lord, do remember me

NEW SUNRISE IS IN SUMMITVILLE off of Route 38, just down the highway from a school for the blind and across the street from a Walmart. The first day there, I stared out the small window in my room, imagining the water washing over Walmart and floating it down the highway. Over and over again, the water came in and washed the big white building with its huge blue letters away. The W and A and L floating past me.

They made me say good-bye to Daddy at the door. Behind him, Jesse Jr. stared at me, his small face pressed against my daddy’s leg, his eyes wide and afraid.

You gonna come home again, Laurel? Jesse Jr. asked me. You gonna live with us again? I promised him I would. Then Jesse Jr. and Daddy were driving away, back home, to wait for me to come home from New Sunrise, moon-free and Laurel again.

A woman named Esther showed me to my room up a long flight of stairs and at the end of a long hall of rooms.

There aren’t any locks, Esther said. We trust in you and the Lord to keep you here, but we can’t lock you in. Your journey is your own. But everyone at New Sunrise loves you already, Laurel. We’re here to guide you home.

I’ll give you some time to get settled, Esther said as she went through my pockets, made me take off my shoes and pulled the soles back to look beneath them. The cops had taken my pipe and moon away. There wasn’t anything left for her to find. In my knapsack I just had my filled-up writing books and three pens, a bunch of scrap paper with lots of words written all over each piece, and a slice of bread and cheese I’d gotten that morning at the Salvation Army breakfast cart.

Would you like to pray now? Thank the Lord for your journey? She smiled at me. She was tall and skinny. Maybe she was twenty-five, but her face was hard and old-looking, and I knew from looking at her that she’d once known the moon.

I thanked Him already, I lied.

Then I’ll see you in an hour at meeting, Esther said. Stay blessed.

I lay down on the bed and tried to pray—We know not the day nor the hour. Lord, do remember me. Our Father who art in Heaven, give us . . . but the words tumbling out of me didn’t make sense, and when the tears started coming, I couldn’t stop them. I was shivering and burning up all at once. My skin was prickling all over like some invisible thing was taking bites out of me. I scratched hard at any part I could reach.

I don’t know how long I stayed that way, scratching and crying, but when I got up off the bed, my throat was burning and the sky was black. The storm was right there—waiting to pour down over me. Maybe I was ready—ready to let it. Felt like it’d been years of me running from the storm and now it’d found me, now it’d come to take me. I was tired. I couldn’t run anymore.

I walked slow to meeting, sat down in a circle surrounded by other people who knew the moon. We prayed. We held hands. So many people cried when they told their stories. A girl just a little bit older than me who had known the moon since she was nine. We looked at each other. Looked away from each other. Maybe she could have been a friend to me, but I didn’t need any friends anymore. I just wanted sleep—sleep until the storm washed me away.

Days passed, and the Walmart sign was always just outside my window. When it rained, everything looked like it was melting. Maybe I was melting. Maybe that was how I’d disappear. When the thoughts came hard—Jesse Jr. crying in my arms, the too-long, wet cuffs on my daddy’s pants, Mama and M’lady—I wrote. Wrote until my hand hurt, wrote until the itching didn’t bother me, until the memories didn’t hurt coming on . . . wrote about the happy endings and people laughing, about sun on water and people’s hair—I wrote about Kaylee and the squad, about gumbo and shrimp boils, about M’lady taking out my hem and telling me about my future . . . Laurel . . . ?

I’m here. I’m still here.

The moon staying inside me, pulling . . . pulling on me hard. Slowly, the sky cleared. Slowly, the storm passed over me.

Laurel . . . Your daddy and brother are here . . . The day before I left New Sunrise, Daddy and Jesse Jr. came to see me. They made us sit in a meeting room with a counselor. We were supposed to sit in chairs in a small circle and talk about family problems that made me chase the moon. But Jesse Jr. only wanted to sit in my lap, his arms tight around my neck. You have to sit in your own seat, the counselor kept saying. She wasn’t the woman from my first day. She was older, a psychologist or something. Dr. Somebody.

You’re not the boss of me, Jesse Jr. said. Laurel is the boss of me.

I held tight to Jesse Jr., not wanting to let him go. My daddy sat across from us, watching me. He’d shaved off his beard, but he still looked older, tired. When the counselor finally gave up on Jesse Jr. leaving my lap, she asked my daddy how he was doing.

I just want Laurel to live, he whispered. I just want her to make it. He looked at me. I’d give my whole life for that, baby girl. My whole life.

I didn’t know how to say to him that I didn’t want his life. I didn’t want to lose anybody else—couldn’t live if another somebody died on me. I held tight to Jesse Jr. Put my face deep in his warm neck, sniffed the smells of him—sweat and something a little bit sour and sweet at the same time.

I’m not mad at you, Laurel, my daddy said. Been too worried sick about you to be anything but worried sick. But when I’m not worrying and fretting about you, I’m remembering my baby girl, the wind blowing in your hair, how you used to make me lift you up so you could grab some sky and put it in your pocket . . . His voice dropped off, and even though I couldn’t look at him, I knew he was crying, crying like he’d cried when we came up on where our house used to be in the Pass, crying like he did when we found out Mama and M’lady didn’t make it, crying hard like he’d cried at the funerals. I pressed my face hard into Jesse Jr.’s neck, thinking about how easy the moon made all that sadness lift up and fly away.

You gonna die, Laurel? Jesse Jr. had asked before him and my daddy left me at New Sunrise that day.Cuz then who would be my sister anymore?

After they left, I went back into my room, lay on my bed and let the darkness take over. I used to ask M’lady what happened when you died, where’d your thinking go. I don’t really know where your thinking goes, she’d answer. Just your soul. The moon took my thinking away, lifted it right up out of me and filled that space where it was with good things—light and sweetness. Happiness. When I was high, I was happy.

My hands were shaking as I put my notebooks and my pens and the pieces of paper into my bag. There was quiet all around me. Maybe it was midnight. The darkness was calling hard to me. Cool air all around me. And somewhere, I could hear a train whistle blowing low. Over and over again. Like it was telling me which way to run. So I did run, hard as I could, away from that place.

By the time I stopped running to catch my breath, I was sweating. A few stars were out. Some clouds moved, revealing the moon. I ran half the night—toward it.

And T-Boom was there, like he knew I was coming.