By twenty-six, because you have not talked religion beyond basic platitudes about heaven and love, you have not talked rules and priorities for raising children, you have just been trying to keep your heads above water, and everything is trouble. It’s the ordinary trouble that most people would say happens. And in fact, it isn’t that unusual. For most people, faith is embarrassing to put into words. It’s harder to explain exactly the way faith has added streetlamps and thruways into your life, your beliefs, especially if you’re someone who doesn’t regularly go to church or pray.

It’s harder still if you’re someone who grew up in a faith that was featured multiple times in Dateline episodes and later in annoying podcasts and who was regularly monitored by the US government to articulate why, suddenly, when you hear the flutter, your potential child’s potential heartbeat, your brain leaps back to that red barn, to the blue door, to your grandmother leading a prayer among the surviving soybeans, and to when the smell of soil in early summer heat was its own promise from the god you knew. How could you have ever fought your girlfriend about what she wants to do, when your god didn’t care about those things?

There’s a place you hope your child is never called to, but every time you’ve glimpsed it, it has been more impossibly beautiful than the last time you saw it. Sometimes, the sky is cotton candy pink, sometimes pool-at-night blue. Where the paths are golden, where people bring back full silver and gold flowers and palms and pothos and quietly sell them to collectors for vast sums of money, even though the plants often die quickly when they’re out in our sun, our cold. Where the voices of the dead can be heard, sometimes singing and calling everyone’s names, where once, alone on a winter morning, you swore you heard the loudest voice of your life saying “Antony, Antony, it’s okay to leave here,” and you knew that was the voice of God, and your mouth crumpled into a gorgeous pink quiver, your eyes the warmest thing against all that January cold, and you were torn between wondering if you were delusional and narcissistic enough to have to tell yourself that God said it was okay for you to go away to college or if it was the truth, he loved you enough to tell you to go. That day, the air leaking from the open doorway smelled like bonfire and apple cider, and that, too, felt like a sign. The doctor said, Oh, it’s twins, and Opal cried harder.