I don’t think this place was everything my mother hoped for that day when she asked God where she should go to give her son the world. Though she didn’t ford a river or hike across mountains, she still did what so many pioneers before her had done, traveled recklessly, curiously, into the unknown in the hopes of finding something just a little bit better. And like them she suffered and she persevered, perhaps in equal measure. Whenever I looked at her, a castaway on the island of my queen-sized bed, it was hard for me to look past the suffering. It was hard for me not to take inventory of all that she had lost—her home country, her husband, her son. The losses just kept piling up. It was hard for me to see her there, hear her ragged breath, and think of how she had persevered, but she had. Just lying there in my bed was a testament to her perseverance, to the fact that she survived, even when she wasn’t sure she wanted to. I used to believe that God never gives us more than we can handle, but then my brother died and my mother and I were left with so much more; it crushed us.

    It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.

51

Katherine had been asking if she could come over.

“You don’t have to introduce me or anything. I could just come have a cup of coffee with you and then go. What do you think?”

Whenever she asked, I demurred. I recognized this old pattern in myself, my need to DIY my mother’s mental health, as though all it would take for her to get better was me with a glue gun, me with a Ghanaian cookbook and a tall glass of water, me with a slice of shortcake. It hadn’t worked then and it wasn’t working now. At some point I had to ask for, to accept, help.

I cleaned the house before Katherine came over. It wasn’t dirty, but old habits die hard. She came carrying a bouquet of flowers, and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. I hugged her, invited her to sit at my little dining room table, and put a pot of coffee on.

“I can’t believe I haven’t been here before,” Katherine said, looking around. I had been living there for nearly four years, but you couldn’t tell by the look of things. I lived my life like a woman who was accustomed to having to leave at a moment’s notice. Raymond had called my apartment “The Witness Protection Pad.” No pictures of family, no pictures at all. We’d always gone to his place.

    “I don’t really have people over very often,” I said. I hunted down a couple of mugs and filled them. I sat across from Katherine, cupping my mug, warming my hands.

She was watching me. Waiting for me to talk, waiting for me to take the lead somehow. I wanted to remind her that none of this had been my idea.

“She’s in there,” I whispered, pointing to my bedroom.

“Okay, we won’t bother her,” Katherine said. “How are you doing?”

I wanted to cry but I didn’t. I’d inherited that skill from my mother. I had become my mother in so many ways that it was hard to think of myself as a person distinct from her, hard to see my shut bedroom door and not imagine that, one day, it would be me on the other side. Me, in bed, except alone, without a child to care for me. Puberty had been such a shock. Before it I’d looked like no one, which is to say I’d looked like myself, but after it, I’d started to look like my mother, my body growing to fill the mold her shape had left. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t, wouldn’t cry. Like my mother, I had a locked box where I kept all my tears. My mother had only opened hers the day that Nana died and she had locked it again soon thereafter. A mouse fight had opened mine, but I was trying to close it back up again.

I nodded at Katherine. “Doing okay,” I said, and then, to change the subject, “Did I ever tell you that I used to keep a journal when I was young? I’ve been reading it over since my mother got here and I’ve been writing again too.”

“What kind of things are you writing?”

“Observations mostly. Questions. The story of how we got here. It’s embarrassing, but I used to address my journal to God. I grew up evangelical.” I made a kind of jazz-hands motion to accompany the word “evangelical.” When I realized what I was doing, I dropped my hands to my lap as though they were on fire, in need of stubbing out.

    “I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yeah. It’s embarrassing. I spoke in tongues. The whole thing.”

“Why is it embarrassing?” Katherine asked.

I made a kind of sweeping gesture with my hands, as if to say, Look at all of this, by which I meant, Look at my world. Look at the order and the emptiness of this apartment. Look at my work. Isn’t it all embarrassing?

Katherine didn’t understand the gesture, or, if she did, she didn’t accept it. “I think it’s beautiful and important to believe in something, anything at all. I really do.”

She said the last part defensively because I was rolling my eyes. I’d always been annoyed by any whiff of the woo-woo, faux spirituality of those who equated believing in God with believing in, say, a strange presence in a room. In college, I’d once left a spoken-word show Anne had dragged me to because the poet kept referring to God as “she,” and that need to be provocative and all-encompassing felt too trite, too easy. It also went counter to the very concerns of an orthodoxy and a faith that ask that you submit, that you accept, that you believe, not in a nebulous spirit, not in the kumbaya spirit of the Earth, but in the specific. In God as he was written, and as he was. “Anything at all” didn’t mean anything at all. Since I could no longer believe in the specific God, the one whose presence I had felt so keenly when I was child, then I could never simply “believe in something.” I didn’t know how to articulate this to Katherine, so I just sat there, watching my bedroom door.

“Do you still write to God?” Katherine asked.

I looked at her, wondering if she was setting some kind of trap. I remembered my jazz hands. I was mocked so much for my religion when I was in college that I had taken to mocking myself first. But Katherine’s voice was absent of malice; her eyes were earnest.

    “I don’t write ‘Dear God’ anymore, but still, maybe, yes.”

When it came to God, I could not give a straight answer. I had not been able to give a straight answer since the day Nana died. God failed me then, so utterly and completely that it had shaken my capacity to believe in him. And yet. How to explain every quiver? How to explain that once sure-footed knowledge of his presence in my heart?

* * *

—

The day Mrs. Pasternack had said, “I think we’re made out of stardust, and God made the stars,” I’d laughed aloud. I was sitting in the back of the classroom, doodling in my spiral notepad because I was already ahead of the rest of the class. I was taking math courses at the university for college credit, and I was dreaming, dreaming, about getting as far away from home as I possibly could.

“Do you have something you’d like to share with the class, Gifty?” Mrs. Pasternack asked.

I straightened up in my seat. I was unaccustomed to reprimands, to trouble. I’d never gotten detention, and I believed, rightly so it seemed, that my reputation as a bright and good kid would protect me.

“That just seems a bit convenient to me,” I said.

“Convenient?”

“Yes.”

She gave me a funny look and moved on. I slumped back down in my seat and resumed my doodling, annoyed because I’d wanted a fight. I attended a public school that refused to teach evolution, in a town where many didn’t believe in it, and Mrs. Pasternack’s words, it had seemed to me then, were a cop-out, a way of saying without saying.

What to make of the time before humans? What to make of the five previous extinctions, including the ones that had wiped out woolly mammoths and dinosaurs? What to make of dinosaurs and of the fact that we share a quarter of our DNA with trees? When did God make the stars and how and why? These were questions that I knew I would never find the answers to in Huntsville, but the truth is, they were questions that I would never find answers to anywhere, not answers that would satisfy me.

* * *

—

    “It’s good to see you,” Katherine said. She drained the rest of her coffee, her third pour since arriving, and got up to go.

I walked her to the door, and the two of us stood in the frame.

Katherine took my hand. “You should keep writing. To God, to whomever. If it makes you feel better, you should keep doing it. There’s no reason not to.”

I nodded and said thank you. I waved at her as she got in her car and drove off.

52

Never again had come back again. After Katherine left I peeked in on my mother. No change. A few days before, I’d had a meeting with my advisor to discuss the possibility of graduating at the end of the quarter rather than waiting another year or more.

“What are your goals? What do you want?” he asked. I looked at him and thought, How much time do you have? I want money and a house with a pool and a partner who loves me and my own lab filled with only the most brilliant and strong women. I want a dog and a Nobel Prize and to find a cure to addiction and depression and everything else that ails us. I want everything and I want to want less.