The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  The tambourine player called to someone behind her: “Hey, Daniella. Your dad usually hangs around a bit after the service, yeah?”

  The tall woman with the straight black hair and the modesty panel came forward from where she was folding up her keyboard stand. “Sure. Why?”

  “This guy wants to talk to him.”

  The woman looked at me. Maybe the formality of my clothes caused her to fold her hands over her belly, a Victorian pose of ladyness, a living person holding herself in the marbled image of good womanhood. She could have stood on a sconce in a Catholic mission, but she had a pea-sized diamond on her ring finger, catching the blue off the overhead lights. “It just depends on how fast you are.”

  “Fast?” I asked.

  “He usually gets stuck talking outside the main sanctuary for at least a while before heading back to his office.”

  “Hm, I’m fast but not that fast, and maybe catching him somewhere quieter is better. My friend Emily told me to come check this church out, and I’m glad I did. She asked me to say hello to Eddie for her, if I came.”

  There might have been a little meanness in my tone, a snide edge. I was feeling irritated with everything and everyone here. Even the shirt this woman wore, the neurosis of it: she must have liked how its low-cut V looked on her, but then another voice had reminded her to show no skin below the collarbone so as not to lead all these powerful men around her to lust after her secondary sexual characteristics against their wills. I didn’t even need to ask if there were any female pastors here. But Daniella’s face darkened. Her eyes narrowed. Her hair fell forward. She rocked and shifted one leg to a wider, more stable stance. Then the beatific glare returned to her eyes and the hands that were over her belly fell down but remained linked. The white gold of her ring looked cold and blue in the stage lights.

  “Oh, really?” she said. “Emily who?”

  For some reason I didn’t answer, let the silence drag out. Daniella’s eyes were troubled, reaching. Finally I said, “Emily McDaniels. Do you know her? She’s in her seventies, maybe. She’s my neighbor.”

  “No,” she said, laughing a little, her eyes turning down in a snap, searching for something in the coiled cables around our feet. “It’s a big place, as you can tell. It’s hard to know everyone.”

  “Sure is,” I said.

  A new and businesslike tone crept into her voice—a cooler formality, more a concierge’s than a daughter’s, though what, in the end, did I know about the tone of daughters? “My father, though,” she said. “He’ll go to his office after saying goodbye to the people in the sanctuary. The building in back. It has a sign. He’s usually available for an hour or two, if anyone wants to talk to him.”

  I thanked her. Daniella grimaced a smile and turned back to tearing down the band’s instruments. As I walked away, I felt a lump rise up in my throat. It happened when I was angry. Was I angry at the falseness of this whole place? No, the lump wasn’t there before. It had appeared with Daniella’s reaction to the name Emily. It was something in my own memory, a recognition of disappointment, maybe. A name hoped for and denied. I thought of the way her hands, when she heard Emily’s name, fell but stayed together.

  21.

  THROUGH A SEA OF POSTSERVICE CHATTER—BAKED IN A CLAY OVEN OF stucco, concrete, and midday summer sun so potent I swore I smelled cotton candy and the reek of the pig barn at the Del Mar Fair—I waded slowly to the far end of what could only be called a compound. Maybe I just liked the word compound, the Branch Davidian ring that had stuck to it. There I found the building I was looking for, CANAAN HILLS ADMINISTRATION in white vinyl lettering on its tinted door. I went in, toying with the last word, how a “minister” was buried in it.

  In the offices the artifice dropped and the decor was all corporate. Cubicles. Cheap walls installed to make private offices. Doors cut into the walls. Names printed on the doors. The glossy leaves of hardy indoor plants. The feng shui of bland fries-and-Coke American power. There were a dozen or so people in there, working. I checked doors for Eddie’s name, and while I walked the place I felt the radiation of each cubicle worker’s welcoming smile on the back of my head. I caught a glimpse of one, the worst kind: the kind that would love me despite anything I might say or do. Screw it, I said to myself, and asked the agape-steeped accountant where I could find the pastor. The man pointed, and then his smile diminished a degree as he turned back to his work, the spreadsheets that failed to provide him an occasion to exhibit Jesus’s sacrificial love of the living.

  At the far end of the building was a door labeled EDDIE LAMBERT: HEAD PASTOR. I tried out different titles for myself. Good to meet you, Head Pastor, I’m Mark Haines: Hand Pastor, Past Pastor, Taco al Pastor, Dick Pastor—maybe that was me, the last one.

  I knocked. Sometime during my visit to this place, I had decided on talking to Pastor Eddie. It wasn’t intuition or insight leading me. As my knuckles rang against the hollow door, I knew I was being led by a grudge, looking to score a hit or two on a person I could have been, in a different life. It didn’t have anything to do with Emily, not at the root. I didn’t expect he would have ever heard of her, not in a place this large. Deep down, I just didn’t like the guy and couldn’t stand the thought of leaving here without him knowing it.

  But I didn’t know what I was going to say to Eddie, how I was going to approach him. Nothing. A big, beige nothing was all I had in my head—the color of stupidity, without expectation or hope. It was my brain again, doing its usual bit, getting ahead of itself, getting me up to my neck in my own messes. But even though it was my brain, it felt a little more like me this time. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, to be on the same page as my malignant neurochemistry.

  A man’s voice inside said to come right in.

  When I did, I was surprised to see that, compared to the man on the screen, the Eddie Lambert in front of me was larger. Mostly in the gut. It must have been the light in here, the way it deepened the folds and shadows in his Hawaiian shirt, puffed by a belly whose macabre independent life seemed to animate the white hibiscus flowers on that expanse of pale blue fabric. He smiled through his white beard, and his Santa Claus–ish smile lines crinkled into a show of welcome. “What can I do for you?” he asked. His voice was sweet and controlled, the sound of humble service, but direct, too, with its authority. There was something cutting against the tide in his humility—something like a demand.

  I shut the door behind me. Lambert leaned back against his chair. I reminded myself why I was here, tried to put that reason at the forefront of my mind. Emily. She was somewhere. I needed to know where. Lambert might be able to help.

  “I’m part of a team that is going through a batch of old missing persons reports,” I said, stepping into the room and straightening my coat. “Due diligence, you know.” My voice had picked up a little of Detective Lawrence’s midwestern accent. Of course, Lawrence and Tuitele may have already been here themselves. That could be suspicious, but I’d already committed. Lambert watched me patiently, placidly, so I kept on. “When there’s new evidence, we need to go back through the file and run through everything.”

  Lambert put his fingers together and rested them against the cushion of his mustache. He waited for me to continue, offering up no sign of recognition.

  “She was a former parishioner of yours, I believe. I was wondering if I might have a few minutes of your time.”

  “Of course,” he said quickly. “This is about Emily, I assume?” He casually pointed to the chair across from him. “Please, have a seat, Detective . . . ?”

  He knew Emily. This was good. Still, a dark little tremor began to work its way up my legs, so I sat. Maybe I wasn’t ruining everything, wasn’t going to get myself into further trouble. Maybe I was even doing something right. A kind of elation came over me at feeling like I was on the right trail, the right path, which should have been a warning.

  “Johnson,” I said, sounding a little more confident and a lot more like Lawrence, whom I
was impersonating in all but name. I sat in the chair, which was a full four inches shorter than Lambert’s own, and suddenly felt like a kid at his first interview for a job at the soda shoppe. “Mark Johnson.” The name rang falsely in my mind, sounding as make-believe as Bilbo Baggins. “This is in regard to Emily Hsu, yes.”

  “Why don’t I call you Mark?” he said, and didn’t pause for my assent. “As I’m sure you can tell, we keep things fairly casual around here.” He paused in the space where someone might have laughed. I smiled and nodded and waited. If I took his lead and started calling him Eddie, it was only a few steps before he had me tearfully handing over the steering wheel of my life so he could drop the junker of me off with God in an act of spiritual valet parking—complimentary, but donation and tip recommended. I didn’t want to trust this teenager with my keys, and besides, the less I said, the fewer chances I created for making an ass of myself.

  “Mark, can I get you a cup of coffee or bottle of water?”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Well, Mark,” he said, giving my repeated naming a mild hint of chastisement. “I wish you had made an appointment. I reserve this time after the service to speak with individuals of my congregation, anyone who may have something on their mind. It’s an important part of what we are here, what we represent, and to be honest, it’s the part of my week I look forward to most.” He laughed a warm, Claus-ish laugh. The belly, it did what you’d expect, the obedient sack of shit.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling foolish, as he wanted me to feel. “We can—”

  “Don’t be, it’s fine. I make time for whatever comes up that is important, anything that can be of service. This seems to fit the bill.” He had stood up while he was talking and walked around behind me to lock the door. “Mrs. Jenkins’s questions about whether or not a Mongolian boy who never hears about Jesus will go to hell will have to wait for next week. We’ll all survive, even the Mongol tyke.”

  I forced a laugh and wished Mrs. Jenkins might send the kid a laptop instead of another badly translated, graphic novel edition of the Bible.

  “So,” he said, with a weary smile that suggested the weight of the topic at hand. “Emily. Something new has turned up? Have you found her?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.” Then, to make a show of concession and trust, I added: “We haven’t found her, no.”

  Lambert must have decided that the fingers-pressed-to-his-lips look was too formal or menacing or apprehensive. He leaned back in his chair, arms on the armrests, his fingers looped around the plastic pads. “I see. Sad, that you haven’t found her. But hopeful, too. I was afraid you were going to tell me she was, well . . . Regardless, it is sad for the Hsus. They’ve had such a hard time of it.”

  “I can only imagine.” I’d thought about her parents, but only from Emily’s point of view—not about what they were going through. Losing touch with their daughter. Years without contact. Years wondering if. Yes, it was sad. I knew something about that. Maybe Emily had her reasons, maybe they were monstrous assholes, but it was still sad. As a monstrous asshole of a parent, I knew that, too.

  “Imagine? You’ve spoken with them already, I presume.”

  I felt the blunder as a rash of warmth in my face. “Not me,” I said, hoping to cover it. “There are a few of us tasked to cases like this. One of my partners is interviewing them as we speak.”

  “Of course,” said Lambert. “They’re good people. Such good people. It’s hardest for people like them to have a daughter like that.”

  “Like how?”

  “A child born with a spirit of rebellion.” He gestured as if laying a bad hand of cards down upon the desk. “I’m not saying she was the Damien child. She wasn’t hopeless. We all bear our marks, which we must learn to transcend in order to find the Lord. But she fought her parents on everything from an early age, I recall. Very difficult girl. She grew into a very prideful young woman.”

  “Pride?”

  He must have picked up on something in my tone. He responded quickly, with a defensive note in his voice. “Wouldn’t you call abandoning her caring parents in the dead of night, without a word then or since, prideful? Leaving them to wonder where their only child had gone?”

  His belief in family values was touching. “In my line of work,” I said, “sometimes people have reasons.” My line of work: ex-security guard, ex-pastor, ex-husband, ex-father, current impostor. I guess it wasn’t a lie, technically speaking.

  “No one is a perfect parent but God,” Lambert said, “and I’m sure the Hsus aren’t any different from the rest of us. But the slight would have to be great to justify that. To blow the ordinary failings of your parents out of proportion is, at root, a sin of pride. The sin of sins. The sin of loving yourself and your wounds over your obligations to other people, over the gift of laying your burdens down in Christ’s hands.”

  My heart rate increased, my palms began to sweat, my hearing narrowed to pinprick, and my vision dulled on the periphery to form a tunnel between Lambert and me. In practical terms, it meant I knew exactly what kind of prick Lambert was and how I wanted to hurt him. I didn’t like what he was saying, didn’t like its condescension, didn’t like my body’s ignorant initial response to it—from the moment his words, those stupid spoken sounds, brushed up against my eardrums—as truth, as acute and personal judgment. A rush of ancient chemicals was triggering a series of fight-or-flight-related physiological responses throughout my sympathetic nervous system. Who we were fighting or fleeing from was complicated, but Lambert was the one in view. The little coward of higher reasoning kept me back, just.

  When I spoke, Lawrence’s accent had left me. Now I was asking the questions, doing the talking. “I’ve seen parents do things that would make leaving quietly the kindest thing she could have done.”

  “Not them,” Lambert said, the tone of the dismayed wise man giving way to something with a little edge in it. “I’ve spent enough time with the Hsus to know that whatever slights she endured were minor.”

  I couldn’t let this devolve. I hadn’t expected Lambert to know Emily at all, but here he was pronouncing on her character. He might be able to give me some helpful insight, even if I had to read against his judgment. But I’d never find out if I started flinging my shit at him from word one.

  “Tell me a bit about what she liked to do besides church,” I said. “Hobbies, interests, things like that.”

  “Oh, that’s hard to remember,” he said. “It’s been a long time, and I’ve had so many congregants between then and now. We were smaller then, this church, but still. It’s hard to remember her before all this happened.”

  If he couldn’t remember what color shoes she liked to wear or what kind of games she tended to enjoy most—if he couldn’t point to the details of what her life was—then painting a picture of her as a young, fatefully doomed rebel archangel was monochromatic, done with wide, clumsy brushstrokes, the result of processing and abstraction and more about the painter than the subject. If Emily’s sin of pride was her choice and terminal, then the boundary was as clear as Lambert’s conscience. But only if there was still some conflict would he go out of his way to establish that so quickly.

  This wasn’t a man who was contradicted enough. He glided on the admiration of his parishioners. I knew because I’d been him. I’d said the same things, used the same lines. They allowed me to cultivate a relationship to the willing and disregard the rest, put them out of my sphere of obligation. The person who used their free will badly became the person I didn’t have to worry about, didn’t have to do anything for. I understood why it worked this way: it was an easy method for making a manageable list of who to care for and how. But it also kept help from some of those who needed it. It put a limit on who to love. It cut someone like my sister out of the fabric and pretended the hole was supposed to be there. So fuck limits.

  “You can’t remember anything in particular?” I asked, giving him one more chance.

  “It
all runs together a little at my age.” He made an exasperated expression. “All I can recall are the usual girl things. Liked horses but didn’t ride them. Nothing too particular, and there’s a chance I’m mixing the horse thing up with other young girls from back then. You understand, I’m sure.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

  “She was a dreamy kid.” For a heartbeat, I heard it as a comment on her looks, a suggestion of something sexual, and sure, it wouldn’t be the first time a man of faith had broken that faith with a defenseless child. But he continued: “Daydreamer. Kept to herself. Very imaginative, always playacting something or another—high drama, lots of danger, that kind of thing.” It all struck an odd note, that this is what he’d remember. He stared at me while he spoke, through me. It was unnerving. Then his eyebrows perked up. “Her prayer requests were landscapes.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Her prayer requests. We have cards you can write your requests for prayer on. People write down what they need help with, and there’s a team that collects them and divides them among prayer groups, and they pray for others. I remember hers because they were covered in drawings. Landscapes. Lonely farmhouses, Alpine castles, beaches. Those kinds of things.”

  I made a face like I was mulling things over. I didn’t know what any of this really told me about Emily, but the idea of having your prayers reviewed by a community of peers smacked of spiritual surveillance, the panopticon, or Mom in your sock drawer. Things change when you make them public. I couldn’t imagine the careful editing and self-censorship of prayers as they were written across those cards, the limited and cultivated image of a person they would reflect, even when they made the motions of confession or revelation. In some sense, Emily’s were probably more accurate than most.