I wait.
Nothing happens. Of course nothing happens.
My anger rises. I drop Cal’s hand. I look up at St. Jude Novena. He is not God, nor did he ever claim to be. But aside from the unconscious angel in front of me, he’s the closest thing I’ve got. “What do you want from me?” I growl up at the stained glass. “What do you expect me to do? Do you want me to fall to my knees and beg you? Well, here I am!” I raise my voice until it’s a shout. “Here I am! Right here! Right here in the middle of your fucking design, your goddamned pattern! I’m begging you. I’m begging you with all that I have. I’ve done everything you’ve ever asked of me, so you fucking give me something back. You give me something in return!”
The saint does not respond. God does not respond.
My ire grows. “I’m sick of your fucking games! None of us have deserved what you’ve done! You take and you take and you take, and you give nothing back! You dangle any chance at happiness right in front of our fucking faces and then you snatch it back right when we think we can have it for our own. I don’t care if love is sacrifice. I don’t care if that’s the only way we can recognize it. I know what it is, I know what it can do, and I won’t let you take love from
me. Not again. Not anymore. He’s mine, you bastard. He doesn’t belong to you—he belongs to me.”
My voice echoes throughout the church: me, me, me, me.
St. Jude flickers in the candlelight. Me, he seems to say. Me, me, me, he seems to mock.
Then the doors fly open behind me. I turn, expecting God himself to walk through the doors, eyes blazing, preparing to strike me down for speaking to him like I have in his house. It’s what I deserve. It’s what I’m owed.
But it’s not him. It’s not God.
It’s my mother.
“Benji,” she cries, rushing toward me. I can’t find the strength to take a step toward her, but it doesn’t matter. Soon she puts her arms around me, pulling me close. She sobs quietly in my ear, scolding me, telling me I can’t scare her like that again, that she was so scared because for a moment, she thought I was gone. Really gone. Gone so she would never see me again, gone just like Big Eddie was gone, and didn’t I know her heart couldn’t take that? Didn’t I know I was all she had left?
“I had to come,” I tell her. “I have to be with him.”
She pulls back, kissing my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks. “You don’t get to leave me too!” she shouts in my face.
“Okay. Okay.”
I let her hold me for a bit longer, and it’s only then that I realize my anger has waned, and I am just hurt. Every part of me hurts inside and out. She rocks me back and forth gently, humming something lightly in the back of her throat, and I focus on the sound. I pick up each and every note in her voice, following the thread of the music until it becomes my father’s song. She’s singing my father’s song to me. I wrap my arms around her.
“I saw him,” I say for the second time tonight. It comes out unbidden. She stops humming. She grips me tightly, but she doesn’t pull away. “Where?” “The river. Michael took me to the river. After I was shot.”
“And he… he was there?”
“Yes. Oh, yes. He was there. He was so big. He was so much bigger than I remembered. Do you remember how big he was? Bigger than mountains. Bigger than the sky. He….” My throat closes.
She quakes against me. “Did you get to speak with him?”
I smile into her hair. “I got to say everything to him.”
“Was he happy? Is he happy now? Please, Benji. Please tell me he’s happy now!”
I remember the grin on his face. His happy shout. Abe, he’d said. “I think so,” I say. “I think he’s okay now. He crossed the river. I made sure of it.”
“Oh, Benji. I miss him so much.”
“I know. But we’ll be together again. One day.”
“I know, baby. I know.”
“He… told me….”
She pulls back and cups my face. She’s so beautiful, my mother is. So goddamned beautiful. “What?” she asks. “What did he tell you?”
You just have to have faith.
In what?