“Is that why you killed her?”
“You came to me so broken, Lo. I could see your loneliness, your want and your need. You thought you moved through the world invisible, but it’s not true. Your pain was so obvious, so obscene, no one could stand to look at you. But I saw you and I’ve loved you and I have given you all that you wanted.” He tilts his head, studying me. “Have you ever considered that everything that has happened was by design? That you were meant to be here? That Bea’s greatest purpose was to bring you to me?” I flinch. “I saved you once. I will save you again. Accept your atonement.”
“No.”
“Then we’ll leave it to God.”
“What does that mean?”
“‘Whoever believes in Him will never die.’”
“And if they don’t believe?”
He holds out his hand again.
I take it.
We face the lake together and he gently, silently, urges me in ahead of him. The freezing water cuts into my bones, but my scalded flesh reaches for it. Lev walks in beside me, the water lapping his clothes. He presses his body to my body, presses his mouth to the side of my face before moving it to the shell of my ear.
“Be a part of this,” he whispers.
He cups the back of my neck with one hand, the other pressing gently against my chest as he eases me into the water. The lake envelops me, taking the burn from my abdomen and bringing it to my lungs. Pressure builds behind my eyes. My legs begin to thrash and my arms grab at his arms and his hands hold me under, keeping me under. My pulse thrums loudly in my head, my chest begins to ache, desperately, and my heart calls for her, only her.
Bea …
I take a breath and I listen.
2017
He prays over her.
She can’t make out the words.
She only hears the strained, awful sound of her own breathing.
He carries her down the path. She sees the pine trees from nearly upside down, the branches crisscrossing, tangled together. He takes her to the lake and as the water covers her body, all she sees is the sky and then, suddenly, she’s a child again, on the swing outside her house again, pumping her legs hard, picking up speed, fast and faster still, taking herself higher and higher, higher than she’s ever been. She thinks, faintly, she hears her name, but it’s coming from too far below her and the sky is all around her now, stretching out before her, infinite.
PART FIVE
SEPTEMBER 2018
By the time I get to the train station, it’s raining.
Raindrops streak the windshield as I pull into a parking spot down the street. I get out of my car and feed the meter, hurrying toward the station, but the low roll of thunder overhead seems like it might be an empty promise. It’s going to pass us by, I think. When I get inside, I check the noticeboard against the wall. The train coming in from Bellwood is right on time. I make my way to its platform, cutting a path through the passengers, and wait. For one moment, I think I see a boy. I close my eyes and when I open them, he’s gone. The train makes its slow pull up and I watch stranger after stranger detrain until my eyes land on a face I recognize.
“LO!” Emmy yells. People step out of her way—gentle amusement all over their faces—as she charges toward me, launching herself in my arms, Foster close behind.
I hold her. I just hold her.
* * *
We don’t know where we’ll talk at first.
We gauge the weather. It feels dangerous to take Emmy to a sit-down place, she has so much energy to burn, but then the clouds part and the sun comes out, and we decide on a park not far from the station.
Foster and I sit at a picnic table together. Children surround us, playing happily with one another. I watch as Emmy finds a group of girls, effortlessly inserting herself in a way I never would have been able to at that age. I watch them claim the swings, watch Emmy pump her legs with steely determination while Foster watches me. Every time I meet with him, he looks a little more whole and a little less complete and I feel it of myself, think he must be looking at me and seeing it too. I reach into my bag for my recorder and set it between us.
“Ready?” I ask him and he nods.
I push the record button and neither of us speaks at first. This is how it usually goes. There are a million questions; finding our way into the first almost always proves nearly impossible. Foster toys with the pendant around his neck. The anchor.
“You been following Casey?” he asks after a minute.
“Yeah. Money’s amazing.”
He snorts. There was nothing Casey didn’t know that was happening within the walls of The Unity Project. As Lev’s right hand, she was exposed to everything and helped make sure the worst of it happened, including, I’m sure, Bea’s death. She spent a minute locked up before her dad bailed her out. Lev Warren estranged her from her family, she says, filled her head with lies, invented a history of trauma for her so the two of them could be close. They’re fighting for a very lenient sentence.
I’m doing everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.
“I’ve been thinking,” Foster tells me after a little while, as kids shriek around us. I move the recorder closer to him, hoping it picks everything up. “I’ve been thinking that it was God. That it was God who brought you back when you were going to die, and it was God that saved Emmy when she was going to die. Lev took credit, but I feel God was working all these things because He knew you had to be Lev’s end. That all these things had to come together for you to … for you to stop him.”
“It amazes me,” I say, “that you still believe in God.”
“It amazes me you don’t.”
I shrug. “I only believe in things—”
“In things you can see,” he finishes. He leans forward. “How’d you get out of that water, huh? How much more of a miracle can you be?”
I stare at my hands, my open palms, and then I look at Foster wordlessly.
“Something happened out there on the lake,” he says. “Two people went in and only one came out. I saw you, Lo. There’s no goddamn way you should’ve…”
They found me on the shore, my face pressed against the dirt, and I was still, like I wasn’t breathing, but I was, while Lev drifted in the water behind me, his lungs full of it.
“If this was some divine plan wouldn’t that mean God killed Bea?”
“No.” He doesn’t elaborate, but I can tell the question disturbs him.
I don’t tell him I’ve been going to church more since it happened. But only after the service, sitting between Father Michael and Rob, the recorder in my hands. I listen as they talk about the aftermath, of the shuttered Unity Centers, of its brokenhearted members sharing their scars with one another. There are so many stories and I see myself in some, less in others—yet we all ended up under the hold of the same man. How does that happen?
I don’t know how that happens.
I’m afraid it makes us weak, but Father Michael doesn’t think it does. He thinks The Unity Project was born of the world’s failures, of its weaknesses. That it took strength to answer the call. That the good members did was as undeniable as the evil they fell prey to, and the necessity of that good, in this world, remains. He hopes we don’t give up on it.