after so much time kept beyond the borders of herself from trauma and drugs. Bea wants to be there when Lo opens her eyes, but Lev wants her here, to see what he sees, to know what he knows. She’d refused the first time he asked. The thought of being anywhere but next to her sister was so unbearable to Bea it hurt. Lev told her he understood but he’d also said, It’s the only thing I’m asking of you. It overwhelmed Bea with shame; how could she deny him, after all he’d done?
The next time he asked, she didn’t.
Now Bea aches for Lo and is trying so hard not to show it. She’s been put in Casey’s charge and Casey, Bea realizes, is someone very important to Lev. There’s a way she carries herself—so graceful and so assured—that Bea would one day like to emulate but for now she’s awkward and small beside Casey, nervous under her watchful gaze.
They stop at a fence along the property, observing members dragging benches into the barn. In another few hours there will be, Lev called it, “a family meeting.” He asked Bea to come early because he wants her to meet his family, to see herself among them. Bea marvels at the thought, her mind never far from the nights she leaves the hospital for her empty home where her own family isn’t and will never be.
Do you know about Lev? Casey asks her. Beyond what he’s done for you?
Bea knew about Lev and The Project in that abstract way you know about something that exists outside of your own needs, their mission far removed from the kind of person Bea understood herself to be. She remembers the girl on the bridge over the summer, remembers watching some of the scene unfold on TV before—it embarrasses her to admit this—changing channels. She knows more than that now, was eager to learn if Lev Warren entered everyone’s life as dramatically as he did hers and how many miracles followed with him. She found the Vice article. She doesn’t know if she should bring it up, not because she believes it—she doesn’t—but because it strikes her as rude and she wants Casey to like her. She glances at Casey, who gives her an encouraging smile because she knows what Bea is thinking.
Of course she knows.
If the Vice article revealed anything, Casey says, it’s that people get so comfortable in the prisons they make for themselves, they instinctively reject what will set them free. Their scrutiny of The Unity Project represents a failure of its people to look inward. Do you agree?
Bea nods.
Then let me tell you about Lev, she says, the way it’s meant to be told.
And Bea hears it, for the very first time, out there at the Garrett Farm.
* * *
1980, Indiana. A boy is born.
His mother doesn’t love him; she shows him so with her fists.
He’s hurting, angry and alone. He yearns to be seen.
He’s seventeen when he wanders into the church and feels the pull of God before he has the language for such feelings. The place is warm. The place is love. As he joins the congregants in prayer, a miracle occurs: he is no longer angry. He is no longer alone. The boy is filled with a sense of purpose he’s never felt before. He sees that he is God’s instrument.
God calls on him to follow, and he does.
Their fingers entwined, Casey takes Bea down the path to the barn.
The boy becomes a man. The man’s faith takes him to the seminary, where he will give his life over in service of the Lord, but he soon realizes there is no God in church, only men who hide their sin behind its walls. The man feels its sickness, can feel God’s grace smothered by its sickness, so he turns to the world and finds still more sin-sickness there: for-profit wars, people without, pockets bared by recession, hands outstretched, no hands to them extended. The man is not on the path he thought he was. He no longer knows what the path is. He returns home, to his hateful mother, where she strips him of his ego and he kneels. He prays. He prays for thirty hours and he does not sleep, eat or drink.
They come to a stop in front of the barn doors. Inside, Lev stands in the middle of a circle, his family gathered around him.