The man’s face tightened at the name. “No. No, he hasn’t. And why might he have a reason to call us? What’s happened?”
“Nothing’s happened,” I said. “That’s to say,” I heard myself ramble, “he heard there was news about your daughter. He called me. I’m with Calvary Chapel. I’m a counselor. He thought you could use someone to talk to.” So I wasn’t a cop anymore. I wasn’t sure I liked this new self any better, but maybe it was an easier angle to play.
“Why not someone from his own church?” the man asked, his voice calm but confused, with a touch of annoyance.
“I have some experience,” I said, “with similar situations.”
“Eddie is a thoughtful, selfless man,” he said tonelessly. “What experience?”
“Oh,” I said, now on the defensive. “Nothing exactly like what you’re going through, of course. But I know what it’s like. To wonder about someone you love. To not know.” Some other self rose up into my face, stretching itself into the heat of my skin, running itself along the nerves of my fingers, reacquainting, filling me with feeling—a disembodied impression of Ellen. I answered it with bile in my stomach, making fists of my hands, tightening my throat. “I know how terrible it is,” I said.
The man had been standing braced against the door frame with one arm. Now he let his posture sink. His shoulders dropped a few inches. Where he’d formerly thrust his chest forward two small breasts swelled against his shirt. His belly pressed against the maroon fabric. He looked down, at my feet, shod in my father’s saddle shoes. It was like watching the will vacate a person.
“It was kind of Eddie to think of us,” the man said in a softer, more suppliant voice, eyes moving across the stone walk—stopping, I knew, where they came upon an out-of-place bloom, a fallen twig. He paused, letting something pass. When his words returned, they were gently bitter, like he had a mouthful of pith and rind, the fruit having passed into his gullet a lifetime ago. “He is a generous man, Pastor Lambert. That is true. Very true. Tell him I said that, when you tell him we didn’t need to speak with anyone. I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time, but I think you have.”
“There hasn’t been more news about Emily, has there?” His tone had sounded so final that I was suddenly afraid I’d missed the worst, irrevocable news. I was no good father. I barely deserved the name. But I knew how I’d be if Aracely had died, and I searched the man’s body for signs of it on him.
The man’s upper lip pulled back. The smoker’s tooth appeared again. It bit into his lower lip.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my business.”
“No,” the man said. “It’s fine. There hasn’t been any news, and we’ve had enough years to acclimate ourselves to this.”
From within the house came the sound of shuffling feet. A woman’s voice called out. “Who are you talking to, Stuart?”
The woman appeared over Stuart’s shoulder. She was taller. Her eyes were large and unmade-up, brown and friendly. She had a narrow mouth and full lips that were only beginning to show their age. Across the bridge of her nose and on her cheeks she wore a dusting of freckles beneath the grime of later sun damage. She looked so much like Emily it was hard to imagine being her husband, looking at her and seeing his missing child instead.
Her smile was weak, but unlike her husband’s, at least it was a smile.
Stuart spoke to her but never took his eyes off me. “Eddie Lambert sent this man. He’s a counselor. He thought we might want to talk to him.”
The woman—Adrianne, Lambert had called her—said, in the same toneless way of her husband, “Pastor Lambert has always been a good friend to this family.”
“I told him we wouldn’t need the counseling,” Stuart said. I waited, watching her.
“No, we don’t. But thank you. Tell him we say thank you,” she said.
I felt awful that I’d come here and intruded on their long-standing grief in this way. “Of course, of course. Though I imagine you’ll see him before I do.”
“Not likely,” Stuart said. Adrianne’s fingers tensed once around his shoulder.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, sensing a gap, an opportunity I couldn’t resist. “I got the impression you and the Lamberts were friends.”
“Well,” Adrianne said, and left it at that. They watched me with eyes that said it was time to go. But I couldn’t, not yet.
“I’m sorry again,” I said, letting my posture break, letting them see the appearance of my guard going down. Then I switched to a more confidential tone—everything I used to do to encourage young Christians to confide their sins in me, for which I could hold them accountable. “Forgive my misunderstanding. I must have just gotten the impression that he knew Emily well, and in a church that size you don’t get to know everyone. I made the leap to assuming you were all close. My mistake.”
Stuart continued to chew on his lip. Adrianne looked at me but didn’t give a sign that she saw what was there. “Our daughters,” she said with careful enunciation, “were like sisters. Emily was at their house as much as at ours. She called him Uncle Eddie. Before, of course.”
I nodded sympathetically while my brain collapsed in on itself, self-compressing toward a gravitational singularity under the weight of the revelation—not the bright, divinely sun-streaked kind I used to imagine myself having. “I see where his concern was coming from then.”
Stuart spoke: “We aren’t friends like that any longer.” Who he blamed for that state of affairs was clear from his tone. I wanted to know why.
“Like I was saying to Stuart, I’ve dealt with some of this in my own life,” I said. I left the statement open enough that they could say anything, really, to fill the silence—in the hope that they would at least keep talking.
Adrianne brought her husband’s arm down from where it had been braced against the doorjamb. She twined her fingers in his. She looked at their hands and didn’t look up again. “Forgive me, but is that everything?”
It wasn’t, I wanted to say. But I didn’t want to press these people too hard. They were hurting. I didn’t want to add to their burden. If they could say anything to bring me closer to Emily, they would have already found her themselves. But they’d told me enough.
“Pardon the intrusion,” I said sincerely, and made to leave. “It was well-intentioned.”
“What isn’t?” Adrianne said, and shut the door.
23.
LAMBERT HAD LIED TO ME. HE WAS OBSCURING HOW WELL HE’D KNOWN Emily, his daughter’s best friend. There could only be so many reasons for doing that, and only one I was convinced by—the most common one committed by a man of God against a teen under his care. The blood boiled in my veins, became red clouds churning through my body, clouding my sight. My hands shook.
I drove around awhile, trying to find a pay phone. By the time I spotted one, I was in City Heights and ready to admit I should have a cell. Instead, I was on a hot paved corner by a carniceria running an old, emphysemic grill on the sidewalk. The Santa Ana wind whipped thick, dark clouds of smoke my way as I plugged some quarters into the machine and got connected to Canaan Hills. I was hot and tired, but that wasn’t why I was light headed, reeling. The knowledge of Lambert’s lie had settled and left me giddy and vengeful, the way the first good buzz of the day used to feel, lifting a grudge up to the height of self-righteous truth, transmuting a wound into a crosshairs, aligning the pins in the damaged tumbler lock of my brain into beatifically pissed-off clarity.
I asked the voice that answered on Canaan Hills’ end to connect me with Daniella Lambert. The receptionist put me on hold to track her down. A few minutes later she—of course, she—was back: “She’s out at the Barrio Logan service project site. I should have known. She’s got something like this going on nearly every day of the week.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Real heart for giving. I heard.”
“It takes that to run the outreach programs. What a gift, am I right?”
“Where in Barrio Logan is it?” I
asked. “I’d like to chip in.”
She told me, and I made the short drive across town.
Tucked in by the harbor, Barrio Logan had been passed off over the years, from the navy during the Second World War to the shipping industry to junkyards to cheap developers and slumlords. The neighborhood was tucked under San Diego’s swinging dick of a bridge that slapped down right through the middle of the community and let visitors come right through to tony Coronado Island without having to slow down, look around. In the seventies, locals took over a lot under the bridge when the city reneged on a promise to build a park there. Since then, the residents had been building, piece by piece, Chicano Park, which ran almost the entire way down to the water. Every concrete pier that held up the bridge was painted over with murals, making the place look like a prehistoric monument done up in Technicolor, only these stones weren’t aligned to some astrological calendar—only the forces of weight and gravity and our deep and abiding desire to get massive numbers of cars to where we want them, when we want them, and to charge a toll for the right, damn those who live in the shadow.
I parked on the road under the bridge and got out. The pier propping up the on-ramp to the bridge overhead was painted with ¡VARRIO SÍ, YONKES NO! Below that was a scene of workers protesting before a factory—men, women, and children picketing while others in the background tore down a barbed-wire fence with a kind of double-minded pragmatism. On the next pier a purple-skinned goddess looked more ambivalent about the whole thing. I preferred the Aztec warrior with the eagle headdress. He looked like he knew what he was about, knew himself to be a predator with a good eye.
I’d thought it would take me a while to figure out where Canaan Hills was set up, what they were doing. But it wasn’t hard, just a game of spot the white person. I’ve got a good eye, too. There were about ten within view from where I stood. But none of them were Daniella, so I walked deeper into the park. As I passed, the purple goddess seemed to note my clothes and roll her eyes. Another gabacho.
There were a few tables and ice chests set up under the shade of a Mayan-style kiosk made of the traditional poured concrete and Behr latex paint, red and green. A few of the church people walked the park with trash grabbers and plastic bags, mostly just wandering, since the park looked pretty clean. They would have been better off on almost any beach on a Saturday morning. The rest of them fanned out, returned to the tables, then fanned out again. I watched for a while, trying to figure out what they were doing.
Then one approached me and gave me a can of soda still dripping cooler water. He’d tied a little tag to the tab. The ink was smudged from the water, but I could still read it: A SMALL GIFT FROM US TO YOU TO SHOW GOD’S LOVE, NO STRINGS ATTACHED. —YOUR FRIENDS AT CANAAN HILLS.
There were always strings attached, I wanted to tell the teenage boy with the recessive chin who’d given it to me. Maybe especially when your proselytic tool of choice is the Coca-Cola Company suite of products or when the nod to local culture means offering the full rainbow of Fanta flavors. Still, I was thirsty, the orange soda hit the spot, and he hadn’t asked to share any news, good or otherwise, with me. He just wandered back to base camp and reloaded, grinning like a fool doing good, which is just what most fools think they’re doing.
I went close enough to see that Daniella wasn’t at the tables. I turned around, scanning for her. Wearing the suit, I felt conspicuous, like I was here to assess the value of the land for a coming wave of mixed-use development, half luxury apartments and half frozen yogurt shops. So I kept moving, walking a few blocks down toward the water. This part of the park seemed to be reserved for a gathering of homeless people, which looked enough like an outdoor AA meeting that I thought about introducing myself for the free coffee.
Then I came back the other way. Still nothing. The operator at the church may have had it wrong, or maybe Daniella had already left. When I was past the Mayan kiosk again, thinking I might have to give up on finding Daniella today—thinking about what to do instead, since things like going home and waiting weren’t options—a voice cut across the park. It was her.
“Hey. You lied.”
I turned around. Daniella was standing on the wheelchair ramp of a brick building’s side exit. She was just outside the shadow of the bridge, so the San Diego sunshine fell on her hard, like a house from the sky. She was put together but not done up, wearing a teal top with puffed sleeves, charcoal slacks, and modestly close-toed shoes so as not to tempt the foot fetishists. With her straight black hair, darker complexion, and strong nose, she looked enough like some of the women in the murals to belong here. She definitely didn’t get her looks from her father. I hoped she didn’t get much else from him either.
She walked toward me with an older man. The shadow of the bridge touched her, starting at her feet and cutting upward, dividing her into graduating proportions of light and dark until it consumed her. She sent the man off to the kiosk with a whispered word and a wave.
I headed toward her. “Your dad lied,” I said when we were close enough. “He didn’t tell me you and Emily were best friends. Didn’t tell me a lot of things, I suspect.”
I wanted her on her heels, wanted to know the truth and quickly. But she just shook her head and smiled politely. “Doesn’t surprise me. That’s not exactly against the law, though. Unlike, say, impersonating a police officer.”
That rung my bell, got everything humming. “It’s not what—”
“I don’t care,” she said flatly. “I’m not worried about that. Why are you looking for her?” Her eyes didn’t betray suspicion or malice. I don’t know what they betrayed, but there was something that kept me searching them. For Daniella to know I wasn’t a cop, Lambert had to know. For Lambert to know, he must have spoken with someone in the police department, maybe the Hsus, too. Maybe Gustafsson had seen me as I hightailed it. That was not good. It was, in fact, a very bad kind of bad. But whatever was happening out there, back at Canaan Hills or in Ramona or wherever, it didn’t seem like Daniella wanted to be a part of it.
“I was trying to help her out,” I said, choosing honesty. “Then she disappeared. I saw her a couple days ago, living with a drug dealer. Cops raided the place, but she disappeared on them, too. I’m worried about her. I need to know she’s safe.” Even saying that I needed to know was insufficient. It felt stronger than that, bigger, more compelling, beyond need or obligation or duty, under the pull of a firm and unbending kind of force.
She looked me up and down. I couldn’t imagine how I appeared in her mind, what she made of this haggard middle-aged man wearing discards of an out-of-date suit in a park like this, holding one of the free sodas her people had brought here. She chewed her lip, seemed to catch herself doing it, then reset the line of her mouth. It reminded me of Emily. She had the same habit.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, and walked away without waiting for an answer. She flagged down a short, round woman with a pageboy haircut and spoke with her. I looked around for a trash can. Then something like guilt kicked in, and I searched for a recycle bin instead. Daniella came back a moment later, squinting against the dust kicked up by the Santa Ana, which had grown insistently gusty and unfurled its heat on us, like the door to the oven of the Anza-Borrego Desert had fallen open.
“Carina’s going to keep an eye on things here for me,” Daniella said. “Let’s go someplace a little quieter. I think that’d be a good idea.”
“Fine,” I said.
“Follow me,” she said, already walking and not bothering to check that I was behind her. She waved to a balding old man with a feather earring who scooped up cigarette butts fanned out around a trash can. The charred dots on the lid made it look like a ladybug. The man looked like a hippie burnout turned born-again, someone whose countercultural suspicion was probably turned now to the war against Christians in America and, in all likelihood, toward anyone who tried to restrain the lily-white hand of God that made greed good in the munificent free market. Time and perspective, two unrel
enting, changeable assholes—but not without a sense of humor.
24.
DANIELLA DROVE US IN HER YELLOW-PAINTED OLD VOLVO STATION wagon down to the embarcadero. The air shimmered with dust, blown garbage, and sunlight reflected brilliantly off sea chop. We sat on a bench along the sidewalk, pinned between the glossy downtown skyline on one side and navy warships and Disney cruise liners on the other, both vessels at the ready to take some drunk pleasure-seekers to a third-world country for no good reason.
It had been a quiet drive. I’d been telling myself to let Daniella take the lead. She had something she wanted to say, something she wanted me to know. You could frighten away confession with a wrong word or glance, and she hadn’t given any opening that I could, like the patient and prying pastor I’d been, press into.
Then we sat on the bench. The bright light and military hardware, the smell coming off the hot dog vendor’s cart and the tables of hats for tourists embroidered with TOP GUN above the bill, it all left me sore, suddenly, sick to death of this entire place, this entire world, and the thought of someone like Lambert living contentedly within it. The idea of waiting disappeared into thin air, like all ideas do.
“Your father abused her, didn’t he?” I said.
My muscles tensed as if, at her word, I could spring to action and tackle the guy here and now. It had been a feeling first but then a narrative so straight and narrow and sure I could have walked over the water on it: a paternal pastor figure with a teenage girl in his charge, someone vulnerable who could likely be controlled or kept quiet; that girl running away—from what, it seemed obvious—growing up into a troubled woman choosing the wrong men, the wrong drugs; that girl passing through Oceanside, trying to skip town, failing and falling back into old habit. The only thing it left out was where Emily could be now.
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