Greg Jackson - Prodigals - Stories

At the new coffee shop a barista pulls the lever on the espresso machine like she isn’t sure what will happen. A finger taps your shoulder. Oh, goodness, you say, and you and Amy’s mom are hugging. She’s grown bigger over the years, cut her hair short, let it gray. How is she? Just lovely, she says. She’s remarried. Yes, you heard. A younger man, a naval engineer, the stuff of light gossip. Larry, she says. You look so great! Well, thank you, she says — but she does. And how beautiful are women of a certain age, when they stop obsessing over weight and clothes and come to inhabit the world without pretense.

I’m doing yoga, she tells you.

My girlfriend likes that, you say. She smiles, says nothing. And what do you hear from Amy? you ask.

A shadow passes over her face. Do you know, Jesse, I haven’t heard from her in months ? I hardly recognized her the last time she was here. She got involved in, what do you call it, helping the janitors at her school get a decent wage? And she was in those protests up in New York. Helping folks after the storms hit. I said, Amy, we got storms down here, honey. People in need down here. That’s what the church teaches, after all. And you know what she said to me, she says, What about the church, Ma? Do you have any idea what goes on in this country while we talk about Jesus this, Jesus that? Well, I said, you can’t save everyone, sweetheart, try as you might. And she says, Talk to me when you’ve tried. But I think she felt bad because she said, We could all be trying a little harder. My own daughter! But you know, I was proud of her too, Jesse, because I could hear God’s love in what she said.

If God loves one person, it’s Amy, you tell her.

What a sweet thing to say, she says. But you know, she kept saying how revolution was the only hope. I mean, revolution —in this day and age?

Amy’s very pure hearted, you say. When she thinks something, she’s got to believe it all the way down, as deep as it goes.

But Amy’s mom is staring out the window. She kept saying how all the problems were structural. Everything was structural . I don’t pretend to know what that means.

You say you guess it means we’re all caught up doing one another little harms we don’t even notice. You touch her shoulder. You and Amy are still young, you remind her.

But you don’t feel particularly young. In fact you feel older than just about everyone on earth. And how did mothers get so innocent as they aged? How, instead of revealing itself to them, did the world grow ever stranger and more worrying, as though you formed a system with them and moving in one direction caused them to move in the other, unseen cables in the dialogue of souls?

So you’re still up north, Jesse, she says. You like it up there? You’ll let me know if you hear from Amy, won’t you? She always admired you so much.

Oh, well, did she now. Really? You’ll take it. But parents say shit like that all the time and who knows, who really knows? Who can say the filters of necessary illusion the lives of children pass through on their way to settling in parents’ minds? What did your own parents think all those years as your hair grew shorter, when you gave up makeup, dresses, and the posture of an apology? No doubt they had their own confusions to approach in glancing and unpracticed dives. No doubt they would hold whatever they could still in their shifting world, even you. You would hold them still. You would sit like dolls at the kitchen table. What noise? you would say. What rumbling?

In the days after, your thoughts run to Amy and the trip you took as high school seniors. A storm had torn up the coast where a friend of Pastor Bob’s, another DTS alum, had his congregation, and it fell to you and Amy to drive down the van with all the clothes and food, the tools and blankets, your church was donating. Our very own angels of mercy, Pastor Bob said. And how exciting it had been! The open road, the two of you, set free in service to a simple good. South and east you drove, on country roads that cut through spectral cotton fields and shuttered towns, places boarded up but for old gas pumps and Chinese takeouts. Embry’s. Golden Chopsticks. You ate lunch at a rest stop, sitting next to Amy by a bushy swale that smelled of moist decay and life, and you thought, This . Right here . I will live forever in states of exception, like today.

Since her arrest the year before, Amy had been more devout than ever, but you had become interested in painting — and what did she make, you wanted to know, of art that flirted with sacrilege, beauty assembled from the raw material of sin?

But that’s what’s so exciting, Amy says. Looking for God— finding God — where you least expect to.

In your memory the sun is spilling through a crack in the afternoon. Pale gold sluicing the tidal gray. Washed-out starlight above a Chevron station. And what will you think looking back? That in your rush to know your friend you forgot how statements are postures, not truths, and most people mysteries even to themselves? How we are all waiting to be stripped down to our least garment and known when we can’t even manage it ourselves, from the inside out?

Years later you paint a series of scenes from your arrival in town. The vantage point hovers in midair, several feet above the eyes of a standing observer. It is evening. The houses have a posed beauty in the glowing light, splintered, hushed, spilling forth clothing and furniture, curtains, toys, downed gutters. People on lawns carry panels of siding and plywood in their hands. They move, as you remember, in something thicker than air. The breeze through the van window is as warm as skin, alive with salt. You sleep in a stranger’s living room that night. Candlelight laps at the ceiling. And you wonder what resolve leads people to go on living in the path of storms, only to remember, slipping among indistinct strata of consciousness, that the people here don’t believe things happen by accident.

And where would they go? Amy says the next day in the car. Their lives are there. Their families and friends. Their job, their church.

And what’s the difference, does she think, between a thousand acts of charity done in faith and the same one thousand acts done without it?

Well, Amy says, but falls silent. The farmland rolls on beside you, tracts of cash crops growing hay colored in the autumn sun.

The difference, I think, she says at last, is that the person without faith might think a thousand acts were enough.

And you remember this much later, like a last remark at the crossroads where you and Amy part. How otherworldly she seemed just then. How awesome and unreasonable. You felt you were walking down into the valley while Amy, growing tiny above, climbed the steep and narrow path to a distant temple. And you felt so happy all of a sudden, so inferior to Amy and so happy to be.

But that wouldn’t be her last incarnation, not by a long shot. And how does the force of belief not diminish as one conviction supplants the last? Where does Amy go to reemerge, to break apart and come back whole? Where is she now? Where are you, Amy? you whisper. Where do you go?

And then you see her. It’s back in Baltimore, at some pop-up dance event Anita’s dragged you to. You step outside to smoke and there’s Amy, looking off at the dock lights in the distance, the harbor beyond her, the low buildings and piers like a crust along the shore.

Amy, hey!

You might be a ghost to judge by her look. No one else in her group turns.

Jesse, she says. My God.

What are you doing here?

What do you mean? She smiles. Same as you.

That’s not true, you say. I came to dance.

She tilts her head toward the group. Anarchists , she mouths — like that explains anything.