That was when she stopped believing in God. She prayed so hard night after night for her dad to stop hurting her mom and to stop being mean to her. For him to be nice. To tell her he loved her. That he was proud of her. But it never happened. All those prayers just withered on her lips like dead bugs. They were just wasted words. So she stopped praying. Stopped believing that God even had the power to answer prayers.

  But then in tenth grade, Judah came along. And he was so gentle. And so kind. And he just seemed to see her and to understand her pain without her ever having to say a single word about it. He actually asked her questions about herself, and he listened to her answers. And she wondered if maybe somehow, this was God trying to answer her prayers from years ago. But honestly, she never really bought into that. She listened to Judah preach for decades, and none of it really ever hit home for her. It all just sounded hollow. He talked about God the Father. And the Father’s love. And it would bring those nights back from so long ago when she shivered under her blankets and the moon loomed down and she could hear through the walls her father’s violent, screaming rage.

  Judah’s mind started to slow down. Everything slowed down. Snowflakes drifted down. His heartbeat slowed. He breathed in deep. And there was a bubble in the back of his mind like water starting to boil up from his unconscious. And the bubbles got bigger and faster, bursting over the surface. Boiling over. And there were words. Not words. Sounds that seemed like words. But not words he’d ever heard before. But he knew what it was.

  And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

  He was speaking in tongues. It was the Holy Spirit come upon him. He’d never spoken in tongues. Never even believed in it. Thought it was a bunch of malarkey. But the feeling of the words springing like a fountain in his mind and spilling out from his lips was undeniable. He had no idea what he was saying, but the words were unwinding years of tangled pain and regret and self-hatred. He felt his shoulders loosen. He felt his heart open up like a storybook to a fresh, new page.

  He opened his eyes. The snow was still falling. The moon hung in the sky. It was the same world, but it was also different somehow in a way he couldn’t quite put a finger on. He fell asleep.

  Three days later, Judah and Esther packed up their truck and headed home. It just got too cold and there was too much snow for them to be living in a tent. And they had no money for a hotel room. So they drove through the snow on their way out of town, which looked kind of magical, actually, covered with snow. But Judah grumbled anyway about absolutely everything. About the snow piled up on the sidewalks and how slick and slushy the roadways were and how there was only one snowplow out working and it wasn’t even throwing down any salt. He was ache-y and exhausted. The rapturous, Pentecostal feeling of the Holy Spirit had burnt out like a flame and left only a dying orange glow in a pile of jagged, black ash. Maybe it hadn’t been real at all. Maybe he was just going crazy. Maybe it was the devil playing tricks on him. Maybe he really was just losing his mind.

  But Esther felt great. She hadn’t felt so good in her joints in a long time. And she knew that Judah didn’t like to drive in the snow anymore, but it was gonna be fine. And of course they were leaving town without their daughter. But she was gonna be fine. Everything was just fine.

  Neither of them spoke the entire ride home. It was a deep, strange, consuming silence they both got swallowed up in. The sound of the wheels on the road and the whine of the engine and the wind through a cracked window became a part of them, circling down inside each of them—like blood in their veins.

  Chapter 5

  It was four months to the day after they left Brier Bend, Minnesota. Esther’s headache subsided enough for her to start washing the dishes. She ran the water in the kitchen sink. The scent of dish soap filed the edges off the rancid smell in the house. She dipped her gloved hands in the warm, soapy water. In the sink and spilling over onto the counter, there were stacks of plates, dishes, and cereal bowls. The whole house was a mess. It was a tragic scene, really.

  The house reeked like rotten cabbage or dead squirrel or something. Dirty clothes strewn over the floor and hung randomly off furniture. Empty boxes of Lucky Charms piled up around the trash can. Most days, Judah and Esther just wandered around the house, bumping into things, barely speaking more than ten words a day to each other. Judah hadn’t left the house since he drove to the church to leave his letter of resignation in the crack of his office door, and that was the first day they got back from Minnesota. Nobody seemed surprised by his resignation. Nobody came knocking on their door, begging him to stay. Time just kept on flowing, like a river.

  Esther had joined a knitting club that met at the old Bethel Presbyterian Church basement. She’d make her famous broccoli cheese dip and head out every Thursday with a ball of yarn and her needles. Some nights, when she came home, she’d find him lying on the floor in his robe, all splayed out like a toad that got run over by a golf cart.

  Esther got headaches that knocked her down for a few hours every day. Her mouth was incredibly dry, and her tongue seemed swollen. She was grinding her teeth a lot for some reason, but other than that, she felt great. As long as she kept taking her pills once or sometimes twice a day, she actually felt young again, and her joints felt smooth and fluid. She even caught herself smiling once in a while.

  She dunked her gloved hands in the soapy water and gazed out the blown-glass kitchen window that overlooked their garden. Spring was popping up outside. The snow had all melted. Leaves started sprouting. But the Greeves’ garden was dead and sad and withered and choked with weeds. Sunlight seemed to tiptoe around their property, leaving it constantly draped in shadow. There was a dead rabbit in the garden, shriveled and leathery with a few tufts of fur shifting in the breeze. Bones poked through the skin on the hind legs where birds had picked away at the flesh. A pair of buzzards circled overhead.

  Esther noticed a small ripple out by the tree line. At first, she thought it was just the light catching a bubble in the blown glass of the kitchen window or a bubble of soap rising up out of the water. She blinked at the ghostly image through the window as it came closer to the house. She tried to swallow. Her heart thumped so hard it hurt. Blood leapt in her throat. She dropped a dish. It shattered on the floor.

  “Judah!” She shrieked. “Judah!” She ran for the door. She had never moved so quickly in all her life. She was at the door in four powerful strides. “Judah!” Her breath snagged. Her heart pounded. She ran out into the mud. Sunlight stabbed her eyes. But something wasn’t right. She couldn’t quite figure it out, but it didn’t seem real. Was she dreaming?

  “Judah,” Esther shrieked. He ignored her the first time. He was busy sniffing the air and trying to identify all the smells in the house. When she screamed his name a second time, he wondered where she got the energy. But then, he started to think about the tone of her voice. He had maybe never heard her shout anything in the decades they had been together. And never so crisp and clear. When she yelled his name a third time, he shot up and looked out the blown-glass window over the sink.

  And he saw her. She was there. It was real—the realest thing he’d ever seen. Like the first time he ever laid eyes on her at the hospital, screaming her little head off—a head full of wet, curly blond hair. This moment was the same. Sparrow’s second birth.

  For this my daughter was dead, and is alive again; she was lost and is found.

  His bones popped and crunched as he took off running hard over the floor and out into the sunlight and the mud and the earth and sky. He felt himself laughing. He ran past Esther. He ran through the pathways in the garden and over the cobblestones.

  He hit Sparrow chest first and threw his arms around her and tackled her to the ground. They tumbled together in the grass. He laughed and laughed and laughed.

  “You smell like moldy cheese,” Sparrow told him, her voice muffled in his robe.

  Esther leapt on top of them, and the three Greeves clung in an awkward embrace on the ground for several minutes.

  “I can’t breathe,” Sparrow said finally, and the three of them rolled apart, but they sat side-by-side in the grass for a long time together in silence. Sparrow slid a heavy backpack off her shoulders and let it topple to the ground. She moved her fingers through the tall, wavy grass and then plucked a blade out of the ground and rubbed it between her fingers like she had never seen grass before.

  Her wild hair shook in the breeze. It was a duller color than Judah remembered it. And her skin was paler. She seemed exhausted. He looked over at the scar on her arm to make sure it was still there. He put his arm around her and felt the warmth of her skin on his fingers. To make sure she was real. Like doubting Thomas, he wasn’t totally convinced that resurrection was possible.

  “I’m sorry,” Sparrow said, breaking a long silence. Tears erupted suddenly from her eyes and spilled down her face with a stream of spit. And she leaned into her father. His arms slid around her bony shoulders.

  “I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you,” he told her. “I love you.”

  “I wanna get better,” she blubbered. It came out muddled and strained through her tears.

  “I’m sorry too,” Judah said. “I don’t think I ever really saw you. I just saw the version of you that I wanted and hoped for. And I tried to put you in a bottle when you needed to fly.” He sobbed. “I’m sorry.”

  The two of them cried together in the grass.

  Esther wasn’t feeling the emotions she had expected to feel. Sparrow seemed so far away even though she could reach out and touch her. Why wasn’t she more excited at this rapturous moment that she had been waiting on for so long? Everything just felt fine. She reached out and placed her hand on the back of her daughter’s t-shirt, which was drenched with sweat. She pulled her hand away and looked down at it, somehow confused by it.

  “I’m gonna make you something to eat,” she said. “You must be starving.” And she got up and walked back to the house.

  Sparrow wept into her father’s chest. She couldn’t stop the tears even if she tried. They were spilling out of her like a flood through cracks in the dam. She felt the tears, warm and dripping on her skin and eyelashes. She felt the wind in her hair, her soaked t-shirt clinging to her back, the sun on her skin. She felt dizzy with a buzz of feelings that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  She had detoxed in the woods behind the house for three nights. She had sat in the grass, leaning back against the trunk of her favorite silver maple tree, listening to the woodpecker and the hushed sound of water rushing up the trunk. And the feeling of home was better than getting high. Even when she was on her knees barfing in the dirt or squatting to crap like an animal, it still felt good somehow.

  Off in the corner of her mind even in the midst of severe cramps, searing headaches, and fever dreams, there was a soft and strangely calming glow like she was doing the right thing, and she was exactly where she needed to be. Memories from her childhood rushed through her mind like an old movie. And she felt loved. This tree loved her. That woodpecker loved her. The wind, the sky, her parents all loved her. She was loved. More loved than she had ever felt before. There was something out there that loved her even in spite of all the things she had done to hurt all the people that had ever loved her. And all those things she had done over the years to get high—that was just somebody else. That wasn’t her. Like she had been a ghost for six years and was just now coming back into her body.

  Chapter 6

  After she encountered her parents on the street in Brier Bend a few months earlier, Sparrow freaked out, and she went and got high. Once she realized her parents had found her rooftop garden, she knew she couldn’t go back there, so she spent the next two nights sleeping on the back pew of the Brier Bend United Methodist church. The wooden pew creaked and it was hard, narrow, and uncomfortable, but at least it was warm.

  The front door of the church had been unlocked on those first two nights, so she just walked right in, and she was gone the next morning before anyone noticed—or so she thought. On the third night, though, the door was locked, so she did the very last thing she wanted to do. She moved in with this guy she was sort of seeing, who also happened to be her drug dealer. His name was Bump. He had a pierced eyebrow and a neck tattoo of a spider. His story was that he used to be a minor league ball player, a catcher, who washed up after he tore his shoulder to shreds and could never get his swing back. He got hooked on painkillers, and his life took a hard, left turn.

  He lived in a rundown, old farmhouse just outside of town, and there was this one window in his bedroom where the wind would sneak in. It was always cold in there, and he’d run three space heaters all night in the dead of winter. Whenever Sparrow got high, she saw a little man sitting out on the roof outside that window. He was a skinny, little guy with a plaid shirt and a cowboy hat. And he just stared in at her all the time. She knew he wasn’t really there, but he looked as real as her hand in front of her face, and it was comforting somehow to see him. One night, she was dreaming about this little guy sitting there on the roof like he always did, looking in through the window. But suddenly, he got up and rushed into the room through the open window. She woke up startled. And there was Bump standing over her with a Louisville Slugger. She rolled quick off the bed, and the baseball bat cracked against the headboard.

  She ran for the door, but he was blocking the way. He swung the bat. She ducked and felt the wind of it toss her hair. She turned and ran out the window and stepped out onto the icy roof in her bare feet. Snow was falling slowly. She heard the wind in her ears as she crept out along the shingles and reached the spot where the little guy sometimes sat. He wasn’t there. She looked back to see Bump sticking his head and shoulders out to the window, shouting crazy things at her—it might’ve looked kind of funny if she wasn’t afraid for her life.

  She slipped on the ice. Turned awkwardly in the air. She saw the sky. And it was beautiful. A soft glow of blue and white. She saw the pine trees stab the clouds. She turned in the air and saw the ground. She fell two stories and hit a blanket of snow. Miraculously, she was unhurt. She jumped up and ran back inside the house, right through the front door. She leapt over the couch and grabbed her backpack. On the end table, encased in a plastic cube, Bump’s prized baseball signed by Yogi Berra, caught her eye. She took it.

  She heard him crashing down the stairs, so she ran out the door and was gone.

  Three days later, she snuck into his garage and climbed into the back seat of his Audi A4. She didn’t want to live anymore. Her life was out of control. She felt like she was on a train headed for a cliff, and there was no way to stop it. She was powerless. Her mind was too foggy to think her way out. If she could just think she might be ok, but there was a thick rolling fog in her mind like the fogs rising up from Shadow Lake back home in the fall every morning. Her belly growled with hunger. And she remembered her home back in Bethel Hollow, PA and the beautiful garden that popped with life every spring like some kind of miracle. And her parents. And the warmth of the wood-burning stove. And the view out her bedroom window. And the rolling hills and the wide-open sky. She had lost it all. It was gone.

  Bump was a drummer in a metal band. She could hear the shouts and rattles of their band practice blasting out through the wood paneling in the basement. The vocals were just angry barks. The melody sang out from the guitar, clear and dark and beautiful. She had sat in on a few of their band practices before, and the lead guitar was by far the best thing about the whole band. Everything else was just a cloud of inarticulate noise. Not surprisingly, the guitarist was the only one who didn’t get high during practice.

  A few weeks earlier, she had asked Dan, the guitar player, to teach her how to play. She told him she wanted to play like J Mascis. He laughed and said, “I don’t know who that is, but I can teach you to play like me.” So she went over to his apartment, and they sat down on his couch together. He handed her a beat-up Alvarez acoustic and taught her a few chords. When he made a move to kiss her, she kicked him directly in the balls and stormed out. She threw his guitar down the steps on her way out. She heard him call after her, “Don’t tell Bump!” And she didn’t.

  There in Bump’s garage, Sparrow listened to Dan’s guitar melody rise above the chaos of the rest of the band. She closed her eyes and tried to sing a harmony with it. Her voice sounded fragile and ragged, and her notes were way out of tune. She couldn’t even settle into the right key. Every note she tried clashed. Eventually, she shook her head and gave up.

  Her dad had taught her how to sing harmony ages ago. She was very young, like 4 or 5, when he started taking her to the church every day to sit at the piano. He would pluck out single notes and ask her to match pitches. When she mastered that, he started playing scales, and she would sing along. Then, he would play chords and have her match the root or the third or the fifth. Then, he would play single notes and ask her to sing thirds and fifths from memory. They worked at it every day. By the time she was 8, they were singing in harmony together in the garden while they worked. She remembered it being kind of magical, their voices braiding together. He would even make up tunes on the spot, and her voice would just naturally fall into all the right notes. She wasn’t sure how it happened exactly, but that magic was gone.

  She missed her parents desperately, but for the past six years, she had forced herself not to think about them. Every time something reminded her of them, like when she would work on her rooftop garden or if she walked past a church with the sounds of an old hymn drifting out through open windows, she would just go get high and the feeling would go away. She ended up living her entire life in a drug-addled fog, and she chose that fog every day.

 

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