Laura Anderson Kurk

New rules__e needed new rules. No one opens the main doors but me. No one leaves the property without me. No one goes outside without letting me know. I had these horrible images in my head of kids being restrained against their wills, of kids crying my name out, begging me to help them when I was powerless. Desperate times_ Lord, my soul called out. Lord_somehow that__ as far as I could get. I didn__ have the words.

Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom__ voice came to me, repeating things she__ said for months. Like, __y skin is melting off my face, isn__ it?_ And, __y whole body feels dead from the crap they__e pouring into me. Do I look green to you?_ And, __hen I__ naked, I can see my heart beating.

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She__ set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I__ begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin. He slid it across the counter to me__on__ worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change.

It was an oddly satisfying idea to feel bereft as I left my mother this time. We only feel bereft when we__e deprived of something meaningful.

With a damp palm, I turned the knob and cracked open the door. She was asleep in her freshly made bed. I can__ explain how relieved I felt for this simple mercy. She was here and safe on clean sheets.

Uncommon anxiety came to us in common hours when other people were doing mundane things like taking out the trash or checking their phones. But there was nothing to be done for this. We couldn__ change who we were or what had happened.

When Dad was in the middle of a description of the hotel__ laundry facility, I interrupted. __hy haven__ you told me today, like you do every day, that Mom__ going to be better soon?__e looked up then. His gaze locked with mine and held a promise that no matter what he said or didn__ say, he and I would ride this out together. __ haven__ told you that today, Meg, because I don__ know.

I__ felt this before, when my granddad was in the hospital before he died. We all camped out in the waiting room, eating our meals together, most of us sleeping in the chairs every night. Family from far-flung places would arrive at odd hours and we__ all stand and stretch, hug, get reacquainted, and pass the babies around.A faint, pale stream of beauty and joy flowed through the heavy sludge of fear and grief. It was kind of like those puddles of oil you see in parking lots that look ugly until the sun hits them and you see rainbows pulling together in the middle of the mess.And wasn__ that just how life usually felt__ confusing swirl of ugly and rainbow?

Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. __here I__ only myself,_ she__ said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant.

I worried I would miss it, and I knew, from losing Wyatt, that things happen the moment the soul is released. Wyatt had been there in the school, watching me, making sure I survived. Souls linger_they do. They linger a bit before they turn toward eternity. It could be that no matter how perfect their future will be, the past still tugs for a moment.

Look at this one._ I picked up a small painting of a man with dark hair and a short, dark beard. He wore a loose shirt, cobalt blue, unbuttoned at the top, showing a prominent, knobby collarbone. He looked_complicated and hungry. She__ captured him focused intensely on a book, his face pressed against a wall like he was resting. Or waiting.

My mom told me once that Wyatt loved her the way a boy will love his mother, but I loved her the way an artist loves another. Jo taught me what that meant.

I__ stumbled upon the inner sanctuary of a woman who loved the world. Loved the faces of people she saw. Loved the way a hand looked when it was relaxed. Loved the way a woman looked when she touched her own face. The way a man looked when he opened himself to her. Loved the way wind changed a tree or a field or a child__ hair. The beauty of a neck meeting a shoulder. The softness of a smile that wasn__ forced.

I really want to believe that when our Quiet Waters kids wake up in the middle of the night, scared, they__l remember being in their bunks with John and Kate and Whit and me right there protecting them,_ he said. __ hope we gave them that sense of belonging because I know there__l be times in their lives when grasping at those bonds could mean the difference between making it and not.

He was taking a leap here, negotiating with a crackhead, under the table, in a dark cantina. The courage etched on his face came from loving Aidia so much he__ close his eyes and walk through fire to see her safe.

Grayson noticed me next to the lockers. He pointed at me then held his arms out magnanimously. __ou__e welcome, new girl,_ he said. __ just saved you from having to find a nice way to say no to the leg dragger.

I__ known cruelty in a school__ruelty that would keep these amateurs up all night. But this kind of scene__rowds batting around a person because they thought he was weak__appened to be my personal trigger.

I could__e gone on and on but the truth was all that mattered. __y brother died because someone was jealous.