Page 80 of Atmosphere

Vanessa’s voice, so smooth, so low. “Hi.”

Joan’s after, smaller, excitable. “Hi.”

—

“Can I ask you something?”Joan said one night as she gave Vanessa a massage. Joan was in her underwear and bra, Vanessa wrapped up in Joan’s bedsheets.

It was so easy, to be this close to someone. Why had it ever seemed out of reach?

“You can ask me anything,” Vanessa said without looking back at her.

“Does your mother know?”

Joan could feel Vanessa’s shoulders tighten. She dug deeper into them.

“Does my mother know what?”

Joan knew there was no need to clarify.

“My mother is Catholic,” Vanessa said, finally. “So no, she does not.” Her flat tone made Joan think there was nothing more to say but then, after a moment, Vanessa spoke again: “I think she has her suspicions. But she will never ask me directly. In exchange, I never do anything to make it obvious.”

Joan could not conceive of telling her own parents; she certainly was not going to tell Barbara. Sometimes, Joan felt as if the words were in her throat, desperate to leap out of her mouth. But she held them back.

No matter how easy it was for Joan to lose herself in this new life, she was constantly aware of the cold, hard borders of it. The world would not care for her and Vanessa as they cared for each other.

It wouldn’t matter how pure the warmth in her chest felt. It wouldn’t matter that Joan had loved and accepted so many others. There were people—many people—who would never return that kindness.

It was too early, in all of this, to know what the future held. But what Joan understood already was that what they had together was a lit candle, and the wind could be fierce.

“AreyouCatholic?” Joan asked.

Vanessa turned over onto her back and pulled the sheets up over them both. “I no longer believe in God,” she said. “If that’s what you mean.”

Joan grabbed Vanessa’s hand and started playing with her fingers, grazing her own through the gaps in Vanessa’s. She saw that Vanessa had a hangnail on her right middle finger, the skin reddening.

Joan thought of all the people she believed she had known well in her life. Her family, her old friends back in college, Donna and Griff. She would have said she knew everything about them. But it was only now, vulnerable in the intimacy of the middle of the night, that things turned granular. It was only now, in the quiet of this moment, that Joan’s eyes could see the redness around Vanessa’s cuticle.

“You don’t believe in any god at all, or just the Catholic God?” Joan asked.

“The Catholic one is the only one I know. And I will fight against it until the day I die.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean…sometimes my mother and I go months without speaking to each other because I refuse to go to Mass, and she refuses to drop it.”

“Months?”

“One time it was a year.”

Joan’s eyes went wide.

“She says I’m stubborn,” Vanessa said. “But it’s…it’s hard to pick up the phone sometimes when I’m mad. And that doesn’t come from nowhere—I got it from her.”

“Don’t you miss her? When you aren’t talking?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then why not just go to Mass when you visit her and ignore what they say?”

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