therapist," I told her point blank.
"Okay, fair enough," she answered, backing down. "I saw a therapist for a while after my sister died. I questioned a lot of things and it really helped me to talk to someone."
I grunted with a nod. "Yeah."
"It was hard to hold onto my faith when I was deep in mourning." She spoke quietly, holding her hands to her chest. I watched as her fingers tucked between the lapels of her coat to tug the cross out. "It's hard not to question why such horrible things can happen to good people. Or how God could allow one of His own to suffer so much, when she had done nothing wrong."
I didn't mean to snicker but I did. It was a gentle sound, barely audible, but she heard it. She trained her eyes on me as we turned onto the sidewalk and asked what I was laughing at.
"I'm not laughing."
"You just did."
"No," I insisted weakly, but she knew better. So, I said, "I don't believe in any of that shit."
"Any of what shit? God?"
"Yep."
She nodded gently. "I figured. That's okay. You're within your right to believe what you want. Faith, to me, is a very personal thing. That’s why I don’t go to Church."
"Oh, thanks so much for your permission," I deadpanned.
"I didn't believe for a little while."
I don't know what made me ask, "What changed?"
Audrey smiled at the question, as though she could see phantom shreds of light seeping from between my cracks. She was all too eager to share her story as she welcomed herself to wrap an arm around mine. "For about a year after my sister died, I considered myself agnostic. I hoped there was more, you know—a god, an afterlife ... But it was hard to continue following my beliefs when I was in so much pain. It was like having a piece of my body removed and not being given anything to dull the ache."
I imagined living without Jake. I imagined him being gone, and not in the sense my parents were talking but really gone. I had almost lost him once, but he’d been stubborn. He wouldn’t die. Instead, he stuck around, and even with as rough as it was, I’d prefer this life over not having him at all.
The thought immediately choked me up, and I shook my head, sending it away.
"But, then ..." She hesitated and eyed me skeptically. "Do you promise not to laugh?"
"Sure," I shrugged.
"I'm not sure I believe you."
I snorted. "That's fine. Don't tell me then." Pulling my arm from her grasp, I continued walking down the street with a boorishness I wasn’t proud of, and Audrey hurried to keep up.
"Okay, I'll tell you," she relented easily. "I woke up one morning and, on my windowsill, was a butterfly."
I had heard about this, people seeing butterflies and thinking they were visitors from the beyond. A message. A sign. It was just another thing people told themselves to bring a tiny shred of comfort to their lives. And I understood it, sure, but it didn't stop it all from sounding completely absurd.
"I see," I muttered, not wanting to say anything else in fear I might actually laugh in her face.
"I know what you're thinking," she said. "You're thinking I'm insane."
"Not insane," I corrected.
"I wasn't looking for a sign from my sister," she insisted adamantly.
"Sure. I get it."
"No." She grabbed my arm with a surprising amount of force and turned me to face her. "You don't understand and you're not listening."
"Fine," I muttered, staring down into her eyes, a dark navy in the darkness. "So, tell me."
"That morning, I woke up to find a butterfly on the windowsill of my bedroom," she said, a firm and serious expression drawn on her face. "My window was open a crack, there was a small hole in the upper part of my screen that I'd been begging my father to fix for months, and somehow, this butterfly managed to find its way through the hole and down through the crack and onto the windowsill inside my room."
"Okay," I nodded, still unimpressed. This was what they did, religious people. People of faith. They try to convince you of the things you know to be false. They try to sway you toward their stance of blind belief in something that might as well be as impossible as the unicorns or mermaids. This was exactly why Audrey and I couldn't happen, this was exactly why this entire night was a bad idea,