Page 7 of Bless This Hot Mess

The thought of sitting in those chairs made her stomach swoop like she’d crested the top of a roller coaster. She passed a little side garden where Mrs. Lavadeer knelt in dirt-streaked track pants she may have once used for running, hand planted to steady herself on a trowel in the flower bed. The older woman looked up, studied Emma-Lou’s black clothes and set jaw.

“Tout est bien qui finit bien, ma chère,” she called. “Are you doing alright?”

“Getting there,” Emma-Lou answered, and leaned on the little picket fence to share how she was really feeling,

“I hear their laughter in the plaster,

Their prayers tucked into every tile.

Though the Triangle kept their bodies,

Their purpose lingers in this file.”

It was true. She could see them in every crack of the lobby paint at WWJD, in the grooves worn into the rug where generations of listeners had shuffled in with their donation checks, casseroles, and a few complaints. Her parents’ presence had hummed in the building and felt necessary to keep the lights on. She stepped onto the path that led toward the Napanee River, her chorus gathering like a storm.

“Who rises when the lighthouse keepers

Vanish far from earthly sight?”

Up ahead, Mr. Patel sat on a wooden crate by the back door to his restaurant, taking a break. He raised his coffee cup toward her in a little salute and said quietly, “You do.”

“Who finds a pathway in the dark

Until her courage sets a match alight?”

She thought of the empty bedroom where she’d been sleeping with the lamp on. Of waking up to phantom engine sounds, thinking her parents’ Chrysler 300 had finally pulled into the driveway, safely delivering them home.

“I wasn’t born to play it safe,

I feel their hands upon my back.”

That line surprised her. She’d always thought of herself as the safe one–the rule follower, the steady hand on the wheel. But there it was, her truth slipping into rhyme.

“If storms keep coming, I’ll face them

Guiding strangers through the black.

They built the tower.

Now it’s my turn,

To keep the signal intact.”

The last phrase rang out as she stepped onto the smallfootbridge over the river. The planks creaked beneath her heels; wood weathered to a greenish-grey and carved with decades of hearts protecting initials, sums of promises kept and others broken. Love locks rusted from the rain and snow hung heavy with the whispered secrets of new and time-tested lovers and the weight of knowing they’d never be freed from the torture of holding on, having tossed aside reason and rationale in the form of a key into the river below–all in exchange for hope.

Emma-Lou stopped halfway across the bridge and the Napanee River glided past underneath, bluish-green and glinting, catching slices of the sky in its slow, Dedalian dance downstream. On its surface, sunlight glittered like a million tiny notes of encouragement. Somewhere upriver, a chorus of kids were at play–skipping stones or pretending they knew how to smoke a stolen cigarette. Emma-Lou curled her fingers tighter around the manilla folder and looked down at the water as the bridge of the song rose up from its depths to meet her,

“There’s a promise pressed inside me

Like a secret wrapped with care.

Just why was I left alone here?

When they are now, nowhere?”

Her voice thinned onnowhere, and the word stretched out over the river like something fragile, like a line cast into the deep.

“But maybe loss is its own gospel,