Page 8 of Bless This Hot Mess

And maybe love demands we try,

To turn the silence into truth,

To raise the fallen one more time.”

The bridge plank beneath her right foot had a nail sticking up, polished by countless shoes. Her mother would have called the town office to complain and then laid hands on thebridge and prayed for more municipal funding. Her father would’ve tripped on it three separate times and declared each one a test from God. Emma-Lou knelt, took off her heel and hammered the errant nail flush back into place.

The wind shifted, carrying a distant church bell and the faint staticky bleed of a car radio from the other side of the river. Somewhere, someone had their dial tuned to WWJD. The thought steadied her. She inhaled, filling her lungs as much as she could as she stood up and reached for the railing for the final chorus. The town lay before her in miniature–church steeples, radio tower, the faded brick squares of the station itself. Her station.

“Who rises when the lighthouse keepers

Leave without a final word?”

Somewhere behind her, a flock of starlings came out of hiding from a tree and swirled into the air, wingbeats jittering like applause.

“The girl they thought stayed small forever,

She’s waking now, she’s being stirred.”

She thought of herself at twelve, doing mock weather reports into a hairbrush in the mirror. Of her father laughing and then saying, “Careful, Lou-Lou. You keep that up, we’ll have to give you a timeslot.”

“Not by certainty or safety,

Not by knowing how to lead,

But by the echo of their calling

And the town’s unspoken need.”

Her chest hurt. Her eyes burned. But the note held and grew.

“I will stand where they once stood,

With trembling hands and open eyes.

They built the tower.

And through my sorrow,

I’ve finally realized–”

She closed her eyes as the last lines rose. For a heartbeat, she saw her parents–not as they’d left, in vacation wear and duty-free sunglasses but as they’d been in the studio. She imagined them with their headphones on now, laughing into the microphones, picking out their favorite hymns to put on eternal rotation and gently pressing the ON AIR button.

“The waves they tended

Still roll through me.

A daughter of the lighthouse

Learning how to rise.”

She softened the last word into the wind, and the river carried it away. For a moment, there was silence. Just her, the water, and the call and answer of the starlings high above.

Emma-Lou opened her eyes. The manilla folder stamped withDeclaration of Death: Lost at Seastill weighed down her arms. Her feet still hurt in the cheap black pumps. Her parents were still gone and nothing it seemed would change that.

But the wild, reorienting thing was this–underneath all that grief, something else had started stubbornly, to burn. Not relief. Not yet.

Resolve.