What Comes After

The secondary protagonist, 16-year-old Evangeline, is the vector that connects all the other characters, partly because of her pregnancy and partly because of her emotional strength. Her pregnancy and maturation encourage Isaac’s realizations and development. Evangeline has brilliant red hair and is frequently equated with a skittish wild animal. Jonah says, “You couldn’t touch that girl without feeling your skin had disappeared, that you’d turned to water and flowed into a warm ocean. I’d give anything to touch Red one last time […] she’s alive, that girl” (35). Evangeline breaks Jonah open and gives him a place to be entirely himself—bitter, hurt, and gentle simultaneously.

Her mother’s abandonment, both physically and emotionally, created a yearning in Evangeline for a sense of home but also a distrust of adults and authority figures in general. Her painful childhood and early adolescence have granted her a mature perspective, and she saw beyond Jonah’s wounded awkwardness to the gentleness that at his core. She likewise saw Daniel’s arrogance and propensity for violence but saw beyond those things to his insecurity. She’s the only character that, like Isaac, could see Daniel as a child, despite his cruelty and bad behavior. Her ability to see past appearances to truth is the primary reason why she bonds with Isaac and can see his value even through his grief and silence.

Evangeline represents mystery itself. She appears in the novel emerging out of the woods, pregnant and in need but also fiercely independent. She’s capable of taking care of herself and her baby but desperately wants to be cared for and find a home. Though her default is to distrust adults, she tests Isaac and Lorrie, slowly allowing herself to believe in a future for herself and her daughter that includes them and is safe and hopeful.

The novel’s third point-of-view character, Jonah, has taken actions that are the catalyst around which all the plot elements develop. His and Daniel’s interactions with Evangeline led to Jonah murdering Daniel in a fit of rage and to his own death by suicide. Evangeline recalls her first impressions of Jonah as “the shorter boy, thin and pale, with brown hair that looked home cut” (31). She later saw Jonah as “more ordinary than the boy she’d created in her head […] his skin not quite as pale, his lashes not so dramatic. Even his acne was less obvious” (156). She reflects that “when his hazel eyes met hers, her body remembered perfectly how it had felt to kiss him” (156). Jonah and Evangeline knew one another deeply in part because of their shared trauma because of a parent’s betrayal.

Jonah is introspective and quiet, and he has a conduit to the Divine that he experienced in a Quaker meeting. Isaac was struck by Jonah’s ability to maintain silence and to allow the Divine into his consciousness: He told Jonah that he may be a mystic given his description of his experiences at the meeting. While Evangeline and Isaac tend to push away their feelings and their pasts and shy away from self-reflection, Jonah’s narration is entirely self-reflective. He digs deeply into his experiences to try to explain to himself why he murdered Daniel—where that violence erupted from and whether he could have avoided it. He sacrifices himself to give others peace, and though he’s a murderer and acknowledges that he wanted to kill Daniel in that moment, he’s also a gentle, compassionate soul and puts others above himself. Jonah’s transformation from boy to spirit is the most pronounced change in the novel. Although Isaac begins the novel, the Epilogue is devoted to Jonah’s voice: His desire to help Evangeline and Isaac find shared comfort pushes his consciousness beyond death.

Though Daniel’s character emerges only through the perspective of the three point-of-view characters (his father, Isaac; his best friend, Jonah; and Evangeline), Daniel’s death initiates Isaac’s journey of self-discovery. Daniel’s rape of Evangeline pushed Jonah to murder and brings Evangeline to Isaac. Evangeline recalls how Daniel “radiated beauty: tight through well-muscled shoulders, loose through narrow hips, a worn leather belt riding his movements. This was a boy who, though annoyingly full of himself, could protect a girl if he wanted” (54). Her description specifies his relationship to girls but encompasses how others have described him as well. Strong, blond, powerful, popular, and charismatic, Daniel was the quintessential high school quarterback who dated the most popular cheerleader. However, the novel gradually reveals his tendencies toward cruelty and brutality, his insecurity and fear about his relationships with Jonah and his girlfriend Samantha, and the tensions between him and his father.

Daniel represents the potential deception of appearances. Although he appeared strong and beautiful to everyone around him, his power was uncontrolled, and Lorrie and Isaac recall his internal personality as “a little brutal” and how he “could be cruel” and even a “bully” (397, 326). Everyone ignored or overlooked Daniel’s violence and cruelty; no one intervened or pressed him to self-reflect or change because of his external beauty. The only character who saw through his facade from the start is Evangeline, but even she went into the woods with him, knowing that being alone with him might be dangerous. Fundamentally, his cruelty toward Jonah and Evangeline, not Jonah’s brokenness or evil, led to his own death.