Teresia (unedited)

(Glenwood)

We landed in early August.

The heat hit me first, wet and heavy, like someone had thrown a damp quilt over the sun. My lungs recoiled, unsure whether they breathed in air or soup. Everything smelled like car exhaust, hairspray, and fried grease.

Back in Weldon, summer arrived differently, the heat thick but softened by the lake wind. Here, it barged in and demanded attention.

Mother cried before we even got off the plane. She pressed a tissue to her cheeks with the same hand that held her boarding pass.

I’d done all my crying an hour earlier, quietly, while she slept with her head against the window. I’d watched the sun rise over a cloud bank that looked like a glacier dissolving into gold, and it was then that it hit me: we were really leaving. Not for a trip or for the summer. Leaving. The kind you didn’t come back from.

I didn’t say anything on the taxi ride to our new place, content to watch the streets go by.

It looked like a different planet.

Beige and strangely permanent, like the city had stopped evolving decades ago. Sun-bleached signs, strip malls with fake palm trees, and apartments the color of soggy paper, all sitting under a sky that stretched flat, blue, and lifeless.

The taxi driver flipped between stations. A preacher’s voice cut through the static, then disappeared again.

“Glenwood,” Mother said. “Where Rick grew up.”

Rick. I flinched at the name. I wanted to ask her how this marriage would be different from the others.

R-I-C-K, who I’d met for the first time three months, two weeks, and four days ago, a month before my mother married him. I didn’t know my real father. I only knew that he’d been married back in Sweden, and to someone else.

I kept my face toward the taxi’s window. We passed a row of kudzu-infested chain-link fences and cars on cinder blocks.

Mother came to America while she was pregnant with me, carrying me across the ocean like contraband, determined to start over where no one knew her name.

Over the years, Mother had told me a thousand stories about my father. They all contradicted each other. One minute, he died on a foreign mission trip, and the next, he worked on an oil rig in the North Sea. I think she lied because the truth hurt more.

I used to imagine what it would’ve been like to see his name in print on my birth certificate, proof that I’d been something more than a speed bump in some couple’s marriage.

“Just a little farther,” Mother said.

We arrived at The Well Fellowship in Glenwood a little before noon.

Rick greeted us at the entrance in a tan shirt with a pin that read ”Assistant Pastor.” He lifted his hand in greeting the moment he saw us.

“You made it,” he said. His teeth were a little too white for someone who claimed not to care about appearances.

Mother nodded. “We’re here.”

“Hi,” I said quietly. He had to be at least twenty years younger than my mother.

“Let’s get you settled.” He fiddled with the thick glasses on his nose and grabbed our bags.

Her third husband.

Mother says Rick saved her. I think he made her disappear.

Mother used to dance barefoot in the kitchen, listening to ABBA, or some other 70’s pop group, while stirring sauce or scrubbing the counters. She would sway her hips like she was somewhere else entirely. There was always music. Always light.

When Rick came, the music stopped.

Sometimes I’d pass the kitchen and stare at the radio, dust thick on the dial, and wonder if it even worked anymore.

Mother said we hadn’t been living right, and it was time to make some changes.

I followed behind the two slowly.

The church was modest but tidy. It looked like it had been hand-painted more than once, and not by professionals. The white clapboard chapel had navy trim and a single steeple that rose clean into the sky. The windows were tall and plain, no stained glass, only bare panes that caught the afternoon light and threw it back without ceremony.

On the far left side of the property stood a low, tan ranch-style house with green shutters and a sagging porch swing. An exposed garage jutted out from the side, propped up on wooden stilts, sheltering a few cars in various stages of falling apart.

Unremarkable, but I couldn’t stop looking at it. A curtain in the house’s window shifted. A person’s shadow moved across the glass. My brow furrowed. Rick kept talking like he hadn’t seen it.

“Pastor Connors’s house,” Rick said. “The family’s out now, but you’ll meet him Sunday.”

Next to the church sat a gravel parking lot, and beyond that a small storage shed that was half-collapsed on one side, where the youth group kept folding chairs and old holiday decorations. It marked the start of the woods, which pressed in from behind, covering the back of the shed with its leaves.

And to the left of the church was the attached, two-bedroom apartment that Mother, Rick, and I would move into.

Rick said it had once been the church overflow. Inside, a beige rotary phone sat on a tiny shelf by the door. Its cord knotted as if it’d been there forever.

Through the window above the kitchen sink, I could see the house next door again. I saw the same window. The curtain hung open as if someone stood behind it.

I followed behind Rick and Mother, a little slower, my eyes still glued to the glass.

Our apartment had its own entrance on the inside and another on the outside, with a crooked screen door that creaked like it needed greasing.

That night, Rick prayed over our dinner and thanked God for the ‘new beginnings’ he’d gifted our family. Family. The word sat inside my stomach like a piece of spoiled fruit.

Rick kept his hair in a neat combover, slicked into place with a strong-smelling pomade. I didn’t like the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t paying attention.

After dinner, I retreated to my bedroom. My suitcase sat on the floor where I’d dropped it earlier. I sat on the edge of my mattress, the bed didn’t have a frame yet, and listened to the cicadas scream outside. It sounded like trees cracking open.

The pipes knocked, and the apartment walls were thin enough for me to hear Rick and Mother making love in the other room. The air conditioning wheezed like an asthmatic old man, and the persistent dampness in the carpet made my socks slimy. I lay in bed with my feet uncovered, a habit I’d never had before.

Rick had left church pamphlets on my pillow, folded clean and crisp, like origami. I didn’t read them, but I memorized the titles.

The Path of a Godly Girl.

Fathers Are the First Men in Your Life.

The War for Her Soul.

Temptation Wears Many Faces.

I thought about my other stepfathers. Stephen, the one I met when I was five. A skinny man who played in local bands and cut hair on the side. He’d died of cancer. I don’t think Mother or I ever got over it.

I’ve tried to forget the next stepfather’s name, but I never forgot the way his voice turned ugly after a drink, or how long Mother stayed to herself afterward.

Unable to sleep, I tiptoed outside and walked out to the parking lot. I stared up at the church steeple. The cross looked like it floated. I tried to pray, but nothing came out, not even tears.

All I got was the buzz of the streetlamp and the slow realization that I didn’t know what I believed anymore. Not in God. Not in people. Maybe not even in myself. Maybe.

I didn’t hate it here. I just didn’t know who I was supposed to be anymore.

Over the next few days, I stopped looking for myself in mirrors. I stopped flinching when men brushed past me in the street. I stopped telling Mother when I felt scared, or overwhelmed, or anything at all.

I started writing more. Lines that meant nothing. Descriptions of people. Sentences that sounded like they belonged to someone older and wiser. It made the days bearable.

I held on to one memory from Weldon. Mrs. Donnelly had handed back one of my essays and dropped it onto the desk with a quiet nod. At the top, in neat red ink, she’d written: You have a voice.

I’d stared at it for a long time.

I hadn’t known what I was going to do with it back then. But I knew now: be a writer. I’d held it close, like the boarding pass Mother wouldn’t let go of.

Proof that I still mattered.

Later, when Mother and Rick finally went quiet behind their bedroom door, I opened my notebook and wrote about the person who lived across the church property.

I watched the window next door. A small red light appeared behind the glass, brightened, then faded.

A cigarette.

I pictured the sort of person who would hide in a pastor’s house and smoke beside an open window.

For the first time, I wondered what else people hid at The Well.