Billy

Billy’s hug once bruised my sternum when we were fifteen. I took the injury to mean I was lovable. Now, here we were three decades later in Mallorca, where he lived—worlds away from New York City and the cult where we’d first met.

Billy and his sisters had grown up in that cult, where he was groomed early on to preach to people twice his age. He was all the things I wasn’t: confident, easygoing, blond. I’d been raised differently—my single mother had turned such a blind eye to religion that she didn’t see when it swallowed me whole—yet Billy and I had both ended up in the same place.

 Billy's escape became instant lore when he slipped out of service one Sunday, hopped on his motorcycle, and never came back. He left an unsuspecting fiancée behind on the pew. I was jealous; it would take me years to finally leave too, and even longer to divorce.

My memories of Billy had since smoldered, then died in the shadows of those cult days, but the hug still felt alive—as if at any moment, I could still smart from the crushed bone that guarded my heart.

At dinner that night in Mallorca, when Billy went to get the bottle of home-pressed wine, his daughter whispered across the table, “Was it really as bad as my dad always says?” How could I answer this girl who was the same age we were then, who'd only known citrus groves and vineyards? Billy and the rest of us had survived a spiritual holocaust that had left us in a strange and lonely afterlife. We were now squatters inside our abandoned interiors, with injuries no one else could see.

“It hasn’t been easy, Billy,” I confided in him after dinner, as we careened through the Traumuntana Hills back to my rental. He listened, but stayed quiet about his own divorce, his thwarted baseball career, and the rest of the wreckage his older sister had hinted at over the phone.

Minutes later, Billy hugged me goodbye; I was fifteen again, wanting my hot tears to roll down onto his shoulder, to let out the gulping noises that had been mounting in my throat, to offer my ugliness as something beautiful for him to hold.

But now he knew my breaking point. As he let go, I could feel myself pull back into my private sea of pain.

I spent the next two weeks alone, writing inside the old soap factory I'd rented on the hill. I wrote and wrote, letting the charging tides of my words break against my emotions. I made soup out of leeks and rabbit and stale bread, and thought of bringing some to Billy.

At the end of November, I flew home to New York with only a few pages saved on my laptop. My thoughts that were once a seawall against the past had become diaphanous, letting the memories drift through, delicate, yet intact. I no longer needed so many words to say what I meant.