NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

Animals in Kind

Fiction by ​​Valli Jo Porter

They came in twos, relentlessly coupled in their grief: wives and husbands, girlfriends and boyfriends. The women without partners brought their own mothers, sisters, friends. They milled around the circle of folding chairs. They wore Sharpie-scrawled nametags. They forced smiles over the refreshment table, where they drowned instant coffee in creamer, picked over stale scones, commented on the humidity. They assiduously avoided the common hole in their lives. As if they had no less depressing place to be on a balmy August weeknight in Virginia Beach than this church gymnasium.

Alone, Leah stood under the basketball hoop, gripped a Styrofoam cup of black coffee that she didn’t drink, watched. The others, they looked like animals herded together against their will. But at least they had another of their kind to weather the storm. She wondered how many of their stories had made the news, how many of them she would recall from her obsessive newspaper clipping. By her count, in the last year, twenty-eight children had died in the Hampton Roads area. Car accidents, drownings, smotherings, a fall from a third-story window. Eleven of those had died in less shocking ways, according to their obituaries in the Virginian Pilot. Mostly cancers, the newsprint recounting bravery in the face of the poisonous torture of treatment, declaring the children “home now, and no longer in pain.”

In the evening after work, Leah cut out the stories and obituaries, positioned them on sticky photo album pages, and filed them in the burnished brown album on her tiny apartment coffee table. Tonight, she tried to match the stories to couples. A well-dressed couple in their forties: definitely a teenager, either one who sliced her wrists or one who drove his car into a tree, drunk. A girl, perhaps as young as Leah, accompanied by her own mother: the baby who died in the apartment fire. The others: cancer, caught in the undertow, cancer, car crash.

The facilitator, a gray-haired woman with her glasses hanging from a chain around her neck, invited them to sit down, to introduce themselves. This is a safe place, she cooed, where others understand the pain, even if they don’t share the specifics.

They sat, almost filling the circle of chairs. The man in the first couple introduced himself and his wife, and she managed to say, “We are missing our daughter. We didn’t know it, but she had a congenital heart defect.” Half the members of the circle wiped their eyes; women fumbled for tissues in purses. As the mothers, fathers, grandmothers memorialized their missing children, Leah realized she could not give her son’s name. Someone would recognize that she was the one who’d married a monster—the monster who killed their son. After all, the Pilot had run the story of her husband’s indictment on the bottom of the front page, with the headline, “Sailor charged in shaking death of infant,” next to Jason’s mugshot. She had started her new job as an administrative assistant at the hospital three days before, so she had only attended court to testify. She hadn’t sat through the rest of the trial. After losing Maxwell, she didn’t even care. Light the pyre, watch it burn.

She had stuck that newspaper clipping between the obituary for stillborn twins and the toddler who suffered heat stroke in the back of his father’s car, which was parked in the hospital parking lot. She’d heard the details in choked whispers from coworkers: The anesthetist, an excellent doctor and doting father, forgot to drop his son at daycare. The child pulled out all his eyelashes while he was dying.

After all of the people seated between her and the facilitator had spoken, Leah introduced herself with only her first name and said, “I lost my son. He was eleven months old.” She didn’t give the rest of the story. How Jason was the only guy back in Ohio who asked her out because she was red-headed, freckled, overweight. How she managed to earn a scholarship to Ohio State and go in defiance of her parents. How she couldn’t stand the loneliness after Jason left for basic training. How she didn’t mean to get pregnant when he was on leave but was happy anyway for the excuse to follow him to his duty station in Virginia. He left on deployment a week after Maxwell was born and didn’t come home for ten months. In e-mails, he would ask for pictures of “the boy,” and as his deployment end date neared, he seemed to soften to the idea of fatherhood—especially, she thought, when he saw how much she loved their baby, loved her life with him.

For the rest of the session, Leah listened, imagined the children alive, imagined bottling these people’s grief, taking it home. Trapped in test tubes and beakers, it would become opaque, would separate, fat from whey like breast milk in the fridge, and she would stow it all in the freezer, all packed together in the back.

After all, the most human act was remembering.


 
Outside, on her way to her car, she turned the corner and ran into someone.

“Sorry,” she said, stepping back from the man. He had been inside, had snuck in after the session started.

“It’s okay,” he said. He turned an earnest gaze on her. “You were the only other one in there alone.”

Leah hesitated, then fell in beside him. He was tall, long of limb and face, perhaps early thirties. She had assumed he belonged to one of the other women inside, not that he was a lone wolf like her.

“Well,” she said, “not all of us can belong to a pride or pack.”

“No,” he agreed. “For some of us, those are terrible places to be. You’re alone in a crowd. Jason,” he said, offering his hand, and it took Leah a heart-thudding moment to realize that he wasn’t invoking her ex-husband’s name. He was introducing himself. She considered lying about her name, because sharing both her loner status and her identity seemed to be one intimacy too many. But she wasn’t positive he’d missed her introduction, so she told the truth.

“Your son was a baby, too,” Jason said. “How long ago did it happen?”

“A year,” she said. “You?”

“Eight months. He was four months old. He would have had his first birthday last week.”

“Mine would have been two in September.”

They didn’t say anything, observing that moment of silence Leah had noticed people gave her sorrow whenever she was forced to mention it: at the Social Security office when she was changing her name back; at work when she needed help filling out her W-4; on the phone when she was trying to settle the medical bills that kept trickling in, months after the fact. She had told the other administrative assistant in her cube that her infant son had died, and that she didn’t care if people knew, but she didn’t wish to talk about it.

She was sure the others talked about her in the same whispers as they did the anesthetist.

And it was perhaps the fact that this Jason was willing to stand next to her, wordless under the yellow buzzing parking lot light, that made Leah say something she never had in her life: “Well, do you want to get a drink with me?”

He said he did, but he didn’t know where the bar was. As she watched for his headlights in her rear-view mirror, she wondered what kind of man lived in a Navy town and didn’t know the location of the nearest bar.

She also wondered what kind of animals shared drinks after a support group for parents of dead children.


 
At the bar, under the anonymous cloak of darkness and alcohol, they confided their losses. Jason had gone to wake his son, Aiden, for his morning bottle, only to find him facedown in the middle of the crib, blue, cold to the touch. The paramedics didn’t even try to revive him. SIDS. He’d been dead for hours.

Leah had returned home from a Mommy’s Night Out with the other military wives to find Maxwell unresponsive in his crib as well—a crib he’d never slept in before. As a newborn, he’d awoken with a jerk every time she tried to place him in it, swaddled or not, so Maxwell had slept next to her every night of his life, cuddled in the crook of her arm, attaching to her breast without even fully waking her in the middle of the night. That had been the most desperate part in the week afterward: jumping awake at two or three in the morning, weeping as she searched the bed for her missing baby, her breasts rock hard with the milk they had not yet stopped making.

At Mommy’s Night Out, the other military wives had assured her reassimilation after deployment was hard, especially with a baby who didn’t know his daddy. At home, Jason, who hadn’t wanted to be a father and had missed out on the first eleven months of practice, couldn’t take Maxwell’s crying. Crying for her. Instead of calling her—God knows she would have left dinner, she had been hesitant to leave Maxwell in the first place—Jason snapped.

Afterward, when she needed to understand how it had happened, she found a video on YouTube, showing just how hard you have to shake an 11-month-old to sever his cervical spine. It was sickeningly violent, the weighted doll flopping in the demonstrator’s hands, head whipping back and forth. She had crawled to the bathroom and thrown up and sworn to herself that she would never lay eyes on her husband again. She initiated the divorce the next week. From jail, he didn’t contest.

She hadn’t called her parents or her brothers, hadn’t gone home for Christmas. They undoubtedly knew—Jason’s family would have told them—but their silence belayed their judgment: You reap what you sow. This is your punishment for getting pregnant in the first place. She’d withdrawn, nursed her wounds. She hadn’t told her story to anyone, but new, long-faced Jason seemed just the right amount of sympathetic and encouraging. He wanted to hear it. He wanted to lap up her sorrow.

They sipped their beers and traded lonely anecdotes and avoided looking at the mirrored wall behind the bar. After they shared the haunting details of their losses, though, Leah noticed that Jason’s details weren’t nearly as descriptive. In fact, his remarks seemed to slink around the periphery, careful to conceal something or another. He was a musician, he allowed, but even when she asked, “What about Aiden’s mom?,” he only said, “She’s not in the picture.” People who could do this mystified Leah; she was always forthright, sometimes painfully so, and she didn’t know how to be any other way. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but she wasn’t sure she trusted that.

Before they left, Jason waved off her debit card, paid cash for both of their drinks.

“Thank you,” he said. “For talking.”

Leah nodded, then did a second thing she had never done before: scribbled her number on a napkin and handed it to him.


 
The next week, he called and asked if he could see her. “I felt better after we talked,” he said. “Better than after therapy.”

“I did, too,” Leah said, although she hadn’t been to therapy. Hadn’t wanted, until the first anniversary of Maxwell’s death passed, to talk about anything at all. But she meant it: She had felt better after talking to Jason. This newer, better Jason.

She proposed meeting at the bar again, but he hesitated. “Bars make me nervous,” he said. “Maybe I could come to your place?”

This seemed like a red flag. After all, she’d talked to him for two hours and still knew hardly anything about him. She hesitated, then gave him her address, tidied her already spotless apartment, waited on her balcony to see his old pickup truck pull into the parking lot. His sorrow, so authentic, so palpable, testified to his character.

He brought a six-pack of beer, which she sat on the coffee table, next to the album of newspaper clippings. Immediately, she wished she’d tucked it away in her closet.

“So, how often do you play gigs?” she asked, to break the silence after they twisted the caps off their beers.

“Oh,” Jason said. “Weekly.” He then glanced around the room before picking up the framed 4x6 on the table next to him. A sudden revulsion shook through Leah’s body. She should have definitely put that away: the last picture of her with Maxwell in the PICU, after all the tubes had been removed, the IV pulled, the technology that had prolonged his life for a day pruned away. He had still been warm in her arms but alarmingly limp, his fire red curls still vibrant on his head, his soft eyelashes defined against his pallor. She clutched him to her chest, and reflexively, when the nurse said, “Smile,” she had—a  painful twist in her otherwise tear-stained, drawn face. Why had the nurse said “smile?” Why had she obeyed? When she saw the picture, she hated it. Her amazing boy who’d just taken his first steps earlier in the week, motionless in her arms, broken, gone, and yet still the most breathtaking thing she’d ever seen. And her smile in that picture—pained, trying hard, still attempting to do as others directed, even though the world was over.

As Jason studied it, she understood that she’d done almost everything wrong in the past year. What type of person clipped and collected obituaries of children? Framed a picture of herself holding her dead son? Didn’t call home when her husband killed her child?

“He looks like you,” Jason said finally. “He is amazing.”

The present tense stung, but Leah viscerally understood that Jason was acknowledging the strangeness of the picture, the agony of it, the beauty of it.

“He was the happiest accident I’ve ever had,” Leah said, and chugged her beer. She hadn’t eaten, and it went straight to her head. “Marrying his father was the worst plan I ever followed. I only did it because I was supposed to. Well, maybe that’s not true, I had this fantasy we’d be a perfect little family. But I know I could have done it on my own. Sometimes I imagine I came here and got my job and this apartment right after I found out I was pregnant. I’d be rocking him to sleep in the bedroom right now instead of this.”

Jason put the picture down next to the album. He hesitated, but Leah could almost see the wall he’d erected crumbling, felled by her rawness. “My wife and I aren’t living together right now. I might lose my job if we get divorced.”

Leah turned to him, waited. What type of guitarist lost his job if he got divorced? Work had saved her in the past year, so she understood his anxiety. But she didn’t ask about his job. She asked about his wife.

He folded his ankle to his opposite knee, fiddled with the shoelaces in his Converse tennis shoes. “She left when I wouldn’t try for another kid right away. She’s living with a friend from our church.”

When he said the words “our church,” understanding bloomed in Leah. At college, she’d tried out the Christian Fellowship. Even with guitars and trendy praise songs and everyone in jeans, it had been too uncomfortably reminiscent of her childhood: five, six hours of every Sunday spent at church, with the litany of sit still, be quiet, stand when we do, Jesus Jesus Jesus. Of course there had been fun and games after services, and the people were genuinely good, most of them, but the relentless message was one she couldn’t help imprinting: You are nothing—why should you be elect? And her parents’ relentless rules: Don’t say this, don’t do that, don’t think that, don’t be this person. New Jason could’ve easily been one of the other college kids on stage, leading the Christian Fellowship service. He probably was, back when he was in college.

She made an inarticulate noise of acknowledgment as she twisted off the cap of a second beer. “Do you think we’ll see our babies in heaven?”

“I hope so.”

“Do you think Maxwell will be eleven months old? Eleven months old, for eternity? Or will I get there and find a grown man that God raised himself? And I’ll have to be happy about it, even though he’ll be a stranger, a pale shade of the perfect little person I birthed and nursed and loved so desperately? My love for him was so big that it almost hurt then, and it kills now. But I’ll have to be happy about it, because that’s what heaven is? Forced happiness?”

Jason shrugged. “I don’t know anymore. I just know that I hope to see him again.” He drained the end of his beer. “My wife acted like we could replace him. She was frantic to get pregnant again immediately. The week afterward, even. It was as if she could just erase him. It made me hate her.”

The vehemence with which he declared it, and then punctuated it with the hiss of pressure from a new beer, shocked Leah. He had seemed devoid of passion, and this wasn’t where she expected it to manifest. She wasn’t even sure she hated her ex—hate wasn’t the right word. She hated what he had done. He was a monster. But he’d also given Maxwell life. She couldn’t hate his essence, couldn’t hate the half of Maxwell that had been from him. Maxwell had been all innocence—no matter what her parents and their church preached—so his father had to have been innocent at some point, too, even though she couldn’t remember it. Couldn’t see back past the night Jason manifested his most evil, violent self. But she could logically see that it had to have existed.

After she sat with it awhile, she found that she had a certain weakness for New Jason’s illogical hatred of his wife. Understandable. It was all understandable.

“Do you think you’ll divorce?” she asked. “Why would you lose your job?”

He shifted, crossed his other ankle to his opposite knee. He obviously didn’t want to tell her, but she wanted to hear him say it. “I’m a minister.”

“A music minister?”

“Yeah. Although I think I shouldn’t be any more. But starting over just seems impossible.” He laughed then, and it seemed out of place in her apartment—she hadn’t laughed once the entire time she lived there. “You seem to be taking it really well that the guy you’re drinking with is a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

“Well, you haven’t tried to convert me yet. You didn’t bring a Bible, unless you’ve got it stowed in your pants somewhere.”

He laughed again, this time more genuine and less a nervous tic, and she laughed, too, at the awkwardness of the image. When their laughter died down, they looked at each other for a beat too long before turning to their drinks, and Leah sensed the hole in the conversation: This is where sex went. And she felt it, the pull, the animal idea hovering between them.

“You know what I like about you?” Leah asked. She focused on the album on the table in front of them.

“What?”

“You’re beside yourself, too. As you should be. Anyone who outlives a child should be beside themselves.”

Jason turned back to her, his eyes wide in his long face. The geometry of him didn’t seem to add up. She felt she could measure him, calculate angles and planes for hours. “Know what I like about you?” he replied. “You think my dysfunction is admirable.”

She tipped her head, traced her finger around the lip of her beer. In that last semester of college, in another small defiance of her parents, she’d taken an Intro to Anthropology class. Her professor studied silver leaf monkeys, the males of the species who were vicious and territorial. They would fight for supremacy, and if the challenger dethroned the leader of the family, he’d then kill all the nursing infants. Assure the dominance of his genes. The female monkeys, after they screeched and mourned their young, would turn, raise their tails, present to the new dominant male for mating.

They chose to carry on their own genes, too, in whatever manner they could.


 
Leah couldn’t quite label it an affair, what was going on with New Jason. That’s how she thought of him, always with the descriptor in front of his name, like a courtesy title. An acknowledgement—reaffirmation, really—that he was a completely different person than her ex. At first, he came over once a week or so, brought beer. Sometimes they talked for hours, but other times they watched a movie or a lousy reality show, joking about it the entire time. He graduated to bringing pizza, and she graduated to baking desserts in advanced. They drove to the next support group together, and when Leah spotted a new woman, huddled alone by the refreshment table, she startled a bit at her own reversal of fortunes. No one seemed to think it amiss that she and Jason were together. No one seemed to remember them as separate.

On what would have been Maxwell’s second birthday, Leah called off work. She had been increasingly incommunicative in the week leading up to it, waylaid by the heaviness of the date, the intensity of her eruption of grief, which she’d been putting off so well. Jason took off work, too, drove her to the zoo, where she and her ex had taken Maxwell a few days before his death. New Jason walked around with her, only observing the most obvious facts about the animals, and didn’t put his arm around her shoulder, didn’t take her hand. When she woke up the next day, Leah felt lighter, more limber, as if she’d shed a skin that had grown too tight.

About two months after Leah met Jason, her cube mate at work, a warm woman who was roughly her mother’s age, a woman who could have become a mother figure to her if she had been interested, noticed something had changed. “Is there someone new in your life?” she asked. “You seem happy.” Leah said she’d made a friend, but New Jason was more than that: a lifeline. When she was leaving the break room, she caught sight of a flier on the Wanteds corkboard, ripped off the number of a band looking for a lead singer.

Jason seemed reticent when she handed it to him, but he surprised her two days later by calling and saying he had gone to the band leader’s basement, jammed with them for awhile. He was going to play with them at a tavern on Friday. Would she like to come?

She arrived before their first set, and he immediately introduced her to his two band mates, Tony and Donny. Although he’d never struck her as clean cut—not compared to her ex Jason, with his hair in a fade and his uniforms always pressed and creased—next to these other two, New Jason was positively ministerial, with no visible piercings, and no facial hair. And she hadn’t expected Jason’s voice: a clear tenor, surprisingly dexterous, giving her goosebumps as it curled around the lyrics of “Last Dance with Mary Jane,” “Creep,” and so much of the late ’90s oeuvre. She sat at a table in the front row, picked ice cubes out of her drink with her fingernails, and considered how, more than any conception of God that Jason’s parents had passed down or he had formed for himself in the past ten years of church employment, music was his salvation. He heard God in the four right chords. She understood also that his religious upbringing had been both less restrictive than hers and more intense. While she’d been sitting obedient and silent in a pew, listening to the preacher thunder out dire warnings about their fallenness, their wretchedness, Jason had been raising his hands, closing his eyes, weeping as he recommitted his life to Jesus after each especially powerful worship service. He’d always known both church and pop songs that she’d only learned once she escaped to college and listened to her roommate’s CD collection, reveling in the truth that pop and rock and R&B taught her: Others felt the same way she did. Forlorn. Inadequate. Careful, carnal, proud. Jason seemed to have known that from the beginning.

If these feelings were all too human—these contradictions all held together in one body—maybe none of them, not a single one, was elect.


 
After he started playing with the band, Jason seemed to gain confidence that he could, in fact, start over again. “I’m going to quit my job,” he said. “Before Christmas. Before I have to direct the Christmas pageant. I can do it. I can work at a big box store if I have to, gig at night.”

“File for divorce?”

Jason shook his head no, and it took Leah a moment to understand. The yes was a given, and he was out ahead of it. “We tried counseling. It just proved to me there’s nothing there to save.”

And even though she could not call what was going on between them an affair—after all, they hadn’t so much as touched each other, let alone kissed—she sensed she was intimately entwined with these drastic changes. Even if he wasn’t divorcing his wife for her, she was making it possible for him to divorce his wife. Her own life had been cruel the past two years, and she had no desire to wreck anyone else’s, but she took a perverse pleasure in this. She attended all of the band’s shows and hung out with him every Saturday afterward. By November, he lost the courtesy title and became her Jason of reference. In her apartment, her newspapers piled up next to the album, uncut. Instead of going to the support group’s November meeting together, they cooked spaghetti bolognaise at her apartment and drank wine. Before he left, she hugged him quickly.

After all, they weren’t having an affair.



The fall slid into the temperate winter of the Atlantic coast. Leah swept up the leaves that fell from her balcony plants, traded flip flops for ballet flats, stowed the burnished photo album that bore witness to the devastating capriciousness of life in a closet. At the first December show of Jason’s band, during the break between sets, she returned from the bathroom to see Jason in a tight conference with another woman. She was petite, dark-haired, dressed for revenge—skinny jeans, slinky shirt that exposed the top half of her back. A decade ago, she had probably been the prettiest little thing at Bible college. The jealousy that roiled through Leah’s stomach, so shockingly physical, propelled her to her feet. She wandered over to the bassist, Donny, and said, “When did she get here?”

“Not sure,” he said, unplugging and replugging a mess of cords before he looked up. “Who is she, anyway?”

“His wife. Megan.” Leah only knew her name because of Aiden’s obituary in her album. Jason had never uttered it.

Donny raised his eyebrows. “That’s awkward. I thought you were his legit girl.”

“They’re getting divorced. We’re just friends.”

“Right,” Donny said. “Right.”

His knowing dismissal made Leah panic. “No, you don’t understand,” she said, desperate to smooth
over Jason’s omitted details. “We both had babies who died. We met at a support group for bereaved parents.”

Donny blinked at her, and she could tell her explanation had just cemented her and Jason’s affair in his mind. After all, that’s what animals did: turned, raised their tails, carried on however they could.
For the rest of the night, Leah turned the idea over in her mind. There was wisdom in the way animals moved on. In the way they lived in the moment, by instinct. By heart.

After the show, Jason drove her home and walked her up to her apartment, lingering at the door. “Why don’t you come in?” she asked. “And stay?”

For the first time, his hand found her waist, even as he said, “I need to go. It’s late.”

Leah said, “Don’t. It’s one a.m. Stay.”

“I shouldn’t. I have to lead worship tomorrow.”

“Jason. Just stay.”

She didn’t consciously say his name often, and he had to know why—the echo of her past in its very syllables. The million times she’d said it, the million times she’d cursed it. “Jason,” she said again, and he followed her into the apartment, dropped his coat, followed her into her bedroom. Took off his shoes, his belt, set his wallet on her nightstand. Crawled into bed next to her with his clothes on, wrapped his arms around her, pulled her close under the covers. She had worried, in the moment before he spooned her, that they would fit awkwardly since he was so lanky, but no, they fit perfectly. Almost familiarly. As if she had known from the very beginning, just by looking at him, how they would piece together.

“What did she want?” She didn’t have to use more than a pronoun; his ex’s visit had hung over their interactions the rest of the night, had silenced them on the ride to her apartment, even though Megan left directly after her conference with him.

“Just to see me play one last time.”

Leah nodded in the cove of his body. “I knew who she was immediately. Even though you’ve told me nothing about her.”

Jason palmed her hand on her hip, curled his fingers in between hers. “Maybe you can come to see me play the last time at church next Sunday.” He rolled away and said to the ceiling, “At the end they’re going to give me a parting gift. It feels so official and gross. I wish I could just fade out.”

This invitation surprised her. She’d assumed that Jason would separate from the ministry like ex Jason had from the Navy—unceremoniously, dishonorably—and that the process would have nothing to do with her. But of course, for Jason, the process had everything to do with her.

She turned to him, pressed her lips to his. “I’ll come,” she whispered.


 
As part of the annulment, Jason said he’d let his wife have their church, said he would find another one. But Leah sensed that he’d spend his Sundays lazing in bed with her. After all, he had spent every night of the last week with her. When he rose early to get ready for his last Sunday worship service, she lay awake and spied slivers of his skin through the crack in her bathroom door as he shaved, showered. When he emerged in a plaid shirt and jeans, she felt a pang. “You know, I didn’t mean to make you cynical,” she said. “Even though I can’t quite share it, I admire your hope.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. She could tell he was surprised but not displeased. “What makes you think I’m cynical?

“Maybe cynical wasn’t the right word,” she said. Maybe she really meant that she hadn’t meant to make him a sinner.

Jason had to be there early to set up, so she drove herself to the church, a low-slung building that crouched between a bakery and an open field on the right. It had been years since she’d been to a proper church, and this one seemed foreign. Inside, the sanctuary was nothing more than a multipurpose room with basketball court lines snaking under the chairs. The congregants were a little too young, a little too hip. The preacher wasn’t any older than Jason and wore a similar uniform of skinny jeans and lumberjack plaid. All of the teens who sat lined up in the front row looked like they were the cool kids at their schools, the girls thin and long-haired, the boys preppy and clean-faced. Even the white-haired people in the audience swayed to the beat, clapped their hands.

And how strange to see Jason, her Jason, stand up in front of these people, the lights bright on the stage, and apply his voice to the words: Jesus, Jesus, friend of mine. Words familiar in texture but now foreign in substance. She marveled that Jason had picked these songs to sing this very week, the week he came back to her bed every night, the week he took his clothes off, and hers, too. “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,” he sang. “Prone to leave the God I love.” Leah couldn’t quite place the anxiety that seemed to wash over her, even though it seemed like something she’d experienced before. Around her, the others clapped or reached hands into the air, closed their eyes, and sang out.

The last song of the set was new to Leah, but a visible ripple of excitement spread through the congregation as soon as the first chords sounded. Jason nodded at another guitarist and the backup singers. His voice was uncharacteristically thick on the first phrase: “Blessed be your name.” Leah’s chest felt full as he wobbled out of the end of the stanza, clearly trying not to cry.

He backed away from the microphone and spent the chorus and the next verse just playing the guitar, letting the backup singers and the congregation carry the song. On the screen where the lyrics were projected, Leah saw why Jason couldn’t get it together: All about the “road marked with suffering” and “pain in the offering,” but still “blessed be your name.” Her throat felt too full to swallow.

When the bridge arrived, Jason seemed to gather resolve. He rowed his guitar onto his hip, out of the way, and thrust his arms in the air. The drums, the other guitars, the piano dropped out, and he stepped to the microphone and sang over top of the audience, every note true and punctuated: “You give and take away. You give and take away. My heart will choose to say, Lord, blessed be your name.”

Leah had been clapping along so as not to seem too out-of-place, but the words, and the way Jason sang them—as if he had been waiting the entire song service just to belt out those three sentences—as if they ameliorated him—as if they set him free—as if they made him forget—Leah was appalled. She froze in place with her hands clasped in front of her, no longer following the beat as the instruments started again, cymbals clanging.

To just dismiss the injustice of it all, so callously, so surely. To choose to do so. She could not.  She wanted to scream out, “Remember! Remember Aiden! Remember Maxwell!” but the music was too cacophonous—Jason would never hear her. She backed out of her seat, into the aisle, staring straight at Jason up on the stage. She didn’t recognize him.

And all around her, the sheep in the fold, eyes closed, arms reaching toward heaven, like children begging to be picked up.

​Leah turned heel, fled the gym, fled the building. Next to the overflowing parking lot, in the grass strip where she had parked her car, she turned back and surveyed the church: a low-slung ark, sinking into the turf, stripping down the humans inside to their most animal state.                                   

Valli Jo Porter
​
Valli Jo Porter earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. She lives with her husband and two children outside Cleveland, where she is finishing a short story collection that centers on belief and unbelief as well as revising a novel manuscript she affectionately refers to as her Middle Child.