? ? ?
For the rest of the day, I stare at the Post-it on my affirmation wall. Anger is a kind of murder you commit in your heart. I’ve read it so many times, I think I believe it. Today, there was something else in my heartbeat. There was a skirmish. There was a fight.
“Angel, what do you miss the most?”
Angel hangs her head over her bunk. “I miss Pop-Tarts,” she says. “And Mountain Dew, and real pizza, and oh, fried chicken. I miss that the most.”
“No people?” I ask.
She shakes her head, the tails of her cornrows flicking side to side. “Not a soul,” she says. “People like me, we don’t look back. Only forward.”
“Are you ever gonna tell me how long you’re serving?”
“Do you think I’ll tell you anything about that with you lying on your bed all mopey and sad-looking? You’d burst into tears.”
“Fine,” I say. “Be that way.”
She disappears back to her bunk. After a moment, I hear her ask, “Are you trying to get me to ask you who you miss?”
“Maybe.”
“All right,” she says. “Who do you miss?”
“My grandpa,” I say.
She slides off of her bed and stands in front of me. “I thought for sure you’d say Jude.”
I shake my head. Jude is beyond missing. He’s in some other realm where his absence crouches always in the shadows, his hands pressed coldly to my heart.
“He was my father’s father,” I say. “He’s dead now, but I can’t help thinking he wouldn’t have let any of this happen. If he’d been stronger, if he’d lived, I think he might have saved all of us.”
I didn’t know my grandparents well. My grandmother was a wrinkled peach of a thing who died when I was too little to think about it, but Grampy was around even after the Prophet showed up. He didn’t say much when my father started talking about the new things he’d decided to believe in, but I could tell Grampy didn’t like it by the way he’d go silent and hunch his shoulders, all of his muscles bunching up inside the loose skin he lived in.
I was five when he died. We waited for hours in the hospital, and I spent the entire time being fascinated with a sheet cake in the hospital waiting room. My father wouldn’t let me eat any. He said it was touched by the teeth of Gentiles, or something. So I just stared at the chocolate insides marring the inches of white frosting and only the memory of a message scrawled in green on the top. It was a cake to celebrate someone getting better, being cured, leaving the hospital for good.
Grampy had been in a war years before when, on a foreign street, out of nowhere, he got punched in the thigh by a speeding piece of metal from an exploded car. And here, years later, his leg began to die, the muscle turning to poison and killing him a little with every heartbeat.
In this room, we waited to hear how getting his leg cut off had gone.
I looked at my parents like they’d become new people, suddenly, morphed into misshapen versions of themselves. Things had been changing for a while, ever since the Prophet started stopping by, but this was the first time I’d seen them together outside our house. The fluorescent lights of the waiting room illuminated their strangeness, their apartness. Had my mother’s lips always hung so slack? Had my father always had those livid blue veins that stabbed his eyes like pitchforks? My mother had quit her job by now, her swelling stomach stretching her gray shirt. My father’s beard was nearly to the center of his chest. It must’ve been about a month before we’d leave for the woods.
When the surgeon came out, he closed the wooden door behind him and put on a face that was trying to look sincere, but really looked tired.
“I’m so sorry. Donald didn’t make it.”
He explained how it happened. A bad thing grew out of the blood, formed a ball, and floated through his veins where it became jammed. Everything happened quickly after that.
My father’s face was impenetrable. He stared straight ahead, eyes avoiding the surgeon.
“It might not be my business, but do you have a faith?” the doctor asked.
My father lifted his head. “Why?”
“It can help, sometimes, believing in something.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, do you believe people go to a better place when they die? To heaven?”
My father was pulling on his bottom lip. His face was full of extra skin that bagged bluely and made him look tired. “I don’t know. I never asked.”
“Pardon?” the surgeon asked.
“I don’t know if I believe that. I never . . . I haven’t thought to ask about heaven.”
The surgeon’s face wrinkled in confusion. He bowed slightly—“Again, I’m so sorry for your loss,”—and walked back through the wooden door.