“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. Look, I need to go. Sorry to bother you.”
“Aracely hasn’t changed her mind,” she edged in before I hung up, “but do you want to pass on anything to her?”
I thought about it as long as I could, before I felt overwhelmed and my mind flatlined. “No,” I said finally, “I’ve passed on enough.” Some vestige of all that funereal grief rose up in my face. “I have to go. Talk to you soon, Gabby.”
Next I dialed information and got the Ramona Substation. I tried to get Detective Lawrence, but he was out. I asked for Tuitele next, and the dispatcher put me through.
“Yes?” he asked, already bored.
“Hi, Detective. This is Mark Haines—the person you, uh, interrogated this morning.” This sentence coming out of my mouth should have felt more odd than it did. “They must all blur together.”
“Yeah, I remember. Want us to have another crack?”
“No, I’m good,” I said. “Look, I know what you said, but I had to see if you found Emily back at the house.”
“Same line,” he said. “We don’t talk about it, not with you. Unless you’re a relative or with the FBI, there’s no reason for me to say a word.”
“I don’t need details. Just a yes or no. Did you find her?” My blood pressure was rising, and I could feel my brain getting ahead of me. I tried visualizing its wet, pulpy mass—to see myself forcing this convulsive goop back into my skull. “Christ.”
“Don’t get angry, man. That won’t help at all.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s just—”
“And don’t get the wrong idea. Apologizing won’t help either, and I’ll mail the box of cookies back COD.”
“Look,” I said, forcing air into my body like I was an engine. “Maybe you don’t have kids, but I had a daughter. I have one, I mean, but she’s grown. This girl, I was looking out for her, trying to. And if I don’t know what happened to her, it’s like I’m letting down another daughter. She’s not my kid, but it’s like that. I’m not asking for much. I’m going to lose it here if I don’t know. Help me keep from going nuts.”
“Nuts, right,” Tuitele said. “I know you know about nuts.”
I figured they’d read about me, but knowing was different. The shame I felt was deep and fresh, a kind of shame I didn’t think I was capable of anymore. And I knew this compulsion to know about Emily, the intensity of it, was questionable, was unlike myself—was like Ellen, in fact, and what had driven her to kill herself. They knew about nuts, but they didn’t know the half of it. “If you’re going that route—”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I know nuts. My brother got into some fucked situations, didn’t make it out. Never found him. My parents stopped being the same people like that.” He snapped loud enough the phone receiver picked it up. “So, yeah. I get it.”
“Then please.”
There was only breathing on the line. When he spoke again, Tuitele was nearly whispering. “There was no one there. You said maybe her name was Emily, and in the garbage we found some mail with the name Emily Hsu on it. H-s-u.” The words caused a strange refocusing to occur in my mind, as if the name—her actual name, it seemed—exerted a gravitational pull on all the detritus of my thinking about her. “That name matches a missing persons report from a few years back. At the time she was listed as a runaway, and there wasn’t too much follow-up after the initial report.”
I felt like I was taking a risk speaking, that all this would somehow be retracted. But I asked if there was more.
“That’s all I can say. We’re going to see if the parents can identify her in any of the photos, the ones we found with all the kinky shit. But we have to be careful about that. So far forensics is showing that the files hadn’t been accessed in some time. The laptop never connected to the internet through Gans’s ISP, none of his fingerprints on the thing, so besides it being in his garage there isn’t much to link it to him. No other tangible sign of, you know, that kind of thing, or drug dealing either. He says he has a couple girlfriends who come in and out, so right now we’re stuck with the idea that somehow she ran away again, between the time you saw her and when we showed up.”
“That’s a good sense for timing, don’t you think?”
“Tip came from somewhere else, anonymous. Wasn’t her.”
“But where would she go out there? It’s the middle of nowhere.”
“That’s the question,” he said with the first edge of annoyed resignation in his voice. “That’s the question. But Gans’s bail was set at thirty grand, and he’s posted.”
The thought of Sammy being free gave me pause. His threat hovered in the back of my mind, compounded by Emily—her name was Emily—being out there somewhere, too. I was scared for her, a little for myself, but knowing these things had settled my anxiety. “Thank you,” I said to Tuitele.
“No way,” he said, his voice rolling back up to full volume. “Fuck off, never gonna happen. Don’t call here anymore. Let us do our fucking job. Your job now is to check the papers. That’s where you get your news. Got it?”
“Right. Got it.”
“I’ve got fucking work to do. Have a good life, old man.” He hung up. I couldn’t help but feel there was a genuine element to the overperformance. Maybe I just didn’t like being called an old man, but that was my problem.
I stepped out from the side of the building into the dispersing crowd. I was woozy, disoriented. The way they looked at me asked questions, and their presence snapped my emotions back into position. Even in a moment like that, the things I felt could be modulated, as if musically, by the imagined attention of others.
Esme was standing near a massive, nearly empty planter with a single six-inch square of beach grass positioned in its center, statement landscaping that uses invasive plants because they’re cheaper than Mexican hot sauce. With her glasses on, Esme looked glamorous, in a way—a ridiculous thing to say about a middle-aged woman in a jean skirt and white polo shirt, I guess. But she ran her fingers through her hair and pushed it behind her ears and was unordinary. Her life made me feel my exhaustion.
“Ready to hit the road?” I asked.
“Dinner?”
“Not today. Sometime soon, I promise.”
She looked at me skeptically.
“Honestly. Pick another day, any day. But I need some sleep.”
“I’m the one driving, and you aren’t going home until you’ve had some dinner.” She shook her head. “Don’t pretend like you know what you need.”
18.
WHEN ESME DROPPED ME OFF, I THANKED HER FOR COMING FOR ME. I meant it. The dusk was doing its thing and everything was going gray. Gray house, gray tree, gray something, gray something else—the things mattered less and less. She said to call soon. I told her I would.
I walked up the driveway, unlocked the front door, and went inside. A flick of a switch, and there was everything that was supposed to define me, to give me a sense of meaning and self and history: a couple rooms, a beige fridge, a secondhand couch, books and magazines worth less than the paper they were printed on. I turned off the lights, sending it all back into darkness, and went down the hallway to the bedroom. Never has a word so entirely described the contents of what it denotes, bed and room. There wasn’t even a frame. I undressed and pulled a sheet over my body.
There’s a kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn’t resolve. That’s the kind of exhausted I was. My mind loped in lazy circles, kicking up stray thoughts; my thoughts were carousel horses carrying riders who came into my field of vision only momentarily and were accompanied by horrendous music: Emily, Sammy, Mike, Ellen, Gabby, Aracely, the “Macarena.” I knew from the first that I wouldn’t be getting any sleep, but I lay there an hour anyway, helpless against the feeling of helplessness.
Then I got up, made coffee, and started pacing the house, from kitchen to bedroom, thinking about Emily. Emily Hsu. A runaway or something worse. What else did I know? I went into my off
ice, which I hadn’t used in over fifteen years, and dug out a sun-bleached yellow legal pad from behind the desk to start writing. She didn’t have a relationship with her parents, she’d said, and didn’t want one. Had a falling-out with religion, or at least the Christianity she’d grown up with. She said she’d had a falling-out at the last place she’d lived, too, and that must have been Sammy’s. But after she left my house, she’d turned up there again. Had she chosen to go back? If there was any truth to what the goiter-headed kid, Shaw, told me, choosing that life didn’t make sense. Maybe Shaw didn’t understand what was going on. Or maybe there was a fix that needed maintaining, and that was enough of a lure. She’d shown plenty of signs of being an addict when she stayed with me, and she was high when I saw her at Sammy’s place. Was that how Sammy kept her around for so long? I didn’t know, and my list choked out around there, without enough oxygen. I just didn’t know her. Not well enough.
I looked around the office. The space felt like an indictment to do a kind of work I found useless, worse than useless, but still familiar. On the bookshelf, the red, blue, and green spines of the three-volume set of William Jurgens’s Faith of the Early Fathers were unmistakable. Out of the blackness of another man’s memories floated up a phrase in one of those books, from one of Augustine’s sermons: “How could you have consented when you did not exist? But He who made you without your consent does not justify you without your consent. He made you without your knowledge but He does not justify you without your willing it.” It sat in my brain like a fat, white, guilt-ridden Buddha.
Canaan Hills. The words were tethered to an image of a crucified Jew, strung up next to two naked criminals in the grassy knoll at the center of an Anglophilic roundabout in a California housing development, the kind that spun endless minor variations on the same three stucco homes. Canaan Hills was the name of the church Emily had gone to as a child. I knew that, remembered that. I didn’t know how to find her parents or her friends, but I knew churches, and a glance at the clock showed it was, even now, Sunday morning. I could start there.
On the way I stopped off in Encinitas. There was the beginning of a Santa Ana kicking up dust, making the palm fronds snap in the wind like kites. Encinitas was too clean for my taste. Here trees stayed trimmed. Lawns were manicured, pedicured, seaweed wrapped, dipped in nutrient-rich mud baths. The asphalt looked as if it were scrubbed by hand. During the day, people waved at one another, especially if they’d never met. It was too much. Even the sun was warmer and purer, the kind of sun that wouldn’t dream of giving you cancer. It had been a long time since I’d made this stop, and part of me wondered if the house I was looking for would be vanished: burned down in an electrical fire, torn down by a hobo developer with squatter’s rights.
But no, it was there. The paint on the wrought-iron fence bubbled in places, looking like it would split if touched. Whole bars were bare, showing rust and black. The house itself looked only a little better. It was small by the neighborhood’s standards, only one story. It had off-center cross-gabled front eaves that corresponded to the three-paned window of a reading nook below. A stone chimney lifted itself to the lowest possible height demanded by smoke. The patio furniture was mildewed, and the fabric of the folded-up canvas umbrella was crumbling to dust. I had sat under that umbrella, telling Ellen about this girl I’d met, Gabby. She’d grabbed my hands, said she could see it in my eyes that this one was the one—always certain, seemingly inexhaustible and permanent, fixed—and sealing my faith in that feeling, too, with her faith. Unlike this house or the sun’s destruction of this red umbrella with light‚ only light. The red front door, though, looked as immaculate as hellfire, even if its brass hardware had tarnished. I unlocked the door with a key on my key ring and went inside.
Because of the neighboring eight-bedroom quasi-Swiss mess—it could have been an adult-scale stage set from It’s a Small World and was probably designed by pointing at the illustration on an imported bar of chocolate—no sunlight made it inside until the afternoon. The living room was less alive and more in a vegetative state, dim and still. The air was thick, like fog in a low valley, and full of dust. I’d stopped paying for the biyearly housekeeping too long ago. Beneath the scent of dust and the general staleness, the smell of lilac and lavender persisted: the smell of my mother, a smell that couldn’t be cleaned out of the place.
It was important to keep moving. I got out of the living room, past the floral-print couch and the cabinet of pie birds and miniature cottages, and headed down the hallway. The first bedroom had been mine, and I went in.
After Ellen’s death, I’d avoided coming here as much as I could. Right away, my parents, in their grief, had decided to get out of this house, get out of the state, and were going to move to Arizona. I had taken to finding bottom like a born skin diver—hell on my heels and profoundly underwater and alone, having quit the church and alienated myself from my wife—but I hadn’t yet realized it wouldn’t be as comfortable as I believed. They needed me to go through my stuff, but I put it off and put it off. I was angry at the idea of them selling the house, which they never brought themselves to do before passing away, one after the other, in the red-state desert, of perfectly, stupidly natural causes. But eventually I had come to the house drunk and stripped the walls of my old room, tearing down the stapled-up pictures of Shaun Tomson and Tom Curren pulled from surfing magazines, the handwritten Bible verses, the pictures of old friends at camps where we’d all had so much fun, had grown so much in the Lord, had ogled girls, had water-skied. I threw it all away, leaving a bare room of white walls in which there were hundreds of tiny black holes. That was growth: the accumulation of marks, divots, punctures. The bed still had the same green bedspread on it.
I’d come for clothes but not the ones in my old closet. Everything there was earth-toned plaid and two sizes too small. Back in the hallway I passed a closed door and went into my parents’ old room. The brass bedposts were still bright, if dusty, and the lavender bedding still vibrant enough to show off the small white flowers printed on it. I worked at not noticing things and went straight to the closet. A couple old, strange blouses, a couple shoeboxes, and a vinyl suit bag. I took that, laid it on the bed, and unzipped it. The coat and pants were a charcoal flannel. I slunk the white dress shirt off its hanger and onto my arms. It was a little loose, but not by much. Then I put on the pants, tucked in the shirt, tried on the coat. They were all a decent fit. Decent enough was the best I ever hoped for anyway.
This is what I’d been wanting to wear at Mike’s funeral. It would do for today. I stepped before the mirror above my mother’s dresser. The clothes looked fine. The man wearing them needed a shave. The man wearing them looked like a man to be feared, to be respected; a man to be pitied; a man to look up to and in some ways love. The man wearing it looked like my father.
I felt something on my face. In the mirror I saw they were tears—saw them with a dull objectivity. The suit. It was what he wore to her funeral. His little girl, alive for thirty years and then, in a moment, never to live again. My father didn’t speak at the service, but his face betrayed what he knew, what suicide meant, his stoic and steadfast acceptance of that meaning. Everyone shook his hand. There were words but none of condolence. How could you console a father for his daughter’s eternal separation and damnation? How could a father be anything but what he was? He couldn’t. Then he’d taken all his beautiful, tailored clothes to the desert and left this one suit by the sea.
I went back to the closet for the brogued-leather saddle shoes that matched the suit. They made a satisfying click on the hardwood. When I stepped back onto the plush carpet in the hallway, something had changed. It was the atmosphere, and not just the high, dry lightness of the Santa Ana. On the left side of the hall was the open door to the bedroom. On the right, there was a Virgin of Guadalupe made from snipped, bent, and painted soda-can aluminum. Pepsi swooshes were visible on the backside of the fluted metal. But that wasn’t what stopped me. A few steps past it
was the closed door. Ellen’s room.
I walked up to it, put my hand against the wood. I listened. There was no sound, nothing. But still I’d had some expectation, my ear had bent to listen. My mind divided on itself. A lower half was searching out memories of being a boy, standing here and asking through the hollow core whether she’d come ride bikes, the way it would open on some new and surprising configuration of her passion of the day—a massive diorama of local wildlife, a chessboard and Dover edition of The Game of Chess, a self-constructed wooden dollhouse with miniature furniture, a scribbled-in, dog-eared copy of the NIV Bible—and how easily she would leave it behind to lead me out into the neighborhood, down to the tide pools at Moonlight State Beach, up to the train tracks to shout at the commuter train. The higher part of my mind kicked at the lower one, trying to keep it down, threw some elbows. The part that was left, which was me, we waited it out to see who’d win. While we waited, my hand moved to grip the knob. I wondered what its goal was. The bickering parts of my mind both paused with their hands on each other’s throats, turned, watched.
The knob rotated a centimeter, then hitched. Locked, from the inside. From all sides I felt relief. My hand retreated to a pocket, and I retreated to the front door with a feeling of abandonment. But who abandoned whom I couldn’t say.
19.
BEFORE HEADING TO CANAAN HILLS, I STOPPED AT THE 7-ELEVEN AND USED the pay phone to call 411. They connected me, and then a lie about a mono outbreak in the teen ministry got me straight to Andy at my old church.
He answered curtly and directly, like he was a disaster relief dispatcher. “What’s this about a mono outbreak?”
“Sorry, Andy,” I said. “No kissing epidemic, at least nothing more than the usual one. Take the keys out of the nukes.”
The Churchgoer Page 14