My mother stood with some of the small children, her eyes bright and conscious. She hunched over the baby in her arms, her newest, a girl with double streaks of smoke beneath her nostrils.
“Where’s the Prophet?” Constance asked. Her voice cut through the churning sound of the flames.
People looked around, aware that nobody had thought of him before that moment, too caught up in pressing their children as close as possible to their bodies. They lifted their heads, taking in the trappings of their Kevinianness burning around them. They couldn’t have known that the body of Kevin burned then, too. Their entire religion up in smoke within the span of moments.
“WHERE IS HE?” Constance screamed.
She ran around the crowd, staring into soot-streaked faces, frenzy in her eyes. Surely she was thinking of the sacrifice she’d made for him. If he was dead, it all meant nothing.
Her pink, sockless feet slapped over the frozen ground, running toward the Prophet’s house.
“Constance, stop!” my father screamed.
She pushed through the door of his smoldering house.
Everyone loved Constance. This was true up to the moment of her death. When she stepped over the crumbling threshold of the Prophet’s house, the fire fell in love with her. So much so that it devoured the delicate blond threads of her hair in screeching, smoking kisses, instantly filled her cheeks with pink and red. It loved her so much that, in an instant, the entire house collapsed around her in a hug.
I think I screamed, though no one heard me because in that moment the entire world screamed, the physical screaming of faithful people, the screaming of fire as it demolished the hard labor of a decade, the screaming of trees as their sap boiled inside them, the screaming of tiny mammals woken from the peace of hibernation to find their bodies aflame.
Hours later, after I’d climbed down the mountain, the sky blushed with sunlight. Snowflakes started falling like white moths, and the stars winked out one by one, without a sound.
Chapter 57
“We found Constance’s remains at the crime scene,” Dr. Wilson says.
I nod.
“Can I say something?” he asks, pushing his glasses up his nose.
“You don’t need my permission.”
“I just want you to know, you’re allowed to feel badly about this.”
I pick up my head. “What?”
“You’ve been through something terrible. And maybe I haven’t done my duty in assuring you that you have no reason to feel guilty. None of it was your fault. Losing your hands, your childhood, Constance dying—”
“Of course Constance dy—” I swallow a throatful of bile. “Of course her being gone is my fault.”
“I can see why you might feel that way. But it’s not logical. It’s grief making you see things unclearly. Do you realize that, as long as I’ve known you, these many months, you’ve never actually acknowledged that she is dead?”
“Why is that important?”
“So you can accept it. So you can move on.”
“Move on?” I ask, the blood rising in my face, my veins stretching with it. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You’re so out of touch, you know that? As if you can relate to a single thing I say. You with your expensive clothes. With your tie clip.”
“My tie clip?” he asks laughingly.
“Nobody who wears a tie clip could possibly understand.”
“And why not?” He smiles like the whole thing is a joke, and that makes me angrier.
“You don’t get it. If you did, you wouldn’t tell me to move on. Hey, why don’t you move on? Get yourself back to DC and live your nice life in your fancy house with shiny things that make you feel good inside. And go out with your wife and eat expensive food, and give your son a car because that’s what good fathers do. And give up on me and give up on the Prophet because he’s deader than dirt, and so will we all be someday.”
“You’re very intuitive, Minnow. You got so very much right in that last statement. All but one thing. I don’t have a son anymore.”
I shake my head. “Yes, you do,” I say. “He likes Thomas Hardy. His name’s Jonah.”
“I did have a son named Jonah,” he agrees. “And now I don’t have a son named Jonah. And that is that.”
The air vibrates numbly, the way it did in the forest the moment before a lightning strike.
“I said that to myself a lot at first, after it happened. Like an affirmation. I had a son named Jonah. And now I don’t have a son named Jonah. And that is that.”
“What happened?”
“I bought my son a car for his sixteenth birthday. You even got that part right. How did you guess? Carol—that’s my wife—didn’t want him to have it. He’d barely passed his driving test and anyone could’ve seen he wasn’t ready. But I bought it for him anyway, because it was his birthday and because I could. And because my father didn’t for me. And that night he wrapped the car around the trunk of a tree.”
The room grows perfectly quiet. I look away.
“So how do you deal with it?” I ask.
He shrugs. “God, I can’t answer that. You don’t. Or, time heals. Or, you get used to it. I don’t know.”