Chapter 9 #2
"You prayed for her while she got worse.
" My voice shakes, and I let it. "She got two trips to the hospital and a thousand hands laid on her head before anybody in this family would drive her to an actual doctor, and you know what finally made you?
It wasn't God. It was the state. It was a stranger with a clipboard telling you that you'd let it go too long, that a sixteen-year-old in crisis needs medicine and not a prayer circle?—"
"That is enough."
That's the closest my father comes to shouting, and the table goes silent under it.
He breathes, gathering himself the way he gathers himself in the pulpit.
"Your sister is managed now," he says. "Medicated. And I thank God for her every day. But I look at her, and I look at you, and I see the same thing in both my girls. I’ve asked the Lord every night what I did—what's in this family, in my blood or my house, that he would give me two daughters who are?—"
He stops.
He doesn't say the word. He doesn't have to. It's sitting there on the table with the corn pudding, plain as anything.
Damaged.
"Say it," I tell him.
He doesn't.
"You think we're broken," I say. "Both of us.
You think Hannah getting help just hid it, and now you're looking at me, waiting for the crack to show, and nothing I say is going to change your mind because if I tell you I'm fine that just sounds like Hannah telling you she was fine.
There's no answer I can give you. You've built it so there's no answer. "
It's my mother who breaks the silence, and what she says is worse than anything my father's managed.
"There's something else, Sophia."
I look at her. She's still not looking at me.
"Carol from two doors down from your place." My mother folds her napkin into a smaller and smaller square. "She says there's a man. A motorcycle man, with tattoos, coming and going from your street at all hours. Staying the night."
And there it is. The second board.
"His name is Njal," I say.
"So, it's true." My father's jaw goes tight. "You've taken up with one of those. On top of everything. While the whole congregation is watching this family."
"One of those." I almost laugh. "You don't know one thing about him."
"I know the type."
"You know nothing." And now I'm the one not raising my voice because I finally understand it's the quiet that cuts.
"You want to know about Njal, Daddy? He's the kindest man I've ever met.
He went over to get Hoagie in the middle of the night so I wouldn't worry.
He cooks. He listens." I stand up. "And he's got the same illness Hannah's got.
Same diagnosis, exactly. The thing you call God's punishment. "
My mother's hand comes to her mouth.
"And you know what's different about him?
" I'm shaking now, all the way through. "His family didn't call it sin.
They didn't pray over him and wait for the rot to lift.
They got him to a doctor, and they loved him through it.
And he is the steadiest, most whole person I know.
So don't you tell me what those people are. "
"Sit down, Sophia." My father points at my chair, the way he'd point a child back to a pew.
"No."
I haven't said no to my father since I was a child.
The word feels enormous in my mouth, and the ceiling doesn't fall, and God doesn't reach down.
The only thing that happens is my father's face going gray and still.
"You care more about that congregation than you ever cared about your own children," I say, and once it starts I can't stop it.
It's been building my whole life. "If you'd cared about Hannah half as much as you cared about how it looked, she'd have seen a doctor at fourteen instead of bleeding out the best years of her life in prayer circles while you protected your good name.
You let a stranger from the state love my sister better than you did. And now you're doing it to me."
The silence after is the loudest thing in the house.
My mother is crying without sound. My father is looking at me like he doesn't know who's standing in his dining room.
Maybe he doesn't. Maybe she's new. Maybe she got born this week, on a ladder with paint on her face, in a bed where the sky stayed up.
"I'm not staying for dessert," I say.
Nobody stops me.
I get my keys and walk out the door I've walked through my whole life, past the framed cross-stitch in the hall that says: As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
* * *
I make it to the end of their street before I have to pull over.
I don't cry. I thought I would. Instead I sit there, gripping the wheel, breathing, feeling the shape of what I did rattle around in me like a coin in an empty can.
I said no to my father.
Twenty-six years of yes sir and whatever you think is best and I'm sorry, Daddy.
Tonight, I stood up in his dining room and told him the truest, hardest thing I know about my own family.
I told him the truth, and I didn't soften it.
I didn't apologize, and I walked out, and the world is still here, the streetlights still buzzing on in the dusk, my own two hands still steady on the wheel.
I keep checking them. My hands. Holding them up off the wheel in the dim cab to see if they're shaking the way Hannah's shake, the way my father's been waiting all night to see mine shake.
They're steady.
Of course they're steady. There was never anything wrong with me. There was only ever something wrong with the people who needed me to be small.
When I think about Hannah, up in that library in Tallahassee, who told me everything once she was strong enough—all of it, the hospital, the clipboard, the state, the years she lost to the prayers—and who has spent her whole recovery making sure I understood it was never her fault.
She's the only one who'll believe me about the AI without me having to convince her.
Because she knows exactly what it feels like to tell the truth and have your own family hear it as madness.
I pick up my phone.
I find her name, my sister, the other damaged Crockett girl, the one who got out, and I start to type.