The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  “No editorializing,” I said.

  He pressed his eyes hard with his fingers. I wished he were using pins. “She wanted money. She said it was for rehab. I meet people all the time who are ready to turn over a new leaf, and she didn’t sound like them. She wasn’t hungry and glad to be hungry, the way they are. But I didn’t see another way, so I gave her the money.”

  Everything seemed to darken a degree. It wasn’t the sun’s recession. It was me, my mind, something in my devices of perception. A visual depression. Something to match what I was seeing, what I was hearing, how I felt. “You could have helped her,” I said. “Why couldn’t you get her set up with her parents again?”

  “I couldn’t,” he said, now looking away, off to a corner of his yard. He didn’t say anything for a while. His body spasmed against itself, like he might lose his composure. But he regained it, depressingly. “You don’t understand. I had seen—God showed it to me—that I could help hundreds, thousands, with Canaan Hills. It was my purpose on this earth. I owed it to those people. But she could have stopped it all. I couldn’t do that to the others and to those I can still do good for. I couldn’t throw it away.”

  “You should have,” I said, shifting in such a way that I knew my body wanted to kick him in the side. His must have registered the slight movement because he groaned and grimaced, curling up on himself like a bug on hot concrete. I stopped short. I was proud of my restraint, my belated mercy.

  “God would have wanted you to throw all that away to take care of that one girl,” I said. “I hope that’s what haunts you on your deathbed.” He flinched again, seeming to think I was about to make that day today. I let him think about it a long time, then added, “Whenever that day comes.”

  I began to walk away, studying the pattern of broken glass at my feet. Immediately I was aware of some shape or order in it, but the pattern kept slipping away into my peripheral vision, refusing to be seen or given sense.

  He pulled himself up. His feet ground glass into the concrete. The thin, high screech was like a car’s brakes about to go out. “That’s it?” he asked.

  I stopped and looked at him hard. He was frightened, relieved, confused, guilt ridden. As he should be, as I’d wanted him to be. “That’s it,” I said. “I wanted you to know you weren’t the only one who knew what you’d done. I know. And I’m not the type to think of you as a vessel for God’s work.”

  Now I felt cold in my fingertips and hands. This inner chill was at war with the heat still lingering from the day’s Santa Ana, and it left me uneasy, nauseated. I started walking again. It was then I looked up and saw him, framed in broken glass still clinging to the door frame: a boy, ten years old or so. Frozen, eyes darting from his father to me. The plastic dinosaur he held clattered to the ground as we made eye contact.

  My stomach yawed, pitched over an edge. His hair was cut short, front plastered up with gel. His skin was a shade darker than his father’s, but his eyes were Lambert’s. He stood perfectly still, afraid to move and break his witness. I gave him as much room as I could as I stepped through the broken sliding glass door. As I did, I wobbled sideways and my shoulder shook loose a few more pieces of crumbled glass. A little blood began to leech through my dress shirt. Not enough to think twice about.

  A vice cinched down around my temples. There was seawater up to my nose. I felt like I was drowning, like I was drunk. This time, I walked through the house and saw it. Clean and comfortable. At the ready for family movie night or a glass of wine with old friends. Cherry-scented candles in fucking alcoves. I went out the front door, closed it behind me, and walked across the street, into the mustard, and down the hill. I retched once then, at the base of a Cleveland sage. The scents mixed and made me feel worse. Feeling worse felt good.

  I stood, unmoving, for a long time. The sun was setting in the west, catching the weeds and dust with its hot, orange light. Long shadows trailed from the coyote bushes. Clouds of gnats buzzed in the pollen haze. Dusk was falling, making everything go fuzzy and soft. All of it was being lost prematurely, in the dark, to places where human eyes couldn’t manage. How had it gotten so late? How had these days gone past as they had? What days? I wondered. How many? I couldn’t enumerate the answer, didn’t know—the last nine or nine thousand?—and what did it matter anyway since those days were gone, part of all the oblivion.

  So I walked on until I reached my truck. Then I drove slowly, with shaking hands, down the road that ran along the eastern side of Mount Helix. I saw, in my mind more than with my eyes, how that crucifix above me lay down its long shadow on the neighborhoods below. Even its shadow, though, would disappear in the darker, more encompassing one of the mountain itself. As I drove, this larger shadow cast itself upon my truck, stretched out across the valley, and would settle over all of us as night, until the earth made another turn. Even my faith in that fact of rotation was unsettled. I doubted the dawn.

  27.

  IT WAS A LONG, DARK DRIVE BACK NORTH ON THE HIGHWAY. THE REST OF humanity and I streamed along with our headlights on, like we knew where we were going.

  The road kept threatening to run in reverse on me, the way patterns at high speed can. I kept thinking about Lambert, and his kid watching. I felt my brain clawing at some black box of redacted memories, the ones of when I must have decided I’d had enough and swallowed a palmful of pills. When I was drunk enough and depressed enough to forget that Aracely was in the house. There was only that one moment I could see, the only one my brain had decided to keep around: my little girl, ruffles on her cotton pajama shorts, legs tucked up to her body, placing the phone back in the cradle. While I was wheeled away and the world wheeled into blackness again. I could only guess the rest, rely on secondhand reports, no memories of my own to go on.

  That day hadn’t been the only time I’d considered suicide. I knew that much. The possibility had bubbled up into my brain often enough after Ellen had done it. She had made the unthinkable more than only thinkable for herself, and so how could I not think it, too. And then there was this: that either God existed and my sister’s soul was burning, damned; or Ellen was simply gone, and God was an illusion. For the longest time I was forced to sift myself between those two impossible weights. Alcohol lubricated the process, made it easier. The love of my family made it worse. Gabby’s love meant worry over my eternal salvation. Not Ellen’s—I was alone with hers, which for the others was already foreclosed and final. Then I drank myself insensible one night, and whoever of me was left wasn’t afraid and wasn’t beholden to anyone. Even then, before I realized belief was lost to me, I’d turned to death and not God. But death failed me, too. Gabby had found me on the couch early that morning. She thought I was only passed out, and she went to the neighbor’s, a member of her small group, asking what she could possibly do—what she should do. The pills made me sick, the way they are intended to. Aracely must have heard me in the bathroom. She woke in her bed, walked her little body down the hall, and found me, deranged and semiconscious, and made the call that was all I could remember. And still I ran away from them and their concern—from her and Gabby, my parents, anyone who knew me—resented it, pushed it away. Any kind of love.

  What had Gabby said to me when I spoke to her the night Mike was killed? That I was everything bad Aracely was afraid she was capable of. This was why: not only the attempt to end myself, but everything on either side. The drunken rages. The disappearances for days. The instability. The swift dismissal of God. And then, even after I was sober, the inability to want anything other than to be left alone, unasked for, unrequired. It was who I was, who was left. There had been nothing to do but live with that. Impossible. But there wasn’t another choice.

  A glowing, angled arrow appeared in the sky on the horizon—the sign for In-N-Out, as good a symbol as I could hope for, which meant I was back in Oceanside. I got off the freeway and headed for home. I would do what Daniella had asked me to do. Get Sammy arrested. It’s what he’d always needed, what he’d gotten from
church at one point in his life. In the morning I’d call Tuitele and Lawrence. All I wanted was a little sleep first. I hadn’t slept in days except for a half drowse here or there or a few hours on a jailhouse cot.

  It felt good to be driving up Ditmar Street, off the freeway and in a familiar neighborhood, one that made sense to me. I knew who lived in these houses. Not personally, but I thought I understood. I swung the truck into my own driveway and stepped out. The clack of my dress shoes on the concrete made my heart jump; during the drive I’d forgotten I was wearing my father’s clothes. As I walked up the driveway, there was a shiver buried in my spine from the sound of this tap dance on the concrete. Maybe it was the memory of my father’s wood-heeled click, coat slung over one arm, on the way to the front door. Now I made my way to mine. I’d left the coat in the car. It could wait until the morning, too.

  The bougainvillea scratched at the front window in the dry wind. It felt like the branches were scratching at the insides of my eyes. I pushed my key into the front-door lock. Instead of metal biting against metal, the entire door pushed in, opening onto a blue-dark living room.

  The darkness quavered as I wondered what was inside and why my door was open. I was more bummed out than keyed up. I felt more depressed than angry. I hadn’t expected it, but I did not feel surprised.

  I snaked one hand in, flicked the light switch, and jumped back. For a few moments, I flattened myself against the garage door. No one emerged. No gunshots rang out. All was quiet. I went back and listened at the door. No sound, no movement. I kicked it open and jumped into the bougainvillea. The paranoia building in my brain smelled off, like old meat, like religion, and I didn’t like it. I told myself that I must have just not shut the thing all the way. At least it was late enough that not many neighbors would have seen me run away from my own front door.

  Still, I was afraid to step into my living room and stay there. It took resolve, and when I did, the room wasn’t recognizable, not in the way I expected. I saw my National Geographics, but instead of being on the bookshelf, they were piled loosely on the ground with the bookshelf resting on top of them. The TV was on its side, on the carpet. Balls of stuffing from the couch cushions were drifting around the room in the cross-breeze like small, weightless rabbits. It looked like a crackhead had used my place for a DIY Build-A-Bear Workshop.

  Sammy. Or whomever Sammy reported to. That’s who had done this. His warning rang in my ears as if he’d just said it: leave Emily alone, or else the people he worked for would kill me. I looked in the kitchen. The fridge door was open and my carefully accumulated selection of condiments was shattered on the ground. The coffeepot, my closest friend, hadn’t survived either. I checked the bedroom next. The bed was still made, and for a moment I was stupidly hopeful, though of what I couldn’t say. Then I smelled the piss. The bed was soaking in it. The bathroom mirror was shattered, making an incomplete mosaic of bullshit on the floor.

  In my office, someone had taken the time to pull my old theology books from the closet. They looked exhausted, half-opened and in loose piles, having humped one another all over the floor. Was this how a criminal sent a message? It seemed so unfocused and haphazard. Still, fear and adrenaline flushed through the rusted-out septic leech lines of my system.

  Then, from out front, I heard car doors shutting. My body locked up and became one giant ear. There was the sound of steps on pavement. Whoever did this had been waiting for me. I knew it in a single flash, like a sudden convert under the hand of the televangelist. And now they were coming in.

  I didn’t stop to think. Instead, I ran. First to the kitchen, yanking on the sliding door and wondering why it wouldn’t open. Then I remembered to flick the stupid little mechanical latch. I stepped out into the yard and shut the door, gently, soundlessly, and listened again. There was a party a few blocks over, sending a bass line my way. The traffic noise was steady, easily relegated to background noise. I didn’t hear anything else.

  Time was what I needed. Time to think and get the police after Sammy. If his people were after me, that wouldn’t necessarily solve my problem, but if they were after me, then they were certainly after Emily. I couldn’t just knock on the neighbors’ door and ask to use their phone, dragging the Rosas into this mess, too. From the dark yard, the view of my well-lighted house through the windows could have been of any regular suburban home. Of course, in my head “regular suburban home” suggested a small but content middle-class family, which was something my own home had never known—was, in fact, an endangered species except as an idea, the gray wolf of American life.

  Then I stepped onto the desiccated corpse of a palm tree I’d let die years ago and jumped the wooden fence into my neighbors’ yard. It was strange to stand on the Rosas’ grass, in the dark and uninvited. I’d always envied their white hammock, bolted to the trellis posts. In the dark there was less to envy. I tried to climb the fence opposite the one I shared with them, but there was nothing to get a foothold on. In a little garden patch was a two-foot-tall gnome with a pervert’s grin and his finger pointed toward the sky. I grabbed him by the neck, set him by the fence. His oblong hat was just enough of a step to get me over.

  With every fence I crossed, each new yard became a little less strange to enter. Then I reached the end of the block. From there, I skulked along the black-and-orange streets until I came to Pacific Coast Highway. There was still a lot of traffic, and I felt like a fool waiting for the crosswalk signal—a fool who’d get shot in the back because he stopped, midescape, to obey traffic law.

  When the light turned, I ran with my head down and kept running. A hooker smoking in the red-and-green neon light of the Dolphin Hotel’s inverted L sign shouted at me, “Slow down, baby. Enjoy yourself.”

  For that moment only, it still felt good to be home. Everything else was panic and fear.

  28.

  I WAS WINDED WHEN I REACHED OCEANSIDE STATION A COUPLE BLOCKS farther down. It wasn’t really a station. It was a small cinder-block office, some automated ticket machines, a few awnings, and six shitters. There was a Burger King and a few refrigerated boxes that would give you a candy bar or a soda for a handful of quarters. The birds-of-paradise, oversaturated in the lamplight, were huddled in clumps and cowering. A homeless guy sitting on a planter fumbled furiously with what I hoped was his zipper. People used to meet in train stations, have lunch or a drink at them, flirt with counter girls, run away with alluring women and mysterious men. But you can’t get a smile from a machine, and besides the scattered waiting passengers, the most mysterious man appeared to be perfectly content with himself.

  The timetable showed a southbound Metrolink coming in twenty minutes. I lined up, bought a ticket from the machine, and was content to be surrounded by so much human indifference.

  I paced while I waited, keeping an eye on every person in the area. It was a quiet night. Most of the business commuters had come and gone. I was left with some scattered gothic teenagers, a few domestics ending late shifts, a couple more homeless people, and a few wandering Burger King wrappers.

  The sound of the ocean, only a few blocks away, was loud, a solid booming rumble every couple minutes. The waves had to be big. The surf report had been my most important news source for so long, and now a tropical storm must have come up in the south while I was distracted. Distracted by other people, their bullshit business, their nonsense. I tried to tell myself that, but I knew it wasn’t true. I’d been distracted for just about my whole miserable life.

  Then there was a bang. I spun around, already expecting to have a new orifice in a part of my body that didn’t need one. A maintenance worker picked up the heavy domed trash can lid he’d dropped and put it back where it belonged.

  Soon the train was grinding its brakes from the direction of San Clemente. When it stopped, I climbed in and took a seat on the short mezzanine level at the end of the car. Tucked in one corner, I had a view of who would come up the stairs from the lower level or down them from above. If I needed to, I
could run in the opposite direction, never forgetting my security guard instincts. A vagabond of an old woman snored in the seat across the aisle. Soon we were moving again, skimming through neighborhoods, voyeurs gazing into the backs of houses bright like lanterns in the dark. These were where those normal families lived, in their normal houses, little places worth maybe a million dollars, even though they backed onto the tracks. Just single-family places, you know, in safe neighborhoods. A good value.

  Vagabond grandma woke up and began searching through her bag. “Old goal, old goal, old goal,” she said. I was being chased, possibly about to be murdered, for poking my nose into some kind of trouble, all because I’d been friendly with some hitchhiking lesbian Christian. The idea of me being the crazier of the two of us in this train car helped me hold it together. Then the woman hooted victoriously and pulled out an enormous bag of pretzels, Rold Golds. At least she knew what she wanted.

  The train rolled across the trestle over the Agua Hedionda Lagoon, the same one I’d seen going to Mike’s funeral with Esme. That was yesterday, in the daylight, with fog rolling in. It looked different in the clear, dark night. It felt like a decade had passed. Some hormone pulsed through my body. I didn’t care which. Someone was trying to kill me. And Emily: I had assumed she’d left my place by choice, but now it seemed like she’d been taken. They knew where I lived. Sammy said I’d die if I did anything to help her, so she was important to him. She’d been seen at the beach with me, around Oceanside.

  I would be fine at my parents’ old house, at least long enough that the police could locate Sammy. There should have been a sense of strangeness to all this—there having been men at my house, tearing it apart, waiting to tear me apart, going into hiding—but I felt none of it. I was focused on what to do, clear on what that was. I had an absurd faith in the next step.