The Text from Salt Lake

"You can learn the thing that changes everything from the person who doesn't know they're the one telling you."

I woke at five past six with the particular hollow disorientation of someone who had slept through something. The house was too quiet. Or it was too loud and I was only picking up the edges of it. Or I had been dreaming about the vet and the dream was still louder in my head than whatever was actually happening. I lay on my back in the dark and listened, and the listening confirmed only that the hollow in my chest belonged to the bed at the foot of the mattress, which was empty in the specific shape of a Border Collie who was not in it.

The clock on the bedside told me it was ten past six in tired red digits. I reached for my phone. No missed calls. No texts. No messages from the clinic. Sophie had said she would ring if anything changed, and Sophie had not rung, which I had to keep reminding myself was the good kind of silence rather than the ominous kind.

I put the phone down and sat up, cataloguing across the separate systems of the body the aches from the day before. The shoulder from the carry. The arm under the dressing, which felt stiff but not wet. The neck from sleeping in a posture my body had decided was the one it was going to give me that night. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat for a moment with my bare feet on the cold tile.

The thing I was hearing — now that I was upright and paying attention — was voices. One voice. My father's. Coming, muffled, from the direction of his study at the front of the house.

He was up early. That was not unusual for Dad. Dad was up early most days, the way I was up early most days, an inheritance he had passed to me through the mechanism of having been the only parent who ever got me out of bed on weekends as a child. What was slightly less usual was that he was talking. I strained for a moment to work out who he might be talking to, and then the specific register of his voice came into focus: the over-clear, slightly raised cadence he only ever used to a screen.

Skype.

I was up and in the hallway before I had entirely worked out why I was moving. Skype at six-ten in the morning meant Salt Lake — the only part of the family awake at this hour, where it was still mid-afternoon the day before. Skype at six-ten in the morning meant Lisa, and Lisa meant possibly Eli too, and Eli I had not properly spoken to in about three weeks.

I pulled on a jumper over my T-shirt as I walked, and went down the hallway in bare feet.

The study door was ajar. I could hear Lisa's voice coming through the laptop speakers — cheerful, scattered, recognisably hers — and Will's voice in the background saying something about the trunk of the car. Camping, I thought, and my heart fell slightly.

I made it to the doorway as Dad was saying "Of course, Eli. Help your sister, and we'll talk more when you're free. Love you."

"Hold up," I said. Too loud. My hand came up against the doorframe to steady me as I nearly tripped over the edge of the rug.

Dad turned. His face had the particular still quality that I recognised as his disappointed-for-you face — the one he used when something small had gone wrong and he was waiting to see how I was going to handle it.

"They're gone, mate."

"Call them back."

He didn't reach for the laptop. He just looked at me. His eyes had the slight glassiness of a man who had been up for a while.

"What is it?" I asked, because his stillness was not the stillness I had expected. I had expected a quick no-they-had-to-go, but his was a heavier no, a no that was holding something.

"They're busy packing to go on this camping trip of theirs."

"Of course." I rubbed a hand across my face. The sleep was going but slowly. "I forgot all about that."

I stood in the doorway for a moment longer than I needed to. The room was the room it always was — Dad's little study in the middle of the house, the bookshelf of faith-and-finance paperbacks on the left, the filing cabinet on the right, the desk facing the window where he could see the side fence. Nothing in it was different from yesterday. Dad was in his dressing gown. The laptop was on the desk and the screen had fallen back to the Skype client with a dead call at the top of the list and a small blue camera icon that I would not be clicking.

"Where are they going again?"

Dad looked at me for a beat longer than the question needed. It felt like the opening of a conversation whose shape I could not see the end of.

"I don't remember," he said.

That was not right. Dad always remembered these things. Dad was the man who remembered everyone's flight numbers and ward callings and the birthdays of his grandchildren by year. Dad not remembering where Lisa and Eli were going camping was the first thing I had registered all morning that was actually wrong, as distinct from merely missing, and I filed it without quite knowing what to do with it.

"I'll message Eli later," I said, and my hand waved in the vague dismissive shape I used when I was trying to get out of a conversation before it got heavier.

I had half-turned to go when Dad said my name.

"Jerome."

It was not urgent. It was gentler than urgent. He had been about to say something else — I was fairly sure of it — and this was the thing he'd said instead. I turned back.

"Yeah?"

He parted his lips. Something was in them. He reached for it and did not find it, and what came out instead was a smaller version of what he had been going to say.

"How's Millie?"

"I've not heard yet." The answer was already standing by in me like a card I had been holding. "I'll contact the vet later this morning and see when I can collect her."

Dad nodded. The nod was too slow. "I'm sure she'll be fine. Mum's been praying for her."

I let out a small laugh. It surprised me that it came out. "And apparently all the Sisters in the Ward too."

Dad laughed too, a real one, and the tension in his shoulders softened for one specific second and then came back. For that second his face was the face I knew, unaltered. I saw him. And then whatever he had been holding came back, and it sat again behind his eyes, and he was not hiding it but he was not offering it either.

"Dad—"

I stopped.

I had no idea what I had been going to say. The word had come out of my mouth on the momentum of the second I had just seen, the second of him being entirely himself without whatever it was, and I had wanted to hold that second longer, and I had reached for a way to hold it, and the reaching had produced the word Dad and nothing after it.

He looked at me. Waiting.

"Nothing," I said.

"Alright, mate."

I went.

My bedroom felt smaller than it had when I had left it. I sat on the end of the bed in the cold patch at the foot of it and opened Skype on my phone and called Eli. Three rings. Four rings. Voicemail. I didn't leave a message. I thumbed over to the messages app and typed.

Jerome: Sorry mate just missed you. Have a good trip.

I sent it and then sat with the phone in my hands, looking at it.

My phone buzzed in my hand.

Eli: Sorry couldn't answer your call. We're leaving soon.

I stared at the screen.

Jerome: Yeah. I forgot about your camping trip.

Eli: We'll be without electronic devices for a few days. Is anything urgent?

I looked at that message for quite a long time.

The honest answer was I don't know. The honest answer was probably yes. The honest answer was Dad has a face on this morning and I think something has happened and I don't know what, and the problem with typing that into a little green bubble to send to my brother on the other side of the Pacific was that my brother was about to go into a slot canyon for three days and I would be giving him a thing he could not do anything about.

I typed around it. I deleted what I typed. I typed again.

Jerome: Has Dad told you any big news lately?

I watched the screen. The three dots appeared. Went away. Appeared again. Went away. Then, from the front of the house, Charles's "I'm off!" in his louder-than-necessary morning voice, and the front door banging shut behind him. And then the dots came back on my phone.

Eli: He said that you're all moving to Salt Lake City soon.

I read it. I read it again. I read it a third time.

I sat on the end of the bed with the phone in my hand and my legs gone cold under me and the very small, very specific feeling of a thing clicking into place in the wrong way. Salt Lake City. Moving to Salt Lake City.

The call from the temple.

Mum's words last night — the call we received in the Temple — had been, I had thought, a calling. Some ward role. Some stake thing. I had understood call the way I understood call in the context of the church, which was as a word for an assignment. What Eli was telling me was that call in this context meant call to Salt Lake City. Mum and Dad had been told — or had been asked — or had felt that God had told them — to move the family to the United States.

And the word divine, which I had let sit on the kitchen bench last night without knowing what to do with, suddenly had a shape, because divine was the word people like my parents used when they believed a thing had not come from a person but from a place higher up.

I thought of my own mission that I had been quietly not deciding about. I thought of my arm. I thought of Millie at the vet. I thought of the fact that we had a house, a street, a life, and a mortgage, and that none of those things moved to Salt Lake City without a great deal of violence being done to them. I thought of Charles, who was sixteen and in Year Eleven. I thought of the chapters I had been writing on my thesis draft last night. I thought of the Haven.

I thought, without being able to stop myself, of what it was going to do to Millie.

Eli: Everything okay?

I looked at the message and I could not send him what was real. He was about to go into a canyon for three days and what he needed from me was the version that would let him go. I could come back to this with him when he came out. There was nothing he could do about it today. Today was not the problem.

Jerome: Yeah. Talk to you when you get back from your camping trip. Stay safe.

The thumbs-up came about four seconds later. I watched it arrive. I set the phone on the bed beside me.

I sat there for what might have been a minute or five. The house had returned to its morning sounds — the distant hum of the kitchen fan, the faint clink of cutlery being put away, the fridge cycling on. Mum, by the sound of it, was in the kitchen. Making breakfast, or pretending to, or having another round of a conversation with herself that she was losing.

What I could not fit into my head was the scale. Not the plan. I could vaguely picture the plan — the sale of the house, the visas, the flight, the whole shape of an international uprooting — but the plan had edges I could at least describe. What I could not fit was the scale of why. Dad was not a man who made decisions on the strength of a feeling. Dad was a man who made decisions on the strength of an engine on a hoist that was either running or not running, and the two feet of workshop paperwork on the desk in his study, and the three vintage jobs currently booked out against November that had deposits against them. I could not fit into my head the Dad I knew agreeing to walk away from those things on the basis of a single meeting in a temple. Mum, maybe. Mum was possible. Mum had always carried a different kind of faith from Dad's — the kind that described the world as moving and asked her to move with it. Mum hearing a thing at the temple and believing it entirely was not, in itself, anything new. The new thing was Dad.

I could not fit divine into Dad's face this morning. I could fit worried, possibly. I could fit decided. I could not fit called.

There would be a conversation. Probably this week. Probably soon. Probably one where Dad sat me down in this study and explained, in the measured way he had, that certain decisions had been made, and that I was going to be asked to join the family in making them. Probably one where he asked me specifically about my mission. Probably one where I would have to say something truthful about my mission that I had not yet said out loud.

I did not think I was ready for that conversation this morning.

I lay back on the bed, across the width of it, my feet dangling over the far edge, and put my forearm over my eyes. The arm under the dressing was not the one I had put over my face — I had remembered that much. I breathed.

A knock at the front door.

I lifted my head. Nobody knocked at our door at six thirty-five in the morning. Charles had his own key.

Mum's voice, from the kitchen: "Is it Charles?"

Dad's voice, from somewhere closer, down the hall: "I'll get it."

I pulled my legs off the bed and sat forward, my hand still on the phone.

The door opened.

"Luke!"

I stood up.

Mum, from the kitchen: "Luke?" — and then her footsteps running down the hallway.

I pulled tracksuit pants on over the shorts I'd slept in and opened my bedroom door.

Down the hallway, the study door was closing. Luke's back — canvas jacket, longer hair than I remembered — and Dad's arm reaching past him to pull the door to.

The latch clicked.

I took a step into the hallway. Stopped.

From the kitchen, off to the right of the hallway's midpoint, came the sound of Mum — a cupboard door shutting harder than it needed to, the huff of a woman who had just been excluded from something in her own house.

I stepped back into my room and closed the door.

My phone was still in my pocket. I took it out. Eli's thumbs-up sat where it had been — the one thing in the morning that had not moved — and I put it back on the mattress.

Salt Lake City. Luke at the front door. Dad not remembering where his children were going camping. Mum running in her pyjamas down a hallway toward a son she had not seen in close to two years. The whole architecture of the morning had acquired, in the last several minutes, a shape I had not been ready for, and the shape was still acquiring pieces.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the empty patch at the foot of it where Millie would have been curled.

What the actual heck is going on, I thought, and for the first time since I had woken, I heard my own voice very clearly in my head.