It was still snowing in the golden path. Each pile on the branches and stones they could see looked in texture and coloring like jellyfish. It was beautiful and alien. But jellyfish were like that too, and their stings could be dangerous.

The expedition was there and all of them were delighted, although their crew was worried because they hadn’t packed any cold-weather gear. They had paid one of the church members to go to the closest Walmart and buy windbreakers and sweatshirts and boot socks to wear as mittens. Antony kept thinking about his daughters, alternating between sending these people away and considering the amount of money they had given the church. Ayanna and Olivia, he tried to consider the least. Why had he let Ayanna do this at all? How could he not have reacted when Olivia ran after her? There had been a moment when she turned, where if he had reached and grabbed the back of her dress, or even said her name, it would have at least saved her. And what kind of parent was he to have let his seventeen-year-old daughter do something he would never do?

When Opal had been over for dinner, out in the garden, he had told her about a time when he had walked the golden path. He said he had heard the voice of God twice in his life. The lies came so easy. Once while walking alone in the snow and being afraid to go to college, and once while walking that path. He had told her the voice had spoken to him about bringing love into the world. He was still not sure what that meant, but it was what he wanted Ayanna to experience. Didn’t she also think that God had a plan for their daughter?

Antony had purposefully echoed the words Opal’s mother used to comfort her in bad times: “Remember, this is the Lord’s plan. Even in the hard times, he’s with you.” He knew she had been told that when they were having marital troubles, had heard his former mother-in-law say it on a night when Ayanna had a 103 fever and wouldn’t stop throwing up, when he was laid off from his job, during the storm that had knocked out all their power for an excruciating, humid week where they could not afford to stay in a hotel for more than one night and kept arguing which night it should be, which would make them more able to endure the rest of that unpleasant August. It had bugged him that there was none of this Lord’s-plan talk during the good times, no “God has helped you find your way to one another, this marriage is blessed” talk. Nothing of that sort when he had graduated from college. None of God’s will was apparently involved when they had found out they were pregnant with twins.