my message if I emailed her. I’d told Libby that Grace and I were probably leaving, and she said, “I want you to come live with me,” and we spoke like friends who hadn’t just missed the last three and a half years of each other’s lives.
In the howling, icy wind and the stark fluorescent light of the motel parking lot, the four of us loaded suitcases into the back of Libby’s car. They’d take it all back to their home in Lawrence, thirty miles away. My sister and I would follow in the morning.
We hugged them goodbye, and they headed home with our things.
As Grace and I drove to Newbery’s house in silence, I thought of a conversation I’d had with Bekah back in August. A letter had gone viral—a father disowning his son for coming out as gay—and she had called me into her office at the law firm.
“I can’t believe it!” she’d exclaimed. “This guy actually says it right!” She started to read aloud, detailing the father’s refusal to have any further communication with his son. Their happy times together were a thing of the past, and his son was no longer welcome in his home.
“If you choose not to attend my funeral,” he wrote, “my friends and family will understand.”
I’d felt my heart sink as Bekah read, but she was too excited to notice that I’d only managed a dull “Wow…” in response. I knew this letter was exactly the posture my family would take if we left. Grace and I had wept that night, realizing that it was gay people—I’d stopped using the “f” word by then—who would best understand what we were going through. The community we had antagonized more than any other. I hated that it had had to come to this for me to understand what the church had been doing to vulnerable people for so long.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
I couldn’t escape the sense of certainty pulsing through me as I pulled into Newbery’s driveway.
No matter what I had intended, I deserved every bit of this.
Newbery opened the door. His two sons and his wife were already asleep. He led us down to their basement, a pile of linens in hand, and Grace and I each picked a couch and tucked ourselves in. This place was foreign, but unlike the motel, it was bright and cozy. And most important: we had friends here. I was ready to cry myself to sleep, assuming Newbery would leave us to our misery and head off to bed. Instead he sat down in a recliner and talked with us for a couple of hours. I hadn’t known how badly I needed to talk to someone until he started asking his gentle, unassuming questions. How urgently I needed to mourn my family aloud, free of the need to stifle and camouflage every word.
Why had they made it so hard to tell the truth?
Just before 10 A.M. the following morning, I parked an enormous U-Haul at the end of our front sidewalk. Grace and I walked up to the front door like we had a thousand times before.
I rang the doorbell.
“Why did you ring the doorbell?!” Grace was incredulous.
“Because…” I had never thought to do otherwise. We were outsiders now. I had internalized my new status overnight.
My parents reinforced that status from the moment they opened the door. They stayed with us wherever we roamed in the house, apparently afraid to leave us alone. As if they couldn’t trust us. It hurt my heart, but not like the jacket I found hanging on my bedroom door. Tucked into the hood was a sheet of paper torn from a notebook, with Bekah’s handwriting: “This is yours, Meg.” She had received the jacket as a gift from Jael several years earlier, but she’d shared it with me because she knew I loved it, too. We wore it so much that we’d put a hole in the left sleeve. The first moment I was alone, I slipped across the hall into Bekah’s bedroom, pressed my forehead to the floor, and wept so hard no sound came out. At the thought of her lying in bed thinking about this the night before. At the thought that she wanted to give me this piece of her—of us—to take with me. At the fact that she couldn’t say anything more than This is yours, Meg