Making Faces

by Amy Harmon

“Everybody is a main character to someone,” Bailey theorized, winding his way through the busy hall and out the nearest exit into the November afternoon. “There are no minor characters.

If God makes all our faces, did he laugh when he made me? Does he make the legs that cannot walk and eyes that cannot see?

“He’s old enough to know better. Age isn’t an excuse. Eighteen-year-old kids are considered old enough to fight for their country. Fight and die for their country. So a twenty-five-year-old piece of shit like Becker can’t hide behind that excuse.”

Jesse got wasted the night before we left for basic training and got Marley pregnant. Jesse never met his baby boy. I really should go see Marley, but I can’t. Grant was the only one who seemed to take it all seriously. He told me he never prayed so hard as he prayed the night before we left for Iraq. And that kid was always praying. Which is why I don’t ever pray anymore. ‘Cause if Grant prayed that hard and still died, then I’m not wasting my time.”

“You think God saved my life?” Ambrose struck back, his face incredulous. “How in the hell do you think that makes Paul Kimball’s mother feel? Or Grant’s parents? Or Jesse’s girl, or his baby boy, when he’s old enough to realize he had a daddy who he’ll never meet? We know how Luisa O’Toole feels about it. If God saved my life, why didn’t he save their lives? Is my life so much more valuable? So I’m special . . . and they’re not?”

“Don’t you get it, Fern? It’s so much easier to take if God had nothing to do with it. If God has nothing to do with it, then I can accept that it’s just life. Nobody is special, but nobody isn’t special, either. You know what I mean? I can come to terms with that. But I can’t accept that your prayers are answered and theirs aren’t. That makes me angry and hopeless—desperate even! And I can’t live that way.”

“I guess it means we don’t understand everything, and we’re not going to. Maybe the whys aren’t answered here. Not because there aren’t answers, but because we wouldn’t understand the answers if we had them.”

“I’ve seen those books you read. The ones with the girls on the front with their boobs falling out and the guys with the torn shirts. You read smutty romance novels and quote scripture. I’m not quite sure I have you figured out.”

“I was heartbroken for the others . . . especially Paulie. But all I could think about was you. We didn’t know immediately what had happened to you. I promised myself that if you came home, I wouldn’t be afraid to tell you how I felt. But I’m still afraid. Because I can’t make you love me back.”

Why do terrible things happen to such good people?” Ambrose asked. “Because terrible things happen to everyone, Brosey. We’re all just so caught up in our own crap that we don’t see the shit everyone else is wading through.”

“And so we endure. We have faith that there is purpose. We hope for things we can’t see. We believe that there are lessons in loss, power in love, and that we have within us the potential for a beauty so magnificent that our bodies can’t contain it.”