Page 107 of The Voice We Find

“Jump, Gabby, don’t be afraid. I’ve got you!” Sophie’s voice mimics my own this time as Gabby makes use of her entire body to show the scene vividly in ASL.

The words trigger my memories of her in real time, of teaching her to float on her back and then to doggy paddle from one end of the pool to another. It wasn’t too long afterward that we took her to the beach for her first surf lesson.

Time fast-forwards again, the background switching to a garden where Gabby’s spotlight dips to show her kneeling next to our imagined mother, who tries to calm her after a beetle startles her and crawls up her arm.

Sophie reaches down as if to pluck the invisible beetle off Gabby’s shirt sleeve. She dangles it out to the audience, and a few young girls in the front squirm and shriek.

“Why would you fear this beetle when God made you so much stronger than him?” Sophie asks in a maternal voice that causes my throat to thicken. She cups the imaginary bug in her hands and sets it free in the garden bed next to Gabby.

The instant the two of them are back on their feet and the screen behind them morphs into a shot of rural India, I grip the armrests on either side of my chair.

“You okay, August?” Bonnie asks.

But I can’t find the words to answer her, not as Gabby describes the details of a trip I declined.Twice. Once when my mother calledto ask me to consider replacing their music pastor who dropped out last minute, and then again when my father called two days later. Our last phone call.

I’d just stepped out of a meeting with a killer music collaboration that had the potential to catapult all of Vanessa’s weird morning meditations into reality when my dad called.

————

“You have a minute to talk, son?”

I didn’t, but unlike my mom, my dad wasn’t a big phone guy. When he called, it was usually as brief as it was important.

“Sure, everything good at home?” I speed-walked past the conference room and Vanessa’s office toward the green room at the end of the hallway. I was famished. “You guys leave for India soon, right?” I slipped into our green room stockpiled with every kind of beverage and snack obsession known to mankind. Vanessa didn’t believe in skimping on anything. She was a go-big or go-home type of woman—the very quality that reeled me in when she offered me a contract I couldn’t refuse. That was the thing about Vanessa. She made it so you couldn’t refuse her.

I could tell by the interference of the wind against my dad’s phone speaker that he was somewhere outside. I checked the clock on the microwave to realize Dad was probably packing up for the day. “That’s actually what I was hoping to talk to you about.”

“India?” I beelined to the mini bags of trail mix. “Listen, I know Mom’s bummed that I said no. But the studio is insane right now. Believe it or not, I just got out of a meeting with an artist whose last EP had a million streams in the first week. The first week! That kind of deal is—”

“Are you living with that woman?”

The bottom floor of my gut dropped to my feet. “What?”

“Your boss. Vanessa. Are you living with her?”

I dropped the bag of trail mix on the counter in front of me, watching as a green M&M plummeted to the tile below. All the lies I’d so carefully woven since I walked away from the band years before were now a tangled noose around my neck. “I still have my apartment.” A technicality. At the moment it was more like a glorified storage unit. A place to collect my junk mail.

And my mom’s monthly care packages from home.

“Your mother told me a little over a year ago that she knew you were hiding something from us. Said she felt something was off every time she prayed for you.”

“What she feels is her hatred for LA,” I countered bitterly.

“No,” he growled. “If your mother hates anything, it’s how quickly her only son turned from his faith to chase after all the shiny things of this world. You’re squandering your God-given gifts.”

“So now I’m the prodigal son?” I laughed darkly. “How many twenty-six-year-olds do you know who’ve made a half-mil in less than a year? How many do you know who drive a Porsche and work with some of the top talent in the music industry today? Vanessa has opened doors for me I never believed possible. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“You’re blind.”

“No, I’m in love.”

“Love doesn’t hide!”

His sharply spoken words rattle through my bones. I could count on three fingers the number of times my father raised his voice at me. The first was when he was teaching me to drive, and I nearly rammed us into a concrete barrier. The second was when I rolled my eyes at my mother when she scolded me for leaving the trash out.

“You’re settling for a counterfeit.” My father’s restraint was back, but I almost wished it wasn’t because mine had just snapped.

“You don’t know anything about her!”

---