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When I was six, my mom made a terrible slip in judgment at the prompting of another parent and gave the okay for me to watch the movie Poltergeist. The other mom had said it was actually pretty funny, but I had nightmares about people coming up from the ground for weeks. The only thing that had calmed me was for Mom to remind me that God puts a hedge of protection around us and to assure me that it stretched out “even on the bottom.”
That night, as Mary slept under Sawyer’s spaceship sheets, those nightmares came back, except this time the horror wasn’t that I would be attacked but that I wouldn’t be able to help. I just kept seeing those people reaching up through the ground, and I couldn’t move to save them or even hear them. I woke in a cold sweat.
Since I couldn’t possibly go back
