Free While the City Slept by Eli Sanders

religion,” her friend Carmen says. “Always.” She returns to St. Louis for a time, prays about it with her younger sister, Annie, and with one of her sisters-in-law, Jenni Butz.
    On a churchwomen’s retreat, Jenni and Annie share some Bible verses with Teresa. “Some difficult verses,” Jenni says, “about her need to turn her entire life over to God and make some really tough changes. And we all were crying, and I remember Ann saying to Teresa, ‘Are you sure you’re going to heaven?’ And with tears streaming down her face, Teresa saying, ‘No.’ And Ann said, ‘Do you want to, right now?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ And so we prayed with her, and we showed her scriptures that talked about how much God loved her, and had such great things in store for her life and wanted to bless her, but that that sin was getting in the way and she needed to put it down, and get the forgiveness and the healing that only Jesus can give. And so she did. We prayed, andshe gave her whole heart to Jesus that day, and committed to follow him for her life, and she was assured of her place in heaven, because of what Jesus did on the cross. And the following months, we sat and we studied the Bible together, and we learned, and she was baptized, and she grew, and she struggled, and she raged. She did all of those things. But it was real. Her love for Jesus was real. And she was changed.”
    After this, after the
Cabaret
tour is over, Teresa heads for Seattle again but doesn’t let her lesbian friends know. She tries dating men, creates an account on eHarmony. Later, when they reconnect, Carley tells Teresa, “Even if you weren’t gay anymore, you could have called.”
    —
    She is still gay. She gets into a relationship with another former boat worker, a woman named Amy. It’s 2002, and they live together in a small condo Teresa buys using money she’s been socking away since her time on the boats, even amid all the instability in her life. It’s yet another way she’s like her father, a serious saver. “Did not want to owe anybody anything,” Carmen says. It also helps that Teresa has steady income from work she’s begun doing at Seattle-area hotels, essentially a stationary version of her boat life. All of it adds up to Teresa’s having great credit at a time of exceptionally easy credit, which allows her to get an affordable mortgage on the $145,000 condo. It’s located in Renton, a working-class suburb south of Seattle that the Green River runs by on its way to becoming the Duwamish.
    Like Carolyn, Amy won’t talk about their time together, but by all other accounts her relationship with Teresa is intense and rocky. Teresa, Carley says, “put her whole heart into all of her relationships,” and this one ends hard. So do some of the hotel jobs. Teresa tells friends she’s lost one because she disappeared from work to fly back to St. Louis to see her Cardinals in the World Series and lost another because she was told by management to fire maids who were undocumented immigrants, but refused. These endings bother her less than might be expected. “You getfired from one job, you get another one,” is how a friend describes her attitude.
    Girlfriends are a different matter. Teresa has a difficult time getting over people, Amy included.
    —
    On the night of Saint Patrick’s Day 2005, a Washington State Patrol officer notices a car drifting across lanes on Interstate 5 where it passes through downtown Seattle. It’s Teresa’s black Saab convertible, the car she bought so that when the sun was out in Seattle, there would be nothing between its warmth and her skin. The officer pulls the car over, smells alcohol on Teresa’s breath, notices her bloodshot eyes. She can’t find her registration, keeps handing him, according to the officer’s report, “papers that looked nothing like a registration.” Her speech is slurred, her coordination poor. Perhaps relevant to the standard field sobriety test, she’s noted to be