It’s an hour later in Montgomery than it is in Boise, so Jessup should already be up—he’s an early riser, five every morning to work out with a group of buddies, except Sunday, when he’ll sleep until eight or nine, depending on what he’s done the night before—but he’s on vacation, so he doesn’t feel too guilty about lying in bed. Besides, it’s barely seven o’clock. Christmas day or not, it’s early enough for a house with no children in it.
The curtains are open, and he watches the snow tumble from the sky. It’s hypnotizing. It makes a soft patter on the glass: big, light flakes, cotton-candy snow, something he never gets tired of seeing, particularly since he only sees it a few times a year now.
He feels the bed shift, Amy’s body rolling against him, her arm over his shoulder, her hot breath on the back of his neck.
“Merry Christmas,” she says.
He replies, “Happy Hanukkah.”
“Hanukkah was over like a week ago, dumb-ass.” She kisses the back of his neck, scratches indulgently at his back. She likes to joke that the only white supremacist at the Southern Poverty Law Center fell in love with the only Jew in Alabama.
They’ve been together close to two years. The wedding is in June.
Amy knows all of it. Every single part. No exceptions. Even about Wyatt.
She’s a year younger than him, and she works on the Teaching Tolerance project. She told him that he’ll carry it around with him forever. And she’s right.
She’s a good woman. Better than he deserves.
That’s how it works sometimes.
And sometimes, late at night, in Montgomery, when it’s raining, Jessup looks out the window and imagines that the rain is a cleansing rain, the world scoured clean, the world made new, but he knows it doesn’t work like that. And even if it snowed in Montgomery, even if he could wake up to blankets of snow coating Alabama, covering everything, the world would not be made new. That’s not how it works.
It works like this: the light swallows the darkness.