Preface
Hello, my sweet brothers and sisters.
You should know, before you read anything else, that my memory is not perfect. Once, growing up, when my brother Tim was leaving the room, he and my daddy decided to figure out exactly how much they loved each other.
“I love you,” Tim said, leaving.
“I love you more,” my daddy said back to him.
“No, I love you more.” (This might be the most defiant thing Tim has ever said, by the way.)
They went back and forth for a while, and then finally my daddy asked, “How much?”
And Tim, who was born a wise and ancient soul, came up with the most expansive measurement he could for the most immeasurable love he’d known: “More than God can count.”
Somewhere along the way, after hearing this sweet story a hundred times and letting it settle into my heart, I absorbed it into my own history. I decided that the entire exchange occurred between my daddy and me, not Tim.
I started saying it all the time.
I retold the story as though it were my own.
I was so sure about it that after my daddy died, I had More than God Can Count tattooed on my forearm as a memorial to him.
Years later, after I’d shared this precious phrase with the world and my tattoo artist, Tim gently informed me that it was he who had originally said it, not me.
This book is my best remembrance of what happened, but my memories may not be perfect. To somebody else, this story might look a little different.
Speaking of somebody elses, the people and places in these pages have shaped me. They’ve showed up for me and they’ve failed me. They’ve covered me in love and filled me with doubt, delivered to me my greatest joys and most immense grief. I love all of them. I’m indebted to all of them. Because this is a book about healing, because the truth I set out to tell doesn’t care if somebody is called Mallory or Kate, I’ve chosen to give some of the beloved characters new names, and some of the details in my story have been changed. Don’t worry, none of the new names are too silly.
When you’ve read the final page of this book and turned off your light, or gotten off at your stop, or finished the last of your coffee, I want you to forget about me, my name, my face, my journey, and look inward toward yourself. This is a story about healing, not just mine, but ours. Healing is alive in all of us, it’s for all of us. I know this, feel it, in every perfect breath I take. I hope that when you’re through, you’ll know too.
Thank you for making space in your full, busy hearts for this story. Your time is so valued and I’m beyond grateful that you’re choosing to spend some of it with me. You are loved, you are love, and I believe that healing is for you.
Prologue
I don’t know why everyone’s crying.
They stand over me and look down on me like I’ll never get up, Coach Powell, my daddy, the big, barrel-chested boys from the basketball team. I want them to feel better, but I can’t make the words to tell them. I’m so confused.
The ambulance was going sixty-five when it hit me and now I’m bound to the bed at Baton Rouge General. My neck is broken, my spleen is gone, my lung is collapsed, and I’m not wearing any underwear. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but long enough that time has begun to take a new shape. Beyond the slivers of sunrise and darkness that sneak through the hospital shades, beyond the protocols and shifts and dosages and routines, I’m removed from the passing of hours, divorced from what was ordinary—cheerleading and algebra and Sunday dinner at my grandparents’ house.
The doctors don’t let me feel the pain. They keep it at a safe distance with a tingly calming medicine that goes through a needle in my hand and makes me sleep. The medicine doesn’t let me feel anything at all. I notice the bumpy path of staples that leads up my belly from my pelvis to my sternum but I don’t feel fear about them. I cry only once, when I find out they shaved the bottom of my head as bald as my daddy’s. Everything my body is supposed to do is performed by someone or something else. A machine breathes for me; a long tube snakes down my windpipe to the edges of my lungs. The nurses thin my blood for me with little injections in my tummy. I’m a robot with skin.
The stream of visitors is constant, two at a time. They bring casseroles for my parents, black speckled lilies and tea roses, and lots of tears.
What’s the problem? Why are you crying? Don’t cry.
I want to tell them. But I can’t. I try scrawling on the bedsheets with my fingers but nobody really understands. My hands are stuck to the bed and my voice has been taken from me, but everyone I love is here. I feel so, so loved and so, so confused. I drift in and out of a haze, not knowing where I’m going, but feeling as though I have a very long journey ahead of me.
1 Different Kinds of Smart
I am awake but I keep my eyes closed, letting only the smallest bit of light slip in. There’s just enough hot, heavy Louisiana breath coming through the window screen to fog up the pane with the promise of another hundred-degree afternoon. The bird dogs start in, barking at the chicken feathers floating in the air and running circles in the kennel, but I am only listening for the sound of her feet on the floor. The farmhouse groans as the humidity rises and the air conditioner sputters to life. Finally, I can hear her.
My mom pads barefoot across the hallway and the smells of face cream we can’t afford and Community Coffee settle on top of me. Her shadow crosses the threshold and I peek quickly at her glossy red toenails. Even at five years old, I know that she is beautiful, painted just the way a Southern woman should be.
“Mornin’, RuRu,” she sings.
I’m sprawled belly down on a trundle bed between my big brothers, a lanky, big-eyed doll with salty morning breath. She rubs up and down my back and scoops me up the way she always does, forearm in the crook of my knee, left shoulder a pillow for my cheek, and we walk. She knows I am awake, but she pretends so that I can, so that we can keep dancing our favorite dance.
Coffeepot steam and dust come to me in warm, sour clouds as we move down the stairs. I sniff hard and worry it will give me away. I am not ready to be done with our game yet and there are still a few more steps left to go, creak, creak, creak, down the stairs and past the kitchen.
Her feet sink into the plush rug and go quiet. We have arrived. She sets me in their bed next to the hearth that is my daddy. His big, warm body is a furnace you’d think I could never need in July, but that I cannot do without. I snuggle right into him.
“Pat, pat. Rub, rub,” he coos as his hand sweetly finds the spot between my shoulders. “God loves you. Daddy loves you.”
We wait together for a stretch of time that has never felt long enough. We wait until the bugs scream louder than the birds and the world comes calling for us. This is my most sacred space, where joy lives. This is where I begin.
St. Francisville is small, a half speck of a town. For a child, though, it is just the right size. In this place between the sticks and the swamp, joy is growing everywhere; it’s always within arm’s reach. You could hack away at it if you wanted to but it would always grow right back, bigger and fuller and wilder than it was before. Lots of things grow wild here. The live oaks are covered in mossy Muppet hair, palm leaves poke through the picket fences and tickle your legs when you walk, and love is the long, leathery vine that wraps itself around all of it. It’s comically Southern, but I don’t really know it yet. On Fridays, the boys play football and the girls wave cellophane pom-poms. On Saturdays, the women whisper about all of it, attaching scandal to every glance exchanged between daughters and sons. The men just smile and shake their heads. On Sundays we all slip into our church clothes and watch the hot sun shining in through the stained glass in Popsicle-colored laser beams. My daddy sits next to me in the pew and points out the dove in the stained-glass window.