Gazing out the passenger window, ten years old but bearing the craggy countenance of an old man, he glanced my way, pupils like sinkholes of despair, troughs of worry furrowing across his forehead. Arms folded, lips pursed, heels pummeling up and down on the floor mat, walled off and pensive. He shifted, fiddling with his seatbelt before giving voice to his trouble.

“Do you believe there’s a God?”

His question struck like an arctic blast knifing through a window crack, bitter and cold, pinning me against my seat. Feeling turbulent, threatening, and instantly transforming our benign ride into a white-knuckle experience. Tension sprayed into the air, a harbinger of a conversation forever etched in my memory.

Completely caught off guard, I stalled, silently praying, hoping my response would inspire and transfix. Yet all I could do was turn the question back, speaking softly, gently, hoping to draw him out.

“Do you?”

He exhaled wearily, eyes fixed on some distant point as if he’d been wrestling with the question for years. “No.” A hard edge to his tone. “Because nothing good has ever happened to me.” He shook his head, eyebrows pinching into a scowl. “I don’t believe in God because if he were really up there, he would have answered my prayers and helped me and my family. But he never did.” An agonizing pause. Then he muttered, “But I believe there is a devil. There has to be.”

Stunned by his statement, hands strangling the steering wheel, mind whirling, trying to respond. Quiet fell between us, broken only by the car engine knocking against the cold, pistons pumping hard, belts whining, tire treads searching for traction. A mile marker zipped past, another before I finally managed, “Why do you believe that, Daniel?”

“Cause my whole life is just full of bad stuff.” He groused. “Shit, that keeps happening all the time.” Swallowing hard, voice icing over, crackling. “That’s why I think the devil is winning. Especially in my family. It feels like my family is cursed, you know? That’s why evil stuff keeps happening.”

Tortured silence, both of us, it seemed, playing out the conversation in our minds, fully aware our conversation was being directed by unseen spiritual forces waging war in Daniel’s heart, a cosmic battle between good and evil.

When words came, I tried to spout hope, spewing my adult belief in a God who saved me from whiskey and water. But in that moment, my reassurance sounded hollow, trite, impotent, offering little to an almost fourth-grade boy questioning the existence of a higher power. Only in retrospect could my foreboding be called a premonition.

Long after I dropped Daniel off at his foster home that night, I remained troubled and unable to sleep. Memories came unwanted from my childhood, hearkening back to when I was Daniel’s age. When it seemed as if the Devil had taken up residence in our home, my father’s alcoholism and mental illness fixated on the supernatural, the macabre.

An ever-present topic fueling his drunken rants, permeating our house not just with whiskey and water, but something far more sinister. A time when I was convinced evil sat with us around the kitchen table.

Lying in bed that night, I felt like a child, afraid of the dark, unable to keep my legs from trembling, anxiety making it hard to breathe. Bombarded with childhood memories, dread like pinpricks probing up and down my spine. Remembering when my father was fixated on the spiritual world, raging against God, and forcing my sister and me to search for demons until light came up in the morning…