Anger. Fury. Rage. It takes strength just to feel it.
Jesse says nothing as Grace walks back into the chapel she escaped just moments ago. Nobody seems to notice as she walks down the aisle, as she sits back down next to her father just in time to catch the grand finale of Mom’s sermon. The energy of the room envelops her and she is carried away with the rest of the congregation, her anger and sadness and feelings she cannot name swept up with the roomful of other lives, other passions and disappointments, other secrets, other loves, other lies. She closes her eyes and imagines she is one of many—nameless, faceless, not her mother’s daughter. She listens to the powerful voice talk about how Jesus championed the weak and defenseless, how he embraced the misfits, how he loved the unlovable, how he spoke for those who could not speak for themselves. How he died for her sins. How he died fighting for all of us. How now it is our turn to fight.
The chapel rings with Grace’s mother’s words: “What are we going to do with our freedom, our power? What are we going to do with all this grace? What are we going to do with these blessed lives? What are we going to do to deserve them? How are we going to let our lives prove our repentance?”
Grace needs to leave, needs to be alone. She walks out again as everyone rises for the last hymn, their eyes clouded by inspiration. She can feel their hope as she escapes the chapel, all their fired-up good intentions to change some vague and abstract notion of the troubled world around them. Maybe they’ll go home and get online and donate a hundred bucks to a worthwhile cause. The best of them will give a dollar and a smile to that homeless vet by the highway off-ramp with his cardboard sign asking for help. But what are they going to do for a girl who had been part of their community, who needed real help and was shunned instead?
Grace walks the few blocks home and goes straight to her room, the only place she can think of that is supposed to feel safe. But she imagines eyes watching her, like the room is alive, holding its breath, waiting for her to do something. Maybe the closet will be dark enough, small enough. Maybe in there she will not feel watched.
She crouches on the floor of the small closet, the hems of Sunday skirts and dresses brushing against her forehead. Light streams under the closet door as she pulls it closed from the inside. It is almost dark. She is almost hidden.
But there is still light. Still enough seeping in to let her know she’s not alone. Enough to illuminate the words carved into the forgotten few inches of wall between the door and the corner, an unseen place, a place so dark, it could only be known by someone trying to be small—on the floor, with the door closed.
HELP ME, the scratches say. They are the texture of screaming, so rough they must have been carved by fingernails.
ERIN.
Sometimes dads leave and no one tells you why. Then sometimes they come back, and no one tells you why then, either. So you’re left on your own to figure it out. This is when logic comes in especially handy. Without logic and rational thinking, one might be left to the much lesser device of emotion, which can create all sorts of problems when left unchecked by reason.
Here’s an example: 1) A dad leaves; 2) While he’s gone, his teenage daughter experiences something everyone says is traumatic; 3) The dad comes back; 4) The mom and dad still don’t talk to each other; 5) The mom and dad sleep in separate bedrooms; 6) The mom and dad smile too much whenever the daughter’s around and pretend everything’s fine.
Then the family ends up in Prescott, Oregon, landlocked, exactly 81.7 miles from the ocean, in a town none of them particularly likes, and the girl has absolutely no say in the matter. Her family is still intact, technically speaking, though her father is at work far more than he’s at home, the twenty-mile commute to his office at the university a convenient excuse for his long hours and a convenient tool for avoiding the family he has little interest in being a part of, and the mother interacts with very few real, live people, preferring to manage her vast social-media empire of parent-support groups from her laptop perch on the kitchen island, right next to the fruit bowl, which is now devoid of bananas after she proclaimed them too sugary for her daughter’s sensitive system.
Erin could be emotional about it. She could be anxious and stressed and confused. She might feel guilty, might blame herself for her father’s unhappy return, might see herself as the toxic glue keeping her family intact. But she refuses to let emotions rule her. She knows she is better off without them, without pain, without thoughts and memories that serve no use but to hurt her. So she creates a world inside her head where these things will not bother her, a place where logic rules, a place she can control. She shoves the memories and feelings down so deep, they will not touch her.
There’s no use in wishing her family were different. Wishing doesn’t get anything done. Neither wishing nor thinking about the past is an efficient use of one’s time.
So Erin will not think about the events that followed her father’s leaving, not the handful of visits to the extended-stay hotel room that he absurdly called an apartment, prefurnished in durable beige fabrics, which takeout meals and late-night tears could not stain. She will not think about nights alone in the house with Mom’s endless crying, how it made studying or reading nearly impossible, how the house was filled with it, so thick Erin had a hard time breathing. Of course she knew that wasn’t possible—that her mother’s emotions could have an effect on the actual consistency of air—but regardless, Erin avoided the house as much as possible. She walked the whole length of Alki Beach as many times as it took to fill her pockets with shells whose species she practiced identifying by touch in the darkness, long enough to kill enough time so that Mom would probably be asleep when she got home. She checked the tidal charts each morning so she would know what to expect. The sea’s rhythms were constants, predictable and comforting, while everything else was changing in the life of a girl who abhorred change.