“I’m not sure,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what, just finish the paper, submit it, and then reassess. There’s no hurry. If you start the postdoc now, if you start it next year, or the next, it really doesn’t make a ton of difference.”

My lab was frigid. I shivered, grabbed my coat from the back of my chair, and put it on. I rolled up my sleeves and started to clear off my workstation, something I should have done the last time I was there. The last time I was there, I had finally finished my experiment, answered the question. I had tested the results enough times to be as certain as was possible that we could get an animal, even that limping mouse, to restrain itself from seeking reward by altering its brain activity. When I observed the limping mouse for the final time, fitted as he was with the fiber-optic implant and patch cord, everything had looked the same. There was the lever, the little metal tube, the manna of Ensure. There was that mouse, that limp. I delivered the light and like that, like that, he stopped pressing the lever.

    I left my workstation, went to my office, and sat down to write my paper, thinking about all of my mice. I should have been ecstatic to be finished, to be writing, with the hope of a new publication and graduation looming before me, but instead I felt bereft.

The demands of scientific writing are different from the demands of writing in the humanities, different from writing in my journal at night. My papers were dry and direct. They captured the facts of my experiments, but said nothing of what it had felt like to hold a mouse in my hands and feel its entire body thump against my palms as it breathed, as its heart beat. I wanted to say that too. I wanted to say, here it is, the breath of life in it. I wanted to tell someone about the huge wave of relief I felt every time I watched an addicted mouse refuse the lever. That gesture, that refusal, that was the point of the work, the triumph of it, but there was no way to say any of that. Instead, I wrote out the step-by-step process, the order. The reliability, the stability of the work, the impulse to keep plugging, keep trying until I figured a way through, that was the skin of it for me, but the heart of it was that wave of relief, that limping mouse’s tiny, alive body, living still, and still.

Pastor John used to say, “Stretch out your hand,” before he asked the congregation to pray for a fellow congregant. If you were close enough to the person who needed prayer you would literally touch them, lay your hands on them. You would touch whatever part of their body was accessible to you, a forehead, a shoulder, a back, and that touch, that precious touch, was both the prayer and its conduit. If you were not close enough to reach, if your arm was simply outstretched, brushing air, it was still possible to feel that thing I have often heard called “energy,” that thing I used to call the Holy Spirit, moving through the room, through your very fingers, toward the body of the person in need. The night I was saved, I was touched like this. Pastor John’s hand was on my forehead, the hands of the saints on my body, the hands of the congregants outstretched. Salvation, redemption, it was as intentional as skin touching skin, as holy as that. And I’ve never forgotten it.

    Being saved, I was taught when I was a child, was a way of saying, Sinner that I am, sinner that I will ever be, I relinquish control of my life to He who knows more than I, He who knows everything. It is not a magical moment of becoming sinless, blameless, but rather it’s a way of saying, Walk with me.

When I watched the limping mouse refuse the lever, I was reminded yet again of what it means to be reborn, made new, saved, which is just another way of saying, of needing those outstretched hands of your fellows and the grace of God. That saving grace, amazing grace, is a hand and a touch, a fiber-optic implant and a lever and a refusal, and how sweet, how sweet it is.

53

I finally started writing my paper in earnest. I spent twelve-hour stretches moving from my lab to my office to the coffee shop across the street that served mediocre sandwiches and salads. When I got home at night, I would collapse on the couch, fully dressed, and fall asleep counting the sheep of all the things I needed to get done the next day. The next day, I would do it all over again.

My writing rhythm, when I was in it, involved blaring a mix that Raymond had given me for our six-month anniversary. It was perhaps an act of masochism to play the soundtrack to the final days of a relationship that hadn’t lasted very long, but the songs, bluesy and dramatic, made me feel like my work was in conversation with the artists who sang them. I hummed along to the music, typing out my notes or reading the responses from my team, and feeling, for the first time since my mother had come to stay with me, like I was doing something right. I wrote and hummed and avoided anyone who reminded me of the world outside my office. Namely Katherine. She had been trying to get me to go to lunch with her again since the day she’d come over, and I had finally run out of excuses.

    We met for sushi on the Friday of my first good week. I ordered a caterpillar roll, and when it arrived I ate its head first, wary of the way it had been staring at me.

“Looks like you’ve been keeping busy. That’s great,” Katherine said.

“Yeah, I’m really happy with all the progress I’ve been making.” I watched her break her chopsticks apart and rub them together, tiny splinters of wood shredding off of them.

“And your mother?” Katherine asked.

I shrugged. I tackled the caterpillar’s torso and spent the next few minutes trying to steer the conversation toward more solid ground: my work, how important it was, how well I was doing.

Katherine praised me, though not as effusively or as convincingly as I’d hoped. “Are you still writing in your journal as well?” she asked

“Yes,” I said. After Nana died, I’d hidden every journal of mine under my mattress and did not take them back out again until the summer before I left for college. That summer, I fished them out, the springs of the mattress creaking and groaning as I lifted it up. I could have taken those groans as a warning, but I didn’t. Instead, I started reading my way through every entry I’d ever written, reading my way through what was essentially my entire conscious lifetime. I was so embarrassed by the early entries that I read them all, cringing and squinting my eyes in an attempt to hide from my former self. By the time I got to the years of Nana’s addiction, I was undone. I couldn’t proceed. I decided then and there that I would build a new Gifty from scratch. She would be the person I took along with me to Cambridge—confident, poised, smart. She would be strong and unafraid. I opened up to a blank page and wrote a new entry that began with these words: I will figure out a way to be myself, whatever that means, and I won’t talk about Nana or my mom all the time. It’s too depressing.

    I went off to school and kept writing in my journal, and by the time I got to graduate school it was a regular habit, as vital and unconscious to me as breathing.

I knew that Raymond had been reading my journal for weeks before the truth came out. While I wasn’t as clean as my mother, I had inherited her uncanny ability to sense when an item was just a little out of place. The day I found my journal on the left side of my nightstand’s drawer instead of the right, I thought, So, here we are.

“You want to explain this, Gifty?” Raymond asked. He was waving my journal around in the air.

“Explain what?” I said, and I could hear the schoolgirl in my voice, all the other Giftys whom I had promised to leave behind, who had instead come with me.

Raymond read, “?‘I’ve been letting Raymond think that I’m planning our trip to Ghana, but really, I haven’t done a thing. I don’t know how to tell him.’?”

“Well, now I don’t have to tell you,” I said, and I watched as his eyes narrowed. I’d written that entry the day I figured out that he’d been reading my journal. It took him two weeks to get to it.

“Why would you do this?” That voice of his, the voice I loved, the voice of a preacher without a pulpit, so low I felt like it came from inside of me, now boomed with rage.

I started laughing, the same mean and terrible laugh that made me afraid of myself. It reminded me of the sound one might make at the very bottom of a cave, piercing, desperate.

The laugh scared Raymond too. He shivered like the baby bird. He shot me a hurt look, and I recognized in that look my window, my opportunity to fix what was broken between us and climb back into his good graces.