The rental car was parked. She smelled better than expected for driving so long and sleeping in the car. Everything felt unchanged. Red-tinged dirt. The large tree that had to be at least one hundred years old. Smaller pine trees planted by a neighbor that should have been bigger by now. Lawn mowers roaring and complaining through the air. Summer warm-cut-grass scent. In the distance, Ayanna could see the red barn’s black roof. She considered driving to a gas station and changing out of the workout leggings and oversized T-shirt she was wearing. Her dad had always made her dress nice despite the dirt and mud. Under her breath, Ayanna was humming the song members of the church had sung while digging out the rows while she meditated in the dirt. The eyes of love.

Almost everyone in the forum had said they were going to stay away from the doors. That time in their lives was over. Ayanna, not that she was keeping score, felt like she had been in the most benevolent leaning of all the faiths. Most had been more like cults: people thrown through the door for angering leaders; teenagers tasked with harvesting the seeds people used to create acre; weird sex stuff; and rituals of saying the door measured your soul on each visit. If you were holding disbelief and cruelty in your heart, of course you would pop. Ayanna’s only contributions to those conversations were platitudes. It seemed rude to say, Well, I mostly had a pretty positive experience until my sister died!

There were no dead here. That was what also made it feel like the past. The closest she had seen one was ten miles away, wafting between horse shape and teenage-girl shape on a bridge next to a very low river. She had considered calling her father and had decided not to because he had done nothing to reach out to her. Ayanna hoped he had stayed in Spain, not flown here or to Germany. The closest she could get to a prayer in this situation was to hope he would stay home and raise his young kids. That he would always put being a responsible father first. She did not want to think about the money he had probably embezzled from the church. It was still strange to be here without him and her grandmother.

Ayanna got out of the car. Stretched until she felt a welcome pop in her shoulder. Retied her shoes, once, twice. Then, carrying a tote she had bought near the Michigan border filled with snacks and a water bottle, made her way down the road. She tried to think only of the gravel her shoes crunched over, the way the tree branches reached toward her, birdsong, and attempted to remember the Japanese word she liked so much that meant “sun coming through tree leaves.” There was a feeling, though, that Ayanna tried to say was anxiety, of being pulled forward.