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The reverend smiled. “Well, people have to be able to trust me to keep their confidences. I won’t tell your mother, for instance, that we’ve spoken.” I must have looked startled, because he chuckled again. “Not that she would ask. Purely hypothetical. But I can speakbroadly. I can tell you that the seniors I visit with at Willowcrest almost always have the same concerns. At the end of a life, there are choices we’ve made, things we regret, things a member of the clergy can help a person come to terms with.”
“They want to get right with God,” I said.
“That’s one way of putting it, sure. And I’ve heard every sort of story. Some of them are pretty banal, some small misdeed or misunderstanding that the person has become fixated on. Some are heartbreaking—the lost loves, the family estrangements. And sometimes... well, sometimes it’s something far worse. It’s rare that I hear something that shocks me, but even then I try to have compassion. Nobody suffers more than a person who’s carried a terrible secret all their life.” He looked somber. “So I try to offer solace. And your grandmother—I won’t tell you which category she fell into. Some of what we discussed, she intended to take to the grave, and I have to honor her wishes. But I will tell you that when we last spoke, I believe she had found peace.”
He paused, hesitated like he was going to say something else, and then didn’t.
I found myself shaking my head. “Even if she found peace, she wouldn’t have remembered.”
“Ah, but God remembers. That’s the beauty of it. We put our faith in God to know us, to be the guardian of our truth—and he forgives us, whether we remember asking for forgiveness or not.” He paused. “Your grandmother had fallen away from the church, but she still had faith. And hope. I hope you can find some comfort in that.”
I felt sheepish. “I don’t know if it’s comforting. I don’t even know if I believe in God.”
“What if I told you that was perfectly all right?”
“I’d think you were good at your job,” I said, laughing a little. “But that’s a lot of trust to put in something I’m not even sure is real.”
“Do you struggle with that? Trust?”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking of Adam.You look for a way to controlwhat’s happening,he’d said.To make the bad thing less bad. I twisted the garnet ring on my finger, then stopped as Reverend Frank looked at it, looked at me, and tilted his head as if he had suddenly understood something. The silence stretched between us.
“You know,” he said finally, “there’s a saying I often think of at moments like this. ‘Let go or be dragged.’”
“That’s in the Bible?”
He laughed. “Oh, I saw it on a bumper sticker. But I believe that good advice can come from anywhere. I’m afraid I have to start getting ready for the meeting, but if you’d like to talk more, my door is always open.”
“Sure.” We both stood.
I turned to go, and then turned back. “You were going to say something before,” I said. “After you said that Mimi had found peace. There was something else. What was it?”
Sympathy mixed with sadness flickered over his face. “I was thinking of the last time I saw Miriam. She was looking forward to spending Christmas with you and your family at the Whispers, but she was a bit confused. She said her husband was going to be there.” He paused. “And when she said goodbye, she told me we wouldn’t be seeing each other again.”
I spent the rest of the day thinking about what the priest had told me. About Mimi letting God do the forgiving while she did the forgetting. About the secrets, whatever they might have been, that she had taken to her grave. About the way she’d said goodbye to him, as if she’d known it was for the last time. My grandmother had found peace. She was ready, and now she was gone.
Let go or be dragged,he’d said. A bumper-sticker proverb—but one that rang embarrassingly true. How many times in my life had I done this, clinging desperately to a moment that was already over, refusing to say goodbye to someone who was already gone? I thought ofthe night my roommates told me to move out, the way I’d cried and begged to stay just a little longer, another month, another week, unable to stop myself even as I saw Clarissa exchange looks with Colin, her lip curling beneath her septum piercing as she mouthed the wordpathetic. I thought of the boyfriend who’d broken up with me my junior year of college, and how I kept asking for one more conversation, one more shot at working it out, until he texted me back with a numbered list of all the reasons why he didn’t want to date me anymore. (Bad breathwas the first entry; the last one, number 15, wasBecause you forced me to write this fucking list.)
I thought about my father letting my calls go to voice mail.
Obsessing about the circumstances of Mimi’s death wasn’t about her. It was about me. Casting myself in the role of detective meant that I would never have to unclench my fingers and release what had already slipped away; I could dwell forever on what might have been, and tell myself I was doing something important, courageous, noble.
The worst thing, the thing that made me cringe, was realizing how close I’d come to buying into my own bullshit.
But I didn’t have to. I could let go. I could move forward. I could live my life without the fear of falling—and I could start by being honest about the person I wanted to live that life with.
Until we tell them.
It was time. It had, I realized, been time for a while.
The reading of the will was the next day, and I woke up early, full of nervous energy. In the morning, we would drive to Bangor to meet with Mimi’s lawyer. And in the afternoon, on the drive back home, I would tell my mother the truth about Adam.
The house was quiet as I slipped outside and found my way to the pine path, past the deadfall, all the way to the place where we’d found Mimi’s body. Snow had fallen overnight, only an inch or so, but it was enough to blanket everything so that the whole worldlooked soft and clean. I stood there a long time at the mouth of the sea, gazing out into the bay that was half-frozen and half hidden by fog, and pretended I could see her there—not the way she’d been when we found her, dead and stiff, her eyes open beneath the ice, but alive. Her back turned, her head held high, walking alone into whatever lay beyond the horizon. In this version of her last moment, there was no break in the ice, no plunge into the frozen sea. She just kept walking into the mist until I couldn’t see her anymore. She was gone, and I was alone.
But I wasn’t, I thought. Not anymore.
We drove in silence to Bangor. My mother seemed lost in her own world, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. I looked out the window at the passing landscape and thought about California. I’d only ever been there once, but the place, even just the word, was imbued with promise. I thought about clean slates, fresh starts. I thought that when I left this place, the only thing I would miss about it was the way it looked under a blanket of freshly fallen snow.
And later I would remember this, and think that I should have known better. That I should have seen that beautiful white landscape for what it was. The fresh snow was a lie, an illusion, the thinnest and most fragile layer of beauty laid over an ugly world. It wouldn’t last, couldn’t, wasn’t made to. All it took was a single footstep to break the spell and reveal the dirt underneath.
