Atheists Who Kneel and Pray

by Tarryn Fisher

  Grief without the fights, grief without the apology, grief without the closure. Thick, suffocating grief wound tightly around one woman. And with as much pent-up grief as you have for one woman, you’re sticking your dick in another one. It’s sick.

  Pride, I had too much of it. If I really wanted to I could have fucking found her. I know that now. I should have begged and groveled, crawled to her on my hands and knees so she could see the effect she had on me. Maybe I could have brought her back.

  The pen was there that day, lying on my nightstand. I didn’t recognize it, where had it come from? It was a tourist’s pen, something you’d buy at the Market: a skyline of Seattle behind a tiny plastic dome. There were flecks of glitter in water. I picked it up, watched it snow over Seattle. And then, just like that, the words fell into my head.

  Are you going to write a song about it?

  Why yes, yes I was. I called the song “Beggar.” It was the second song I’d written about Yara and it took twenty minutes to get it out. It had her rhythm: soft, soft, hard, hard. When I was done I felt…less. Just less, like I’d transferred some of my grief into a composition book instead of letting it sit in my chest. This was what Yara had told me would happen if my heart broke. I hated the song because of that—I hated every song about her, and they all were about her. I hated the girl that made us famous. I hated myself for loving the girl that made me a beggar. Bitter, bitter—like orange rinds. She’d done this to me purposefully, hurt me with intent. I changed for her, but she hadn’t changed for me. That was the difference. She’d just left me behind.

  I checked my trash for her e-mail.

  I have a dream that Yara is locked in a closet and calling my name. When I wake up I’m covered in sweat and my heart is pounding. I glance at my phone. It’s five o’clock in the morning. I do the numbers in my head as I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Two years this month, that’s how long it’s been since she left. I take a shower, make myself a pot of coffee, but I can’t shake the dream. I could see her so clearly, her long hair braided down her back, her red-rimmed eyes. I make a point not to look at old photos because every time I do it feels like I’m back at day one—the first day after she left me—but I can’t stop the dreams. They bring her face back to me in detail. My friends tell me that I need closure. Before the residue of the dream has worn off, I book a one-way ticket to London. It’s now or never, I tell myself. I pack a small bag and leave without telling anyone.

  “Business or pleasure?” the woman in the seat next to me asks.

  She fastens her seat belt and then looks over at me expectantly. I have no plan to spend the flight talking to a stranger.

  “Business,” I say.

  “What sort of business?”

  “I’m going to find my wife.” And then I lean my head against the window, the pillow propped against the glass, and fall asleep.

  I stay in a hotel she once told me about, on the Strand. She bartended there for a few months before she decided to adventure in America. What are the big differences between London and Seattle? The weather is the same. As I put one foot in front of the other and steer my body through the streets, I am rained on the same way I am rained on back home. I don’t walk with my head down like everyone else because I am looking in their faces, the people who carry umbrellas (we don’t really do that in Seattle, carry umbrellas). I am searching for Yara, who no longer works in the same place Ed Berry reported. Rainwater drips down my face, into my mouth because I won’t bend my head against the rain.

  I am looking for Yara. I am looking for Yara…

  I think about calling Ed, but I’m already here. I can find her. That’s what I say to myself as I walk through the streets. Even before I met her it seemed I was looking for Yara. I knew that she struggled to accept love. I was too young to understand consequences. I thought everything would work out in my life, that the wrongs would right themselves and that eventually she would be okay. That’s not how it works. I know that now.

  The bars here are all named things with a The at the beginning: The Porcupine, The Imperial, The Glassblower, The Oyster and Mirth. I look into their windows, eyeing the bartenders. I am looking for Yara.

  She is everywhere and nowhere. I see her in the people. She Americanized herself to fit in, but now I see that she is London. How can a person be like a city? Her attitude about life is damp, but she pushes forward with an old elegance. She doesn’t complain about what’s happened to her or why. It’s the damp she lives in, it’s part of who she is and she’s fine with that. I’ve seen so many others question, and cry, and rage against the whys of their life. Yara doesn’t waste time on that. She has somewhere to be and she goes. She grew up with adjectives. She’s interesting and old like the gothic buildings that line the street. If you go inside many of them they’re modern and young—that’s like Yara too.

  I love London.

  In the afternoon I am tired of walking and looking, looking and walking. I find a place to sit and eat called The Counter at the Delaunay. There is a blue and white pattern on the floor that I can’t stop looking at. I sit across from grandparents who have brought their young grandchildren for lunch. We’re all in a booth by the window. The boy and girl look like twins.

  “Can I see your lovely smile? Show me your lovely smile,” the grandfather says as he holds up a camera.

  “Do Mister and Missus Grumpy need to go to the toilet?” the grandmother asks. “You’ll let me know, won’t you? Perhaps a little later then.”

  I’m fascinated by the way they speak to each other, the attentiveness and tone.

  We don’t speak to our children that way in America. We don’t direct as many adjectives at them. I think of the songwriters I love, all from here, this place of giant red buses and gothic spires. Steve Mac; Camille Purcell; Paul Epworth; Goddard, Worth, and Lennon. Their grandparents must have taken them to lunch and told them to show their lovely smiles, and offered them bites of their bacon roll—“Would you like a tiny bite, then? It’s crispy on the inside, but the bread is very soft and warm…my word! Look how many swirly twirly shapes and designs are on this table! You’re very posh, aren’t you, my lovelies! Posh and perfectly darling…”

  I understand Yara more by listening to her people. The longer I walk, and listen, and stay, the more she makes sense to me. Tigers don’t make sense in a zoo—they conform to the zoo, but they don’t make sense. I order a tea the way she used to drink it, and something called porridge and banana. The girl who brings them to me asks if I want honey for my porridge.

  “Yes, please,” I say.

  Yara used to put honey on her oatmeal, I remember that. I’m doing this all to feel close to her. Maybe then I can find her.

  The porridge is delicious. How did she ever eat oatmeal when she was used to eating this? It’s creamy and decadent. I get honey on everything—my hands, and the table, and my clothes. I want to write a song about that too—following your girl to London and getting honey on everything. She causes me to write songs without knowing it.

  On the fifth day I’m there I get a call from my mother. My father had a heart attack. I run to my hotel and toss everything into my luggage. Everything is a blur after that—the cab ride to the airport, the flight home on which the wifi doesn’t work, the hot coffee I spill on my pants. My cousin is there to pick me up. Her face looks grave. I don’t think about Yara again until after the funeral. Then I feel more desperate. People die. We are not permanent. We have to hurry if we want things.

  We play Bumbershoot in September, six months after my father died. It’s a largely acclaimed art and music festival in our home state, something we’ve been dreaming of for years. We climb the stage and can only describe the experience as one of the most surreal moments of our lives. Just a few years ago we were bright-eyed and hopeful, standing in the audience and dreaming of the day we’d be on the stage. And now we are. The weather is gracious, the sun pounding down on Seattle in her full majesty. I glance up and eye the scrappy little cl
ouds that dot the sky. There will be no rain today. My mother and sister are in the crowd too, wearing matching red visors. They jump up and down and wave when they see me looking. They’re wearing their Pixies shirts and I know they’re headed to the reunion show after this. It’s from the stage that I see another familiar face. I remember a fight, yelling, Yara throwing a loaf of bread at my head and telling me to choke on it. It sounds comical now but at the time it wasn’t. The anger that spun out of her tornado-like, ripping up what we’d been building together. She said things that night that I’d rather not remember, horrible things about me and the band…my family. It was a painful memory, a gateway to the end. I catch Petra’s eye and she smiles as she sways to the music we’ve already started playing. Her hair is an ashen yellow and she’s dressed in a sheer white dress. I can see her outline underneath the fabric, the dark circles of her nipples. She wants me to recognize her—she wore that dress so she’d have a better chance of it. Women use their bodies like weapons.

  After the show Petra waits for me at the back of the stage. There are a lot of people there calling my name, but she stands quietly, her hands clasped in front of her body like she already knows I will stop. If I couldn’t see her goddamn nipples I’d say she looked saintly. I stand in front of her even though security has me by the balls. A big burly guy in a leather vest says, “We need to keep moving.”

  “Hello, Dave.” She pushes her hair behind her ear and looks at me shyly.

  It’s so intimate, the way she calls me Dave. It triggers something, maybe my deep loneliness, and that’s why I lift the barrier and wait as she ducks under it to join me. She waves to her friends like this was the plan all along and links her arm through mine.

  We don’t speak until we’re in the trailer we share with two other bands. Since they’re performing we have it to ourselves for a few hours. The guys pull beers out of the fridge and wipe the backs of their necks with plush white towels, while Petra and I move to the tiny back room where there is a double bed. I sit on the edge and she sits next to me.

  “I’m not trying to sleep with you,” I say. Though saying it out loud makes it seem like I am.

  She smiles that closed lip smile that she’s mastered and shrugs like she could go either way. I have a thought that I’m ashamed of: what if I should have been with Petra all along and Yara was the mistake? Well, clearly Yara was a mistake, but I’d always blamed Petra for the initial frays in our relationship. Wholly unfair perhaps, but that’s what Yara put in my head: Petra was there to cause trouble, Petra was waiting for us to break up. Petra had been quiet in those days, trailing the band from show to show, showing up so often she became one of our entourage by default. Then the thing had happened with Yara. She came around for a while after that, but one night after I’d had too much to drink, I’d ordered her the fuck out of my condo. According to Brick, in a drunken slur I’d told her that it was her fault Yara and I had broken up. I think of that now as I sip water from a bottle and watch her studying me cautiously. Is she looking for anger?

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “About what I said. I was hurting and I wanted to fuck everything up.”

  “That was a long time ago.” She shrugs. And then she says, “She had this way of making you crazy. It was like she enjoyed torturing you.”

  I stare at her. Maybe it was true, but no one had ever said it out loud before. I don’t want to talk about Yara. She must see it on my face because she stands up and grabs my hands, pulling me to my feet.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she says. “I’ll buy you dinner.”

  I only hesitate for a moment. I haven’t been with a woman in a year. That was after the initial year when I slept with anyone who was game. I like holding her hand, but more than that, I like the way she looks at me.

  It’s the first day that I don’t check my trash for Yara’s e-mail.

  The excitement around a wedding was contagious. Everyone wanting to know the details. Plenty of congratulations, slaps on the back, and unwarranted advice. While I was basking in the happiness of it all, my future wife was looking more wilted by the day.

  “What is it, Yara?” I asked. “Do you not want to do this?”

  She looked shocked by my question. “No, no,” she assured me. “I’m just not this person…who plans a wedding, you know?”

  I did know and I liked that about her.

  “I’ll make all of the arrangements,” I promised, kissing her on the forehead. “It will be small. Tiny. Just close friends and a handful of my family. Is there anyone you want to invite from back home?” She was shaking her head before I’d finished the question.

  “I was a bridesmaid once, right out of uni—I mean college,” she said. “A girl I’d gone to high school with, pretty and popular back then. Her name was Angie. She was out of my league in high school, and I was out of hers when I moved to London. I didn’t realize we were friends until she asked me to wear a high-waisted mint dress and hold a handful of wildflowers.”

  “You’d never hung out?” I asked.

  “No. And I was about to turn her down. I felt awkward about being her bridesmaid when we weren’t even real friends, and then she told me that she’d always admired me, and while the rest of them cared about stupid things I did my own thing. Truly, I think her real friends had all moved away and abandoned her in a way. They saw her early marriage as something that could be viral. Anyway, I did it. I was her bridesmaid. I remember feeling panic for her as she walked down the aisle, even though she didn’t feel it for herself. How did she know everything would be okay, that he would take care of her, that she’d remain herself? I know now that she didn’t, that love was a leap of faith, and that love was just a word until someone gave it a definition.”

  I nodded slowly, not wanting her to stop speaking. It was so rare that she shared things from her past like this.

  “I don’t know if John, the man she married, fulfilled her in the way she was hoping, if he was a good husband and father. We never spoke again after her wedding. But sometimes I have these sharp moments of realization that this is my wedding, and that I am to be married. I think of Angie and wonder how much I can trust all of this.”

  I couldn’t relate, though I did my best to understand her. I came from married people, hard and unwavering Catholic dedication to family. It was what you did, and it was what I’d always wanted.

  “Do you worry that I’ll disappoint you in some way?” I asked.

  She smiled. “No, I’m worried that I’ll disappoint you in some way,” she answered. “That I won’t be enough.”

  I pulled her into my arms and held her so tight. “Impossible, Yara,” I said. “You don’t have to be enough for me or anyone. I love you as you are. I don’t want you to ever feel pressured to be something for me. That takes the ease out of real love.”

  She’d looked at me hard, like I’d said something outrageous.

  “That isn’t the deal we made, is it?” she asked.

  “Deal? What deal?” The ferry docked and I shifted my car into drive to follow the line of cars off the boat.

  “The one where I date you to inspire you,” she said quietly. “Be your muse.”

  I’d forgotten about it. How long ago had that been? How much had happened since then?”

  I looked over at her and she was staring out the window, her fist pressed to her mouth.

  “Yara, I never was part of that deal,” I said. I reached out and squeezed her knee. “I only played along to get you. If you recall, I was talking marriage before I knew your name.”

  “Oh, I recall,” she said.

  I was worried. I didn’t like when she locked me out. I decided to change the subject, away from weddings, and my family, and her anxiety over both.

  “We should go away for a few days,” I said. “Go somewhere to relax and just be together.”

  Her hand dropped back to her lap and she turned to look at me.

  “Really?” she said. “Where?”

  “Somewhere where it
’s just you and me.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

  We were walking through the front door of our condo when my phone buzzed in my pocket. A text. I didn’t recognize the number.

  Hey, hope you don’t mind—Brick gave me your number. It’s Petra.

  I glanced up at Yara, who was walking toward the bathroom. Yara didn’t like Petra, she’d made that abundantly clear. Despite my better judgment I typed: Hey! That’s cool. What’s up?

  The bubble appeared to let me know she was typing, but then I heard the bathroom door open and I jammed my phone into my back pocket.

  I don’t know why I did it. Why I didn’t tell Yara right then and there that Petra had texted me. A stupid choice.

  “What’s wrong?” Yara asked when she saw my face.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m just tired.”

  She nodded like she understood, and it occurred to me what a long day it had been for her. I walked up behind her and rubbed her shoulders as she stood in her favorite spot staring out of the window that overlooked Elliott Bay.

  “Take your clothes off and get into bed,” I said. “I’ll give you a massage.”

  “With your tongue or hands?” she asked.

  “Both.”

  She raised her eyebrows at me and then walked toward the bedroom.

  Before I followed her I pulled out my phone. Petra hadn’t sent a follow up text after all. She must have changed her mind about whatever she was going to say. I deleted her text and put my phone on the charger before following Yara into the bedroom.

  There were severe thunderstorms on the day of our wedding. We got married in February in a little chapel in Vancouver. The church had a bell tower that they promised they’d ring once we were married. We’d expected rain, but nothing like the torrential downpour we got.