“I heard you’re famous now,” she said, passing the joint.
She didn’t mean to get drunk. She poured herself another drink because Devon asked why her cup was empty, what, did she become a nun or something? She poured a shot of tequila into a cup of lemonade, then another shot, then another, then she let Devon pull her onto the dance floor. Not because she wanted to dance but because dancing was an excuse to be close, to touch, to be comforted by the press and pull of Devon’s body against hers without having to talk. And the drinks made her feel nice, although the room was warm and she felt disgusted by Devon’s swampy T-shirt as she draped an arm around his waist. Her blood was probably thinning as she danced, but how nice it was to feel drunk and relaxed and warm and touched and touching.
Devon kissed her neck, squeezing her ass with both hands.
“You’re so fuckin’ fine,” he said, breath hot against her ear.
He grinded against her, biting his lip in that serious way of anyone trying hard to be sexy. She giggled. He laughed too, squeezing her again.
“What?” he said.
“I thought you like boys now,” she said.
“Who the fuck told you that?”
“People.”
“Does this feel like I like boys?”
He pressed her hand against his bulge and she wrested her wrist out of his grasp, pushing him away. She felt trapped, suddenly, like she was suffocating. Blurry-eyed, she felt along the wall, past bodies bumping into her, the frenetic rhythms pumping out the speakers, through the sticky humidity to the back door. On the other end of the balcony, Cody Richardson leaned against the wooden railing. He was taller, thinner now, his dirty-blond hair shaggier, his plaid shirt hanging off his angular shoulders. He smiled, flashing his silver lip ring, and she eased toward him, gripping the rail.
“Don’t you think it’s weird?” he said.
“What?”
He pointed over her shoulder. Beyond the lavender roofs of other beach houses, she could see the top of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, two white domes that kids on the school bus used to call “the boobs” when they drove past on field trips.
“Any minute—boom.” Cody’s eyes widened, his hands exploding away from each other. “Just like that. I mean, all it takes is a storm and we all blow up.”
Nadia rested her head on the railing, closing her eyes.
“That’s how I wanna go someday,” she said.
“Really?”
“Boom.”
—
THIS IS HOW she imagined it: Her mother driving around town, her husband’s service pistol in her lap. A curve, then another curve, the morning light as pink as a baby girl’s nightgown. She was groggy or maybe clearheaded, as clear as she’d ever been. She thought first about driving to the beach because it’d be a good place to die. Warm enough. A dying place ought to be warm—enough coldness waiting in the afterlife. But it was too late. Surfers were already padding across the sand and dying should be private, like humming a little song only you can hear.
So she drove on, half a mile up the hill from Upper Room where her car was shielded by branches. She shut off her engine and picked up the gun. She had never shot anything before but she’d seen animals die, pigs squealing as they bled out, chickens flapping as her mother wrung their necks. You could coax out life or you could end it at once. A slow death might seem gentler but a sudden death was kinder. Merciful, even.
She would be merciful to herself, this once.
—
WHEN HER FATHER ASKED, Nadia told him she hadn’t seen the tree. In the darkness, the tree in front of their house was nearly impossible to see, so she’d made too sharp a turn. It was nearly four a.m., and they were both standing in the driveway, her father in his green plaid robe and slippers, her leaning against the truck door, her shoes in her hands. She had planned to sneak back inside the house, but her father had run outside as soon as he heard the crash. Now he crouched in front of his dented bumper, feeling the jagged metal.
“Why the heck weren’t your headlights on?” he said.
“They were!” she said. “I just—I looked down to shut them off and then I looked up and then the tree.”
She swayed a little. Her father frowned, straightening.
“Are you drunk?” he said.
“No,” she said.
“I can smell it on you from here.”
“No—”
“And you drove home?”
He stepped toward her and the sudden movement made her drop everything in her hands, her purse and shoes and keys clattering to the driveway. She jutted her arms out before he could come closer. He stopped, his jaw clenched, and she couldn’t tell whether he wanted to slap her or hug her. Both hurt, his anger and his love, as they stood together in the dark driveway, his heart beating against her hands.
THREE
We pray.
Not without ceasing, as Paul instructs, but often enough. On Sundays and Wednesdays, we gather in the prayer room and slip off jackets, leave shoes at the door and walk around in stocking feet, sliding a little, like girls playing on waxed floors. We sit in a ring of white chairs in the center of the room and one of us reaches into the wooden box by the door stuffed with prayer request cards. Then we pray: for Earl Vernon, who wants his crackhead daughter to come home; Cindy Harris’s husband, who is leaving her because he’d caught her sending nasty photographs to her boss; Tracy Robinson, who has taken to drinking again, hard liquor at that; Saul Young, who is struggling to help his wife through the final days of her dementia. We read the request cards and we pray, for new jobs, new houses, new husbands, better health, better-behaved children, more faith, more patience, less temptation.
We don’t think of ourselves as “prayer warriors.” A man must’ve come up with that term—men think anything difficult is war. But prayer is more delicate than battle, especially intercessory prayer. More than just a notion, taking up the burdens of someone else, often someone you don’t even know. You close your eyes and listen to a request. Then you have to slip inside their body. You are Tracy Robinson, burning for whiskey. You are Cindy Harris’s husband, searching your wife’s phone. You are Earl Vernon, washing dirty knots out of your strung-out daughter’s hair.
If you don’t become them, even for a second, a prayer is nothing but words.
That’s why it didn’t take us long to figure out what had happened to Robert Turner’s truck. Ordinarily waxed and gleaming, the truck hobbled into the Upper Room parking lot on Sunday with a dented front bumper and cracked headlight. In the lobby, we heard young folks joking about how drunk Nadia Turner had been at some beach party. Then we became young again, or that is to say, we became her. Dancing all night with a bottle of vodka in hand, staggering out the door. A careless drive home weaving between lanes. The crunch of metal. How, when Robert smelled the liquor, he must have hit her or maybe hugged her. How she was probably deserving of both.
The truck was the first sign that something wasn’t right that summer, but none of us saw it that way. The banged-up truck only meant one thing to us then.
“Look what she done.”
“Who done?”
“That Turner girl.”
“Which one is that?”
“You know the one.”
“Redbone, clear-eyes like.”
“Oh, that girl?”
“What other Turner girl is there?”
“Don’t she look—”
“Sure do.”
“Like she spit her out.”
“Y’all see his—”
“Mhm.”
“How much you think that costs to fix?”
“Why she do that?”
“She wild.”
“Poor Robert.”