Chris Adrian - The Great Night

It was a different sort of Jesus time than the one they had that day at home, but Molly was failing at it just as badly. Her mother was trembling and ululating and her father was shaking and barking and her brothers were yipping and her sisters were mewling, and beyond them the whole congregation was similarly taken up, and Molly would have to listen, later, as they all talked about how wonderful it was for them when they spoke the spirit that way. She closed both eyes, then opened one to a slit to watch Peabo, who was standing quietly next to her. The limerick about Reverend Duff faltered and was silenced as she watched him. He doesn’t look stupid like the rest of them , the voice said, at the same time that she thought, He doesn’t look stupid like me . Molly looked forward at the back of Mrs. Louque’s head. The lady was dancing in place like a little girl.

Their hymnbooks were touching and their elbows were touching and their knees were touching. But Peabo didn’t look at her, and he sang the hymns without any extra notes or extra syllables that could be put together into a message. When it came time to exchange the peace, he turned to her mother and hugged Colin and Chris and Clay and her father, and he reached past her to hug Mary, but he didn’t even look at Molly. That would have been too obvious, she told herself, and she tried to think of some clever way of communicating with him. All she could think was to tear a piece from one of the hymnals and fold it into the shape of a snake, which would signify something, though she wasn’t sure what. Her failure to imagine just what that was made everything feel useless and dumb, and she was sure, all of a sudden, that she had imagined his unique advance. She closed her eyes and shook her head and found herself wanting to scream.

It would have been fine to scream. You were supposed to express the spirit however it came. This usually took the foster children by surprise, even though they were briefed about it before they came to church for the first time. But he seemed to take it all in stride. Molly did her usual thing, swaying back and forth with her eyes on the ceiling and muttering times tables in pig Latin to herself. She tried to distinguish the voices of her brothers and sisters from the cacophony. She heard Malinda saying something like “Edelweiss!” She heard her father saying “Omalaya!” and her mother saying “Paw-paw!” and then, finally, she heard Peabo, right next to her, saying something that sounded like “I love you I love you I love you I love you.” There was an altered, electric quality to his voice. She did not open her eyes or look at him, but she slipped the words into her times tables: “I-ay ove-lay oooh-yay.” She kept on with the oooh-yays until the very end, when folks were passing out and the last hymn was starting up slowly, rising from various places around the hall from those who had recovered enough to sing. When she opened her eyes, she saw Peabo standing straight and tall next to her, mouth agape with the hymn, shouting it as much as singing it.

She went to his room that night, after she was sure everyone else had fallen asleep. It was the little room they put all the foster kids in, not even really a bedroom, since it didn’t have a closet, just a wardrobe. There was a dresser and a small chair, but no space for anything else except the single bed. The drapes were open, and by the light of the streetlamps Molly could see Peabo stretched out in bed, on top of the covers in his pajamas. She stared from the doorway for what felt like five minutes, but she couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or not.

She didn’t say anything because he hadn’t said anything, and it seemed like it would be cheating to use words. She didn’t know what words she would have used anyway, though it was clear what she wanted to say. She did the message: reach, reach, dip, kick, leap, leap, leap, every time a little higher, though not too high, since his room was right above her parents’ room. But she went high enough to kick her feet — one, two, three times — and when she landed softly she dropped into a squat and then exploded upward. This was a move from the video for “Jesus Loves You More.” Her hands were supposed to stretch out and then fall, fingers fluttering, to her sides. But the same not — part of her that spoke with the voice that was not a voice took control of them just as she was stretching, and her hands opened up at the top of her reach into two perfect Fuck You birdies, aimed not at Peabo but at the whole world.

He didn’t stir at all the whole time she danced, which wasn’t very long. Her dance was shorter than his had been, and she regular-walked, not moonwalked, out the door. Back in her bed, she wondered if he had been awake at all, not sure if it would be disappointing to actually talk to him at length, now that they were communicating at a higher level. She imagined going on forever this way, through his successful fosterhood and eventual adoption, through weddings and family reunions and funerals, proceeding in parallel past family milestone after family milestone. She imagined them at Malinda’s funeral, softly jangling their tambourines at each other, communicating shades of irony and grief not contained in the mundane verbal condolences of the others. She had nearly fallen asleep, and was sure she was about to enter a dream in which, knowing it was a dream, she could enjoy Malinda’s death, and say things like “No, I don’t miss her at all,” when she felt a pressure on her mattress and awoke with a start. He was sitting on her bed. “Do you want to see my Jesus?” he asked her.

“Darkness,” said Aunt Jean. “And light! Light … and darkness!” She was doing Molly’s makeup for the video, painting half of her face black and half of it white for the concept portion of the shoot, which involved the family taking turns presenting their black faces and their white faces to the camera as they sang in a black-and-white checkered “dreamspace.” (That was a sheet Jean had colored herself with a reeking marker.) Melissa, who had insisted on having her face done first, kept sniffing at it curiously. Jean had paused in front of Peabo, a tub of makeup in either hand, and said, “Why, the dark is built right in, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, and gave her a neutral stare. In the end, she painted him just like the rest of them, but his black side was darker and his white side more startling than everyone else’s.

“Cold,” Jean said, throwing her head back and raising her hand to make mouthy little singing motions with it as she showed them her black profile. “Warm!” She pivoted sharply on her heel to show them her white face. Molly felt sure that the total effect, with the checkered background and their swiveling Kabuki faces, would make people dizzy or possibly give them a seizure, but she didn’t say so. And the voice didn’t say so, either. It had been quiet all day. She didn’t really care anyway if someone had a seizure. She didn’t really care if she was playing well, during the fish-spangled band-shot portions of the video, when Jean roller-skated around the garage with the video camera to her eye. She didn’t care if she kept the beat or not, and she didn’t care if Peabo did, either. If he was throwing her grace beats, she ignored them.

“Everything will be different, after you see Him,” he had said, and that was true. As Molly had tried unsuccessfully to sleep, with the Jesus swinging languidly in her mind in a fivesecond arc that measured the minutes until dawn, she tried to see how she could not have understood what he actually meant, and she pictured herself on trial before her family, with Malinda seated as judge and everyone else in the jury box, listening with impassive faces as she attempted to explain. “I thought he meant he was going to share his Jesus with me. His own personal Jesus. His experience of Jesus.” And it had been true that part of her thought this was going to be the case, and that same part had wondered what it would be like to show him hers. She could only imagine the obvious thing, opening her chest to show him the very shape of her heart.