Rob …
Foster’s voice pulls me from my thoughts. “Can I ask you something?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“Do you remember it?”
I turn to him. “Remember what?”
“Lev—bringing you back.”
I can’t read his expression, but I can hear the tentativeness in his tone. The question is important to him and it took something of himself to ask it. The answer is important to me, but I don’t know if I could do it justice with words.
“I had ICU delirium,” I say. He raises an eyebrow. “You’ve heard of that?”
“You think the nurses were going to kill you or something?”
“No.” But I almost wish I had because it would have been less painful than the things I did hallucinate. “I’d see my mom…” She’d hold my hand and she was crying. But she was also supposed to be dead. If I tried hard enough, I could put myself back in that hospital bed and feel it, it was so real. “Even after they told me she was dead, I would’ve sworn on my life that it happened. Or sometimes, I thought I was in a forest—”
“A forest?”
I laugh a little, but it’s not really funny. I can see it now, lush green surrounding my hospital bed. The air was thick like it is in the woods in the summertime, and I could feel it on my skin, in my lungs. And even though I was in a hospital bed in the forest—which should have been the first clue something wasn’t quite right—it all made perfect fucking sense to me at the time. It was everything else that didn’t.
“At some point, I thought there was a man at the end of my bed, reaching for me. I’d have nightmares because I didn’t know who he was or what he wanted, but…”
“It was Lev,” Foster finishes.
“Yeah. Why did you want to know?”
“I just wondered what it felt like to be a miracle…” He trails off. “You were a legend. One of the first things I ever heard about in here was you…”
“I wish someone had told me sooner.”
“Yeah, well, there’s something Lev says.”
“What’s that?”
“‘Whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it.’”
I suck in a breath through my teeth. I never thought I’d hear anyone say those words again and I feel them pulling me from the present, dragging me into the past, and I wonder if I’ll ever be as far from the worst things I’ve experienced as I pretend to be. I can smell the station, can feel Jeremy as though he’s close, as though I could almost reach out and grab him, hold him back. I close my eyes and I see him there.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s surrender,” Foster answers. “Accepting your atonement is surrendering to God. You can’t join The Project for selfish reasons or you wouldn’t last a day, because what it requires of you is so much that it can only be powered by belief in something greater than yourself.” He quiets for a moment. “So no one could tell you. Not even Bea. The moment had to reveal itself to you when you were ready.”
I don’t say anything. I don’t know how to tell Foster that God isn’t the reason I asked to be baptized into The Project.
I know who I’m surrendering to.
* * *
It doesn’t take long to clear out my apartment.
Foster hauls what few boxes there are to the SUV, marveling over how little a life I’ve made for myself in the last few years and part of me does a little too. It’s sobering to see my incompleteness as a person so undeniably in front of me, the lies I told myself to exist within its emptiness—as though it wasn’t a reflection of my own. I never wanted to carry that with me and it’s a relief to let it go.
I understand, now, why this part is important.
“Ready?” Foster asks. I cross my arms and look up at my old window, overlooking the street. I could leave now, and have that be the end of it. “Lo?”
But there are other things I don’t want to carry anymore.
“I have to go to the cemetery.”
“What?”
“My parents.” I turn to him. “I want to pay my respects.”
He nods. “Sure. Let’s go.”
“I need to do this alone.”
I don’t want to be strengthened by Foster’s presence, to have it urge me, finally, past that gate. I want to prove I can do this on my own.
“I don’t know…”
“Just meet me at St. Andrew’s in about an hour.”
“I’m not supposed to leave you alone.”
“What does he think is going to happen to me?”
“Come on, Lo,” he says. “Everyone’s on edge.”
“Forty-five minutes?”
After a long moment, he relents. “Fine.”
“Thank you.”
“Forty-five minutes,” he repeats.
I pass SVO on the way, slowing as the building comes into view. The lights are on upstairs, the middle of the day. My feet almost lead me to the entrance, the muscle memory so ingrained. I remember my first day, feeling like it was going to be one open door after the other from that moment on. How wrong I was.
I let it go.
It takes me ten minutes to arrive at St. Andrew’s. I stand in front of the gate, a knot forming in my chest. Patty used to lay flowers down on the anniversary of the accident. I’d wait in the car, refusing to join her. It’s not good for you, she’d tell me, but she’d never managed to change my mind. Eventually, I stopped going altogether. I thought this was the way to keep the accident from touching me but it just bound my losses tighter to me.
Lev was right; I did live inside it.
I step through the gate.
I have a general idea of where I can find my parents’ headstone. I shove my hands in my pockets, my boots crunching across what remains of the snow, as I make my way to it.
I move through the rows of graves, wincing at the vestiges of holidays still adorning some—fake poinsettias, garland, strings of Christmas lights—and the decorations that tell stories of neglect; fake flowers with ragged and torn edges, bleached from the sun. But all that is better than the nothing I’ve always done.
Their grave, when I find it, is modest and unassuming, and the knot in my chest loosens, the anticipation proving worse than the thing itself. It feels as much mine as it is theirs, in some ways. The Lo they knew died with them. Their shy, sweet girl. I’ve lived in those opposites so long now, to the extent I don’t even know if they’d like me to meet me or be proud to know me. But maybe after I’m baptized, that will become less of a question. I hope it will. I reach out my hand, my fingers tracing the etched lettering of their names. I close my eyes.
I let them go.
“Bea?”
I open my eyes.
Maybe I misheard.
But then it comes again.
“… Bea?”
The voice is none I recognize but it sets my pulse alight. I turn and find myself face-to-face with a priest. He looks slightly older than Paul, with brown skin and wavy black hair, a soft, round face. He realizes his mistake almost instantly, his brown eyes noting my scar.
He inclines his head in apology.
“I’m sorry. I thought you were—”