Gina fell in love with Alma much in the same way she had fallen for Bobby: gradually, organically. And, like her love for Bobby, it had made a permanent imprint on her heart.
Bobby had been worried that she would be homesick, but Gina promised him she wasn’t. Her husband knew about her life in Utah, about her parents and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but he’d never really understood her past.
“Salt Lake City, the Church, my parents’ house… none of it felt like home.”
It was only when Calan was born that she felt the first pang of homesickness, a longing that made her want to be around not only the people, but the scents and shapes associated with her place of origin. She missed belonging to a tree with more branches.
She missed Alan.
Alan was Gina’s older brother by a decade and her favorite person in the world. Gina had cried hysterically when he left for college. She had been eight years old and vowed to go on a hunger strike if Alan didn’t visit her every single weekend. One year after Alan moved out of the house, her parents announced that he was no longer a part of their family. Gina, who had witnessed her parents and her brother arguing over matters of the Church several times, assumed that he had been excommunicated. She begged her parents to let her see Alan (“I don’t care that he isn’t LDS anymore, he’s my brother!”), but they were resolute. She broke into her parents’ drawers and found his address in New York City. She wrote him letters in secret, but he never wrote back—and for years she blamed herself for his silence.
Gina was twelve when she found out the truth: Alan had died of an AIDS-related infection when he was only nineteen years old. She had spent months writing letters to a dead man. She was only able to mourn the loss of her brother years after his passing.
It was then that she decided that, as soon as she was old enough, she’d leave her house and Salt Lake City for good. Her parents claimed his lifestyle had gotten him killed—the gay curse was what people still called the disease back in the early 90s—but Gina knew the real culprit: Mormon judgment.
Until she left her home, Gina’s only source of happiness was running track. When people praised her speed and asked what kept her motivated, she gave them the answer they wanted to hear: God. How could she have explained to them that running itself was her motivation? Not the competitive sport of running, but the hope that someday she’d be able to run away from her life and forge a new one. When she finally did, her parents told her never to contact them again.
Gina had considered naming her baby boy Alan, but that hadn’t felt right. Her brother had struggled with his identity ever since he was born, ever since he understood that he was different and, in their world, it meant he was a freak, a mistake, an aberration. It meant he would either have to suppress his true self or be shunned.
It came to her when she was in the hospital, lying on the single-framed metal bed. She was holding her newborn son, staring into his curious, open eyes, watching his nose twitch ever so slightly, admiring his yawn, mesmerized by the way he moved his tiny hands, and by the sounds he made. This is love, she thought. Nothing else could compare. It was the kind of love that made you believe in God, in a Higher Power, in something bigger than yourself. It was Life.
After leaving her parents’ house, Gina had spent one full year attempting to convince herself that she was an atheist, but that hadn’t worked. Gina believed in God as much as she believed in all things invisible, yet undeniable: air, love, energy. Even as a young girl, when she was feeling conflicted, she’d lie awake at night and ask God to speak to her. Her parents usually referred to God as Heavenly Father, but Gina called him by his name: Jesus Christ. Soon, she shortened it to Christ. “Christ, please show me the way,” she’d say. And then she’d repeat His name like a mantra, an incantation. “Christ, Christ, Christ…”
So when she held her baby boy in her arms and Bobby asked what she wanted to name him (he had been hoping to name him Backer, after his great-grandfather), Gina was reminded of those days, the days of searching for meaning, for truth. She hadn’t expected motherhood to be the answer to her prayers, but it was. She looked into her son’s round face and understood that he was love, he was life, and, in a way, he was God. We all were. Including Alan. We were all Christ. And so she combined their names, Christ and Alan.
“Calan,” Gina whispered to Bobby on the day their son was born. “His name is Calan.”
She never told people where she got the name. It became her secret, one she silently shared only with God and Alan. If Bobby or Nick noticed its origin—they are the only two people in her life who know about Alan and who know that her parents aren’t dead—they never mentioned it. Sometimes people will read his name and assume it’s pronounced Cay-lun and Gina will correct them, but she’s never compared it to her big brother’s name.
So when she heard Malaika say those words, Alan with a C, Gina felt as though the girl had seen inside her very soul.
She doesn’t know whether
