The Prayer He Answers

The others wanted my body and my labor and my obedience. He wanted the last thing, the one under all of that, the thing that had kept me a person while they took everything a person has. He wanted my God. And he did not go at it with mockery, which I could have stood, or with rage, which I could have prayed against. He went at it with patience and with what looked, if you did not know better, like care.

He had me pray. That was his cruelty, the exact shape of it. He did not stop me praying, the way the others might have. He asked me to. Pray, florecita, he would say, go on, I will wait. And I would, because praying was the one thing I had left and I was not going to be talked out of it, and he would wait, quiet, respectful even, his hands folded, until I was done. And then he would ask me, gently, with no heat at all, the question. Did anyone come. Did He hear you. He would let the silence sit there, the silence after the prayer, the same silence as after the scream, and he would never say a word against God. He would just point at the quiet and let me look at it.

I know now what he was. I did not then. He was not a man who had never believed. He was a man who had believed, all the way, the way I did, and had prayed for something that mattered to him more than his own life, and had gotten the same silence he was now showing me, and had decided the silence was the truth and everything else was a story people tell so they do not have to hear it. He thought he was being kind. That is the thing I have had the most years to sit with, and it is still the hardest. He thought he was doing me a mercy, taking the lie away early, before it could cost me more than it had already cost him. He had made his own ruin into a doctrine and become a missionary for it, and I was his congregation of one. Everything he did to me he did as a service. That is not me forgiving him. It is me telling you the truth of him, which is worse than if he had been a monster, because a monster you can hate clean.

And it worked, some. I will not pretend it did not. The question got into me. Did anyone come. He was right that no one had. He was right about the silence, the silence was real, and I was not going to lie to myself that I had heard a voice when I had not. What he was wrong about was what the silence meant, and that was the only ground I had left to stand on, and it was so thin. I could not prove him wrong. I could not point to one answered prayer, one rescue, one sign. All I had was a decision, made in the dark, with no evidence, that the silence was not the same thing as absence. He had his silence and I had my decision, and on the scale they weighed almost exactly the same, and some nights his side went down.

My faith did not fall. It went further in. Each time he pointed at the quiet I took my belief one room deeper inside myself, behind one more door, where his patient voice could not follow. I stopped being able to say, even to myself, what I believed or why. It was past words by then. It was a hand closed in the dark and a refusal with nothing under it but itself. My voice was nearly gone in those days, worn to a whisper from the night I screamed myself raw, and maybe that was fitting, maybe the faith and the voice went underground together because they were the same thing, the part of me that still insisted on speaking to Someone whether or not Someone answered. He had my body. He was working on my soul with the patience of a man who had all the time in the world. He did not get it. But I want you to know how close it was, and that the closeness was the whole point of him, and that he did all of it while telling me he was setting me free.