Sing You Home

MAX

I always figured I’d have kids. I mean, it’s a story most guys can identify with: you’re born, you grow up, you start a family, you die. I just wish that, if there had to be a delay somewhere in the process, it would have been the last bit.

I’m not the villain, here. I wanted a baby, too. Not because I’ve spent my whole life dreaming of fatherhood, but for a reason much more simple than that.

Because it’s what Zoe wanted.

I did everything she asked me to. I stopped drinking caffeine, I wore boxers instead of briefs, I started jogging instead of biking. I followed a diet she’d found online that increased fertility. I no longer put the laptop on my lap. I even went to some crazy acupuncturist, who set needles dangerously close to my testicles and lit them on fire.

When none of that worked, I went to a urologist, and filled out a ten-page form that asked me questions like Do you have erections? and How many sexual partners have you had? and Does your wife reach orgasm during intercourse?

I grew up in a household where we didn’t really talk about our feelings, and where the only reason you went to a doctor was because you’d accidentally cut off a limb with a chain saw. So I don’t mean to be defensive, but you have to understand, the touchy-feely part of IVF and the poking and the prodding isn’t something that comes naturally to me.

I had a hunch that it wasn’t just Zoe who had infertility problems. My brother, Reid, and his wife had been married for over a decade and hadn’t been able to conceive yet, either. The difference was that, instead of forking over ten thousand dollars to a clinic, he and Liddy prayed a lot.

Zoe said that Dr. Gelman had a better success rate than God.

As it turns out, I have a total sperm count of 60 million-which sounds like a lot, right? But when you start figuring in their shape and speed, all of a sudden I’m down to 400,000. Which-again-seems like a pretty big number to me. But imagine that you’re running the Boston Marathon along with more than 59 million drunks-suddenly it gets a little more challenging to cross that finish line. Add Zoe’s infertility issues to mine, and we were suddenly looking at IVF and ICSI.

And then there’s the money. I don’t know how people pay for IVF. It costs fifteen thousand dollars a pop, including the medications. We are lucky enough to live in Rhode Island, a state that forces insurance companies to cover women between twenty-five and forty who are married and can’t conceive naturally-but that still means our out-of-pocket expenses have been three thousand dollars for each fresh cycle of embryos, and six hundred dollars for each frozen cycle. Not covered: the ICSI-where sperm are directly injected into the eggs (fifteen hundred dollars), embryo freezing (a thousand dollars), and embryo storage (eight hundred dollars per year). What I’m saying here is that, even with insurance, and even before the financial nightmare of this last cycle, we’d run out of money.

I can’t really tell you the moment it went wrong. Maybe it was the first time, or the fifth, or the fiftieth that Zoe counted out the days of her menstrual cycle and crawled into bed and said, “Now!” Our sex life had become like Thanksgiving dinner with a dysfunctional family-something you have to show up for, even though you’re not really having a good time. Maybe it was when we started IVF, when I realized there was nothing Zoe wouldn’t do in her quest to get pregnant; that want had become need and then obsession. Or maybe it was when I began feeling like Zoe and this baby to be were on the same page-and that I had somehow become the outsider. There was no room in my marriage for me anymore, except as genetic material.

A lot of people talk about what women go through, when they can’t have a baby. But no one ever asks about the guys. Well, let me tell you-we feel like losers. We can’t somehow do what other men manage to do without even trying… what other men take precautions to not do, most of the time. Whether or not it’s true, and whether or not it’s my fault-society looks at a guy differently, if he doesn’t have kids. There’s a whole book of the Old Testament devoted to who begat whom. Even the sex symbol celebrities who make women swoon, like David Beckham and Brad Pitt and Hugh Jackman, are always in People magazine swinging one of their children onto their shoulders. (I should know; I’ve read nearly every issue in the waiting room of the IVF clinic.) This may be the twenty-first century, but being a real man is still tied to being able to procreate.

I know I didn’t ask for this. I know I shouldn’t feel inadequate. I know it is a medical condition, and that if I suffered a cardiac arrest or a broken ankle I wouldn’t think of myself as a wimp if I needed surgery or a cast-so why should I be embarrassed about this?

Because it’s just one more piece of evidence, in a long, long list, that I’m a failure.

In the fall, landscaping is a hard sell. I do my fair share of leaf blowing and buzz cutting lawns, so that they’re prepped for the winter. I prune deciduous trees and shrubs that flower in the autumn. I’ve managed to talk a couple of clients into planting before the ground freezes-it’s always something you’ll be glad you did come spring-and I’m pretty sold on some red maple varieties that have spectacular color in autumn. But mostly this fall, for me, will be about laying off the guys I hired during the summer. Usually I can keep on one or two, but not this winter-I’m just too far in debt, and there isn’t enough work. My five-man landscaping business is going to morph into a one-man snowplowing service.

I’m pruning a client’s roses when one of my summer help comes loping down the driveway. Todd-a junior in high school-stopped working last week, when classes started up again. “Max?” he says, holding his baseball cap in his hands. “You got a minute?”

“Sure,” I say. I sit back on my heels and squint up at him. The sun is already low, and it’s only three-thirty in the afternoon. “How is school going?”

“It’s going.” Todd hesitates. “I, um, wanted to ask you about getting my job back.”

My knees creak as I stand up. “It’s a little early for me to start hiring for next spring.”

“I meant for the fall and winter. I’ve got my license. I could plow for you-”

“Todd,” I interrupt, “you’re a good kid, but business slows down a lot. I just can’t afford to take you on right now.” I clap him on the shoulder. “Call me in March, okay?”

I start to walk back to my truck. “Max!” he calls out, and I turn. “I really need this.” His Adam’s apple bobs like a cork. “My girlfriend-she’s pregnant.”

I vaguely remember Todd’s girlfriend driving up to the curb of a client’s house this July with a car full of giddy teens. Her long brown legs in her cutoff jean shorts, as she walked up to Todd with a thermos of lemonade. How he blushed when she kissed him and ran back to her car, her flip-flops slapping against the soles of her feet. I remember being his age, and panicking every time I had sex, certain that I’d be in the two percent of cases where Trojans failed.

How come, Zoe used to say, the odds are that, if you’re sixteen years old and desperate to not get pregnant, you will… but if you’re forty and you want to get pregnant, you can’t?

I won’t look Todd in the eye. “Sorry,” I mutter, “I can’t help.” I fiddle around with some equipment in the flatbed of my truck until I see him drive away. I still have work to do, but I make the executive decision to call it a day. I’m the boss, after all. I should know when it’s time to quit.

I drive to a bar that I’ve passed fifty times on my way to this job. It’s called Quasimodo’s and sports a bad paint job and metal grilles across the one window, which doubles as a lit Budweiser sign. In other words, it’s the sort of place nobody ever goes in the afternoon.

Sure enough, when I first walk inside and my eyes are adjusting to the light, I think it’s only me and the bartender. Then I notice a woman with bleached blond hair doing a crossword at the bar. Her arms are bare and ropy, with crepe paper skin; she looks strange and familiar all at once, like a T-shirt washed so often that the picture on the front is now just a blotch of color. “Irv,” she says, “what’s a five-letter loamy deposit?”

The bartender shrugs. “Something that calls for Imodium?”

She frowns. “The New York Times crossword’s too classy for that.”

“Loess,” I say, climbing onto a stool.

“Less what?” she asks, turning to me.

“No, loess. L-O-E-S-S. It’s a kind of sediment made by layers of silt that the wind’s blown into ridges or dunes.” I point to her newspaper. “That’s your answer.”

She writes it in, in pen. “You happen to know six across? ‘London streetcars’?”

“Sorry.” I shake my head. “I don’t know trivia. Just a little geology.”

“What can I get you?” the bartender asks, setting a napkin in front of me.

I look at the row of bottles behind him. “Sprite,” I say.

He pours the soft drink from a hose beneath the bar and sets it in front of me. From the corner of my eye, I see the woman’s drink, a martini. My mouth actually starts to water.

There is a television above the bar. Oprah Winfrey is telling everyone about beauty secrets from around the world. Do I want to know how Japanese women keep their skin so smooth?

“You some kind of professor at Brown?” the woman asks.

I laugh. “Yeah,” I say. Why the hell not? I’m never going to see her again.

The truth is, I don’t even have a college degree. I flunked out of URI a hundred years ago, when I was a junior. Unlike Reid, the golden son, who’d graduated with honors and had gone on to work as a financial analyst at Bank of Boston before starting his own investment firm, I had majored in Beer Pong and grain alcohol. At first it was parties on the weekends, and then study breaks midweek, except I wasn’t doing any studying. There is an entire semester I cannot remember, and one morning, I woke up naked on the steps of the library without any recollection of what had led up to that.

When my dad wouldn’t let me move back home, I crashed on Reid’s couch in his Kenmore Square apartment. I got a job as a night watchman at a mall, but lost it when I kept missing work because I was sleeping off that afternoon’s bender. I started stealing cash from Reid so that I could buy bottles of cheap booze and hide them around the apartment. Then one morning, I woke up, hungover, to find a handgun pointed at my forehead.

“Reid! What the fuck?” I yelped, scrambling upright.

“If you’re trying to kill yourself, Max,” he said, “let’s speed it up a bit.”

Together we dumped all the alcohol down the sink. Reid took the day off work to come with me to my first AA meeting. That was seventeen years ago. By the time I met Zoe, when I was twenty-nine, I was sober and had figured out what a guy without a college degree could do with his life. Thinking back to the only classes I’d really liked in college-geology-I figured I’d better stick to the land. I got a small business loan and bought my first mower, painted the side of my truck, and printed up flyers. I may not be living the lush life, like Reid and Liddy, but I netted $23,000 last year and I could still take days off to surf when the waves were good.

It was enough, with Zoe’s income, to rent a place-a place that she’s now living in. When you are the spouse that wants out of the relationship, you have to be willing to actually leave. Sometimes, even though it has been a whole month, I find myself wondering if she’s remembered to ask the landlord about getting the furnace cleaned. Or whether she’s signed a lease for another year, this time without my name on it. I wonder who carries her heavy drums up the entryway stairs now, or if she just leaves them in the car overnight.

I wonder if I made a mistake.

I look over at the crossword woman’s martini. “Hey,” I say to Irv the bartender, “can I get one of those?”

The woman taps the pen against the bar. “So you teach geology?”

On the television, Oprah is talking about how to make your own salt scrub, like the ones Cleopatra once used.

“No. Egyptian,” I lie.

“Like Indiana Jones?”

“Kind of,” I reply. “Except I’m not afraid of snakes.”

“Have you been there? On the Nile?”

“Oh, yeah,” I say, although I do not even own a passport. “A dozen times.”

She pushes her pen and newspaper toward me. “Can you show me what my name would look like in Egyptian?”

Irv sets the martini down in front of me. I start to sweat. It would be so easy.

“I’m Sally,” the woman says. “S-A-L-L-Y.”

It’s amazing what you’ll do when you want something bad. You are willing to do anything, say anything, be anything. I used to feel that way about drinking-there were things I did to get cash for booze that I am sure I’ve blocked out permanently. And I certainly felt that way, once, about having a baby. Tell a stranger the details of my sex life? Sure. Jab my wife in the ass with a needle? My pleasure. Jerk off in a jar? No problem. If the doctors had told us to walk backward and sing opera to increase the chance of fertility, we would not have batted an eyelash.

When you want something bad, you’ll tell yourself a thousand lies.

Like: The fifth time’s the charm.

Like: Things between Zoe and me will be better once the baby’s born.

Like: One sip isn’t going to kill me.

I once saw a TV documentary about giant squid, and they filmed one shooting its ink into the water to get away from an enemy. The ink was black and beautiful and curled like smoke, a distraction so that the squid could escape. That’s what alcohol feels like, in my blood. It’s the ink of the squid, and it’s going to blind me so that I can get away from everything that hurts.

The only language I know is English. But on the edge of the newspaper, I draw three wavy lines, and then an approximation of a snake, and a sun. “That’s just the sounds of the name, of course,” I say. “There isn’t really a translation for Sally.”

She rips off the corner of the newspaper, folds it, and tucks it into her bra. “I am totally getting a tattoo of this.”

Most likely the tattoo artist will have no idea that these are not real hieroglyphs. For all I know, I might have written: For a good time, call Nefertiti.

Sally hops down from her stool and moves onto the one beside me. “You gonna drink that martini or wait till it becomes an antique?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” I say, the first truth I’ve offered her.

“Well, make up your mind,” Sally replies, “so that I can buy you another one.”

I lift the martini and drain it in one long, fiery, mind-blowing gulp. “Irv,” I say, setting down the empty glass. “You heard the lady.”

The first time I had to leave a semen sample at the clinic, the nurse stepped into the waiting room and called my name. As I stood up I thought: Everyone else here knows exactly what I’m about to do.

The literature Zoe and I had been given said that the wife could “assist” in the sample collection, but the only thing that seemed more awkward than jerking off in a clinic was having my wife in there with me, with doctors and nurses and patients just outside the door. The nurse led me down the hallway. “Here you go,” she said, handing me a brown paper bag. “Just read the instructions.”

“It’s not so bad,” Zoe had told me over breakfast. “Think of it as a visit to Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

And really, who was I to complain, when she was getting shots twice a day and having constant pelvic exams and taking so many hormones that something as simple as crossing the street could make her burst into tears? By comparison, this seemed like a piece of cake.

The room was freezing cold and consisted of a couch that had been covered by a sheet, a TV-VCR, a sink, and a coffee table. There were some videos-Pussy in Boots, Breast Side Story, On Golden Blonde-various issues of Playboy and Hustler and, weirdly, a copy of Good Housekeeping. A small window that looked like it belonged in a speakeasy was to the right-this would be where I left the sample when I was done. The nurse backed out of the room, and I pushed the lock in the door handle. Then I opened it, and pushed it again. To make sure.

I opened the paper bag. The sample cup was enormous. It was practically a bucket. What were they expecting from me?

What if I spilled?

I started to leaf through one of the magazines. The last time I’d done this, I’d been fifteen and had shoplifted the December issue of Playboy from a newsstand. I became incredibly aware of how loudly I was breathing. Maybe that wasn’t normal. Maybe that meant I was having a heart attack?

Maybe I just needed to get this over with.

I turned on the television. There was already a video playing. I watched for a moment, and then wondered if the person waiting on the other side of the trapdoor for the sample was listening.

It was taking forever.

In the end, I closed my eyes, and I pictured Zoe.

Zoe, before we’d started talking about a family. Like the time we’d gone camping off the grid in the White Mountains, and I woke up to find her sitting on a boulder playing a flute, wearing absolutely nothing.

Afterward, I stared at the sample in the cup. No wonder we couldn’t get pregnant; there was hardly anything there, at least in terms of volume. I wrote my name and the time on the label. I slipped the sample into the drop-off zone and closed the door, wondering if I should knock or yell or somehow let the technician know that it was ready and waiting.

I decided they’d figure it out, and I washed my hands and hurried into the hallway. The receptionist smiled at me as I left. “Thanks for coming,” she said.

Seriously? Shouldn’t that phrase be banned from use at an IVF clinic?

As I walked to my car, I was already thinking of how I’d tell Zoe what the receptionist had said. How we’d laugh.

When I wake up, I am lying on a pillow covered in purple fur, on the floor of a bedroom I do not recognize. Gradually, ignoring the sledgehammer at my temple, I sit up and see a bare foot, flame red polish. My tongue feels like it’s carpeted.

Staggering upright, I look down at the woman. It takes me a full minute to remember her name. I can’t really recall how we got here, but I do have an image of another bar, after Quasimodo’s, and maybe even another after that. I can taste tequila, and shame.

Sally is snoring like a longshoreman-the only saving grace. The last thing I want to do is have a conversation with her. I tiptoe out of the room, holding my pants and my shirt and my shoes in a ball at my groin. Did I drive here last night? I hope like hell I didn’t. But God only knows where I left my car.

Bathroom. I’ll go to the bathroom, and then I’ll sneak out of here. I’ll go home and pretend this never happened.

I pee and then wash up, dunking my head under the faucet and scrubbing my hair dry with a pink hand towel. My gaze falls to the counter, to a foil snake of condoms. Oh, thank God. Thank God I didn’t make that mistake, too.

Get a grip on yourself, Max, I say silently.

You’ve been here before, and you don’t want to go back.

Everyone messes up from time to time. Maybe I’ve had a few more instances than others, but that doesn’t mean that I’m down for the count. This wasn’t falling off the wagon. It was just… a speed bump.

I open the bathroom door to find a toddler sucking his thumb and staring up at me, with his older sister-a teenager-standing just behind him. “Who the fuck are you?” she asks.

I don’t answer. I run past them, out the front door, down the driveway that does not have my car in it. I run all the way out of this suburban cul-de-sac in my boxers. At the juncture of the state highway, I throw on my clothes and dig in my pocket for my cell phone, but the battery’s dead. I keep running, certain that Sally and her children are going to chase me down in the minivan that was in the driveway. I don’t stop until I see a strip mall. All I need is a phone; I’ll call a taxi service to get me back to Quasimodo’s to pick up my car (which is, I hope, where I left it) and then I’ll take refuge at Reid’s house.

It’s not really my fault that the first place I find open is a restaurant whose proprietor is doing inventory on a Saturday morning. That the guy shakes his head when I ask to borrow the phone, and says I look like I’ve had a rough night. That he offers me, on the house, a drink.

Normally, we would have been home. After all, the progesterone shot had to be given between 7:00 and 7:15 each night-and it was easy enough to plan our evenings around that, since we didn’t have any spending money to go to a movie or out to dinner anyway. But Zoe had been invited to the wedding of two seniors who’d met in one of her group therapy classes at a nursing home. “If it wasn’t for me,” she’d said, “there wouldn’t even be a wedding.”

So I came home from work and showered and put on a tie, and we drove to the nursing home. In her purse, Zoe had the progesterone, alcohol wipes, and syringes. We watched Sadie and Clark, with their combined age of 184, get united in holy matrimony. And then we ate creamed beef and Jell-O-the food had to be denture-friendly-and watched the residents who were still mobile dance to big band records.

The happy newlyweds fed each other cake. Leaning toward Zoe, I whispered, “I give this marriage ten years, tops.”

Zoe laughed. “Watch it, buster. That could be us one day.” Then her watch beeped, and she looked at the time. “Oh,” she said. “It’s seven.” I followed her down the hall to the bathrooms.

There were two, one for men and one for women, each big enough to accommodate a wheelchair-or a husband who had to give his wife a progesterone shot. The women’s room was locked, so we ducked into the men’s instead. Zoe hiked up her skirt.

There was a bull’s-eye on the upper part of her butt, drawn in Sharpie marker. Every day for the past week, since we began these shots, I’d redrawn the circle after her shower. I didn’t want to hurt her by sticking the needle somewhere more painful than it had to be.

I had believed there was nothing worse than giving Zoe shots in her belly-mixing up the powder and the water and pinching the skin to inject the Repronex; dialing the dose on the handy-dandy syringe-pen that contained the Follistim. The needles were tiny and she swore they didn’t hurt, even though they left bruises on her abdomen-so many that sometimes it was hard to find a fresh spot for the next shot.

But the progesterone was different.

First, the needle was bigger. Second, the medicine was in oil, and just looked thicker and creepier. Third, we’d have to do it every night for thirteen weeks.

Zoe took out the alcohol swabs and a vial. I swiped the top of the vial clean, and then rubbed the center of the bull’s-eye on her bottom. “Are you going to be okay standing up?” I asked. Usually, she was lying on our bed.

“Just get it over with,” Zoe said.

Quickly I screwed the big needle onto the syringe and withdrew the dosage from the vial. It was tricky, because of the oil-sort of like sucking molasses through a straw. I waited till the fluid was a bit past the number on the syringe and then pushed on the plunger, to get it just right.

Then I twisted off the needle and attached a new one we’d use for the injection. It wasn’t as wide a bore, but it was equally nasty-a good two inches had to get jabbed into Zoe intramuscularly. “Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath, even though it was Zoe having the shot.

“Wait!” she cried out. She twisted toward me. “You didn’t say it.”

We had a routine. “I wish I could do this for you,” I told her, every night.

She nodded, and braced her hands against the wall.

No one ever tells you how resilient skin is. It’s meant to be tough, which is why it takes a little leap of courage to jam a syringe through it. But it was worse for Zoe than for me, so I kept my hands from shaking (a real problem at first) and plunged the needle into the center of the bull’s-eye. I made sure there was no blood mixing into the medication, and then came the hard part. Can you imagine the force it takes to push oil into the human body? I swear, no matter how many times I did this to my wife (and I did look at it that way-as something I did to her), I could feel every bit of resistance that her flesh and blood put up against the progesterone.

When, finally, it was done, I pulled out the needle and stuck it into the Sharps container that was next to the sink. Then I rubbed the injection site, trying to keep Zoe from getting a hard knot there. Usually, now, I’d get her a heating pad, too, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen tonight.

Zoe put everything back into her purse and pulled down her dress. “Hope we didn’t miss the bouquet toss,” she said, and she opened the bathroom door.

An elderly man in a walker was patiently waiting. He watched Zoe emerge from the men’s room, followed by me, and he winked. “I remember those days,” he mused.

Zoe and I burst out laughing. “Not unless he was a diabetic,” I said, and we walked back into the reception holding hands.

The Kent County Family Court isn’t that far from Wilmington, where Zoe and I have rented an apartment for years; but it’s a good distance from Reid’s house in Newport. Clutching the copy of the marriage certificate I got from the town hall, I walk the length of a covered portico from the parking lot into the building.

Every few steps, I hear a bird.

I stop walking, look up, and notice the speaker and the motion sensor. The courthouse has some weird nature recording following me with every step.

It’s kind of fitting, actually, to be headed in to file for divorce and to learn that something I thought was real is just smoke and mirrors.

The clerk looks up at me when I enter the office. She has curly black hair-and that’s just her mustache. “Yes?” she says. “Can I help you?”

These days, I don’t think anyone can. But I take a step toward the chest-high counter. “I want a divorce.”

She flattens her mouth in a smile. “Honey, I don’t even remember our wedding.” When I don’t respond, the clerk rolls her eyes. “Just once. Just once I’d like someone to laugh. Who’s your attorney?”

“I can’t afford one.”

She hands me a packet of papers. “You own property?”

“No.”

“You got kids?”

“No,” I say, looking away.

“Then you fill out the paperwork, and bring it to the sheriff’s department down the hall.”

I thank her and take the packet out to a bench in the corridor.

In re: the Marriage of

Plaintiff: that would be me.

And Defendant: that would be Zoe.

I carefully read the first item to be filled out: my residence. After hesitating, I put down Reid’s address. I’ve been there for two months now. Plus, the next item is Zoe’s address. I don’t want the judge to get confused and think we’re still living together and decide not to grant the divorce.

Not that it works like that, but still.

Number three: On ____________________, in ____________________ (city), ____________________ (country), ____________________ (state), the Plaintiff and Defendant married. An official copy of the marriage license is attached to this complaint for divorce.

Zoe and I had gotten married by a justice of the peace with a speech impediment. When he asked us to repeat our vows, neither of us could understand him. “We’ve written our own,” Zoe said, in a flash of inspiration, and, like me, she made them up on the spot.

On the divorce form, there are four spaces for children, and their birth dates.

I feel myself break out in a sweat.

Grounds for No-Fault:

I have only two choices here, and they are listed for me. Carefully I reprint the first option: Irreconcilable differences that have caused the irremediable breakdown of the marriage.

I do not really know what all that means, but I can guess. And it seems to describe me and Zoe. She can’t stop wanting a baby; I can’t stand the thought of trying again. Irreconcilable differences are the children we never had. They’re the times she would sit at dinner, smiling, when I knew she wasn’t thinking about me. They’re the baby name books stacked for reading by the toilet, the crib mobile she bought three years ago and never unpacked, the finance charges on our credit card bills that keep me awake at night.

Just above the spot where I sign my name is a vow: The Plaintiff prays for an Absolute Divorce.

Yeah, I suppose I do.

I’d worship anyone and anything who could turn my life around.

In a way, I get along better with my sister-in-law than with my own brother. For the past two months, every time Reid asks me if I have a master plan, a goal to get back on my feet, Liddy just reminds him that I’m family, that I should stay as long as I want. At breakfast, if she cooks an uneven number of slices of bacon, she gives me the extra, instead of Reid. It’s like she’s the one person who really gives a crap whether I live or die, who either doesn’t notice that I’m a colossal fuckup or, better yet, just doesn’t care.

Liddy grew up with a father who was a Pentecostal preacher, but when she’s not acting all churchified, she can be pretty cool. She collects Green Lantern comic books, for example. And she’s totally into B movies-the more outrageous the better. Since neither Zoe nor Reid ever understood the attraction of this kind of pulp film, Liddy and I have had a tradition of going to a midnight showing each month, at a dive of a theater that does crappy-director film festivals honoring people you’ve never heard of, like William Castle or Bert Gordon. Tonight, we’re watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers-not the 1978 remake but the 1956 original by Don Siegel.

Liddy always pays for my ticket. I used to offer, but Liddy said that was ridiculous-in the first place, she had Reid’s money to spend and I didn’t, and in the second place, I was keeping her entertained while Reid was at some client dinner or church meeting and so this was the least she could do. We always got the biggest bucket of popcorn-with butter, because when Liddy and Reid went out, he insisted on being heart-healthy. That was about as rebellious as Liddy got, frankly.

I’ve been out drinking three times this week-just a quick beer here and there, nothing I can’t handle. But knowing I was meeting Liddy for this movie is what kept me dry tonight. I don’t want her running back to Reid, telling him that I reeked of alcohol. I mean, I know she likes me and we get along, but she’s my brother’s wife first and foremost.

Liddy grabs my arm when the main character, Dr. Bennell, runs onto the highway at the climax of the film. She closes her eyes, too, at the really scary parts, but then demands that I tell her every last detail of what she missed.

They’re here already! the actor says, looking right into the camera. You’re next!

We always stay for the credits. All the way to the end, when they thank the town that allowed filming. Usually, we’re the last ones out of the theater.

Tonight, we’re still sitting in our seats when the teenage boy with zits comes in to sweep the aisle and pick up the trash. “Have you ever seen the 1978 remake?” Liddy asks.

“It sucks,” I say. “And don’t even get me started on The Invasion.”

“I think this might be my favorite B movie ever,” Liddy replies.

“You say that about every one we see.”

“But I mean it this time,” she says. She leans her head back against the seat. “Do you think they knew what happened to them?”

“Who?”

“The Pod People. The aliens. Do you think they got up one morning and looked in the mirror and wondered how they got to be that way?”

The kid who’s sweeping stops at our aisle. We stand up, walk into the dingy theater lobby. “It’s just a movie,” I tell Liddy, when what I really want to tell her is that no, the Pod People don’t ask what’s happened.

That actually, when you turn into someone you don’t recognize, you feel nothing at all.

Seventy-seven.

That’s how many days after filing the divorce petition I’d have to show up in court. That’s how long Zoe would have, after being served this summons by the court, to join me there.

Since I filed the divorce papers, it’s been hard for me to get back into the swing of work. By now, I should be putting up my flyers for plowing. I should be cleaning and storing my mowers for the winter. Instead, I’ve been sleeping in, and staying out late, taking up space in my brother’s house.

So when Reid asked me to help him by picking up Pastor Clive at Logan Airport the next morning after a red-eye from an evangelical conference at the Saddleback Church, I should have said yes immediately. I mean, it wasn’t like I was busy. And after everything Reid had done for me, the least I could do was repay him with time, if not money.

Instead, I just stared at him, unable to respond.

“You,” Reid said quietly, “are really something else, little brother.”

Liddy came up to the kitchen table, where I was sitting, and poured me a glass of orange juice. As if I needed any reminder that I was just a black hole in the middle of their home, sucking away their food, their money, their private time.

I may not have been able to say yes to my brother, but I couldn’t say no to her.

So now it’s dawn, and I’m fully planning on driving to Logan to meet the 7:00 A.M. plane arrival, but as I’m heading past Point Judith, I notice the waves. I check the clock on my dashboard. I’ve got my board and wet suit with me-they’re always in my truck, just in case-and I’m thinking that there’s no point in getting up this early if I’m not going to get in fifteen minutes of surfing on my way to Boston.

I pull on my wet suit, hood, and gloves, and head toward a bar that has proven itself in the past for me-a fairy godmother made of shallow sand that can take a long, low wall and turn it into a screaming curl.

Paddling out, I pass a pair of younger guys. “Jerry, Herc,” I say, nodding. Fall and winter riders are a unique breed, and we mostly know each other simply because there aren’t many people crazy enough to head out surfing when the water is fifty degrees and the air temperature is forty-one. I time it just right and catch a decent six-footer. On the way back out I watch Herc’s wave go vertical, see him skirt the inside break.

I can feel my triceps burning, and the familiar icy headache that comes from being slapped in the face by a freezing, teasing ocean. It’s harder to pull myself up on the board, easier to nod to the others to take that particular wave while I wait out the next one. “You sure, Gramps?”

I am forty. Not ancient by any means, but a relic in the world of surfing. Gramps my ass, I think, and I decide I’m going to catch the next wave and show these toddlers how it’s really done.

Except.

No sooner have I pulled myself upright and stuck my first turn than I suddenly lose my footing, tumbling backward. The last thing I see is the flat hull of my board, coming at me with lightning force.

When I come to, my cheek is pressed into the sand and my hood’s been yanked off my head. The wind has turned my wet hair into icicles. Jerry’s face slowly comes into focus. “Hey, Gramps,” he says, “you okay? You took a hard knock.”

I sit up, wincing. “I’m fine,” I mutter.

“You want a ride to the hospital? To get checked out?”

“No.” I’m bruised and battered and shivering like mad. “What time is it?”

Herc lifts up the neoprene edge of his wet suit to check his wrist-watch. “Seven-ten.”

I’ve been surfing for over an hour? “Shit,” I say, struggling to my feet. The world spins for a moment, and Herc steadies me.

“There someone we should call?” he asks.

I can’t give them the number of one of my employees, because I’ve laid them all off for the winter. I can’t give them Reid and Liddy’s number, because they think I’m picking up the pastor. I can’t give them Zoe’s number, because of what I’ve done to her.

I shake my head, but I can’t quite bring myself to say the words: There’s nobody.

Herc and Jerry head back out one more time, and I walk slowly to the truck. My cell phone has fifteen messages on it. I don’t have to call voice mail to know they are all from Reid, and they are all angry.

I call him back. “Reid,” I say. “Look, man, I’m really sorry. I was just about to hit Ninety-three North when the truck broke down. I tried to call, but I didn’t have service-”

“Where are you now?”

“Waiting for a tow,” I lie. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take to fix.”

Reid sighs. “I’ll get Pastor Clive a limo,” he says. “Do you need a ride, too?”

I don’t know what I did to deserve a brother like Reid. I mean, anyone else would have written me off long before now. “I’m good,” I reply.

Zoe had wanted me to quit surfing. She didn’t understand the obsession, the way I couldn’t pass by a beach with a rip curl. Grow up, Max, she had said. You can’t have a child if you are one.

Was she right?

About everything?

I picture the sheriff showing up at her house. Zoe Baxter? he’d say, and she’d nod. You’ve been served. Then he would leave her holding the little blue folder, the one she must have known was coming sooner or later, and yet still would feel like a kick in the gut.

In the truck, I am still shivering, even with the heat turned up high. I hesitate… and then reach into the glove compartment. The bottle of Jägermeister is really just for medicinal purposes. You see it all the time in movies-the guy who’s got frostbite, the one who’s fallen off a bridge into the water; the fellow who’s been left out in the cold too long… they’re all confused and frantic until they take a nip to get their blood flowing again.

One sip, and suddenly they’re healed.

Two months later

If not for the garbage truck, I would have missed my court date.

I wake with a start when I hear the high-pitched beeps, jumping upright and smacking my head against the roof of the car. The garbage truck backs toward the Dumpster I’m parked beside and hooks its teeth into the metal loops so that it can lift the receptacle. All I know is that it sounds like freaking Armageddon.

The windows are steamed up and I’m shivering, so I turn on the ignition and blast the defroster. That’s when I realize that it’s not 6:00 A.M., like I figured, but 8:34 A.M.

In twenty-six minutes I am getting divorced.

Obviously, I don’t have time to go back to Reid’s and shower. As it is, I will have to break the land speed record to get to the Kent County Courthouse on time.

“Shit,” I mutter, throwing the car into reverse and peeling out of the parking lot of the bank where I must have fallen asleep last night. There’s an Irish pub around the corner, and last call is 3:00 A.M. I have a vague recollection of a bunch of guys having a bachelor party, of being invited to do some tequila shots.

Fortunately, there’s no snow yet, or for that matter an overturned truck on the highway. I park illegally in a spot that isn’t really a space (not a bright idea at a courthouse, but really, what am I supposed to do?) and run like hell into the building. “Excuse me,” I mutter, my head pounding as I run up the stairs to Judge Meyers’s courtroom. I bump into a woman with her two kids and a lawyer reading a brief. “Sorry… pardon me…”

I slide into the back row of the benches. I am sweating, and my shirt’s come untucked from my pants. I haven’t had a chance to shave, or even wash up in the bathroom. I sniff my sleeve, which smells like last night’s party.

When I glance up again, I see her staring at me.

Zoe looks like she hasn’t slept in seventy-seven days, either. She has dark circles under her eyes. She’s too thin. But she takes one look at my face, my hair, my clothing, and she knows. She understands what I’ve been doing.

She turns away from me and fixes her gaze straight ahead.

I feel that dismissal like a hole punched through my chest. All I ever wanted was to be good enough for her, and I screwed up. I couldn’t give her the kid she wanted. I couldn’t give her the life she deserved. I couldn’t be the man she thought I was.

The clerk stands up and begins reading through a list. “Malloy versus Malloy?” she says.

A lawyer stands up. “That’s ready, Your Honor. Can we have the process on that, please?”

The judge, a woman with a round, sunny face, has decorated her bench with seasonal items-Beanie Babies dressed like Pilgrims, a stuffed turkey.

“Jones versus Jones?”

Another attorney rises. “Ready, nominal.”

“Kasen versus Kasen?”

“Your Honor, I need a new date on that. Could I have December eighteenth?”

“Horowitz versus Horowitz,” the clerk reads.

“That’s a motion, Your Honor,” another lawyer replies. “I’m ready to go.”

“Baxter versus Baxter?”

It takes me a moment to realize that the clerk is calling my name. “Yes,” I say, standing up. As if there’s a thread connecting us, Zoe rises, too, all the way across the room.

“Um,” I say. “Present.”

“Do you represent yourself, sir?” Judge Meyers asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Is your wife here?”

Zoe clears her throat. “Yes.”

“Are you representing yourself, ma’am?” Judge Meyers asks.

“Yes,” Zoe says, “I am.”

“Are you both ready to go forward with the divorce today?”

I nod. I don’t look at Zoe to see if she’s nodding, too.

“If you’re representing yourselves,” Judge Meyers says, “you are your own attorneys. That means you have to put your case on if you want to get a divorce today. I highly recommend watching these other nominal divorces to see the procedure, because I can’t do it for you. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, but she might as well be speaking Portuguese for all I understand.

We are not called again until over two hours later. Which means I could have showered, since, even though I’ve now sat through five other divorces, I have no idea what I am supposed to do. I walk past the gate at the front of the courtroom into the witness box, and one of the uniformed bailiffs comes up to me holding a Bible. “Mr. Baxter, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

From the corner of my eye, I see the clerk directing Zoe to take a seat at one of the tables in front of the bench. “I do,” I say.

It’s funny, isn’t it, that you have to speak the same words to get married as you do to get divorced.

“Please state your name for the record…”

“Max,” I say. “Maxwell Baxter.”

The judge folds her hands on her desk. “Mr. Baxter, have you entered your appearance?”

I just blink at her.

“Sheriff, have Mr. Baxter enter his appearance… You want a divorce today, Mr. Baxter?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re representing yourself today?”

“I can’t afford a lawyer,” I explain.

The judge looks at Zoe. “And you, Mrs. Baxter? You’re representing yourself as well?”

“I am.”

“You’re not fighting the divorce today, is that correct?”

She nods.

“Sheriff, have Mrs. Baxter enter an appearance on her own behalf, please.” The judge turns back to me and sniffs. “Mr. Baxter, you smell absolutely pickled. Are you under the influence of alcohol or drugs?”

I hesitate. “Not yet,” I say.

“Seriously, Max?” Zoe blurts out. “You’re drinking again?”

“It’s not your problem anymore-”

The judge bangs her gavel. “If you two feel like having a counseling session, don’t waste my time.”

“No, Your Honor,” I say. “I just want this to be over.”

“All right, Mr. Baxter. You may proceed.”

Except I don’t know how. Where I live, and whether I’ve lived in Wilmington for a year, and when I was married, and when we separated-well, none of that really explains how two people who thought they’d spend the rest of their lives together one day woke up and realized they did not know the person sleeping beside them.

“How old are you, Mr. Baxter?” the judge asks.

“I’m forty.”

“What’s the highest grade of school you completed?”

“I got through three years of college before I quit and started my own landscaping business.”

“How long have you been a landscaper?”

“For ten years,” I say.

“How much money do you make?”

I look into the gallery. It’s bad enough to have to say this to a judge, but there are all these other people in the courtroom. “About thirty-five thousand a year,” I say, but this is not really true. I made that one year.

“You allege in your complaint for divorce that certain differences arose between you which caused your marriage to fall apart, is that true?” the judge asks.

“Yes, Your Honor. We’ve been trying to have a baby for nine years. And I… I don’t want that anymore.”

Zoe’s eyes are glittering with tears, but she doesn’t reach for the tissue box beside her.

We got together two months ago-after she was served with divorce papers-to hash out all the details the judge was going to need. Let me tell you, it’s a strange thing to go back to the house you used to rent, to sit at the table where you used to eat dinner every day, and to feel like you’re a total stranger.

Zoe, when she’d opened the door, had looked like hell. But I didn’t think it was right for me to say that to her, so instead, I just shuffled at the threshold until she invited me in.

I think that-at that moment-if she’d asked me to come back home, to reconsider, I would have.

But instead Zoe had said, “Well, let’s get this done,” and that was that.

“Do you own any real estate?” the judge says.

“We rented,” I say.

“Are there any assets that are worth some monetary value?”

“I took my lawn care equipment; Zoe took her instruments.”

“So you’re asking that you be awarded the items in your possession, and that your wife be awarded the items in her possession?”

Isn’t that what I said, but more clearly? “I guess so.”

“Do you have health insurance?” the judge asks.

“We’ve agreed to each be responsible for our own insurance.”

The judge nods. “What about the debts in your name?”

“I can’t pay them yet,” I admit. “But I’ll take care of them when I can.”

“Will your wife be responsible for any debts in her name?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Mr. Baxter, are you in good health?”

“I am.”

“Do you understand what alimony is?” I nod at the judge. “It states here that you’re asking the court to allow you to waive alimony today?”

“You mean, so Zoe doesn’t have to pay me anything? That’s right.”

“Do you understand that it’s a permanent waiver? You can’t go back to this court or any other court and be granted alimony?”

Zoe and I had never had much money, but the thought of having her support me is completely humiliating. “I understand,” I say.

“Are you asking for an absolute divorce today from your wife?”

I know it’s legal lingo, but it makes me stop and think. Absolute. It’s so final. Like a book you’ve loved that you don’t want to end, because you know it has to be returned to the library when you’re done.

“Mr. Baxter,” the judge asks, “is there anything else you want to tell the court?”

I shake my head. “Not the court, Your Honor. But I’d like to say something to Zoe.” I wait until she looks at me. Her eyes are blank, like she’s looking at a stranger on the subway. Like she never knew me at all.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Because we live in Rhode Island, which is a predominantly Catholic state, it takes a while to really get divorced. After the seventy-seven days we waited to go to court, it’s about ninety-one days before the final judgment, as if the judge is giving a couple just one more chance to reconsider.

I admit, I’ve spent most of that time shitfaced.

Bad habits are like purple loosestrife. When that plant pops up in your garden, you think you can deal with it-a few pretty purple stalks. But it spreads like wildfire, and before you know it, it’s choked everything else around it, until all you can see is that bright carpet of color, and you’re wondering how it got so out of control.

I swore I’d never be one of the eighty percent of recovering alcoholics who wind up making the same mistakes all over again. And yet, here I am, stashing bottles up in the ceiling tiles of Reid’s bathrooms, behind books on his shelves, inside a corner I’ve carefully slit open in the guestroom mattress. I’ll spill full cartons of milk down the sink when Liddy’s not home, then gallantly volunteer to run out at night to get more so we have it for breakfast-but I’ll stop at a bar on the way home from the convenience store for a quick drink. If I know I have to be around people, I’ll drink vodka, which leaves less of an odor on the breath. I keep Gatorade under my bed, to ward off hangovers. I am careful to go out to bars in different towns, so that I look like someone who drops in every now and then for a drink, and so that I don’t get recognized in my own backyard by someone who’d narc to Reid. One night, I went to Wilmington. I drank enough to get the courage to drive by our old place. Well, Zoe’s current place. The lights were on in the bedroom, and I wondered what she was doing up there. Reading, maybe. Doing her nails.

Then I wondered if there was anyone else there with her, and I peeled away with my tires screaming on the pavement.

Of course, I tell myself that since no one seems to notice my drinking, I don’t have a problem.

I am still living at Reid’s, mostly because he hasn’t kicked me out. I don’t think this is because he enjoys having me living in his basement, really-it’s basically Christian charity. Before marrying Liddy, my brother got “born again” (Wasn’t the first time good enough? Zoe had asked) and started attending an evangelical church that met on Sundays in the cafeteria of the local middle school; eventually, he became their finance guy. I’m not a religious person-to each his own, I figure-but it got to the point where we saw less and less of my brother and his wife, simply because we couldn’t get through a simple family dinner without Zoe and Reid arguing-about Roe v. Wade, or politicians caught in adultery scandals, or prayer in public schools. The last time we went to their house, Zoe had actually left after the salad course when Reid had criticized her for singing a Green Day song to one of her burn victims. “Anarchists,” Reid had said-Reid, who listened to Led Zeppelin in his room when we were kids. I figured it was something about the lyrics his church objected to, but as it turned out, it was the character of the songs that was evil. “Really?” Zoe had asked, incredulous. “Which notes, exactly? Which chord? And where is that written in the Bible?” I don’t remember how the argument had escalated, but it had ended with Zoe standing up so quickly she overturned a pitcher of water. “This may be news to you, Reid,” she had said, “but God doesn’t vote Republican.”

I know Reid wants me to join their church. Liddy’s left pamphlets about being saved on my bed when she changes the sheets. Reid had his men’s Bible group over (“We put the ‘stud’ back in Bible study”) and invited me to join them in the living room.

I made up some excuse and went out drinking.

Tonight, though, I realize that Liddy and Reid have pulled out the big guns. When I hear Liddy ring the little antique bell she keeps on the mantel to announce dinnertime, I walk up from my guest-room cave in the basement to find Clive Lincoln sitting on the couch with Reid.

“Max,” he says. “You know Pastor Clive?”

Who doesn’t?

He’s in the paper all the time, thanks to protests he’s staged near the capital building against gay marriage. When a local high school told a gay teen he could take his boyfriend to the prom, Clive showed up with a hundred congregants to stand on the steps of the high school loudly praying for Jesus to help him find his way back to a Christian lifestyle. He made the Fox News Channel in Boston this fall when he publicly requested donations of porn movies for day care centers, saying that was no different from the president’s plan to teach sex ed in kindergarten.

Clive is tall, with a smooth mane of white hair and very expensive clothing. I have to admit, he’s larger than life. When you see him in a room, you can’t help but keep looking at him.

“Ah! The brother I’ve heard all about.”

I’m not anti-church. I grew up going on Sundays with my mom, who was the head of the ladies’ auxiliary. After she died, though, I stopped going regularly. And when I married Zoe, I stopped going at all. She wasn’t-as she put it-a Jesus person. She said religion preached unconditional love by God, but there were always conditions: you had to believe what you were told, in order to get everything you ever wanted. She didn’t like it when religious folks looked down on her for being an atheist; but to be honest, I didn’t see how this was any different from the way she looked down on people for being Christians.

When Clive shakes my hand, a shock of electricity jumps between us. “I didn’t know we were having guests for dinner,” I say, looking at Reid.

“The pastor’s not a guest,” Reid replies. “He’s family.”

“A brother in Christ,” Clive says, smiling.

I shift from one foot to the other. “Well. I’ll see if Liddy needs some help in the kitchen-”

“I’ll do that,” Reid interrupts. “Why don’t you stay here with Pastor Clive?”

That’s when I realize that my drinking-which I thought I’d been so secret and clever about-has not been secret and clever at all. That this dinner is not some friendly meal with a clergyman but a setup.

Uncomfortable, I sit down where Reid was a moment before. “I don’t know what my brother’s told you,” I begin.

“Just that he’s been praying for you,” Pastor Clive says. “He asked me to pray for you, too, to find your way.”

“I think my sense of direction’s pretty good,” I mutter.

Clive sits forward. “Max,” he asks, “do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?”

“We’re… more like acquaintances.”

He doesn’t smile. “You know, Max, I never expected to become a pastor.”

“No?” I say politely.

“I came from a family that didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and I had five younger brothers and sisters. My dad got laid off when I was twelve, and my mom got sick and was in the hospital. It fell to me to feed the household, and we didn’t have any money in the bank. One day, I went to the local food store and told the cashier that I would pay her back as soon as I could, but the cashier said she couldn’t give me the food in my basket unless I paid. Well, a man behind me-all dressed up in a suit and tie-said he’d take care of my expenses. ‘You need a shopping list, boy,’ he said, and he scribbled something on his business card and set it on one side of the cashier’s scale. Even though it was only a piece of paper, the scale started to sink. Then he took the milk, bread, eggs, cheese, and hamburger out of my cart and stacked them on the other side of the scale. The scale didn’t budge-even though, clearly, all those items should have tipped the balance. With a weight of zero pounds, the cashier had no choice but to give me the food for free-but the man handed her over a twenty-dollar bill, just the same. When I got home, I found the business card in my grocery bag, along with all the food. I took it out to read the list the man had written, but there was no list. On the back of the card it just said, Dear God, please help this boy. On the front was his name: Reverend Billy Graham.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me that was a miracle.”

“Of course not… the scale was broken. Grocer had to buy himself a new one,” Clive says. “The miracle part came from the way God broke the scale at just the right moment. The point, Max, is that Jesus has a plan for your life. That’s a funny thing about him: He loves you now, even while you’re sinning. But He also loves you too much to leave you this way.”

Now I’m starting to get angry. This isn’t my home, granted, but isn’t it a little rude to try to convert someone in his own living room?

“The only way to please God is to do what He says you have to do,” Pastor Clive continues. “If your job is baking pies at the Nothing-but-Pies Bakery, you don’t go to work and decide to bake cookies. You’ll never get your promotion that way. Even if your cookies are the most delicious ones in the world, they’re still not what your boss wants you to bake.”

“I don’t bake pies or cookies,” I say. “And with all due respect, I don’t need to get religion.”

Pastor Clive smiles and sits back, his fingers strumming on the armrest of the couch. “That’s the other funny thing about Jesus,” he says. “He’s got a way of showing you you’re wrong.”

The storm comes out of nowhere. It’s not completely unexpected, in late November, but it is not the light dusting that the weathermen have forecast. Instead, when I open the bar door and slip on the ice that’s built up on the threshold, the snow is falling like a white curtain.

I duck back inside and tell the bartender to give me another beer. There’s no point in heading out now; I might as well ride out the storm.

There’s no one else at the bar tonight; on a Tuesday when the roads are slick, most people choose to stay in. The bartender gives me the television remote, and I find a basketball game on ESPN. We cheer on the Celtics, and they go into overtime, and eventually choke. “Boston teams,” the bartender says, “they’ll break your heart every time.”

“Think I’m gonna pack it in early tonight,” the bartender says. By now, there’s nearly eight inches on the ground. “You all right getting home?”

“I’m the plow guy,” I say. “So I’d better be.”

My Dodge Ram’s got an Access plow, and thanks to flyers I’ve printed up on Reid’s Mac, I have a handful of clients who expect me to come and make the driveway passable before it’s time to leave for work in the morning. During a good storm, like this one, I won’t sleep at night-I’ll just plow till it’s over. This is the first big nor’easter of the season, and I could use the influx of cash it will bring.

My breath fogs the windshield of the truck when I get inside. I turn up the defroster and see the red devil lights of the bartender’s Prius skidding out of the parking lot. Then I put the truck into gear and head in the direction of my first client.

It’s slippery, but it’s nothing I haven’t driven in before. I turn on the radio-the voice of John freaking Tesh fills the truck cab. Did you know that it takes twenty minutes for your stomach to relay the message to your brain that you’re full?

“No, I didn’t,” I say out loud.

I can’t use my high beams because of the volume of snow, so I almost miss the bend in the road. My back wheels start to spin, and I turn in to the skid. With my heart still pounding, I take my foot off the accelerator and move slower, my tires cutting into the accumulation and packing it down beneath the truck.

After a few minutes, the world looks different. Whitewashed, with humps and towers that look like sleeping giants. The landmarks are missing. I’m not sure I’m in the right place. I’m not sure I really know where I am, actually.

I blink and rub my eyes, flick on my high beams… but nothing changes.

Now, I’m starting to panic. I reach for my phone, which has a GPS application on it somewhere, to see where I’ve taken a wrong turn. But while I’m fumbling around in the console, the truck hits a patch of black ice and starts to do a 360.

There’s someone standing in the road.

Her dark hair is flying around her face, and she’s hunched over against the cold. I manage to jam my foot on the brake and steer hard to the right, desperately trying to turn the truck before it hits her. But the tires aren’t responding on the ice, and I look up, panicked, at the same time she makes eye contact with me.

It’s Zoe.

“Nooooo,” I scream. I lift up my arm as if I can brace myself for the inevitable crash, and then there is a sickening shriek of metal and the wallop of the air bag as the truck somersaults through the very spot where she was standing.

When I come to, I’m covered in the diamond dust of crushed glass, I’m hanging upside down, and I can’t move my legs.

God help me. Please, God. Help. Me.

It is perfectly silent, except for the soft strike of snow against the upholstery. I don’t know how long I’ve been knocked out, but it doesn’t look like dawn’s coming anytime soon. I could freeze to death, trapped here. I could become another one of those snowy white mounds, an accident no one even knows happened until it’s too late.

Oh, God, I think. I’m going to die.

And right after that: No one will miss me.

The truth hurts, more than the burning in my left leg and the throb of my skull and the metal digging into my shoulder. I could disappear from this world, and it would probably be a better place.

I hear the crunch of tires, and see a beam of headlights illuminating the road above me. “Hey!” I yell, as loud as I can. “Hey, I’m here! Help!”

The headlights pass by me, and then I hear a car door slam. The policeman’s boots kick up snow as he runs down the embankment toward the overturned truck. “I’ve called for an ambulance,” he says.

“The girl,” I rasp. “Where is she?”

“Was there another passenger in this truck?”

“Not… inside. Truck hit her…”

He runs up the embankment, and I watch him shine a floodlight. I want to speak. But I am wicked dizzy, and when I try to talk, I throw up.

Maybe it’s hours and maybe it’s minutes, but a fireman is sawing through the seat belt that’s kept me alive, and another one is using the Jaws of Life to cut the truck into pieces. There are voices all around me:

Get him onto a backboard…

Compound fracture…

… tachycardic…

The policeman is suddenly in front of me again. “We looked all over. The truck didn’t hit anyone,” he says. “Just a tree. And if you hadn’t turned where you did and gone off the road, you’d be at the bottom of a cliff right now. You’re a lucky guy.”

The rush of relief I feel comes in sobs. I start crying so hard that I cannot breathe; I cannot stop. Did I hallucinate Zoe because I was drunk? Or was I drunk because I keep hallucinating Zoe?

The snow strikes me in the face, a thousand tiny needles, as I am moved from the wreckage to an ambulance. My nose is running and there is blood in my eyes.

Suddenly, I don’t want to be this person anymore. I don’t want to pretend I’m fooling the world when I’m not. I want someone else to have a plan for me, because I’m not doing a very good job myself.

The ambulance grumbles to life as the EMT hooks me up to another monitor and then starts an IV. My leg feels like it is on fire every time the driver brakes.

“My leg…”

“Is probably broken, Mr. Baxter,” the EMT says. I wonder how she knows my name, and then realize she is reading it off my license. “We’re taking you to the hospital. Is there someone you want me to call?”

Not Zoe, not anymore. Reid will need to know, but right now, I don’t want to think about the look in his eyes when he realizes I’ve been drinking and driving. And I probably need a lawyer, too.

“My pastor,” I say. “Clive Lincoln.”

I am nervous, but Liddy and Reid stand on either side of me with smiles so wide on their faces that you’d think I’d cured cancer, or figured out world peace, instead of just coming to the Eternal Glory Church to give my testimony about finding Jesus.

It couldn’t have been more transparent for me if the answers had been tattooed on my face: the lowest of lows for me was that crash. Zoe’s apparition had been Jesus’s way of coming into my life. If I hadn’t seen her there, I’d be dead now. But instead I swerved. I swerved right into His open arms.

When Clive had come to me at the hospital, I was drugged with painkillers and had a brand-new cast on my left leg and stitches in my scalp and my shoulder. I hadn’t stopped crying since they’d loaded me into that ambulance. The pastor sat down on the edge of my bed and reached for my hand. “Let the Devil out, son,” Clive said. “Make room for Christ.”

I don’t think I can explain what happened after that. It was simply as if someone flipped a switch in me, and there wasn’t any hurt anymore. I felt like I was floating off the bed, and would have, if that cotton blanket hadn’t been holding me down. When I looked at my body-at the spaces between my fingers and the edges of my fingernails, I swear I could see light shining out.

For anyone who hasn’t accepted Jesus into his heart, this is what it feels like: as if you’ve resisted the fact that your vision’s gone blurry, and you need glasses. But eventually you can’t see a foot in front of you without knocking things over and bumping into dead ends, so you go to the optometrist. You walk out of that office with a new pair of glasses, and the world looks sharper, brighter, more colorful. Crisp. You can’t understand why you waited so long to make the appointment.

When Jesus is with you, nothing seems particularly scary. Not the thought of never having another drink; not the moment you sit in court during your DUI charge. And not right now, when I will be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

After leaving the hospital, I started attending the Eternal Glory Church. I met with Pastor Clive, who sent out a prayer chain letter so that all these people I didn’t even know were praying for me. It’s a feeling I’ve never had before-strangers who didn’t judge me for the mistakes I’d made but just seemed happy I’d showed up. I didn’t have to be embarrassed about dropping out of college or getting divorced or drinking myself into a ditch. I didn’t have to measure up at all, actually. The fact that Jesus had placed me in their lives meant I was already worthy.

The Eternal Glory Church hasn’t got its own building, so it rents out the auditorium from a local school. We are standing in the back, waiting for Pastor Clive to give us the signal. Clive’s wife is playing the piano, and his three little daughters are singing. “They sound like angels,” I murmur.

“Yeah,” Reid agrees. “There’s a fourth kid, too, who doesn’t perform.”

“Like the Bonus Jonas,” I say.

The hymn ends, and Pastor Clive stands on the stage, his hands clasped. “Today,” he bellows, “is all about Jesus.”

There is a chorus of agreement from the congregation.

“Which is why, today, our newest brother in Christ is going to tell us his story. Max, can you come on up here?”

With Reid’s and Liddy’s help, I make my way down the aisle on crutches. I don’t like being the center of attention, usually, but this is different. Today, I’ll tell them the story of how I came to Christ. I will publicly announce my faith, so that all these people can hold me accountable.

Welcome, I hear.

Hello, Brother Max.

Clive leads me to a chair on the stage. It must come from a classroom; there are tennis balls on the feet of the chair to keep it from scratching up the linoleum. Beside it is what looks like a meat freezer, filled with water, with a set of steps leading up to it. I sit down on the chair, and Clive steps between Liddy and Reid, holding their hands. “Jesus, help Max grow closer to You. Let Max know God, love God, and spend quality time with His word.”

As he prays over me, I close my eyes. The lights from the stage are warm on my face; it makes me think of when I was little, and would ride my bike with my face turned up to the sun and my eyes closed, knowing that I was invincible and couldn’t crash, couldn’t get hurt.

Voices join Pastor Clive’s. It feels like a thousand kisses, like being filled to bursting with all the good in the world, so that there isn’t any room for the bad. It’s love, and it is unconditional acceptance, and not only haven’t I failed Jesus but He says I never will. His love pours into me, until I can’t keep it inside anymore. It spills out of my open throat-syllables that aren’t really any language, but still, I get the message. It’s crystal clear, to me.