The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  Daniella laughed. It was short and low, dragged through some emotional rocks she’d already been steering over, and it left me feeling off-balance. She glanced at me, for the first time showing anything other than composure in her features. Her eyelashes flashed, wet, in this goddamn California sun that seemed to flatten out any feeling. Then she looked up, trying to keep tears from spilling, and breathed a long, heavy breath. “If only it were that straightforward.”

  My throat was dry. The muscles running down my neck clenched. “What does that mean?”

  “He made mistakes—”

  “Mistakes? So you’re going to defend him.”

  “No,” she said, waving a hand dismissively. “He made mistakes, but not that kind of mistake. If that’s what you think happened, you’re wrong. And if I were going to defend him, I wouldn’t have brought you here.”

  Not that kind of mistake. Some ghost train in my mind was still chugging toward that destination. It seemed logical, inevitable. But another part of me was thrown from those tracks, rolled in the dirt, came up now to make sense of the remaining options.

  “Then tell me,” I said. “What did he do to her? Why do the Hsus hate him?”

  She eyed me like I was a beetle on its back. “That’s . . . that’s not the point. They blame him—not for her running away, but for her never coming back. They’re the ones who toed the hard line, but they blame him for telling them to. But that doesn’t really have a lot to do with the trouble she’s in now.”

  “So you’ve seen her? You’ve talked to her?”

  Daniella shook her head, massaging her own fingers anxiously. “She showed up, about a year ago. I hadn’t seen or heard from her for a long time before that, and she was in a bad place. She wanted money.” Now Daniella turned to cracking each knuckle of each finger, methodically working from left to right. When she finished with that, she spun the engagement ring thoughtlessly. “She said she was going to make a big scene unless my dad gave her some money. She was high, but she said she needed it to get clean, that she wanted to use it to get away to someplace where she could start over. She told us . . . horrible things, about who she was living with, about what her life had become.”

  A year ago was around the time I first met Emily at Angelo’s. Before or after, I couldn’t be sure. If she’d had cash, she wouldn’t have been trying to hitchhike, though.

  “I’ve heard some things of my own about who she was living with,” I said.

  “It’s awful,” she said tremulously. “She was completely hooked on pills. She showed me bruises he’d given her. He was . . . was forcing her to prostitute herself. Threatening her if she tried to leave. Locking her in the closet. Telling her no one would care if she disappeared off the face of the earth—and I know her, I could tell she believed it. Then promising to take care of her. That he was the only person who understood her. The only person who could protect her. But he was the one she needed protection from. He’s a monster.”

  The man was Sammy. It had to be. There was enough of Shaw’s story in this. And Sammy was free, maybe trying to find Emily right now, too. The description fit God, too—the first mover, the urtext.

  “So your dad gave Emily the money?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  I whispered under my breath whatever curses came to mind, a long litany of them. Daniella couldn’t hear; no one did. In the old world, a curse could strike someone dead in an instant—traveling to the other side of an Atlantic Ocean crossable only by sail. Those same curses, if heard by others, could have gotten me burned at the stake, once upon a time. Today I could borrow Daniella’s cell phone, call anyone on the planet, and anything I said would lack the power words used to have.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why didn’t he try to help her? Really help her? Why didn’t you?”

  She gave me a blank look, a touch of confusion around the eyes. For a minute she seemed at a loss for words, but then she blinked and found them again. “That’s not, well . . . Emily has her reasons for not wanting help from me. But I needed someone to know the truth about the man she was living with. Someone needs to do something about him.”

  “Why not you?”

  She released her own fingers and pulled back her hair with both hands, gathering it in a ponytail and draping it over one shoulder. The wind began to pick it apart a strand at a time, causing these to flutter around her eyes. “Look. This isn’t easy to explain, but it can’t be me.”

  “Are you scared of your dad? Did he threaten you to stay quiet about the money?”

  “Nothing like that. I mean, sure. He doesn’t want anyone to know he saw Emily, but he’s not a violent person.”

  “You know I saw her just a few days ago, right?”

  “I don’t—”

  “And you know, not five minutes later when the police showed up at Sammy’s, she wasn’t anywhere to be found, right?”

  There was a strange look of panic in Daniella’s eyes. “No—”

  “She could be under the floorboards, for all I know. And you think there’s time? There isn’t time. Not for this.”

  “I’m scared,” Daniella said, not without a hint of anger beneath. “For her. But also because this is my life. I can’t be the one to help her.”

  “Or won’t,” I said. “Because it might cost you.”

  “No, that isn’t it,” she said with a sigh, then pulled her posture upright. “Fine. She won’t take help from me. We were in love. Before. On principle she would refuse anything I had any part in. And what you saw back there, at the park, that is my life. It’s . . . it’s the most important thing to me. And yes, that could disappear in a flash. It would be like I never existed.”

  She sniffled only once afterward—no crying, no sobs—but her posture slumped at the admission, which may as well have been murder for the way her shoulders sunk with shame. She stared hard at the harbor. The hot light seemed to dry whatever tears were in her eyes before they had a chance to spill. She didn’t say anything for a long time. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t looking anywhere in particular, but her eyes never moved from whatever fixed point they’d landed on, while her mind carried her back to who knew what moments.

  Maybe she thought that what she’d said had said it all. I knew what she was getting at. To help Emily would be to risk having that knowledge become public. I knew how these California churches, so sun-glossy welcoming on the outside, were fed by a steady stream of westward-ho Baptists and Methodists, lapsed Catholics, fallen Mormons, and fed-up Episcopalians, warming their hands around the Christian talk radio campfire—people who made their positions against homosexuality not just known but a cornerstone of their homilies.

  We’d done it—I’d done it, I had to admit—too. I’d preached it at youth-group sessions, kept it high in the list of my warnings against sex and the culture at large, which was marshaling itself against our so-called God’s so-called just guidance. Homosexuality as sin was there when I spoke to a fine set of fourteen-year-olds from my small stage about love and sex and proper courtship, taking its place right after masturbation and before the warning that the couple who prays together lays together. I’d gone as far as to let the boys in youth-group sessions know that if they didn’t masturbate, God would take care of that for them, meaning—shit, the things I said back then—they should wait for a juicy wet dream to spill their seed for them, a little sin-free squirt in their Star Wars bedspread. I knew well enough that they’d all been rubbing up against the couch cushions by then. For every person who admitted to dry humping her boyfriend, I knew there were another five or six who kept it a secret. Despite all the nods of agreement, all the innocent and approval-seeking smiles on faces just breaking with acne, bodies just gaining the scummy patina of adult bodies, I knew the sexual morality talk watered a shady fern of shame in every heart. This shame was good, I thought. It would keep them from straying out into the desert, would protect them from the oppressive heat of damnation.

  In my mind, I was giving the same messa
ge to the kid balls deep in his dad’s Playboy magazines as to the Tommy who dreamed of kissing Timmy. I thought these sins were the same, even as the sin of sex between two men or two women became the focus of our ire. It was just one of a thousand ways a person’s genitals could lead them away from God’s light, but it became the vessel for serving up the delicious pleasure of feeling like our way of life was under attack, when in reality we understood nothing about threat. With God’s voice I’d condemned the behavior, without seeing that I was also condemning the desire. What is a person if not his desire? That had become the whole point of my life since I’d been kicked out of my bunk on rock bottom: to have no desires, to let it all go, to be nothing. The things I’d wanted, the things I’d been and done—I wanted to take it all back. Which is what I’d tried with that bottleful of pills. My sister had killed herself to know. I’d tried to kill myself to annihilate what I knew.

  So I could fathom something of the shame Daniella was feeling. Maybe I didn’t know it, but I could understand it. “What happened?” I asked. “So you guys were in love. Probably not kosher at Canaan Hills. But not the end of the world, right?” Even saying it, I knew from experience it wasn’t true—that it could feel exactly like the end of the world.

  “Hm?” she said, turning to find me sitting next to her, surprised, as if coming back from a faraway place. “No, it wasn’t . . . It didn’t end well. Being caught by your father, who is also your pastor. . . . There’s no way that ends well.”

  “Did he hurt you? Her?”

  “No.” She brushed nonexistent crumbs from her lap and then held her knees. “I hurt her.”

  I nodded. This was the deeper shame, it seemed. I tried not to move. Even a stray gesture or glance would be a breach of the gentleness she seemed to need.

  “It’s not that interesting,” she said, doing a poor job of keeping the tremor out of her voice. “He didn’t get the cane, didn’t send us away for reprogramming. He just told us to get dressed.” She paused, remembering. “He came down on us pretty hard. He was angry—he was right to be angry, I think, too—I can see that now. At the time, I don’t know. . . . It all just hurt. But he needed us to know that what we were doing was wrong in the eyes of God, would separate us from His love forever.” Her tone didn’t hint, the way it can, whether “His” was more “his,” whether the love she might lose was God’s or her father’s, whether that was even a difference worth parsing. In my mind, I saw Lambert’s grinning self-satisfied face—his fat lips, Brylcreemed hair, trim beard, eyes like Santa Claus’s bastard-born child—turning his rage on these children.

  “I knew he was right,” she continued. “Emily fought it. She pulled away from me, from the youth group, until one morning her mom went to wake her up and she was gone.”

  “Where were her parents in all this? They didn’t know what happened?”

  Daniella shook her head. “We made my dad promise not to tell. But they had to know something had happened. Emily suddenly didn’t have a best friend. Started slipping at school and church. I remember them coming to the house to talk to my dad about her, right toward the end. They’d found a boy in her room at two in the morning. They didn’t know what to do.”

  “Show her whose rules she needed to abide, right?” I said, jabbing my finger up, pointing to the flat blue-violet sky, beyond it only a vacuum and dark matter and figments.

  “Yes,” she said. “Then she ran away. We all tried to find her. My dad more than anyone. It was a stressful time. He was trying to expand the church and move it to the location we’re at now. But that didn’t matter. This mattered to him.”

  But he had sent Emily down this road. I knew that much. His impersonation of God, his gift of shame. His influence over Daniella, over the Hsus, over the whole church at which Emily knew, irrevocably, she’d become unwelcome.

  I started to say something, but she interrupted: “Look, it’s fine. I don’t need to know your thoughts. I’ve gone through my own process of grief, and study. I know my mind and heart about it, and more important, I know His heart.”

  There was no doubt about the pronoun this time, when there should have been at least a shadow of a doubt about everything she was saying.

  “Through His holy Word, I know what God wants for me, and I’m at peace with it. What happened to me happens—happens a lot with young women, especially. You’re figuring out love, and you’re getting filled with these new desires, and you have this best friend, this person you share everything with, and it can get confused. It’s not the worst thing. It’s not unforgivable.”

  She sounded convincing, but I wasn’t convinced. With enough fear and force of will, a person can build a structure in her mind that self-erects a foundation even in the murkier, subconscious floors below. But doing that doesn’t eradicate the moles and earthworms and all the other sightless, subterranean beings nosing their way through the soil. It just pushes them deeper, spurs them to dig sideways and around. Sure, people experiment, have adolescent phases. But I didn’t like what she was saying, the edge in her tone of voice, the rigidity of preconceived words: that what happened had happened to her—she had done nothing—but that what she’d been part of was not beyond the pale of God’s forgiving and instructive hand, a hand that had pulled her back while it swatted Emily away.

  “The man Emily is with now,” Daniella said, “is something else entirely. And Emily is still out there. I know it. You know it. She needs to be protected from him.”

  But I was stuck on Lambert’s choice, how he’d done it because having a gay daughter would hurt his plan to expand the multiplex—to get his face on more screens, to move more Hawaiian shirts than a Tommy Bahama—a post–Chuck Smith version of the California dream.

  “Your dad is no saint either,” I said, enunciating slowly to keep my own feelings in check. She didn’t respond, eyeing me blankly, so I pushed at it again: “He was afraid of what would happen to his church if someone found out he was a pastor with a lesbian daughter, is that it?”

  “Maybe, but you’re missing the point.” Annoyance entered her voice. “Ultimately, spiritually and morally, I knew he was right, even if I struggled with it in my heart for a while. I left her stranded. She hasn’t forgiven that, and I don’t think she ever will. But I still want her to be safe, and to have a chance of a better life.”

  “And it has nothing to do with that,” I said, pointing at the engagement ring she was rubbing at again like a diamond-encrusted worry stone.

  She sighed, made a pained expression, looking briefly like the image of the Maria Dolorosa on Esme’s candle. “Sure it does. When she showed up for the money, she saw I was engaged. I’m worried it opened up the wound all over again.”

  “And if anyone finds out about you helping her, maybe your story comes out, too. And maybe the fiancé balks. The support you get for this outreach, maybe people start to think it’s misplaced. Who’s going to give the Latino world a Coke if not you?”

  She grimaced derisively. “Those are just a bonus because we have the volunteers and resources. There were another twenty people back there tutoring kids and college students, teaching reading and English, getting people plugged into social services. Only about a hundred combined hours of educational support for the community on a Sunday afternoon alone. But sure, the sodas are nice.”

  I hadn’t asked for a promotional pamphlet. “God giveth diabetes, and God taketh it away with expensive prescription medications.”

  She scoffed. “I don’t need you to understand what we stand for. That isn’t why I’m talking to you. We’re not of the world, but we work within it. Expecting someone from the outside to get it is like asking a fish to tell me about the feeling of flight.”

  “I get it more that you think,” I said. “I’m a bit of a flying fish myself. I used to be a pastor. But I can tell you about growing some legs and evolving to walk on only two of them, too.”

  She had a cold directness when she spoke next, suggesting an analytical mind that wasn’t going t
o let emotions goad it. That was deeply annoying. “Let’s not get into your thoughts about The Origin of Species, okay? It’s trite, it’s beside the point, and it’s not helping. Emily needs our help. I was hoping you could help her.”

  She rubbed at her temples, pulling the flesh around her eyes, revealing the raw red underlayer of flesh around the socket, then releasing it, a tricky tiny peep show of exposure and concealment. “The work you saw me doing back at the park, that work is the most important thing to me. One scandal can ruin a church. It would cancel out all the good we’ve done, and all the good I know we can still do. I can’t lose that, on behalf of those people.”

  I knew what she said made a kind of sense, and maybe I could even admit that not everything she was doing was misguided, full of duplicitous intention, a surface veneer of help papered over the expanding sprawl of brick-and-mortar evangelization. But still I said, “Oh, I get it. Like father, like daughter.”

  She looked like she’d slap me. Then the hand just waved wind at my face, like she was shooing away a mosquito. “You’re a real shit, you know?”

  “Pretty sure Jesus cries at all the seven words you can’t say on television.”

  “Jesus also knocked the money changers flat on their asses. I’m not standing up for my dad. I’m standing up for a community of people who’ve found real meaning. I’m standing up for a community of people committed to improving the quality of life in the whole border region, both sides of the fence. Maybe they sing songs to Jesus, and maybe you have a problem with that, but I’m not the grindstone for your old, dull ax. I’m a person who wants to help Emily. There’s a monster out there who has been hurting her for years, and maybe he’s doing it again right now. I can’t help her myself, but that doesn’t mean I’m not on Emily’s side. I’m talking to you, for one.” Her hands dropped into her lap and gripped each other, an echo of the gesture I’d seen after the church service. “I’m talking to you. Maybe that was a mistake. But I don’t know where Emily is. Do you?”