“Yes,” I said. And I did. I kissed her softly and then sweetly. And then I kissed her again. And again, over and over, for several long minutes, until our lips were sore and I knew I should stop, but found myself sinking in again, licking between her smooth teeth and sliding my tongue against hers because the friction felt so good, and her flavor lit a fire in the pit of my stomach.
“I don’t want to leave,” I said again. I didn’t know if I would ever be ready.
MILLIE TRIED TO take me to church again, but I had a surprise for her. We lived in a city that boasted one of the most famed choirs in the world, and we were going to hear them sing. I twisted some arms and made some calls and got permission to sit in on a rehearsal. I didn’t want to share the experience with a crowd, and Millie would be completely surprised if I just led her in, right down to the front row of the tabernacle, and sat her down. If there was a crowd she would be expecting a performance. No crowd, and the surprise would be complete.
She was excited, her cheeks pink and her smile wide, and she held onto me, squeezing my arm like an anxious child.
“Are we in a church?” she whispered theatrically.
“Kind of.”
“It doesn’t feel like there are lots of people here. Are there other people here?”
“Kind of.”
Her eyebrows rose and she pinched my arm. “How can there ‘kind of’ be other people here? Either there are or there aren’t.”
“There are other people here . . . but they aren’t attending church.”
“Okaaaay,” Millie said doubtfully, but I could tell she was dancing in her skin.
The entire back wall was a pipe organ, something I’d never seen before, and when the organist began to play, I felt the vibrations in my back teeth and the hair stood up on my neck. Millie gasped beside me and I reached for her hand and closed my eyes so that I could experience it the way she was experiencing it. Then the choir started to sing. A wall of sound washed over us, taking us both by surprise, the power and precision seeping into our pores and spilling down our spines, sinking into the soles of our feet.
I forgot my goal to keep my eyes closed and found myself staring at Millie instead, who had lifted her chin and was basking in the sound as if it were sunlight warming her skin. Her eyes were closed and her lips were parted, and she looked as if she were waiting for a kiss. It was an Easter hymn, the choir proclaiming joyfully that He had risen, followed by jubilant hallelujahs in triumphant harmony.
“That’s what heaven sounds like. Don’t you think?” Millie breathed, but I stayed silent, not wanting to ruin the moment with my own opinions about what heaven sounded like. In my limited experience, heaven was silence, a silence so pervasive and complete that it had mass. It had weight. And in that silence there was sadness and guilt, regret and remorse, and loss. Loss of what could have been, loss of what never would be, loss of love, loss of life, loss of choice. I’d felt all those things when I’d swallowed that bottle of aspirin and slit my wrists for good measure. I’d lost consciousness only to become more conscious, more aware. And the silence had been deafening. It wasn’t dark. It was light. So light you had no choice but to see yourself, all of yourself. I hadn’t liked it.
Though I’d wailed and protested being yanked back to the ground, yanked out of heaven—or hell, whatever it was—I’d been grateful too. And my gratitude had filled me with guilt. It wasn’t until I’d met Moses that heaven had become something different. Moses saw people, people who had died and gone on. Heaven wasn’t silent for Moses. It was filled with memories and moments, filled with color. He brought the dead back to life. He painted them. Moses hadn’t wanted to see any of it, but he didn’t have a choice. He had to come to terms with it. And as he had, I had gone along, persistent in my devotion, if only because Moses saw a sister I would never see again, and Moses had answers nobody else did. Even if those answers sometimes made death more alluring. At least death wasn’t the end. Of that, I was sure.
Maybe for Millie, heaven was a place that sounded like angelic choirs and pipe organs, because that was where she felt alive. It was all about sound for Millie, not sight. Not colors, like it was for Moses. But for me, heaven would be something else. It would sound like the bell at the beginning of a round, it would taste like adrenaline, it would burn like sweat in my eyes and fire in my belly. It would look like screaming crowds and an opponent who wanted my blood. For me, heaven was the octagon.
“You know my fight against Santos is Tuesday night. Right?” Talking about this now, while we still sat in the tabernacle, wasn’t probably the best time. The hairs on my arm had been standing at full attention for the last half hour while we listened to one song after another. The choir was singing “Beautiful Savior,” and I was looking down at Millie’s face, thinking what a beautiful savior she’d turned out to be. If heaven was the octagon then Millie was my angel at the center of it all. The girl with the power to take me down and lift me up again. The girl I wanted to fight for, the girl I wanted to claim.
“Yes?” Her lips were turned into my ear so our conversation wouldn’t interrupt the rehearsal taking place. I didn’t answer immediately, waiting as the stirring rendition came to a close. The director waved the organ and the choir into silence, and I grabbed Millie’s hand and we slipped out the way we’d come, mouthing a thank you toward the friend in the Tabernacle Choir who had made it happen. He gave me a wink and a thumbs up, and Millie clung to my arm until we were out in the open sunshine. She loosened her grip and tipped her face up, soaking in the warmth and giving me a perfect view of her lovely throat.