these are the things that had happened to Eliot Quinn:
The summer before his junior year, on the side of I-64 east, Eliot first met death. Colson was in full scorch, and he and his parents had taken a day trip down to the national forest to escape the heat. It had been idyllic—he’d been in a good mood, free-floating between school years, far enough from either end to distance himself from the teen angst that sometimes overtook him, the fretting over SAT scores and football practice, and that most neuroses-addled subject of all: girls. He didn’t even have a thing for one girl in particular, but that was worse somehow—he couldn’t stop thinking about them, all of them, eleventh-grade girls on a conveyor belt in his head on repeat, making him crazy. But that day, all three of them had been happy. They’d picked up a giant tub of buffalo wings, drowned them in bleu cheese, and ate them on Pendleton beach. It was humid, but the breeze off the lake was mollifying, and Eliot had been content to sit and let the sun eat away at his farmer’s tan. Later, he and his father had thrown the ball around at water’s edge and joked about celebrity crushes—some real picturesque 1950s shit.
Even when it started to rain, their spirits were high. They returned to their car in the tepid drizzle, cooled and satisfied by the day.
By the time they made it back to the highway, the rain was a torrent. And this was the part where, in retrospect, Eliot knew it was all his fault. His father had kept the map lights on in front so Eliot could see, so they could all sign. It was slippery, there was a glare, his father should have been concentrating on the road.
Did someone cut them off? Had there been an animal, an orange construction cone? Eliot wasn’t sure. He hadn’t been paying attention—none of them were paying attention—probably because he was absorbed in saying something inane and his parents were busy being such good fucking parents. Whatever it had been, his father pounded the brakes but the car didn’t stop. They skidded through a puddle, hydroplaned across a lane. Then they flipped.
None of that “it happened so fast” bullshit. It happened in real time. Nothing but the excruciating awareness of the moment and its inescapability. Dulled only when Eliot smacked his face against the window as they corkscrewed over the shoulder and deep into a ditch.
The adrenaline when he came to upside down, seatbelt cutting into his windpipe. He unstrapped himself and climbed up and out the opposite window, came round to his mother in the passenger seat. She was screaming, he saw when he got there, but the sight of Eliot snapped her out of it, and he peeled back the misshapen metal of what had been her door and steadied her while she pushed free.
With his mother out, Eliot stuck his head back into the car, but his father wasn’t inside. His mother said something with her mouth he couldn’t see, then took off running back up to the road. Eliot pulled his phone from his pocket and tried to make it dial.
Car accident car accident, he yelled into the receiver, and left the call running, like they’d learned in school.
He ran in the direction his mother had gone until he caught sight of them, huddled in streaks of headlight: his mother on the ground, stroking his father’s hair. His father’s face cut up, already swollen. His father, who was so sturdy he never wore his seatbelt.
Eliot knelt in the wet beside them. A thick vane of glass protruded from his father’s neck, blood everywhere, blood multiplied by rain.
Dad! he said, and his father’s eyelids fluttered open.
When he saw Eliot, he raised a shaky hand and tried to sign.
It’s okay, Eliot said, but his father’s fingers continued to spasm with a desire to say something. You can talk to me. What is it?
Don’t you see? The angels?
What? said Eliot’s mother.
The angels from heaven. They’re so beautiful. Lighting up that tree.
Eliot looked over his shoulder at the tree line, but he didn’t see anything bright until the ambulance showed up—by then his father was gone—and he didn’t see anything beautiful for a long time after that.
* * *
—
After the funeral, Eliot and his mother spent three weeks in a tundral living room, lights dim and AC blasting, and his mother asked him if he believed in heaven.
Like angels and stuff? Like what Dad said?
Yeah.
I don’t know. You?
I think maybe we should go to church, she said.
They were not churchgoing people, a minority in Ohio. Eliot had been inside a church only a handful of times for Cub Scout meetings when he was small. But his father hadn’t been religious, not ever, and still in the end he’d seemed so convinced. Eliot didn’t know what to make of it, but the idea of church seemed to perk his mom up a little, so they googled places, found one with an imposing steeple and a flashy website: Newbirth Evangelical. Make Your Fresh Start Today.
The website said Come as you are, and inside the atrium didn’t look like a church at all. It was round and bright, with floor-to-ceiling windows and high-top café tables and chairs scattered around the perimeter. In the center was a Pepsi machine and a huge banner that said, FREE COFFEE! FREE POP! FREE WI-FI! PASSWORD: JESUS1. Ahead, two sets of thick wooden doors opened into the sanctuary.
Here, things looked a bit more familiar—pews, a stage with a terrifying life-size crucifix. But soon it was clear more modern elements had infiltrated the sanctuary itself, too: diffuse concert lighting in a purple hue, a giant LED screen suspended from the ceiling, and, now assembling on the raised platform in front of the altar, a rock band with electric guitars and a drum kit, big amps on the floor and three giant speakers on stands aimed out at the congregation. Everyone was on their feet smiling and singing and clapping, and Eliot had thought, All right, they are unreasonably happy, but I can handle this.
He and his mother slid into a pew. The music stopped rippling, and everyone else sat, too. The man Eliot assumed was the priest leapt to the stage with his hands raised in victory. On the screen, a slow zoom into a close-up of priest guy’s face as he began his sermon. Eliot had tried to follow along, but lipreading was a slippery business, and he was soon lost somewhere in the desert with a guy named Jacob, who had been wrestling (resting? festering?) an angel.
That’s when he’d seen her, across the aisle, and a few rows ahead: wild auburn hair hanging long down her back, white T-shirt revealing freckled arms. He had never been so taken by a person’s profile, and willed her to turn, just a little. Then his mother was nudging him—time to go, how long had he been staring? As the girl stepped into the aisle, he caught a glimpse of her face, fair and freckled and hazel-eyed, and even better than he’d imagined. Eliot felt a cog turn inside his chest, his grief for the moment dammed off. His brain, once racked by the idea of girls, would hereafter be consumed by only this girl—a nameless dappled mystery.