The ambulance grumbles to life as the EMT hooks me up to another monitor and then starts an IV. My leg feels like it is on fire every time the driver brakes.
"My leg . . ."
"Is probably broken, Mr. Baxter," the EMT says. I wonder how she knows my name, and then realize she is reading it off my license. "We're taking you to the hospital. Is there someone you want me to call?"
Not Zoe, not anymore. Reid will need to know, but right now, I don't want to think about the look in his eyes when he realizes I've been drinking and driving. And I probably need a lawyer, too.
"My pastor," I say. "Clive Lincoln."
I am nervous, but Liddy and Reid stand on either side of me with smiles so wide on their faces that you'd think I'd cured cancer, or figured out world peace, instead of just coming to the Eternal Glory Church to give my testimony about finding Jesus.
It couldn't have been more transparent for me if the answers had been tattooed on my face: the lowest of lows for me was that crash. Zoe's apparition had been Jesus's way of coming into my life. If I hadn't seen her there, I'd be dead now. But instead I swerved. I swerved right into His open arms.
When Clive had come to me at the hospital, I was drugged with painkillers and had a brand-new cast on my left leg and stitches in my scalp and my shoulder. I hadn't stopped crying since they'd loaded me into that ambulance. The pastor sat down on the edge of my bed and reached for my hand. "Let the Devil out, son," Clive said. "Make room for Christ."
I don't think I can explain what happened after that. It was simply as if someone flipped a switch in me, and there wasn't any hurt anymore. I felt like I was floating off the bed, and would have, if that cotton blanket hadn't been holding me down. When I looked at my body--at the spaces between my fingers and the edges of my fingernails, I swear I could see light shining out.
For anyone who hasn't accepted Jesus into his heart, this is what it feels like: as if you've resisted the fact that your vision's gone blurry, and you need glasses. But eventually you can't see a foot in front of you without knocking things over and bumping into dead ends, so you go to the optometrist. You walk out of that office with a new pair of glasses, and the world looks sharper, brighter, more colorful. Crisp. You can't understand why you waited so long to make the appointment.
When Jesus is with you, nothing seems particularly scary. Not the thought of never having another drink; not the moment you sit in court during your DUI charge. And not right now, when I will be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
After leaving the hospital, I started attending the Eternal Glory Church. I met with Pastor Clive, who sent out a prayer chain letter so that all these people I didn't even know were praying for me. It's a feeling I've never had before--strangers who didn't judge me for the mistakes I'd made but just seemed happy I'd showed up. I didn't have to be embarrassed about dropping out of college or getting divorced or drinking myself into a ditch. I didn't have to measure up at all, actually. The fact that Jesus had placed me in their lives meant I was already worthy.
The Eternal Glory Church hasn't got its own building, so it rents out the auditorium from a local school. We are standing in the back, waiting for Pastor Clive to give us the signal. Clive's wife is playing the piano, and his three little daughters are singing. "They sound like angels," I murmur.
"Yeah," Reid agrees. "There's a fourth kid, too, who doesn't perform."
"Like the Bonus Jonas," I say.
The hymn ends, and Pastor Clive stands on the stage, his hands clasped. "Today," he bellows, "is all about Jesus."
There is a chorus of agreement from the congregation.
"Which is why, today, our newest brother in Christ is going to tell us his story. Max, can you come on up here?"
With Reid's and Liddy's help, I make my way down the aisle on crutches. I don't like being the center of attention, usually, but this is different. Today, I'll tell them the story of how I came to Christ. I will publicly announce my faith, so that all these people can hold me accountable.
Welcome, I hear.
Hello, Brother Max.
Clive leads me to a chair on the stage. It must come from a classroom; there are tennis balls on the feet of the chair to keep it from scratching up the linoleum. Beside it is what looks like a meat freezer, filled with water, with a set of steps leading up to it. I sit down on the chair, and Clive steps between Liddy and Reid, holding their hands. "Jesus, help Max grow closer to You. Let Max know God, love God, and spend quality time with His word."
As he prays over me, I close my eyes. The lights from the stage are warm on my face; it makes me think of when I was little, and would ride my bike with my face turned up to the sun and my eyes closed, knowing that I was invincible and couldn't crash, couldn't get hurt.
Voices join Pastor Clive's. It feels like a thousand kisses, like being filled to bursting with all the good in the world, so that there isn't any room for the bad. It's love, and it is unconditional acceptance, and not only haven't I failed Jesus but He says I never will. His love pours into me, until I can't keep it inside anymore. It spills out of my open throat--syllables that aren't really any language, but still, I get the message. It's crystal clear, to me.
"There is audio content at this location that is not currently supported for your device. The caption for this content is displayed below."
Refugee (3:06)
VANESSA
I haven't given much thought to Zoe Baxter until I find her drowning at the bottom of the YMCA pool.
I don't know who it is, at first. I am swimming my laps at 6:30 A.M.--just about the only exercise I can drag myself out of bed for--and am midstroke doing the crawl when I see a woman slowly floating down to the bottom, with her hair fanning out around her head. Her arms are outstretched, and she doesn't look like she is sinking as much as just letting go.
I jackknife and dive, grab her hand, and yank her through the water. She starts fighting me as we approach the surface, but by then the adrenaline has kicked in and I haul her out of the pool and kneel over her, dripping on her face as she coughs and rolls to her side. "What the hell," she gasps, "are you doing?"
"What the hell were you doing?" I reply, and as she sits up, I realize whom I've saved. "Zoe?"
It is quiet at the Y. Pre-Christmas, the lap lane occupants have dwindled down to me, a few elderly swimmers, and the occasional physical therapy/rehab patient. Zoe and I are playing out this little scene on the tile edge of the pool without anyone really paying attention.
"I was staring up at the lights," Zoe says.
"Here's a news flash: you don't have to drown to do that." Now that we're both out of the water, I'm shivering. I grab my towel and wrap it around my shoulders.
I heard, of course, about the baby. It was horrible, to say the least, to have the guest of honor at a baby shower rushed to the hospital to deliver a stillborn. I wasn't even planning on going to the shower, but I'd felt bad for her--what kind of woman has so few friends that she has to invite people who've contracted her music therapy services? Afterward, naturally, I felt even worse for her. I'd helped her bookkeeper clean up the restaurant, after the ambulance screamed away. There had been little baby-bottle bubble wands at each place setting; and I'd collected them on the way out, figuring that I'd give them back to Zoe at some point in the future. They were still somewhere in my trunk.
I don't know what to say to her. How are you? seems superfluous. I'm sorry seems even worse.
"You should try it," Zoe says.
"Suicide?"
"Once a school counselor always a school counselor," she answers. "I told you, I wasn't trying to kill myself. Just the opposite, actually. You can feel your heart beat, all the way to your fingers, when you're down there."
She slips back into the pool like an otter and looks up at me. Waiting. With a sigh, I throw down my towel and dive back in. I open my eyes underwater and see Zoe sinking to the bottom again, so I mimic her. Twisting onto my back, I look up at the qu
ivery Morse code dashes of the fluorescent lights, and exhale through my nose so that I sink.
My first instinct is to panic--I've run out of air, after all. But then my pulse starts beating under my fingernails, in my throat, between my legs. It's as if my heart has swelled to fill up all the space beneath my skin.
I could see why, for someone who's lost so much, feeling this full could be a comfort.
When I can't stand it anymore, I kick to the surface. Zoe splashes up beside me and treads water. "When I was little, I wanted to be a mermaid when I grew up," she says. "I used to practice by tying my ankles together and swimming in the town pool."
"What happened?"
"Well, obviously I didn't become a mermaid."
"Classic underachiever . . ."
"It's never too late, right?" Zoe pulls herself out of the pool and sits on the edge.
"I just don't know what the job market's like these days for sirens at sea," I say. "Now, on the other hand, vampires are absolutely to die for. There's a huge demand for the undead."
"It figures." Zoe sighs. "Just when I've rejoined the world of the living."
I stand up, and hold out a hand to pull Zoe to her feet. "Welcome back," I say.
Because it is a YMCA, there's no fancy juice bar, so instead we get coffee at a Dunkin' Donuts, which are scattered so frequently through Wilmington that you can stand in the doorway of one and spit into the doorway of another. Zoe follows me in her car and parks in the spot beside me. "Quite the license plate," she says, as I get out of the car.
Mine reads VS-66. It's a Rhode Island thing to have a low-numbered license plate. There are people who bequeath two-and three-digit plates to relatives in their wills; at one point a former governor made fighting plate-number corruption part of his electoral platform. If you have your initials and a low number--like me--you're probably a mob boss. I'm not a mob boss, but I know how to get things done. The day I had to register my new car, I brought each of the clerks a six-pack and asked them what they could do for me.
"Friends in high places," I reply, as we go into the coffee shop. We both order vanilla lattes and sit at a table in the back of the store.
"What time do you have to be at work?" Zoe asks.
"Eight. You?"
"Same." She takes a sip of her drink. "I'm at the hospital today."
The mention of that place feels like a net thrown over us, a memory of her being whisked away by ambulance from her own party. I fiddle with the lid of my cup. Even though I counsel kids every day, I am uncomfortable here with her. I'm not sure why I asked her to grab a cup of coffee, in fact. It's not like we know each other very well.
I had hired Zoe to work with an autistic boy several months ago. He had been in our school district for six years and had never, as far as I knew, said a word to a single teacher. It was his mother who'd heard about music therapy, and asked me to try to find someone local who could work with her son. I am the first to admit I wasn't expecting much when I met Zoe. She looked a little misplaced, a seventies child who'd been dropped into the new millennium. But within a month, Zoe had the boy playing improvised symphonies with her. The parents thought Zoe was a genius, and my principal thought I was brilliant for finding her.
"Look," I begin, after a long, weird silence, "I don't really know what to say about the baby."
Zoe looks up at me. "No one does." She traces the edge of her fingertip around the plastic lid of the coffee cup. I think that is just going to be that, and I'm about to look at my wristwatch and exclaim over the time when she speaks again. "There was a death coordinator at the hospital," she says. "She came into the room--afterward--and asked Max and me about where we wanted the body to go. If we wanted an autopsy. If we knew what kind of coffin we wanted. If we were going with cremation instead. She said we could take him home, too. Bury him, I don't know, in the backyard." Zoe looks up at me. "Sometimes I still have nightmares about that. About burying him, and then the snow melting in March, and I'd walk outside and find bones sitting there." She blots her eyes with a napkin. "I'm sorry. I don't talk about this. I've never talked about this."
I know why she is opening up to me. It's the same reason kids come into my office and confess that, after every meal, they make themselves throw up; or cut themselves in the privacy of the shower with a straight-edge razor blade. Sometimes it's easier to speak to a stranger. The problem is that, once you turn your heart inside out for someone to see, the other person loses her anonymity.
Once, when Zoe was working with the autistic student, I'd observed their session. You have to come into music therapy at the place where the patient is, she explained, and when he arrived she didn't make eye contact with him or force an interaction. Instead she took out her guitar and started playing and singing to herself. The boy sat down at the piano and began racing his hands over the keys in angry arpeggios. Gradually, every time he paused, she would play an equally forceful chord on her guitar. At first, he didn't connect what she was doing, and then he began to pause more frequently, waiting for her to musically interact. I realized they were having a conversation: first his sentence, then hers. They just were speaking a different language.
Maybe that was all Zoe Baxter needed--a new method of communication. So she'd stop sinking to the bottoms of pools. So she'd smile.
Full disclosure here: I am the person who buys the broken piece of furniture, sure I can repair it. I used to have a rescued greyhound. I am a pathological fixer, which accounts for my career as a school counselor, since God knows it's not about the money or job satisfaction. So it's not really a surprise to me that my immediate instinct, with Zoe Baxter, is to put her back together again.
"Death coordinator," I say, shaking my head. "And I thought my job sucked."
Zoe glances up, and then a snort bubbles out of her. She covers her mouth with her hand.
"It's okay to laugh," I say gently.
"I feel like it's not. Like it means none of this mattered to me." She shakes her head, and suddenly her eyes are full of tears. "I'm sorry. You didn't come to the Y this morning to listen to this. Some date I am."
Immediately, I freeze. What does she know? What has she heard?
Why does it matter?
You'd think that by now, at age thirty-four, I'd be less worried about what people think. I suppose it's just that when you've been burned before, you're less likely to dip a toe into the lake of fire.
"It's a good thing we ran into each other," I hear myself say. "I was thinking of calling you."
Really? I think, wondering where I'm going with this.
"Really?" Zoe replies.
"There's a kid who's been suffering from depression," I say. "She's been in and out of hospitals, and she's failing school. I was going to ask you to come in and work with her." In truth, I haven't really been thinking of Zoe and her music therapy, at least not in conjunction with Lucy DuBois. But now that I've said it, it makes sense. Nothing else has worked for the girl, who's attempted suicide twice. Her parents--so conservative that they wouldn't let Lucy talk to a shrink--would just need to be convinced that music therapy isn't modern voodoo.
Zoe hesitates, but I can tell she's considering the offer. "Vanessa, I already told you that I don't need to be rescued."
"I'm not saving you," I say. "I'm asking you to save someone else."
At the time, I think I mean Lucy. I don't realize I'm talking about me.
When I was growing up in the southern suburbs of Boston, I used to ride my banana bike with glitter streamers up and down the streets of my neighborhood, silently marking the homes of the girls I thought were pretty. At age six, I fully believed that Katie Whittaker, with her sunshine hair and constellation of freckles, would one day marry me and we'd live happily ever after.
I can't really remember when I realized that wasn't what all the other girls were thinking, and so I started saying along with the rest of the female second graders that I had a crush on Jared Tischbaum, who was cool enough to play on the travel soccer tea
m and who wore the same jean jacket to school every single day because, once, the actor Robin Williams had touched it in an airport baggage terminal.
I lost my virginity one night in the guest team's baseball dugout on school grounds with my first boyfriend, Ike. He was sweet and tender and told me I was beautiful--in other words, he did everything right--and yet I remember going home afterward and wondering what all the fuss was about when it came to sex. It had been sweaty and mechanical, and, even though I really did love Ike, something had been missing.
My best friend, Molly, was the person I confided this to. I'd find myself on the phone with her after midnight, dissecting the sinew and skeleton of my relationship with Ike. I'd study with her for a history test and not want to leave. I would make plans to go shopping with her at the mall on Saturday and would breathlessly count down the school days until the weekend came. We'd criticize the shallow girls who started dating guys and no longer had time for their female friends. We vowed to be inseparable.
In October 1998, during my junior year of college, Matthew Shepard--a young, gay University of Wyoming student--was severely beaten and left for dead. I didn't know Matthew Shepard. I wasn't a political activist. But my boyfriend at the time and I got on a Greyhound bus and traveled to Laramie to participate in the candlelight vigil at the university. It was when I was surrounded by all those points of light that I could confess what I had been terrified to admit to myself: it could have been me. That I was, and always had been, gay.
And here's the amazing thing: even after I said it out loud, the world did not stop turning.
I was still a college student majoring in education, with a 3.8 average. I still weighed 121 pounds and preferred chocolate to vanilla and sang with an a cappella group called Son of a Pitch. I swam at the school pool at least twice a week, and I was still much more likely to be found watching Cheers than getting wasted at a frat party. Admitting I was gay changed nothing about who I had been, or who I was going to be.
Part of me worried that I didn't fit into either camp. I'd never been with a woman, and was afraid that it would be as uneventful for me as fooling around with a guy. What if I wasn't really gay--just totally, functionally asexual? Plus, there was an added wrinkle to this new social world that I hadn't considered: the default assumption, when you meet a woman, is that she's heterosexual (unless you happen to be at an Indigo Girls concert . . . or a WNBA basketball game). It wasn't like certain girls sported an L on the forehead, and my gaydar had not yet been finely tuned.