from the present, dragging me into the past, and I wonder if I’ll ever be as far from the worst things I’ve experienced as I pretend to be. I can smell the station, can feel Jeremy as though he’s close, as though I could almost reach out and grab him, hold him back. I close my eyes and I see him there.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s surrender,” Foster answers. “Accepting your atonement is surrendering to God. You can’t join The Project for selfish reasons or you wouldn’t last a day, because what it requires of you is so much that it can only be powered by belief in something greater than yourself.” He quiets for a moment. “So no one could tell you. Not even Bea. The moment had to reveal itself to you when you were ready.”
I don’t say anything. I don’t know how to tell Foster that God isn’t the reason I asked to be baptized into The Project.
I know who I’m surrendering to.
* * *
It doesn’t take long to clear out my apartment.
Foster hauls what few boxes there are to the SUV, marveling over how little a life I’ve made for myself in the last few years and part of me does a little too. It’s sobering to see my incompleteness as a person so undeniably in front of me, the lies I told myself to exist within its emptiness—as though it wasn’t a reflection of my own. I never wanted to carry that with me and it’s a relief to let it go.
I understand, now, why this part is important.
“Ready?” Foster asks. I cross my arms and look up at my old window, overlooking the street. I could leave now, and have that be the end of it. “Lo?”
But there are other things I don’t want to carry anymore.
“I have to go to the cemetery.”
“What?”
“My parents.” I turn to him. “I want to pay my respects.”
He nods. “Sure. Let’s go.”
“I need to do this alone.”
I don’t want to be strengthened by Foster’s presence, to have it urge me, finally, past that gate. I want to prove I can do this on my own.
“I don’t know…”
“Just meet me at St. Andrew’s in about an hour.”
“I’m not supposed to leave you alone.”
“What does he think is going to happen to me?”
“Come on, Lo,” he says. “Everyone’s on edge.”
“Forty-five minutes?”
After a long moment, he relents. “Fine.”
“Thank you.”
“Forty-five minutes,” he repeats.
I pass SVO on the way, slowing as the building comes into view. The lights are on upstairs, the middle of the day. My feet almost lead me to the entrance, the muscle memory so ingrained. I remember my first day, feeling like it was going to be one open door after the other from that moment on. How wrong I was.
I let it go.
It takes me ten minutes to arrive at St. Andrew’s. I stand in front of the gate, a knot forming in my chest. Patty used to lay flowers down on the anniversary of the accident. I’d wait in the car, refusing to join her. It’s not good for you, she’d tell me, but she’d never managed to change my mind. Eventually, I stopped going altogether. I thought this was the way to keep the accident from touching me but it just bound my losses tighter to me.
Lev was right; I did live inside it.
I step through the gate.
I have a general idea of where I can find my parents’ headstone. I shove my hands in my pockets, my boots crunching across what remains of the snow, as I make my way to it.
I move through the rows of graves, wincing at the vestiges of holidays still adorning some—fake poinsettias, garland, strings of Christmas lights—and the decorations that tell stories of neglect; fake flowers with ragged and torn edges, bleached from the sun. But all that is better than the nothing I’ve always done.
Their grave, when I find it, is modest and unassuming, and the knot in my chest loosens, the anticipation proving worse than the thing itself. It feels as much mine as it is theirs, in some ways. The Lo they knew died with them. Their shy, sweet girl. I’ve lived in those opposites so long now, to the extent I don’t even know if they’d like me to meet me or be proud to know me. But maybe after I’m baptized, that will become less of a question. I hope it will. I reach out my hand, my fingers tracing the etched lettering of their