We sang that in the little classroom in the wing off the sanctuary every Sunday morning. We drew pictures of angels and sheep and pinned them to one of the walls. In the end, my parents had preferred sleeping late to walking me to and from the church, and so I had stopped going. Eventually, the awkwardness brought on by the fact that neither of my parents was sufficiently inspired to attend more than twice a year meant that I, too, had slipped from the fold. I sighed. I regretted that in a paper in college I had grouped the origin stories of the Christian church with—and I felt guilty remembering this, a vestigial shadow from those days in Sunday school—the lunacy that grounded Scientology.
I wondered why my parents had grown further from God (any god) as they had aged. One of my professors had lectured that faith was an upside-down bell curve: a U. It grew weaker through adolescence and adulthood, and then—as mortality started to rear its ugly, cadaverous head—started to rise. Faith made it a hell of a lot easier to put one foot in front of the other when your feet were old and swollen and riddled with arthritis; when your hair was thinning and gray; when your neck was showing its first signs of caruncle droop. My parents weren’t precisely atheists; they did go to church on those two important occasions each year, and at least my mother defined herself as a Christian whenever she was asked (though clearly she was uncomfortable with the question). But neither of them leaned upon the church in times of need, either because they felt it was beneath them or because they had never—even after five miscarriages—felt the church would offer much comfort. I guessed I was like them in that regard.
I shook my head. This wasn’t about my parents growing old or infirm in ten or twenty years. This was about the here and now and the reality that my mother was missing, and how my life might be about to change in ways for which I was neither prepared nor trained. I was, I realized, scared. Very scared. I would take comfort wherever I had any chance of finding it. Any chance at all. And so I went upstairs to my bedroom. I looked out the window, actually up at the cloudless blue sky, and there I did something I hadn’t done in years. I prayed.
Our red Victorian had three porches, one with glass windows that faced south, one with screens that faced west, and one that was open and faced east. The southern porch doubled as a greenhouse in April and early May, incubating the tomato seedlings and pepper plants until it was likely the last spring frost was past and we—my mother and I, and then my mother and Paige—could transplant them into the garden outside. The open porch was at the front of the house, and near the entrance: a pair of heavy, cinnamon-colored doors with slender stained-glass windows in the top halves. Half a dozen feet to the right of the doors was a white wooden glider swing, long enough for two people to sit comfortably. Before my mother had spray-painted the hydrangea silver and my father had been forced to trim and cut away at least half its branches, it had shielded the glider from the street. Less so, now. Sometimes in the summer my mother would have her coffee on the swing and read the newspaper there in the morning; my father would occasionally grade final papers there in mid-May and read books in June and July. By August, the sun had moved, and the swing would remain empty until my father took it down in October and carried it up to the attic.
But not now. It was August, and my sister and I had gone to the swing to sit and wait for our father to return from the airport. I had brought a deck of playing cards and was absentmindedly shuffling it with one hand. Some people bit their nails; I cut cards, equally adept those days with either hand.