The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  Lambert’s mind was going now, the flywheel of memory humming the tones of its etches, grooves, and gouges, his recollection gaining confidence. “She could draw quite well. And I do remember her as something of a reader. Her father, Stuart, used to complain about the fights they had getting her to leave the books at home when they came to church. Well, all except the one book, of course.” He picked up a binder clip from his desk and opened and closed it. “Intelligent girl. It can be hard for those with an abundance of gifts,” he said, with a hint of satisfaction in his face—like he could speak to that one from personal experience. “Unless those gifts are returned to God, they can lead a person into a shallow, small life. A life lived only for yourself. It’s not how He meant us to live.” The contentment on his face implied that he thought this a fate he’d narrowly avoided, though I still registered it, absurdly, as an accusation.

  “And what about you?” I said, trying to shift him off-balance, to make this less about me, even though it had only been about me to me—which is to say, I was trying to find my own center of gravity. “You seem to have known her quite well, Mr. Lambert. Is that standard? Like you said, you have quite a few sheep passing through your gates.”

  He cleared his throat and paused before speaking. Was he thinking back on what he’d told people in the past? Was he squelching the memory of something else so it wouldn’t pass as a shadow in the blood vessels of his face? I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything.

  “It was a long time ago, by church standards,” he said. “We were much smaller then—nothing like what you see here today. One building. A few hundred tight-knit parishioners. We had something special, but that was before it really boomed. And the Hsus were with us from very early on. Without Stuart and Adrianne, we might not be in the place to influence as many as we do.” The man’s blue eyes seemed to focus hard on my own. “Stuart was a leader in our elementary-age ministry, until Emily disappeared. I worked closely with him for several years. A lot of these memories come through him. After she was gone, he couldn’t work with the kids anymore. A shame. So, yes. There have been many sheep. But we try to remember the part each played. We try very hard.”

  By the end of the speech, I almost believed he meant it. I’m sure he meant most of it. I’m sure he tried very hard. But there was something dangling, something left to worry, like a tendril of beef stuck between two teeth.

  “And what was her part, then?”

  He thought about it a moment, eyes never leaving mine. “A missed chance,” he said. “Our failure.”

  I couldn’t say where it was, but his face bore some trace of pain. Then he picked up the binder clip again, and the pain slipped back to wherever it was stored away. “A reminder of our limits and the unknowability of God’s plans for us. Many things, I suppose. When Emily went missing, we took a collection, funded a private search through an agency. Groups took turns with Stuart and Adrianne, cooked them meals, kept them talking, not letting them give up hope, helping them keep their hope in God. I’m sure none of that is in your files,” he said with the smug resignation of someone who nurses the idea of being marginalized, misunderstood.

  I made no sign of acknowledgment except to feel my own anger sour into the usual self-resentment. This guy wasn’t a monster, I thought. Just a dipshit. Not too unlike the rest of us. A bigger platform, sure, but that just made him a dipshit on a stage.

  “At a certain point,” he continued, “we had to help them come to terms with the fact that Emily had made a choice. That this was God’s will, in giving us free will. We could choose anything, though He desired us to choose Him. She didn’t. Even so, we wish we could have brought her back. If not to Him, then to them.” He pressed his lips together into a tight, bitter impersonation of a smile.

  “I’m sure you did,” I said. “Do. And no one at the church has had any contact with her since? Especially more recently?”

  “You would already know if we had,” he said tersely. “We take this very seriously.”

  “I can tell,” I said. I stood up and put my hand out to shake his. He couldn’t do anything else for me, and I knew who I needed to see next. “Well, thank you for your time. And thank your daughter again for me. I happened to ask her for directions to your office, coming out of one of the venues with a band. Seems like a nice young woman.”

  Lambert’s smile was warm, but his face had turned red. “Funny coincidence. She’s an amazing person. She has a heart for giving and for leading our giving efforts that’s just incredible.”

  “You must be proud,” I said, thinking of Aracely, of what I’d say if someone told me they’d seen her. Nothing. I would say nothing, because I wouldn’t know how to praise her, how even to lie in praising her.

  “Very,” he said with embarrassment. “Was any of this helpful?” He took my hand in his. He had the warm, fat, dry handshake of a religious man. My hand might as well have been a ten-year-old’s, dwarfed, crushed, and sweaty in the knowing, confident grip of his own.

  “Yes,” I said, “everything that adds to our understanding is a help, even if it doesn’t seem that way.”

  He nodded quietly. “And what department did you say you’re with again?”

  I took my hand back, the bones in it a little worse for wear. “County Sheriff’s Department, Ramona Substation,” I lied.

  “Ramona?” he said. “Interesting. I know, you’re not at liberty. That’s okay.” He put his hands on his hips, notched on the belt that ran low beneath his gut. “If there’s anything else I can do for you, Detective Johnson—Mark Johnson, right?—be sure to be in touch. And if anything comes to me, I’ll be sure to call you at the Ramona Substation.”

  I nodded, thanked him once more, and left. He was checking the details again. I knew it wouldn’t be long until he spoke to someone with the police in Ramona. The hairs on my neck stood up, begged, jumped through hoops, as if he might reach out and grab me before I even left the building. Maybe Lawrence and Tuitele would connect Lambert’s description of the cop impersonator to me, arrest me. Tuitele had said they knew crazy, and what did this look like if not nuts.

  I glanced back and saw Lambert lingering in his doorway, talking to a woman who’d cornered the market on floral prints. I turned away.

  Maybe it was my brain getting the better of me. Maybe it was the God-hungry hole in my mind, delighting over a few static misfires in the place where epiphany used to reveal itself gloriously, regularly, and in accordance with my father’s faith—doing its best to make a great ball of meaning from all this. Maybe it was a plain, flour-and-water self-destructive streak. I wasn’t spending time thinking about that, wasn’t caught up in doubts about what mechanisms were at work, and that should have been the warning. But despite all this weight bearing down on me, despite the possibility that Lambert would go back into his office and call the Ramona Substation and get me arrested, I didn’t feel wrong. I was on the right track.

  So I stopped at the desk of the accountant for Christ and introduced myself.

  “Good to meet you!” he said, beaming. “What can I do you for?”

  “I’m with the police department,” I said. “Just finished meeting with Pastor Lambert. He said I could ask you to pull up the address for Stuart and Adrianne Hsu in your database. H-s-u.”

  “Huh,” the man said, leaning back in his chair. “I’m not sure why Eddie would ask me to do it.”

  “You got me,” I said quickly, sternly, wanting to betray nothing. “But he said you’d be the guy. I’m running a little late, so any chance you can do it right now?”

  “I’m not supposed to use the parishioner database,” he said. “I manage our investments.” He held his chin in one hand, mock shrewdly. “Besides, can’t you look it up in some police database?”

  “Right,” I said, “and waste a whole day calling the twenty Stuart Hsus in the county.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “But, I’m really not sure—”

  “Look,” I said, “he told me to talk to you.” I
pointed to Lambert, still chatting in his doorway. My gesture must have drawn his eye, because he looked over to us. My heart clenched. He smiled his bearded smile, and I waved. He waved back.

  “See?” I told the manager of spiritual investments.

  It took a minute, a couple clicks, and the guy had an address on a Post-it note for me. But he didn’t seem to enjoy it, it wasn’t the way he had greeted me when I came in. Maybe I’m grating. Maybe greetings are the best part of everything, before the everything that follows starts making claims on your time.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the yellow note. “God bless Monsanto or whatever’s in your portfolio.”

  I made for the door, picking between cubicles. There were so many of them, the cells of modern monks with voicemail and instant messaging. Then I heard a familiar voice. The words weren’t clear, but the tone and timbre ran through my body like the first warm fingers of scotch massaging your insides—that tingling sense of an awful but sought-after beginning, the setting in motion of a lumbering, creaturous desire beyond yourself. Leaning over one of the cubicle walls, not twenty feet from me, laughing with Jesus’s personal stockbroker rendered invisible by corkboard and cloth paneling, was the sleek form of Tom Gustafsson. He was laughing like a goddamn cocksucker is what I thought, those exact words, for some goddamn reason, an echo of Mike’s from within my mind.

  He was in jeans but wore a cuffed dress shirt, just like he had at the funeral. His fingers were in motion, illustrating what he was saying. There was a milder touch to him here. An affability, an ingratiating quality. He was a churchgoer. Of course he was. The rich find deserved providence easy to believe in, when so much of it has been bestowed upon them. But why this church, and why did I need to see his ugly face so often? He was a walking reminder of how I’d failed to help Mike and been fired from my job; how I’d failed to find another; failed to be a father, husband, brother, or son; failed to learn the name of my own grandson; failed to be anything but a simple, beautiful American failure.

  Then came a nauseating wave of panic. Gustafsson could identify me. I was impersonating a police officer. I turned for the door and walked fast. Just as I went through it, Lambert’s biggest, warmest voice caught up to me, and I paused to look back, half expecting him to be coming my way with armed guards or Hawaiian-shirted crusaders with BlackBerrys instead of broadswords.

  But he was just offering a warm welcome to Gustafsson. The two shook hands, traded off squeezing each other’s shoulders. Lambert was short by a couple inches, short in every sense of the word. His energy was streaked with nervousness, something I hadn’t seen while he gave the sermon to two thousand nor when I was asking questions. It looked good on him. I wanted to see more of it.

  Before either had a chance to look my way, I went out the door. So many of those happy parishioners were still milling around, drinking coffee, hoping to find someone they could offer some support to. Maybe at one point they’d had some doubts, had wanted something in a way that frightened themselves, saw the path before them as full of peril and pain. Not now. On every face there was the contentment of settling, the happiness of being in a warm bath of belonging. I’d resented them before. Now the resentment rose up as anger. I wondered who was fucking whose husband or wife, whose parent was dying somewhere, waiting for a visit that wouldn’t come or, worse, a visit intent on winning a deathbed conversion. I hoped for disaster in their lives. I hoped their children would reveal themselves to be perverts, masochists, alcoholics, sadists, power mongers, depressives, atheists, abortionists, Buddhists, Mormons, spiritualists, nihilists. I wanted them to look more like me.

  When I reached it, the parking lot was emptying. It smelled like gravel and exhaust and a little like Easter, too—it was one of those mornings. The odor of things greening.

  Then a severely lifted truck with flared fenders and chrome exhaust pipe—the whole shit show—growled past, almost clipping my shoulder with its mirror and kicking gravel at my shins. My arm began to rise to give it the bird, but I stopped it. No extra attention. It drove away, and I noticed the sticker that dominated the tailgate: the emaciated, George Romero–inspired Jesus on the cross I’d seen before, on a different truck, down at the harbor the day my tires were deflated and I found the goiter-headed kid, Shaw.

  This truck had a blue-and-white dirt bike tied down in the bed. Another one of those kids, ripe for someone like Sammy to get them into some earnest trouble. Or were the Hard Corps Rangers, as the sticker called them, Sammy’s little ring of drug dealers themselves? At the beach I’d self-righteously assumed they were the ones who let the air out of my tires. Now I wondered in earnest.

  As I pulled out of the parking lot, one of the reflector-vested attendants—my mind flashed again on Mike, then pushed the image of him away—was speaking with a security guard. The guard was wearing my old uniform, or one close enough. That Gustafsson went to church here was one thing. That he probably helped manage something of their finances was another. But it hadn’t occurred to me that he was Lambert’s landlord, that my old pal Watt handled their security.

  It was for places like this that I got canned. If I’d been given a different assignment when I started, I could have been standing out here. I could have watched Emily drive to and from this church every Sunday. And even if I was a better security guard than I never pretended to be, I wouldn’t have noticed her absence, wouldn’t have been able to protect her from whatever was coming, however it came.

  22.

  IT WAS HEATING UP IN MISSION HILLS, AND I WAS LOST. BEING FROM Oceanside, I didn’t get down to San Diego proper very often. I passed through two alternate realities while I got my bearings: the mock Spanish village of Old Town, promising a window into early San Diego and an opportunity to buy overpriced ponchos, lucha libre masks, and mass-produced Día de los Muertos dolls, and a park ornamented with decadent Victorian homes painted with such thick, flat colors I thought they were cardboard cutouts as I drove by.

  Mission Hills was tucked above this and only marginally less unreal. Every other home was a restored and expanded Craftsman with all-native, drought-resistant landscaping and sprinklers running in the full summer sun. In contrast, the Porsche SUVs that littered the driveways looked like a tolerable excess, a concession to pleasure compared to all that supposedly thoughtful Architectural Digest–driven consumption. The other houses sat upon the foundations of old homes with squared, modern asses. Their walls were gray concrete, haphazardly stained strips of reclaimed wood, exposed steel trusses. They were dressed up with sans serif street numbers, maybe a crown of bluing copper cut to resemble a wave running across a balcony that extended over a ramp into the private underground garage. It wouldn’t have been my first guess at where Emily was from, but I could see some resemblances now that I was here. Even the houses, minute by minute, lot by lot, didn’t know who or what to be.

  I was going slowly enough in my old truck to earn a dirty look from an elderly woman in skin-tight baby-blue velour, speed-walking with her Great Pyrenees. High, thin clouds blew in with the afternoon. I found the street I was looking for.

  Driving a shitty truck with a mismatched shell wasn’t a cop thing to do, so I parked around the corner and stepped out immediately. I needed to look like I had a purpose. Not for other people. For myself. Lambert might have already called the police. The office drone might have told him I’d gotten the Hsus’ address, and maybe he’d called them, too. Maybe the police would be waiting for me here, bored with having to cuff another lunatic.

  So I walked firmly. With the suit on, I felt like a black-and-white film detective coming home after a long day or like an Adventist missionary launching a seed church. There were lawn mowers running nearby, but I guessed that their operators were less Ward Cleaver and more Cesar Chavez. Ward was off getting some dermabrasion, was performing his savasanas after a steaming bout of Bikram yoga, was jerking off to absurd pornographies using organic hand creams.

  I turned the corner and the road rose. The street wa
s tree lined and the asphalt was cracked and scabbed over, slipping downhill in tectonic chunks. Power lines were going in and out of everything.

  I turned over my plan. There wasn’t anything to turn over. It was as if I’d said heads or tails and then flipped a marble. After seeing that church, where every need was anticipated and every outcome planned for and expected, maybe the lack of a plan wasn’t a bad thing. That’s what I told myself anyway.

  So when the street number on the mailbox in front of me matched the number of the Hsus’ house in my pocket, I started toward it without pausing to gather my thoughts. Stopping once would be stopping forever, and I didn’t have that kind of time.

  The stone walk curved toward the front door. The place was big and old, but not especially well kept. The roof was cedar shake. The walls were brown-painted board and batten. It wasn’t elaborate or elegant, but it was large and nice, and there were intricate designs leaded into the tall front windows. The jacaranda in the front garden was enclosed by a rock planter. On either side of the tree were stone benches braced by rosebushes, backed by a trellis of sweet pea. There was too much time being put into this garden. It looked like a branch didn’t have a chance to grow before it was trimmed. The only gaps in the presentation were the few purple flowers from the jacaranda that had fallen the previous night. They puckered on the ground, empty pouches.

  I couldn’t bring myself to use the brass knocker in the shape of a cherub, so the door reverberated with a dull, fleshy thump when I knocked. It was opened by a man in a maroon polo shirt. He was on the short side, with thin black hair. He said, “May I help you?” without the least trace of a smile, and I saw a hint of Emily in his cool, appraising eyes. In the moment he spoke, a single tarred smoker’s tooth became visible, then vanished again behind pursed lips.

  “Maybe,” I said, glancing over his shoulder. The house was dim, shaded, but there didn’t seem to be anyone waiting for me in there. “Did Eddie Lambert call you?” A cool bead of sweat ran down my side.