Children surround us, playing happily with one another. I watch as Emmy finds a group of girls, effortlessly inserting herself in a way I never would have been able to at that age. I watch them claim the swings, watch Emmy pump her legs with steely determination while Foster watches me. Every time I meet with him, he looks a little more whole and a little less complete and I feel it of myself, think he must be looking at me and seeing it too. I reach into my bag for my recorder and set it between us.
“Ready?” I ask him and he nods.
I push the record button and neither of us speaks at first. This is how it usually goes. There are a million questions; finding our way into the first almost always proves nearly impossible. Foster toys with the pendant around his neck. The anchor.
“You been following Casey?” he asks after a minute.
“Yeah. Money’s amazing.”
He snorts. There was nothing Casey didn’t know that was happening within the walls of The Unity Project. As Lev’s right hand, she was exposed to everything and helped make sure the worst of it happened, including, I’m sure, Bea’s death. She spent a minute locked up before her dad bailed her out. Lev Warren estranged her from her family, she says, filled her head with lies, invented a history of trauma for her so the two of them could be close. They’re fighting for a very lenient sentence.
I’m doing everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.
“I’ve been thinking,” Foster tells me after a little while, as kids shriek around us. I move the recorder closer to him, hoping it picks everything up. “I’ve been thinking that it was God. That it was God who brought you back when you were going to die, and it was God that saved Emmy when she was going to die. Lev took credit, but I feel God was working all these things because He knew you had to be Lev’s end. That all these things had to come together for you to … for you to stop him.”
“It amazes me,” I say, “that you still believe in God.”
“It amazes me you don’t.”
I shrug. “I only believe in things—”
“In things you can see,” he finishes. He leans forward. “How’d you get out of that water, huh? How much more of a miracle can you be?”
I stare at my hands, my open palms, and then I look at Foster wordlessly.
“Something happened out there on the lake,” he says. “Two people went in and only one came out. I saw you, Lo. There’s no goddamn way you should’ve…”
They found me on the shore, my face pressed against the dirt, and I was still, like I wasn’t breathing, but I was, while Lev drifted in the water behind me, his lungs full of it.
“If this was some divine plan wouldn’t that mean God killed Bea?”
“No.” He doesn’t elaborate, but I can tell the question disturbs him.
I don’t tell him I’ve been going to church more since it happened. But only after the service, sitting between Father Michael and Rob, the recorder in my hands. I listen as they talk about the aftermath, of the shuttered Unity Centers, of its brokenhearted members sharing their scars with one another. There are so many stories and I see myself in some, less in others—yet we all ended up under the hold of the same man. How does that happen?
I don’t know how that happens.
I’m afraid it makes us weak, but Father Michael doesn’t think it does. He thinks The Unity Project was born of the world’s failures, of its weaknesses. That it took strength to answer the call. That the good members did was as undeniable as the evil they fell prey to, and the necessity of that good, in this world, remains. He hopes we don’t give up on it.
“Can I ask you something?” I ask Foster.
“That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?”
“When I brought up the op-ed to you in Chapman … you said it was a lie.”
“I said Rob was a false witness.”
“How could you say that, if everything he said was true?”
“Because—” He stops. “Because in that moment, it wasn’t. He said it was abuse. I didn’t think I was being abused.”
“Do you miss it?”
He closes his eyes for a long moment, pain sharp across his features.
“I miss it so much,” he says, his voice rough. He opens his eyes. “Do you?”
I reach my hand out to the