I don’t remember the exact moment she said it to me on the way back from San Juan, the exact town we were passing through or the highway mile marker assigning a number to each minute. Just her words, inside the little car barreling its way through the cold day.
     "Do you think it helped her?" I asked, hugging myself behind the constriction of the seat belt.
     Gina didn’t say anything. She kept driving, fixated on the flat expanse of road.
     "Gina?"
     "You mean if it healed her?" she asked.
     "Yeah."
     A few empty seconds as the mile markers counted down.
     "I don’t know if it healed her, to be honest," Gina said. "But I think it healed me a little."

* * *

     Campus bookstore. I’m standing in the reference section as a few stragglers with late finals come in, trying to sell off their last remaining books for pennies on the dollars they paid three months ago.
     I pull out a compact edition of the Bible, holding it in my hands as if it were a mystery, unsure if it would even fit there. Maybe my hands would burn up and scald and the book would fly across the room, flaming, pronouncing the Demon Yi, scarring the wall with sulfur and smoke.
     The experience at the church in San Juan had made me curious, and by nature it’s only my own curiosity that I can’t escape. It nagged at me every time I passed those hypnotically obnoxious religious cable stations with the 800 number and the big-haired hosts. It nagged at me for different reasons when I drove by a church on Sunday and saw a couple running to their Just Married car, ready to trail cans and streamers behind them in an arc of matrimonial motoring.
     My hands didn’t catch fire and the book didn’t do a Telekinesis Twirl. I opened it to a random page near the middle. I tried to absorb the words, to find something of meaning in the passage. It was like Shakespeare – it didn’t quite roll off the tongue like I expected scripture to. It wasn’t exactly all "Do unto others…" And my grasp of Biblical terminology was as weak as my grasp of nautical terms. "Smiting" held about as much significance to me as "starboard bow."
     I put the book back, unsure why I’d really picked it up in the first place. Maybe it was a test. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the opposite of a flaming book damning me, maybe I thought there was a chance a bright beam would come down from the sky, envelop me in heavenly light, and make the words dance wisdom in my brain.
     Didn’t happen.
     I wanted to feel what I’d felt at the church again. That tingling serenity. That chill that you get as a child when someone shows you a magic trick or the first time you look into the eyes of someone you know you’re supposed to love. Immaculate comfort.
     I thought about what Gina had said. "I think it healed me a little."
     Not for the first time, I wondered why I couldn’t apply the salve. Why it’s so hard for me to embrace something that is so infinitely embraceable. Everyone needs a God right? So why can’t I find the right one?

* * *

     Gina went home, alone this time. She stayed for four days, which I think is the limit of her endurance, and then she returned to Austin.
     She came over, surprising me with bags of fruit she picked up from the Valley. They were huge lemons and oranges, bursting from the too-mild winter. Citrus crops were freezing in other parts of the country, but South Texas was getting along just fine and its fruit was as plump as ever.
     I cleaned out a pitcher and we made fresh lemonade, slicing the lemons and scooping out the thick pulp. It was tarter than the Kool-Aid I was used to, but it was an antidote to the gray day outside. Soursweet bursts of awakening and stringy bitter bits in every bite.
     We drank the stuff in front of the afternoon TV. I was flipping between mountains of daytime crap. Who told Howie Mandel he could have a talk show? Roseanne was there too, and Montel was hanging out with some bad mothers (literal bad mothers, not the motorcycle types).
     "We’re not dysfunctional enough," I told Gina. "We need to strip and have babies so we can be on TV."
     "Speak for yourself," Gina said. "I could get my own show now if I wanted one."
     "Oh yeah, I forgot," I said. "They’re making a soap opera of your life, right?"
     "Characters on soap operas have money. I’m broke."
     "You’d be the ingenue that they bring on to fall in love with the pretty rich boy. His parents don’t approve, but you end up eloping. You’d get married somewhere in Las Vegas or in a barn somewhere with some backroads priest farmer guy performing the ceremony."
     "Do you watch a lot of these?" Gina asked.
     "Your husband's sisters would hate you. They’d be all jealous because you’re new and everybody sees how nice you are. This is fiction, so you can be nice."
     "Hey!" Gina said. "Fuck you!"
     "And his mother hates you too because you’re not good enough for her perfect son."
     "Why is it all the women hate me? My life is all rags to bitches. Don’t the men hate me too?" Gina asked.
     "No, because they all want to sleep with you," I said, laughing.
     "Fine," Gina said, getting up and going to the kitchenette. "I’m getting more limonada."
     I joined her, putting more ice in my cup.
     "Gina," I said. "How’s your mom doing?"
     "I’m still praying," Gina said.
     I looked at the calendar on the wall. I’d waited until the last minute to book a flight out of Austin. My parents were paying half of the flight, and my hesitation had cost us each an extra hundred dollars. Tomorrow I’d be flying out. Gina would go home for Christmas.
     When I came back, things might be different. A week will have passed – time spent at home for both of us, apart and mostly out of communication. I was afraid to leave. I didn’t know what I’d miss when I was gone and I didn’t know what mood I’d find Gina in when I returned.
     My compulsion is always to pin things down, to define them, to keep time in a bottle and resist change.
     But time fixes that notion, quickly. And you can bang your head against it until you’re bloody or you can walk along the path and see where it takes you. I decided to let go, taking my own leap of faith this time that had less to do with God than with my own acceptance.
     Gina stayed a while longer. It wasn’t until I was ready to flip channels again, reaching for the remote on the table, that I noticed Gina had fallen asleep, her slender wrists wrapped around the couch’s throw pillow. She breathed deeply, her body absorbing all the air around her, as if it was fuel for her dreams.
     I let her sleep, the drone of the television providing its mindless audio comfort, as I went to my bedroom and packed for tomorrow’s trip.