Car accident car accident, he yelled into the receiver, and left the call running, like they’d learned in school.
He ran in the direction his mother had gone until he caught sight of them, huddled in streaks of headlight: his mother on the ground, stroking his father’s hair. His father’s face cut up, already swollen. His father, who was so sturdy he never wore his seatbelt.
Eliot knelt in the wet beside them. A thick vane of glass protruded from his father’s neck, blood everywhere, blood multiplied by rain.
Dad! he said, and his father’s eyelids fluttered open.
When he saw Eliot, he raised a shaky hand and tried to sign.
It’s okay, Eliot said, but his father’s fingers continued to spasm with a desire to say something. You can talk to me. What is it?
Don’t you see? The angels?
What? said Eliot’s mother.
The angels from heaven. They’re so beautiful. Lighting up that tree.
Eliot looked over his shoulder at the tree line, but he didn’t see anything bright until the ambulance showed up—by then his father was gone—and he didn’t see anything beautiful for a long time after that.
* * *
—
After the funeral, Eliot and his mother spent three weeks in a tundral living room, lights dim and AC blasting, and his mother asked him if he believed in heaven.
Like angels and stuff? Like what Dad said?
Yeah.
I don’t know. You?
I think maybe we should go to church, she said.
They were not churchgoing people, a minority in Ohio. Eliot had been inside a church only a handful of times for Cub Scout meetings when he was small. But his father hadn’t been religious, not ever, and still in the end he’d seemed so convinced. Eliot didn’t know what to make of it, but the idea of church seemed to perk his mom up a little, so they googled places, found one with an imposing steeple and a flashy website: Newbirth Evangelical. Make Your Fresh Start Today.
The website said Come as you are, and inside the atrium didn’t look like a church at all. It was round and bright, with floor-to-ceiling windows and high-top café tables and chairs scattered around the perimeter. In the center was a Pepsi machine and a huge banner that said, FREE COFFEE! FREE POP! FREE WI-FI! PASSWORD: JESUS1. Ahead, two sets of thick wooden doors opened into the sanctuary.
Here, things looked a bit more familiar—pews, a stage with a terrifying life-size crucifix. But soon it was clear more modern elements had infiltrated the sanctuary itself, too: diffuse concert lighting in a purple hue, a giant LED screen suspended from the ceiling, and, now assembling on the raised platform in front of the altar, a rock band with electric guitars and a drum kit, big amps on the floor and three giant speakers on stands aimed out at the congregation. Everyone was on their feet smiling and singing and clapping, and Eliot had thought, All right, they are unreasonably happy, but I can handle this.
He and his mother slid into a pew. The music stopped rippling, and everyone else sat, too. The man Eliot assumed was the priest leapt to the stage with his hands raised in victory. On the screen, a slow zoom into a close-up of priest guy’s face as he began his sermon. Eliot had tried to follow along, but lipreading was a slippery business, and he was soon lost somewhere in the desert with a guy named Jacob, who had been wrestling （resting? festering?） an angel.
That’s when he’d seen her, across the aisle, and a few rows ahead: wild auburn hair hanging long down her back, white T-shirt revealing freckled arms. He had never been so taken by a person’s profile, and willed her to turn, just a little. Then his mother was nudging him—time to go, how long had he been staring? As the girl stepped into the aisle, he caught a glimpse of her face, fair and freckled and hazel-eyed, and even better than he’d imagined. Eliot felt a cog turn inside his chest, his grief for the moment dammed off. His brain, once racked by the idea of girls, would hereafter be consumed by only this girl—a nameless dappled mystery.
And so they had gone on that way for months, memories of his father receding in one direction, his mother headed another way, transforming into someone else entirely. She bought a Bible, and prayed, kneeling beside her bed each night. She spoke of miracles, of Halloween and rap music as portals to Satan, of the importance of modest dress for women. Most of all, she was relentlessly compliant in the face of the reverend, as if, in his presence, her personality evacuated to make room for his. Each week Eliot returned to the church out of concern for his mother, for another glimpse of the girl, all the while holding his tongue on the things he was coming to learn from the Bible: that deafness was sickness, a punishment for sins, and he was a child of indiscretion, an Eliot among the Johns and Peters and Noahs. Jesus had cured a deaf man in front of a crowd, with two wet willies and a dab of saliva on the man’s tongue. The night he’d learned that, Eliot dreamt of what another man’s spit might taste like.
Then one Sunday after services, Pastor Sherman cornered Eliot’s mother at the far end of the chapel. Eliot had tried to get close enough to see what they were saying, but he could only see his mother nodding along saying, Absolutely, absolutely. When Eliot tore her away, it was only to find that she wanted to return to church that night for a special service—a “revival,” she’d called it. They’d spent the rest of the afternoon running around doing Reverend Sherman’s errands, searching for items that sounded like the components to some mythological shopping list. They retrieved an assortment of essential oils from the pharmacy; they bought things from the food store that did not sound edible: rose hips and tukmaria and frankincense. It all filled up two bags, and Eliot lugged them out to the trunk.
By the time they’d returned to the church, the second service had already started, REVIVAL! written in bright purple 3-D WordArt on the screen. He and his mother slid into what had become their customary pew, but after just a few minutes, Eliot saw the girl getting up from hers. She locked eyes with him as she passed.
He waited until she left the sanctuary to follow her. In the mouth of the atrium, there was no trace of her, but then he felt a hand—her hand—on his arm. She pulled him into a storage room.
The girl tugged at a string overhead and a naked bulb illuminated the closet. The room was crammed with metal shelves, which were in turn stuffed with big Tupperware canisters of communion wafers. He’d almost laughed when he saw them lined up like that, imagined Reverend Sherman going to Costco to buy a case of Jesus crackers. But the girl had come close, put her finger to her lips in a gesture of secrecy.
Eliot, she’d said, I’m happy you came.
He was so nervous right before he kissed her that he actually felt nauseous, but once they started his body relaxed into it, moving like it had always known what to do. She was soft and smelled like baby powder, and he ran his fingers along her neck and down the curve of her waist, then back up her stomach beneath her shirt. The girl exhaled sharply but didn’t pull away.
When he freed up the top button on her jeans, though, she quickly shoved him backward. Eliot smacked his elbow on one of the wafer shelves and bit his lip to keep from making noise. He reached for her hand to show her he was sorry, but her eyes had changed, were wide with something beyond the unbuttoning of pants.
They’re calling you, she said.