Something Much Bigger

"You can be in the same house as the people you love and still be the loneliest you've been all day."

The respawn timer on the screen was sitting at fourteen seconds and I was watching it without really watching it. My left hand was on the WASD. My right was on the mouse. The headphones were the good pair, the ones I had saved up for in second year, and they were cupped over my ears with the snug pressure I had chosen them for. The game's ambient soundtrack was playing in that particular low-key way that League's soundtrack played when nothing urgent was happening on the map — a minor-key hum, faintly ominous, designed to keep you alert without stressing you.

I had been playing for about forty minutes. I was not playing well. I was on a ranked solo queue because the duo queue had felt too much like social commitment and I had wanted the flat impersonal rhythm of playing with four strangers, and the match had not gone well for our side. We were down two turrets and a dragon. The top-laner on our team had gone AFK fifteen minutes in and had not come back. I was playing support and was carrying one of the heaviest warding burdens I had played in weeks, and was bad at it, because my head was not in the match.

My head was at the clinic. It had been at the clinic since I had closed my bedroom door behind me and sat on the end of my bed and stared at the empty space where Millie usually settled herself. I had done that for about ten minutes. Then I had done a sequence of small necessary things — checked the dressing on my arm, which had seeped faintly through the gauze and was probably due for a re-wrap; splashed water on my face; drunk a glass of water; stared at the assignment on the laptop for about two minutes before deciding I was not in any state to write about canine behavioural ethology tonight, of all nights; closed the assignment; and launched the game instead.

The respawn ticked over. I moved the camera to the bottom lane where I was meant to be escorting the carry, and the carry was already half-dead because I had not been there, and I pinged an apology that nobody was going to acknowledge and started the walk back.

It was through the walk back that the first of it came through the headphones.

Not the words. The pitch. A raised note of my mother's voice, carrying through the wall of my bedroom and through the ambient game audio, loud enough that I registered it as her voice rather than any other woman's, but not loud enough to resolve into meaning. It was the particular register Mum used when something had snapped in her that had been wound for a while. I had not heard that register for — I could not remember how long. A while.

I paused on the map. Let the carry die. Lifted one side of the headphones off my ear.

"— can't believe you're so careless, Charles! Can't you do anything right?"

The wall between my bedroom and the living room was not particularly thick. I could hear, now that the headphones were off one side, the particular acoustics of the living room — Charles's chair at the family computer scraping slightly as he turned, the small metallic ting of a fork landing wrong on a plate, the television somewhere playing at a volume that should have been sufficient to cover small domestic noises and tonight was not.

Charles's voice came back, defensive and slightly high. "Seriously, Mum? It's just us for dinner. What's the big deal?"

I held very still.

The big deal, I thought — knowing nothing about the afternoon, not having seen Mum's face since I had left for the vet — was presumably the table. Charles had been set the job of laying it. He did a bad job of things he did not want to do, and tonight he had evidently not wanted to do this, and Mum had evidently found the evidence on arrival. I could picture the table as specifically as if I had seen it. Forks in slightly wrong positions. Napkins not folded. A knife the wrong way around. The crimes of a sixteen-year-old dragged off a computer.

Mum's voice came back harder.

"The big deal is that you never pay attention. I asked you to set the table properly, and what do I find? Utensils all over the place, not a single napkin folded properly. It's like living with a teenager who can't be bothered."

I had heard this speech, in some version, across seventeen years of being her son. The specifics cycled — chores, homework, the unmade bed, the damp towels on the bedroom carpet. The structure was always the same. The accusation of carelessness, generalised outward from the specific infraction. You never pay attention. You can't be bothered. Statements of pattern rather than moment.

But the register underneath the words was wrong tonight.

Mum's irritations usually had a kind of tired weariness to them — the exasperation of a woman who had made the same observation eight hundred times and was tired of making it. What was in her voice tonight was something else. The pitch was higher. The edge was sharper. She was not tired. She was — the word that arrived in my head was strained, and the moment I had the word, I could not unhave it.

Something was off.

I had half-registered it when I had come in earlier. The pantry had been laid out on the bench when I had come back through from the car, and she had been moving through the reorganisation with a particular absorbed energy that I had put down to her processing whatever she had been processing across Monday and this morning. I had not pressed. I had told her Millie was staying overnight and she had nodded and offered tea, and I had taken the tea and left her to the pantry, and the afternoon had moved on.

But the register in her voice now suggested whatever she had been working through at the pantry had not resolved.

Charles's voice came back again, and I heard the particular wheedling edge he used when he felt accused and wanted to deflect. "Mum, seriously? You're making a big deal out of nothing."

I closed my eyes. Oh, Charles. Not tonight.

I did not — at any point in those thirty seconds of listening — consider going out and intervening. That was not the shape of how our house worked when Mum was this particular kind of upset. Dad would handle it, if it needed handling. My job, as the son who was not involved in the argument, was to stay out of the line of fire and let it burn itself down.

But the thing was — this one did not feel like it was going to burn itself down.

Mum's voice rose.

"No, Charles, I'm not making a big deal out of this. I'm making a big deal out of everything. Can't you see that we're on the brink of something monumental, and all you care about is arguing over the table setting?"

I stopped the game.

Not the match — I was still technically alive in the game, respawned and walking back — but I stopped paying attention to the game. The sound of the ambient score continued to play in my one still-covered ear and I did not notice. I was listening.

On the brink of something monumental.

The phrase sat on the floor of my bedroom like something that had been set down there and left. It was not a phrase Mum used. Mum used phrases like for goodness' sake and I asked you nicely and we don't do that in this house. She did not use monumental. She did not use on the brink. Those were the words of a woman who was speaking from a register further up the scale than the table-setting scale — a register in which she had, for some reason, been thinking about something large enough to have given her the vocabulary for it.

Charles, on the other side of the wall, had gone quiet.

Then I heard his voice again, softer and more genuinely puzzled than before. "What are you talking about, Mum? You've been acting weird all day."

There was a pause. A long one.

Mum's reply came in a voice that was not the voice she had started the argument with. It was lower. Tighter. Measured in a way that suggested she was choosing each word against something larger that she would not let herself say.

"I'm talking about something much bigger than the table setting, Charles."

Another pause.

"But, of course, you wouldn't understand."

I sat on the bed with one side of the headphones off and the game forgotten and my mother's last sentence sitting in the air of my room.

Something much bigger than the table setting.

It was the word bigger that had done something to me. Bigger than what. Bigger than Charles's carelessness, obviously — we were past that. But bigger in the sense she meant it was reaching past the table entirely, reaching past the evening, reaching for something that had a size to it in her head that I did not have any access to.

Was it something Dad had told her. Something from the ward. Something the bishop had said. A calling she had been asked to accept. A calling Dad had been asked to accept. Something about Paul — God, something about Paul. Paul had not returned Mum's calls in days. The monumental thing was possibly Paul. Paul was possibly not well. Paul was possibly in some trouble that Mum knew about and had not told us.

I did not know.

I sat with the headphones off for another moment and then put them back on.

The game was still going. The carry had died twice more in my absence. Top lane was still AFK. We had lost another turret. I pinged an apology for nothing in particular, rotated down to the bottom lane, and played the last fifteen minutes of the match with the flat absence of a player whose body was at the desk and whose head was not. We lost. The defeat screen came up with the usual chime. I left the client open, went back to the lobby, and stared at the queue button for a while without clicking it.

My stomach made a sound I could not ignore.

I had not eaten properly all day. The muesli in the morning, the cashews in the vet's car park, the Marie biscuit with Mum's tea. Nothing else. I was hungry in the particular hollow way of a body that had run through a bad afternoon on nuts and adrenaline and was now, finally, past both.

I took the headphones off and set them on the desk. I stood up. The house around me had the muffled evening quiet of a family settled into its corners. The television was not on. Nobody was calling me to dinner.

The hallway was dim. The kitchen light was on. I came around the corner into the kitchen with the mild expectation of finding it empty, and heard —

— my father's voice.

Low. From the dining room. Not the voice he used when he was saying something ordinary.

"What's going on, Greta?"

I stopped.

One step inside the kitchen.

I should have announced myself. Made a noise. Cleared my throat. Walked into the dining room and said hey, I'm going to grab food, and taken my plate to my room, and let my parents have whatever conversation they had been about to have without a nearly-twenty-two-year-old standing in the kitchen pretending he could not hear.

I did not do that.

I stood very still in the kitchen with one foot still closer to the hallway than to the bench, and I listened.

Mum's voice came back, and the first thing I registered was that it was not the voice she had used in the argument. The sharpness was gone. What was there instead was thinner, rawer, and the thinness of it was worse than the sharpness had been.

"Noah, it's just…"

A pause.

"The call we received in the Temple. It's tearing at me — tearing at us."

I did not move.

The call we received in the Temple.

A calling. A church calling received at the temple — which was how those things sometimes went for people like my parents. It would make sense of the afternoon. The pantry. The edge in her voice. She had been asked to take on something large, and had not yet worked out whether she could do it.

A calling, then. Of course. That made sense of a lot.

I took one step toward the bench — slowly, carefully, not so much tiptoeing as walking the way you walk when you have made the decision to not be noticed. I picked up a plate from the stack. The plate made the smallest sound I have ever heard a plate make. I carried it to the pots.

Mum's voice continued.

"Noah, Luke has been gone for years. We've known, haven't we? Deep down, we've known that his choices led him away from the Church. And now, with this call to gather, it's not just an ache anymore. It's real. It's a line drawn. A dividing line."

Luke.

This call to gather.

I eased the lid off the rice cooker and the steam came up. I spooned rice onto the plate with the serving spoon we always used, moving slowly, laying the rice down rather than scooping and dropping.

"What if we don't have our family complete in the eternities?"

The spoon paused.

The temple sealing. The doctrine of eternal family. Mum had talked about eternal family across my whole growing-up in the abstract, scripturally, the way we all had. She had never talked about it in this voice. This was not abstract. This was a woman who had been given reason — concrete reason, from somewhere, today or this week — to think the doctrine might not hold for our family.

Luke. Who had left the church over a decade ago, moved to Hobart, stopped going to sacrament meeting, stopped writing the kind of email that had anything spiritual in it. Mum's grief about Luke had been an ongoing thing, softly visible around the edges of her for years. This was not the ongoing version of that grief. This was the version where something had added to it — something she had heard, or been told, or been shown, that had taken the abstract ache of Luke's absence and turned it into a specific fear about the shape of our family forever.

A call to gather.

I did not know what a call to gather was. It was not a phrase from the Sunday School I had gone to or the seminary I had gone through. It was a phrase from somewhere else in the church — somewhere more serious, more private. A priesthood thing, maybe. A ward-level thing. Something the bishop had said. I did not know.

Dad's voice came through, low and steady.

"Greta, we can't control the choices our children make. All we can do is love them, guide them, and hope that the seeds of faith we planted will someday bear fruit."

I moved to the casserole pot. Lifted the lid. Began to spoon the reheated casserole onto the rice. The serving spoon made a small scrape against the edge of the pot, and I flinched, and nobody in the dining room reacted.

Mum: "But what if this tears our family apart, Noah? What if Luke's influence leads the others away too?"

I stopped spooning.

Leads the others away.

Something in my chest went still.

Mum was worried about the rest of us. Paul, who was not returning her calls. Eli, in Salt Lake City with Lisa. Me. She was worried about me. And here was the thing — the thing I could not let myself think about while standing at a bench with a plate in my hand pretending I was not there — she had reason to be worried about me. The decision I had been quietly not making about my own mission was the exact shape of her fear. And she did not know about that yet. She was afraid of a thing I had not yet told her was already true.

My hand was on the serving spoon and I did not know how long I had been standing with it not moving.

Dad: "We've always faced uncertainties as parents. But our love, Greta — our commitment to the gospel — those have never wavered. We can't predict what comes next, but we can trust the foundation we've laid."

There was a pause.

Then Mum, in a voice that was barely a whisper and that I almost did not catch:

"Noah, I've been so sick with worry."

A chair moved. I heard my father stand up.

"The fear, the uncertainty — it's been overwhelming. And now, this… this divine call to gather. I'm terrified Paul won't be Temple worthy. That something's wrong. That he's out there and not responding because he can't. What if… what if our family — our eternal family — is already slipping away from us, and we're just too late to stop it?"

Divine call to gather.

The word divine sat in the kitchen around me.

Divine was not a word Mum used casually. Divine was a word she used when she meant it — when she was talking about scripture or about a specific intervention of heaven into someone's life. Divine sat in a different register from calling, from assignment, from stake directive. Divine meant that whatever had happened at the temple, my mother believed it had come directly from God.

I was out of my depth.

I did not have the framework for any of this. I had been drifting from the serious vocabulary of the church for longer than I had let myself name, and the language my mother was now using at the table twelve feet away was language I had stopped keeping up with. I could catch the words. I could not quite make them mean what they meant to her.

But I could hear the shape.

Something had happened at the temple. My mother believed it was from God. It involved a gathering. It involved Luke, who was outside. It involved Paul, who was possibly outside. And she had been holding it, whatever it was, for two days, and was only now letting my father hear her say it.

I heard the soft compression of an embrace.

That was my window.

I picked up the plate. I picked up a fork from the cutlery drawer — I had set one aside earlier without noticing — and I walked the length of the bench, around the end, and out of the kitchen back into the hallway. My parents did not see me go. They were in the embrace. I heard, as I moved, my mother's voice muffled into my father's shoulder — I'm scared, Noah. I'm scared of what this means for us — and I did not stop to listen to the rest.

The door of my bedroom was closed because I had closed it. I opened it. I went in. I closed it behind me with the particular quiet care of a man who had been doing a lot of quiet careful closing of doors today.

My bed was where I had left it. The laptop was still open on my desk with the League client on it, a friend notification blinking in the corner that I was not going to read. The space at the foot of the bed was still empty in the particular shape Millie's sleeping body always took when she was there.

I sat down on the bed.

I looked at the plate on my lap. Rice and casserole and the edge of a bit of carrot that had not quite reheated through. I had put too much on it. I was not going to eat most of it. I picked up the fork and I speared a piece of casserole and I put it in my mouth and chewed without tasting it.

I thought, chewing, about Mum in my father's arms out there. I thought about a divine call to gather. I thought about Paul, who had not returned her calls. I thought about Millie on the vet-bed with the tartan blanket and the drip and Sophie coming in every two hours through the night to check. I thought about my arm under the gauze. I thought about the cursor still blinking on the assignment I was not going to write tonight. I thought about Charles at the family PC.

I set the fork down on the plate.

I picked it up again.

I picked at the rice.