We kissed and hugged him again, and he kissed our cheeks, and we promised to come back tomorrow to see him, all of us unaware that the church would uncover our visit the next day and instruct the hospice to keep us—and every other visitor—away from him. He was drifting off to sleep as we left.
The sun was gone when my sister and I left the hospice, my car automatically steering its way back home. Driving around the block was always the last thing we did before leaving town. For over a year, we had been reaching out to our family here. To share with them the experiences that opened our minds. To remind them of passages we had so long ignored while we were together. To convince them that there were other ways. We knew the messages were unwelcome—not unlike Westboro’s decades of protests—but we sent them anyway and would for years to come. We did not use the bombast of our grandfather or the florid insults of our mother, but the still, small voice I had learned from Chad, from David, from the sassy start-up employee in Chicago, and the hilarious Australian guy, people who learned the lesson that Margie had tried to teach me as a child. A soft tongue breaketh the bone. In the years that followed, I watched in amazement as the signs I most often argued against—PRAY FOR MORE DEAD SOLDIERS; PRAY FOR MORE DEAD KIDS; FAGS CAN’T REPENT—began to disappear from their repertoire, replaced by messages like CHRIST OUR STRENGTH and BE RECONCILED TO GOD. It was all the encouragement I needed to go on. Grace and I use tweets and letters and postcards to reach them, cupcake deliveries and birthday presents.
And just once, we used a sign.
For four years, it sat at the corner of 12th and Cambridge, right in the midst of our old neighborhood. A brand-new bus bench I had noticed on a similar drive just a few months after we left. It had been blank back then, except for a phone number to call if you wanted to buy the ad space. Grace and I had spent over a month trying to figure out what to put on it. What would we say to our loved ones living in the surrounding houses? What was the most important thing to tell them? To anyone driving past, the bench’s message looked like a nonsense saying written in chalk paint, surrounded by brightly colored drawings that belonged in the pages of a children’s book. To our family, it was a reminder. “Goldbugs forever,” it read in Grace’s loopy handwriting. A mistaken iPhone autocorrect for “good night” that became a saying among the siblings.
“Goldbugs, bro.” “Goldbugs, sis.”
A sweet way of saying Good night. I love you.
The drawings were for the children who couldn’t read yet. The ones Grace had always drawn for them. The little sailboat on its choppy waters. The fat, floating bubble man stretching his arms out toward a heart. The jolly baby with a lollipop, a shirt too small to cover his belly, and a bib that read simply FOOD. The interconnected symbols of the sun, the flower, and the swirl. Grace, Bekah, and me, back together as we should be.
And on the back of the bench, a line from a story my sister read to us after Bible study one evening. Another Hans Christian Andersen.
There is always a clinging to the land of one’s birth.
Gramps is gone now, buried unceremoniously in an unmarked grave under the Kansas sun. Yet his church remains. I’m just around the corner from it, right outside my old front door. Gran lives here now, with my mom and my dad and my brothers and my sister. Their hearts beat just inside. I can’t knock, and I don’t pray anymore, but I can wish that it all would end. That the walls they built to keep me out would vanish. I want to tell them that the world isn’t evil. That it’s full and complicated and beautiful and good, filled with unknown truths and unbroken hopes, and that it’s waiting just for them. That I’m waiting just for them. I want to tell them that I love them.
I’ll just have to find another way.
Acknowledgments
This book began as an essay, written as a gift for my dearest C.G. Chad, I wouldn’t have undertaken this project without your unwavering belief in me, your honest and tactful criticism, and your willingness to walk