The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  “Like what?” The dark cloud evaporated and my vision attenuated to a clear focus on Lawrence’s pale blue eyes. This was important. This was about Emily.

  “Hm, there was also a good amount of, let’s say, novelty sex items—devices, harnesses, that kind of thing—in one of the back rooms. On its own, I’d be blushing but not alarmed. But with the other business, well . . . And twice now you’ve mentioned a girl. Who is it you’re talking about?”

  I said, “When I first met her she told me her name was Cindy Liu. Someone else told me her real name was Emily. I don’t know what to call her, but maybe she gave you her actual name.”

  Lawrence hummed uncertainly through his teeth. “How would she have told us? Did she file a report?”

  “No,” I said, not understanding. “The girl. At the house.” Tuitele’s pencil stopped moving. I looked between the two of them, and both shook their heads.

  “She was there right before you guys showed up,” I said. “I saw her.”

  “There was no girl,” Tuitele said. “You outside. Gans inside. A computer full of some sick shit. Too many goddamn plants. That’s it.”

  “She was there,” I said. “I saw her, right before—” I remembered Sammy’s threat, too late when it came to talking about Emily but enough to stop me from saying anything about the gun he used to push me out the door. “Right before I left. Where could she have gone?”

  Lawrence furrowed his brows, but his expression didn’t show any concern, any urgency. “Okay,” he said. “What did you say her name was?”

  “Cindy Liu or Emily. They’re both made-up names for all I know, though.”

  “And you’re sure you saw her in Mr. Gans’s house?”

  I’m a skeptical person, but I couldn’t entertain this kind of doubt. I let it settle on me a moment anyway: Was I sure she was there? Don’t be a damn fool, I told myself. Of course she was. We spoke. I watched Sammy chase her back toward the bedroom. Sometimes obsessive self-scrutiny makes a person disbelieve what he knows in his bones—puts the whole world behind a glaze of glass, a microscopist’s remove. I didn’t have time—Emily didn’t have time—for distance, for contemplation.

  “With my own two eyes,” I told Lawrence.

  The two detectives conducted a wordless conversation before me, a long communicative stare passing between them. Finally, Tuitele looked at me: “We turned that house upside down. You two were the only living souls around there. When you kept saying something about a girl, I assumed someone had told you about the woman who called in the anonymous tip.”

  “No,” I said with an urge to rise, to walk out the door and go scour Sammy’s house myself. “She was there. Where the hell could she vanish to? You guys need to get someone over there. Sammy had been angry with her. She was supposed to stay in the back, he said, and he was angry—maybe you missed something. Maybe she’s still there. Maybe—”

  “Don’t get panicked yet,” Lawrence said chidingly. I didn’t realize I was until he said so. My consciousness slid back into a familiar notch, the one just a little above and to the left of my body. For a minute or two I’d been in it.

  Lawrence continued: “We’ll get some people back over there right away. Maybe she was hiding somewhere we missed. Maybe she left the property before we arrived. I’m going to have someone come in and get you processed and out of here. Sorry for all the trouble.” Lawrence nodded in a genteel way, and then both men stood and made to leave.

  “Wait,” I said. “How can I follow up? How can I find out what’s happened to her?”

  Lawrence paused with one hand on the door and made a noise halfway between a laugh and a sigh. “That’s not really how it works. Don’t worry. We’ll do everything we can do.”

  “But,” I said weakly. “I’m worried about her.”

  “You her mom?” Tuitele asked. “Her dad?”

  I thought of Aracely, among the pine trees in Oregon that couldn’t be more different from the desert I was in, hating me while tending to her year-old son. “No,” I said.

  “No,” Tuitele said. “There are limits.”

  A feeling of panic gripped me unreasonably. It was the panic of being tied up on your back in the bottom of a canoe as it coursed down a river, no sense of where you were going or what dangers were in store, only the occasional tree blotting out your view of the sky—every splash or jolt a surprise and a premonition of the waterfall to come, the one lurking in your mind. It was the distilled panic of time itself.

  “If only—”

  “Mr. Haines,” Lawrence said, measuring his words as if cutting exquisite Italian tile. “Your concern is . . . well intentioned, it seems.” He glanced away a moment and then looked me straight in the eye, hard enough that he appeared in my mind as if spotlit, his surroundings dimming. “But I imagine you have your own concerns that need attention. Let us do our job. Tend to yours.”

  They left me sitting there, wondering what my job, what my concerns truly were. It seemed like they knew I’d been fired. Maybe they knew about the incident at the office. They clearly knew about my past, the things the old me had done—at least those committed to official record, etched in partiality on the edifice of institutional history. And my concern for Emily: it was true, I wasn’t her parent, wasn’t even her friend. What was I to any of these people? A cipher, a drunk, a potential smut peddler, an accomplice. I’d had so many people think so many things of me in the last week my head hurt. Screw them, I thought. Screw all of them.

  The first blond cop came back in and asked me to follow him, I had some forms to fill out. I said, “No,” just to refuse something.

  “Come on,” he said meekly, “I’m trying to get you out of here as quick as I can.” He looked so pathetic, I gave in and followed him. There was something left in me that tended outward, as much as I wanted it gone. I just didn’t know where it was leading yet.

  15.

  THE BLOND COP LAUGHED WHEN I ASKED HIM WHO WOULD GIVE ME A ride back to my truck. I waited a long time for a cab. They don’t do cabs in Ramona. The ride cost me forty-five bucks. The driver was a short guy, maybe sixty years old. He tried chatting me up at first, but I didn’t want to hear the sad story of why he couldn’t retire and would die behind the wheel of this thing, or how he’d screwed over too many people and then got screwed out of his retirement, how he’d gotten what was coming. Either way, I didn’t want to know. When I stepped out and paid him, he put what I thought was a few bucks’ change in my hand.

  “No,” I said, “that’s for you.”

  “I’m not giving you money,” he said, his voice like a kindergarten teacher’s. “I want to give you something more valuable.”

  I looked at what I held. It was one of those Baptist comic strips. The first panel featured a lovingly drawn young woman the artist had probably nicknamed Slutty Suzy. A few panels later, she was dead and burning in eternal hellfire. Normally I laughed at this kind of stuff, but it wasn’t funny today. I threw it on the ground and asked the guy for my tip back.

  “Do not store up for yourself treasures on earth,” he said, “where moths and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.” Then he drove away. I waved him off with a one-handed here’s-the-church-here’s-the-steeple.

  My truck was still on the side of the road. The shell had been obviously jimmied open, but the surfboard was inside, oozing wax onto the corrugated metal. I stood there, thinking a minute, not really thinking, waiting. It was as silent as only a desert can be silent. I had a few empty, shimmering thoughts about Emily, where she was or wasn’t. I pushed those away. When I opened the truck door, a lizard skittered across the hood and nearly gave me a heart attack.

  I tried driving over to look at Sammy’s place, but the police were back there and I didn’t want to seem like a nuisance or a nutjob. A couple hours later, I pulled into my own driveway. I’d stopped for food and more coffee. My hips and spine ached from sleeping on the jailhouse cot. My nerves were worn out, and everything in me felt heavy with loss
and lethargy. I’d fallen asleep only once on the drive and was desperate to have another go at it.

  As I walked up the driveway, though, a puny car horn honked behind me. It sounded like a quail, but it startled me anyway. I turned and saw a Civic parked across the street, white under a veil of gray, sooty dust. An arm stuck out the window and waved, but shadow cut across the person waving. I’d never seen the car before. I walked over. Halfway across the street Esmeralda’s voice reached me:

  “Where have you been, Haines? I’ve been waiting for thirty minutes. We’re going to be late.”

  If you had asked me the week before, I would have said Esme was just another person I worked with—someone with whom, because of forced proximity and regular contact, I knew how to trade an occasional joke or quick chat, like shells for corn. She’d never been to my house. We didn’t get together on weekends. At most, we had a few years of regular bullshitting on company time between us, her, Mike, and me. Nothing more. That’s what I thought and what I’d wanted. I was like Pinocchio; I didn’t want any strings on me, even the most tenuous threads—incidental cobwebs picked up moving from hiding place to hiding place on Displeasure Island.

  “Esme,” I said. “Hi. Late for what?”

  “Oh, honey,” she said in a patronizing way that, surprisingly, I didn’t exactly mind. “The funeral is today. It starts at four. I left you messages. We’re going together. Didn’t you get them?”

  Gravity has a limit. It’s based on relative mass and distance, the accretion of material and the resistance of physical matter to compression. I was at mine, dark and low. The thought of Mike couldn’t add any weight. “I’ve been out of the office, so to speak,” I told Esme. “I’m sorry. Look, maybe you should go ahead. I—”

  Esme reached across and popped open the passenger door. She gave me the look a mother gives a trenchant child. “I know this is hard for you,” she said, “but you have to go. All you need to do is get in. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  A dense fog of emotion upwelled in me and, it seemed, a kind of relief. It was just neural triggers, stimulus converted to somatic response, a looping circuit no better than the Clapper’s—that’s what I told myself.

  I cleared my throat, blinked away something like the premonition of tears. “My clothes.”

  “It’s specifically casual,” Esme said. “They don’t want the black suits and veils.”

  I sighed. “Don’t expect too much from me,” I said, going around and lowering myself—and then lowering myself some more—to fit into the Civic.

  “It’s okay,” she said, patting my knee in a way that made every inch of my skin stretch toward sleep. “I never do.” She let a brief, bright laugh escape. “It’s why I like you. You make me feel better about myself.”

  I buckled in, and she pulled away from the curb. The car was clean and smelled like vanilla. A sun-curled cardboard tree swung from the rearview mirror. In one of the cup holders was a lux perpetua candle inscribed with the image of the Maria Dolorosa, the Virgin Mother pierced through the heart by a sword.

  “So, asshole, why didn’t you call me back?” She put the car in third gear, changed lanes, and looked at me in one fluid motion. Her hair was down. It was the first time I’d seen it that way: a curt black bob that she kept tucked behind the ears.

  “I haven’t been home,” I told her.

  Concern covered her face like a shadow. “Where have you been?”

  “To be honest, I’d rather not rehearse it.”

  She made a quiet clucking sound against the roof of her mouth in steady time. “Just tell me if I need to be worrying about you.”

  We were on the freeway, heading south. A bank of idiotic ice plant sucking down moisture gave way to a long view across the Agua Hedionda Lagoon on both sides of the highway. To the east, Jet Skis did circles in water made choppy from their play. To the west, a fog was coming in off the ocean, slipping beneath the wooden trestle. A pod of brown pelicans moved silently across the mingled fresh- and seawater. The last one dragged a foot on the surface of the lagoon as it vanished into the low clouds coming in. I found myself thinking about the idea of God’s breath on the water. What a ridiculous way for all this mess to come into existence. Bring on the cosmic Breathalyzer.

  “No, Esme,” I said. “I’m the same as ever.”

  “Good,” she said, touching me again, this time with an elbow on my arm, “I think. Then stop sitting on your ass and start worrying about me.”

  We spent the rest of the drive talking about her. She was still struggling with Mike’s death. Every shift she worked was filled with panic that the next call she’d get would be the worst news. She didn’t think she’d make it much longer, was thinking of moving, even; she had a sister in Chino who would let her live there while she studied for an RN, maybe. I listened, asked questions, kept her talking. It meant I had to say less.

  We pulled into the funeral home, out past the McClellan-Palomar Airport in East Carlsbad. It was one anonymous building among a series of boxy gray nondescript buildings in a new industrial complex under construction. More of the same was going up across the street. The neighboring building was a box manufacturer. The irony of it filled me with a nasty, mean dread. This was the dismal place where we would honor Mike.

  Others were arriving, too. Most were wearing floral shirts and dresses, shorts, sandals. Esme’s jean skirt and polo shirt weren’t too far above the dress code. There was milling. Everyone wore sunglasses. A few even shook my hand, said it was good to see me. I thought up a few sarcastic responses, things Mike might have found funny, but the vinyl lettering on the front door—CREMATION SERVICES INTERNATIONAL—stopped me short.

  We stepped inside. In the entryway was a poorly printed sign taped to a microphone stand pointing to the bathrooms. Nearby a young woman—no, she was a girl, maybe thirteen—was dressed better than any of us, and beaming. She had a name tag on her black blazer that told us her name was Erika and that she always, always, under any circumstances, made the dot over the i with a smiley face. She handed me a flyer and bounced a little, with the hint of a curtsy, the way girls sometimes do when they’ve conducted themselves well in an adult moment. I looked at the flyer, saw Mike’s fat and happy face looking up at me, and stuffed the thing in my pocket.

  When Esme saw me blinking at everything, she walked ahead, giving me something to follow. The next room could have housed industrial machinery, but the floor had been carpeted an awful brick color, and the walls were mauve. White wooden folding chairs were arranged in a semicircle, maybe a hundred of them. Half the seats were occupied, and another forty or fifty people milled around outside the seating. I couldn’t believe the turnout. It wasn’t that I didn’t think Mike was probably a decent guy or had friends. It’s just that I’d officiated funerals for plenty of decent guys. Most weren’t as well attended as this.

  Around the room were blown-up photographs of Mike on easels: with his wife, a heavy woman as tall as he was and with as big of a smile; wearing a straw hat and waist-deep in water, fishing in a lagoon; grinning in a reflective vest and directing traffic someplace. Seeing him without a uniform on was almost like looking at another person. A stranger who reminded me of a coworker who had passed away. But none of them was the Merchant Marine who’d slept his way around the world, blowing a cool chunk of his paychecks on it—none was the guy who called me a cocksucker the night he died, not quite.

  In taking everything in, I lost track of Esme. I turned a few times, trying to spot her. Being alone in that room was unsettling, a reminder of another person who had died: me. Some vestigial preacher in me kept thinking it was about time to call all these people to their chairs—that it was time for me to begin the service. If I’d let that little voice take the lead, what would my sermon have been? Look around you, I would have said. None of us are making it out alive. No consolation. Enjoy the cheese tray.

  It wasn’t something my sister would have approved of. It wasn’t something that would have occurred to me t
o say back then, no part of the scripts of language I kept my old self fed on—all ephedrine and Crystal Light and rice cakes. Even when we were kids, Ellen would get me on my knees in the backyard, praying her words of prayer, one at a time. Her words were always better than mine. The way they lit up her face, her clear blue eyes, made her glow like neon in the miracle of true belief. Too true. She was my big sister—my icebreaker through the Arctic sheet of youth.

  It took a minute, but I spotted Esme in a corner, talking with a couple who—thin, fit, tall, white toothed, and exuding generosity of spirit—were the picture of the picture of health, the high-contrast, overexposed, third-generation Xerox of success. It seemed tacky here. They could have dialed it back a notch, I thought, out of respect for the dead and grieving.

  I walked over slowly, keeping some distance so as to avoid any introductions. Luckily, she cut off her conversation with the couple as I approached. They peeled away, looking for someone else to inspire a sense of inferiority in. Esme turned. She smiled a patient, steady smile at me, with a touch of a mocking smirk at what she saw. I’ve heard Pentecostals talk about being slain in the spirit. Her look slew me in a harder-to-reach place: that minute, hidden nexus where spirit and body are comingled. I was slain in her kind regard.

  “Hi, Esme,” I said. “Hi.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “You started wandering, and I needed to say hello to some people.”

  “It’s okay. I’m okay.” Looking at her eased my agitation, and I stared, couldn’t or didn’t want to stop. She looked away, and it felt like something had been pulled from out of me.

  “They’re friends from church. They lead a group I’m part of.” She tucked her hair behind her ears and scanned the room.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “This is at God’s Gym?”

  She bumped herself into me. “Stop. They’re nice people. The group meets at their house. It’s like a Bible study group.”