about the Walmart or the missing shoes or the mascara, and the not-saying was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in months.
This is why I live with them. Because they do not require me to be legible. Because they have their own damage, their own boxes they do not open, and the unspoken agreement between us is that we will share a kitchen and a bathroom and the occasional Sunday night drive home from a concert and we will not ask each other to explain the parts that do not make sense. Naomi has her church. Micah has his sister. I have whatever I have, the thing I do not name, the restlessness that has no bottom and no cure and no explanation I am willing to give.
The flask sits in my bag by my feet. I can feel its weight, or I imagine I can. A small, cool, silver possibility resting against my ankle. I do not reach for it. I count the not-reaching. I am up to three hours and change. This is good. This is the kind of good that no one sees, the kind that happens in the private dark of a decision not made, a hand not extended, a swallow not taken, and if I am proud of it I am proud of it in the way you are proud of not falling off a cliff, which is to say: relieved, and aware that the cliff is still there, and not confident enough to look down.
The rain is coming harder. I can hear it on the roof of the Accord, a pattering that started as decoration and is becoming something more insistent. I lean back in my seat and pull my jacket tight around my shoulders. The concert is fading. The song in my head is growing thinner, losing its grip, and I can feel the quiet beginning to press in at the edges, the way it always does when the last noise dies and the world goes still and there is nothing between me and the thinking.
I reach for my phone. The screen lights up, a small bright rectangle of safety, and I scroll through nothing, past photos and posts and ads and clips that I do not see, that I do not need to see, because the seeing is not the point. The point is the motion of my thumb on the glass, the flicker of images, the steady stream of input that keeps the channel occupied. I am filling the room. The room is inside my skull and it is always hungry and the phone is food, the cheapest and most portable kind, the kind I can carry in my pocket and feed myself with whenever the quiet gets too close.
Naomi glances back at me. Her face in the dim light of the highway is angular and watchful, the face of a woman who is always reading the room for threats. She does not say anything. She does not need to. The glance is a check-in, a brief, practiced sweep of the kind a person develops when they live with someone who disappears, and I meet it with a smile that says I am here, I am fine, I am not going anywhere tonight, and she turns back to the windshield, and the exchange is over, and it cost us nothing, and it was worth everything.
Micah asks if I want the aux cord. I say yes. I plug in my phone and find something loud and bright, something with a beat that fills the car the way the concert filled the venue, and I turn it up until I can feel it in my sternum, and the quiet retreats, and the thinking retreats, and I am safe again, for now, in the noise.
I am always safe in the noise. I am only ever in danger in the silence.
There is a part of me, a small and terrified part that speaks only when the rest of me is too tired to shut it up, that knows this is not living. That knows the running is not freedom but a leash, and that the thing I am running from is not behind me but inside me, and that no amount of noise or motion or numbness will ever put enough distance between us. That part speaks sometimes at four in the morning, or in the dead space between waking and getting out of bed, or in moments like this one, in a car with people I love, when the concert is over and the flask is full and the music is loud but not quite loud enough, and through the bass and the drums I can hear, faintly, the sound of my own heart, which is just a body doing what bodies do, keeping time, keeping me alive whether I want it to or not, and the steadiness of it frightens me because it means I am here, I am real, I am a person who exists and who has done things and to whom things have been done, and eventually, one day, the music will stop and the room will be quiet and I will have to sit with all of it, every piece of it, the whole ugly inventory of a life spent in flight.
Not tonight. Tonight the music plays and the rain falls and the car carries me home, and home is a house on Garfield Street with two people who do not ask me to explain myself, and that is enough. It is not everything. It is not close to everything. But it is enough to keep me here, in the car, in the noise, in the moving, which is the only place I know how to be.
I turn the music up one more notch. Micah reaches over and turns it down one. This is our negotiation, our nightly treaty. I fill; he moderates. The music settles at a volume that is louder than conversation and softer than escape, and I let it be, because even I know that some battles are not worth fighting, and the ones with Micah never are, because he fights the way he does everything else: with such patient, irritating reasonableness that you end up agreeing with him just to make him stop being right.
Outside, the rain streaks the windows in long diagonal lines that the highway lights turn to gold. Inside, the car is warm and close and full of the particular intimacy of three people who share a life without sharing a history. We are all from different places. We are all broken in different ways. We all ended up at 412 Garfield Street, three doors in a row down the upstairs hall, and the nearness of us, the sheer dumb luck of having found each other, is the only thing I am grateful for without reservation.
The flask is still in my bag. I am still not reaching for it. The music is still playing. The rain is still falling.
This is how I survive. One minute of not-reaching at a time, in a car full of noise and people I trust and the miles going by outside the window like a promise I do not entirely believe but am not yet ready to break.
Micah
The road is wet and the wipers are earning their keep and Quinn’s music is doing that thing it does where the bass vibrates through the steering column and into my hands, which is her way of hugging me from the back seat, though she would deny it. I let the volume sit where it is. The rain is heavier than I expected. Not dangerous, not yet, but the kind that makes you check the mirrors more often and keep both hands on the wheel and think about tire tread and stopping distance, which is what I am thinking about now, because thinking about practical things is how I hold the door shut on the other thinking, the thinking I do not want to do on a Sunday night after a good show with two people I love in the car.
I am twenty-nine years old. I am five months from thirty. I work as a copy editor for a publishing house that specializes in academic texts, which means I spend my days correcting other people’s arguments, tightening their logic, and noting in the margins where their reasoning has gone soft. I am good at it. I am good at it because I am, by temperament and by training and by the particular accident of grief that made me who I am, a person who notices when things do not hold up. Weak premises. Unstated assumptions. Conclusions that do not follow from their evidence. I find these things the way a dowser finds water, with an instinct I did not choose and cannot turn off, and most days the instinct is a professional asset and nothing more.
Most days. Not all of them. Some days the instinct turns inward and runs its analysis on the argument I have been making my whole adult life, the argument that sits at the center of me like a load-bearing wall, and finds it, still, terribly, inescapably sound. The argument is this: a God who is both good and powerful would not have let June die.
June. My sister. Fourteen when she was diagnosed, fifteen when she finished treatment, sixteen when it came back, sixteen and three months when she died, in a hospital bed in a room with a window that faced a parking lot, on a Tuesday afternoon in April while the dogwoods were blooming outside and our mother was holding one of her hands and our father was holding the other and I was standing at the foot of the bed holding nothing, watching her breathe and then not breathe, and the space between those two states, the breathing and the not-breathing, was so small and so ordinary that I could not believe it was the space where everything ended. It was like watching a sentence stop in the middle. No period. No closing clause. Just a word that was a breath and then the word was gone and the silence after it was the loudest thing I had ever heard.
I do not talk about June often. Naomi knows. Quinn knows in the general sense, the way Quinn knows difficult things, which is to say she has absorbed the shape of it without requiring the details, the way a person can know there is a hole in a floor without needing to measure its depth. They know I had a sister. They know she died young. They know it is the reason I do not believe in God, which is a simplification that I allow because the full version is longer and harder and leads to a conversation I do not want to have at a dinner table or on a couch or in a car, the conversation that begins with how do you know there is no God and ends, always, with me standing at the foot of a hospital bed watching my sister’s chest stop moving and wanting to say to the ceiling, to whatever might be above it: You could have stopped this. You chose not to. I will not forgive that choice.
My parents were believers. Are believers. They pray every morning at six, kneeling beside their bed in the house they have lived in for thirty-four years, and they go to church on Sundays and they read their Bible in the evenings and they believe, with the calm, unshakeable certainty of people for whom faith is not a choice but a climate, that God is good and that His plan is perfect and that June is in heaven and that they will see her again. I do not begrudge them this. Or I try not to. Their faith carried them through the worst thing that can happen to a parent, and if it is a fiction, it is a useful one, and who am I to take away the scaffold that holds a grieving person upright?
But I was there. I was there when they prayed. I was fifteen and my sister was fourteen, and the diagnosis was a word I had to look up, and the prognosis was a word I already knew, and my parents, who had never asked me to believe anything I did not want to believe, knelt beside June’s bed and prayed with such ferocity that I could see the cords in my father’s neck, and they asked God to heal her, to take the sickness from her body, to spare her, please, she is so young, please, she has done nothing wrong, please. They prayed this prayer every day for eighteen months. They prayed it in the morning and at dinner and at night. They prayed it in the car on the way to the hospital and in the hallway outside the treatment room and in the chapel on the third floor with the bad fluorescent light and the plastic chairs and the painting of Jesus holding a lamb that I stared at so many times I can still see it when I close my eyes, every brushstroke, the soft blur of the lamb’s wool, the calm, distant expression on the painted face that was supposed to be comfort and was not, to me, anything but the face of a person who was not going to help.
They prayed. And God did nothing. This is not an interpretation. It is an observation. They asked, specifically and repeatedly, for the life of their daughter, and the answer was silence, and the silence lasted eighteen months, and at the end of the eighteen months June was dead and the dogwoods were blooming and my father, who had not cried once through the whole ordeal, stood in the parking lot of the hospital and broke apart so completely that I had to hold him up, and I was sixteen years old and holding up my father while the sky did nothing and the parking lot did nothing and God, if He was there, did nothing.
This is not anger. I want to distinguish. Naomi is angry at God, furious with a focused, personal fury that comes from having been wounded by His representatives, and her anger is the anger of betrayal, the heat of a person who trusted and was burned. My position is different. My position is not emotional but structural. It is an argument, and I have made it carefully, and I stand behind it with the full weight of my training and my temperament and my grief.
The argument: If God exists and is good and is powerful, then He could have healed June and chose not to. A being who can prevent the suffering of a child and does not is not good. Therefore either God does not exist, or God is not good, or God is not powerful. In any of these cases, worship is not warranted. In the first case there is no one to worship. In the second case the being that exists does not deserve it. In the third case the being that exists cannot deliver on the promises made in its name, and to worship it is to worship a well-meaning incompetent, which is its own kind of cruelty.
I am aware that this argument is not new. I am aware that theologians have been wrestling with it for millennia, that there are shelves of books addressing it, that the professional thinkers of the faith have constructed elaborate frameworks to explain why a good God permits suffering: free will, soul-making, the greater good, the mystery of divine providence. I have read them. I have read them carefully and with the professional attention I bring to every text, and I have found them, every one, to be the kind of argument that sounds plausible in the abstract and disintegrates the moment you hold it up against a specific sixteen-year-old girl dying in a specific hospital bed on a specific Tuesday afternoon in April. The frameworks do not fit the room. The room is too small and too real and too full of the sound of a father breaking apart in a parking lot, and no amount of philosophical sophistication can make that sound mean something it does not mean.
June would have been twenty-six this year. I know this the way I know my own age, reflexively, the calculation running in the background at all times, a parallel clock that tracks the years she is not having alongside the years I am. She would have been twenty-six. She might have been in graduate school. She liked biology, the small-scale kind, cells and membranes and the machinery of living things, and she kept a microscope on her desk, a real one, not a toy, that our parents bought her for her thirteenth birthday. She would set up slides and call me in to look, and I would lean over the eyepiece and see a smear of pond water transformed into a city of moving shapes, and June would narrate what I was seeing in a voice that was half science and half wonder, as if she could not quite believe that the world contained this much detail and she had been given the tools to see it.
She was curious. She was funny in the quiet way that catches you off guard. She could not carry a tune but sang constantly. She hated lima beans with a passion that bordered on theology, and on the nights our mother served them she would construct elaborate arguments for their exclusion from the table, citing taste, texture, nutritional inferiority to other legumes, and the basic human right to not eat something that looks, as she put it, like a tiny green kidney. She was alive. She was so alive that the word seems redundant, the way you would not say a fire is hot, because the heat is the thing itself, and June was the thing itself, the aliveness, the curiosity, the singing and the laughing and the microscope and the elaborate hatred of lima beans, and then she was not, and the world went on as if the fire had never been lit, and I stood at the foot of the bed and watched it go out and have been standing there ever since.
My parents moved on. They would not use that phrase. They would say they gave their grief to God, which is the religious way of saying they put it in a box and trusted someone else to carry it, and the trust sustained them, and the box is still closed, and they are still standing. I did not move on. I am not standing at the foot of the bed in any literal sense; I have a job and an apartment and two housemates I care about and a life that looks, from the outside, like the life of a functional adult. But inside, underneath the functionality, the copy editor’s desk is pushed against a wall and behind the wall is the room I cannot leave, the room with the parking lot outside the window and the dogwoods blooming and the silence where an answer should have been.
I carry June with me. Not as a memory. As a case. An open file, evidence cataloged, argument fully prepared, waiting for the defendant to show up to court. I carry the image of the painting in the chapel, the painted face that did not help. I carry the sound of my father in the parking lot. I carry the microscope slides, the small green kidneys, the off-key singing, the whole inventory of a girl who was here and then was not, and I lay these things on the table, piece by piece, and I say to the empty courtroom: Explain this. Justify this. Tell me why a God who could have prevented this is worthy of a single word of praise.
The courtroom is always empty. No one comes to the stand. The case goes unanswered. And I take this silence, this long, cosmic, unbearable silence, as the only verdict I need.
Quinn turns up the music again. I turn it down. This is our dance, our small, nightly argument about volume, and I love her for it, the way I love Naomi for her sharpness and her scars and her refusal to pretend that the world has not hurt her. They are my people. They are the people I have chosen in the absence of the person I did not get to keep, and the choosing is real, and the care is real, and if the care is built on a foundation of shared damage, so be it. Most foundations are built on something broken. The question is whether they hold, and ours does, three doors down a hallway in a house on Garfield Street, and the holding is enough.
The rain is steady now. Ahead, the highway bends through a corridor of trees and I can see the glow of an interchange in the distance, the lights blurred through the wet windshield into soft, smeared circles. The temperature gauge on the dashboard reads thirty-five. I watch it. Thirty-five is above freezing, which is fine. I am not worried about ice. The rain is rain, not sleet, and the road is wet but not treacherous, and we are an hour from home if the traffic holds.
Naomi has gone quiet in the passenger seat. Not asleep. Thinking. She gets a particular stillness when the church is on her mind, a held quality, like a person listening for a sound they hope not to hear. I know the look. I have sat across from her on enough evenings to recognize it, and I do not interrupt it, because the interruption would only pull her out of whatever she is working through, and working through is what she does, the slow, private, grinding labor of a woman processing a wound that will not close. I respect this. I respect it more than I respect most things, because it is honest work, the work of not pretending, and pretending is the thing I hate most in the world, the thing the chapel painting represented, the painted smile on the painted face that promised help and delivered nothing.
Quinn has finally settled. The music is playing at a volume we can both live with, and she is curled into the back seat with her jacket balled under her head, her phone face-down on her thigh, her eyes half-closed. She is not asleep either. She is doing that thing she does when the night is winding down and the stimulation is fading and the quiet is starting to lap at the edges of her noise: she is holding very still and breathing very deliberately, as if she is trying to convince her own body that the stillness is safe, that she will not be ambushed by whatever it is that lives in her silences. I have watched her do this a hundred times. It never gets less painful to see.
Three doors down. That is us. Three damaged people in three adjacent rooms in a house we did not choose, bound together by the particular gravity of recognized pain. Naomi, who was burned by a god. Quinn, who is running from herself. Me, carrying a dead girl and an unanswered question and the stubborn, irrefutable conviction that the universe owes me an explanation it will never give.
The highway joins a larger road, and suddenly there is traffic, not much, but more than the empty stretch behind us: headlights in both directions, taillights ahead, the general movement of a Sunday night sorting itself toward home. I merge into the flow and settle into the rhythm of it, matching speed, keeping distance, the practical work of driving that occupies the part of my brain that likes to be useful and leaves the rest of it alone with its file and its evidence and its empty courtroom.
Somewhere ahead of us, or behind us, or beside us on this same stretch of highway, there are other cars carrying other people toward other destinations, and I do not think about them except as taillights to follow and headlights to avoid and the general presence of other human beings moving through the same wet night. I do not know their names. I do not know their wounds. I do not know that a couple in a Subaru is driving home from a cabin and the woman in the passenger seat carries an ache she cannot name and the man at the wheel carries a certainty he cannot examine. I do not know that a man and his sister in another car are driving away from a house where God keeps a ledger and neither of them has figured out how to close the book. I do not know these things because the world does not label its convergences. It simply arranges them, quietly, the way a river arranges its currents, drawing separate streams toward the same bend.
The bend. I can see it now, or something like it: the road curving ahead through a stand of trees toward an interchange where the lanes merge and the signs point in three directions and the highway narrows for a moment before it opens again. A familiar stretch. We have driven it before. The curve is gentle, banked properly, well-lit on a dry night but darker when the rain is heavy because the lights do not carry as far through the wet and the road surface reflects the headlights back as glare rather than illumination.
The rain is heavier now. I can feel it in the steering, a faint looseness that means the tires are working harder to grip. I slow down. Not much. Five miles an hour, enough to widen the margin between speed and traction. The temperature gauge reads thirty-four. Still above freezing. Still fine.
Quinn stirs in the back seat. “Are we close?”
“Forty-five minutes, maybe. Hour.”
“I’m hungry.”
“There’s a granola bar in the glove box.”
“There was. I ate it on the way to the show.”
Naomi makes a sound that is almost a laugh. Quinn leans forward and rests her chin on the back of Naomi’s headrest, and for a moment the three of us are arranged in the particular geometry of our intimacy: Quinn leaning in, Naomi tolerating the closeness with a warmth she will not name, me holding the wheel and the road and the careful distance from my own interior that allows me to be a person who drives and talks and checks his mirrors rather than a person who stands at the foot of a hospital bed watching the last breath leave.
The car moves through the dark. The rain falls. The highway bends ahead of us toward a curve we cannot yet see, and the night is ordinary, and we are ordinary in it, three people driving home from a concert on a wet Sunday in November, carrying the usual freight, the scars and the silences and the arguments we make with the dark, and there is nothing to suggest that the ordinary will not hold, that the road will not keep its shape, that the night will not deliver us, as it always has, safely to our doors.
There is nothing to suggest it. But the rain is getting colder, and the road is getting darker, and somewhere ahead, beyond the reach of our headlights, the temperature is still falling, and the water on the asphalt is beginning to consider, in the slow, molecular way that water does, whether to remain what it is or become something harder, something clear and invisible and unforgiving.
I do not know this. I am driving. The gauge reads thirty-three. Quinn is hungry. Naomi is quiet. The music plays. And somewhere on this same highway, converging on the same bend of road, strangers I will never meet in any living room are moving through the same rain toward the same curve, and the night, which has been ordinary, is about to become something else.
I check my mirrors. I check the road. I hold the wheel and the miles pass and the dark comes down, and I do not pray, because I do not pray, because prayer is a letter to an address that does not exist, and I learned that lesson at sixteen and have never had cause to unlearn it.
The wipers sweep. The rain falls. The road bends on.