“When I called the hospital, they told me you’d just checked out,” she said. “They wouldn’t let me see you yesterday. I was there. There was a policeman sitting by your door. How much trouble are you in?”
I shrugged. “None with them. That was all a mistake. So just my usual kind of trouble.”
“Maybe a little more than you realize.” Her smile was pained. Still, it was something of a smile. “I don’t see any flowers in your hands. No box of chocolates. Can’t imagine you’ve got a gift certificate for a massage in your back pocket. If you don’t have a thank-you present for me, you’ll be in more trouble than you know.”
The laugh that came out of me could have been the first chuff before a bout of crying. “I know,” I started, then got stuck. It took me a second to get going again, to find the right words. “I’m sorry for everything. I’m really, really sorry. You didn’t need that. And I’m sorry for being, well, me. I’m working on it.”
The pained look didn’t leave her face, and the smile stiffened and then soured. Her eyes were squinting against something that wasn’t coming from outside.
“As far as a thank-you present,” I continued, “follow me and I’ll see what I can find inside. At least some coffee first. And”—I felt my left frontal cortex buck against what I wanted to say, an aphasia of emotional disability, threatening to arrest the words in my mind—“my gratitude. Not just for the keys. For, ah . . . for all of it.”
I turned away, I had to, and started walking up to the front door. I knew I was hiding from whatever was threatening to come through in her expression. I didn’t think I was up for dealing with it face-to-face, not right now anyway. Without hearing her come up on me, I was surprised by her arms as they reached around my chest and held me from behind. I stopped, couldn’t move. Her cheek pressed against my spine. The warmth of her body warmed around mine. She held me, and I was held. The last fight went out of me, and I thought tears would come then. But they didn’t. Instead, I felt light, aloft. Borne by another’s care. Adrift but in balance, like a balloon a few days after the party, not jerking on its string but not on the ground either, the little party ghost, floating room to room.
Then she let go and prodded me in the fat of my back. “Walk, mister. Into the house. I think I need that coffee.”
I started to turn around to look at her, but she pushed me roughly on the back of the head.
“March,” she said firmly. “You need a shower, too. Whew. I’ll take care of the coffee.” As we walked, I heard her sniffle. I couldn’t see but could somehow sense, in my peripheral awareness, that she was wiping her eyes. “Then we’ll see if any of that trouble’s real trouble.”
39.
BEFORE DAWN, I WAS AWAKE AND AT THE JETTY. THE SURF WAS LOW. Chest-high sets came in lazily every fifteen minutes. The morning fog was light. The moisture in the air left my skin clammy and chilled. The sound of the waves in the dark was thin and high and comforting.
While I was putting on my wetsuit in the lot, a beater of an old Jeep truck parked a few spots down. A ratty-haired teenager got out. He blew a couple loud shots of snot out his nose and started scraping the wax off his board. The grind of the wax comb against the fiberglass echoed off the cinder-block shitters and the moored sailboats in the harbor that were floating on the black ocean stained with streaks of orange lamplight. I walked past him and grunted on my way down to the shore. His smile was a toothy grimace, but he said, “Have a good one,” and I told him to have one, too.
By the time my ankles hit the waves, I was far enough away from the lights that the sky and the ocean were the same black ink. My feet shimmered and disappeared into it, and my board buoyed against it, slapping gently like the hull of a boat against a passing wake. I paddled out, felt calmed by each dive under another gentle, broken gray-white wave that had been set to roiling into itself by the seafloor, unseen below. It was an easy paddle out.
Soon I was floating past the waves, in a dark that was different from the dark of the tunnel. Maybe there are two kinds: the dark we fear and the dark we rest in. And so it’s the same with light. One warms us and gives us color and form, beauty, but the other gives us other people to see and lets us be seen—it exposes us to judgment and shame, without rest—and makes us hunger to know everything we see, and then even that which we can only infer or imagine. Here I was held in the dark as much as I had been held by Esme, tenderly and without reserve. In this kind of dark I felt able to contend with the world, to be content with myself. I wouldn’t move to paddle, wouldn’t catch a wave until the sun rose, and that would be just fine.
But before the sun could brighten up the view to the west, the ratty-haired kid was hooting his way along a couple swift, if small, right-handers. It was quiet enough I could hear his breathing, the respiratory sound of the wave breaking, the surprisingly soft splashing of his body falling back into the water when each wave was over. And then his laughter. He was laughing so hard. Maybe it sounded a little crazed—or, if not that, somehow impolite, like we should be respecting some unspoken rule of silence under these conditions. But that was my rule, my imposition, my law that I would hold against his actions, his joy. He was having such a good time. He paddled back out a dozen yards away from me, an easy distance even for an old man like me. Still, I left him alone.
At Angelo’s I bought two breakfast burritos. The plan I had was to take them both back to the jetty, eat mine and leave the other on the rocks. Mike and I had never finished our round in the batting cages. I’d been thinking this whole time he owed me the breakfast, but maybe I was the one who would have lost. Maybe I owed him.
It was a way to close things out between us. A bunch of sentimental nonsense is what I mean to say, the idea that I owed him anything, that he—dead and gone—could register the debt as paid, that this was anything but an off-off-Broadway play with a cast of one and an audience who was the cast, a little theater to trick whatever emotional beast pacing restlessly inside me to slip its cage and wander into some other habitat. I could articulate all that, and still I couldn’t tell you why the idea of doing it won out, but that didn’t bug me much.
When I got to the jetty, the kid was still surfing under a clear, blue, morning sky. I watched him, remembering those kinds of mornings when you wouldn’t come in until your arms were useless and you could barely stand from exhaustion and hunger. I ate my burrito. When he came in, I gave him the other one.
40.
WHILE I HAD BEEN GETTING LIGHT HEADED IN A BUNKER, GABBY LEFT A couple messages at the house. Our last conversation, when I’d called her after Mike’s funeral, had been bugging her, and she wanted to check on me. I hadn’t felt up to calling her back yet, but she caught me a few days after I got home, sleeping at six at night.
“I thought you might be dead,” she said dryly when I answered. “You’re usually more punctual about harassing me.”
“Yeah,” I said. That hollow flutter from being woken straight out of a deep sleep hadn’t left my chest yet. It mingled with a dark humor about how close Gabby was to being on the nose. “I’ve been off my game. I’ll try harder, I promise.”
“Even the other day,” Gabby said, still teasing aggressively. “You were acting so strangely. You didn’t insult anyone in our family. You didn’t insist on your rights. You’re slipping.”
Our family. That was a strange thing to hear her say. It hadn’t been ours for a long time. It was theirs. Even the phrase “our family” felt more like a postwar ruin than anything you’d put faith in, like the church or a middle class. But a crumbled edifice was still a structure, and I had at least helped set some of the foundation stones, for better or worse.
“No yelling, no insults,” I said. I needed a glass of water, three weeks’ sleep, some Xanax. My voice broke off the words in weak, dry chunks. “I don’t have it in me today. Really, I don’t.”
“Aw, but you sound terrible, and I’ve got you on the run. It’s a rare opportunity.”
“Sorry, I can’t—”
“You sick? Or just scared?”
“Gabby. Please.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll stop. But you do sound bad. Really. Are you okay? Ignore the tone of how I say it. I can’t help not taking you too seriously. But are you?”
I breathed heavily through my nose. “I doubt it,” I said lightly, “but I’ll manage.” It was too difficult to explain everything that had happened. It was too hard even to know what it meant to me, though I could feel the meaning in my gut, clear and articulate as a fist. I thought of Gabby in her small home in Eugene. I thought of Aracely, my little girl, and her apartment, a crib next to the bed. I thought of my grandson, whose name I didn’t know.
“Hey,” Gabby said when I hadn’t spoken in too long. “You still there?”
“Hm,” I said. That was about all I could manage.
“Come up.”
“Excuse me?”
“Come up,” she said again, with less fear and anticipated regret in her voice. That was meaningful, too. “No promises about seeing Aracely. But come stay on my couch a few days. At least it’d get you out of the house for a while. You forget how well I know you, and I know this voice. Haven’t heard it in a while, but I remember it. And Eugene’s nice right now. You might find it exceptionally difficult to shit on.”
I closed my eyes. “You sure?” I asked.
“Of course not,” she said, but her voice was easy on me in a way I hadn’t heard for years.
We agreed that I’d come up in a few weeks. There were a handful of things I needed to take care of around the house. A broken back window. Some stains on the carpet I’d pretend to try to remove by buying some caustic product and never applying it. I put the Nova back in the garage at my parents’ house and had a real estate agent meet me there.
By then I’d put off leaving long enough. There was one stop I needed to make along the way, but I’d been dragging my feet. I had reasons to wait, wanted to give her some time. But eventually I was out of reasons and out of time to kill. I packed the truck and headed north on the 405.
After the arid expanse of the Camp Pendleton Marine Base, where all three of the nation’s best and a few thousand other guys reenacted Normandy Beach invasions every fourth weekend, I pulled off the freeway in San Clemente. There were some regular buildings in the town, like the liquor store, but mostly I drove past mock Spanish Colonials built in the 1920s and ’30s and then the more recent and palatial ones from when we really hated Mexicans but wanted to pretend to live like españoles in prerevolutionary New Spain, down to the complexion of the household staff. Eventually I came to the hard-luck, mid-century shoebox on Elena Lane that had been subdivided, probably using cardboard and duct tape, into two apartments. I parked a few dozen yards down to wait with a view of the driveway.
Waiting was easy now—no rush for anything, no push or pull forward. I wasn’t looking for something to get pissed off about, wasn’t looking for that little adrenaline high of unrighteous indignation—any kind of distracting buzz at all. The last year had been a relapse, even if I’d never had a drink. I was back at meetings, a day or two a week, after years of swearing them off. Alcoholics, like pastors maybe, are never recovered but always recovering. It was a grim truth, and I didn’t like it. I hadn’t fallen into spraying crowds with holy water and preaching the end times, but something of that wretched and retching way of thinking had drifted in like an algae bloom in my brain. Now I was past it, waiting in the still water for whatever would come—no predictions, bitter or metaphysical, and no great hopes, but no certainty about their impossibility either. To wait around in my truck for a while was tedious in a way I could live with, was nothing.
The tedium evaporated like a marine layer when I saw her.
Emily’s hair was blonde now, pasted down with some kind of product, but of course it was her. She was carrying a blue foam surfboard, a seven-footer by the looks of it. She wore knee-length trunks, olive green, and a white rash guard. She stopped at the curb to check her pockets and looked down the street. I thought about ducking but didn’t, and she didn’t see me anyway. She wasn’t looking for me. She didn’t know I was still looking for her.
I let her walk away a full five minutes. Then I got out and walked after her. I knew her destination anyway. She wasn’t taking that board to catch a bus. It was only a few curving, downhill blocks before I passed the Beachcomber Motel and could see the pier below, silhouetted and looking like a zipper in the denim of the ocean. Emily was walking down the stairs to go under the train tracks. I waited on the bluff to see if she’d emerge on the other side and go north or south. She went north, disappearing in the shadow.
I followed under the tracks, where the puddles might be seawater or piss or both—the smell was all the same, putrid and sour but familiar in a way I liked. She was out in the water, so I sat in the sand and watched. The waves were knee-high, and she was, as she’d called it when I took her surfing before, getting hassled, if not surfing. She was still finding her legs, falling mostly before she stood up. That was partly the fault of the waves. They didn’t have enough push, and the board would founder, underpowered. But she was paddling more confidently, was seeing how to get around the break, get over or through waves. And even from this distance, I could see she was finding out that it could be fun.
By the time she rode into the thin, sandy gloss that squeegeed itself against the shore, the sun was low in the sky. It was a perfect kind of post-tourist and pre-autumn evening to be down here, all the blast and idiocy of the summer fading in memory. She wrapped the leash around the tail of the board and walked up the beach, a classic California profile in nearly full shadow, her features existing only in a burnished, golden shade, like the saints on Renaissance altarpieces that seemed to be inwardly self-illuminated. But Emily couldn’t be the surfer girl the Beach Boys sang about, the girl half the young (and not so young) men around her lusted for, laughing through evenings at bonfires and ukulele sing-alongs. That was just her darkened profile, a corresponding outline. And if she was in shadow, my face was catching the light, and she was coming my way.
“Emily,” I called.
If she was startled, she didn’t let it show. She brought her free hand up to wipe some salt water away from her eyes and blinked at me a few times. Then she laughed and shook her head, saying something quietly to herself, and walked over to me.
“Shaka,” I said, waving my hand with thumb and pinkie out like it was a faulty flip phone.
“Oh, fuck off,” she said, standing only a couple feet from me now. Her expression was stern.
“You’re getting better,” I said, motioning toward the waves.
“I’m getting shit,” she said, not taking her eyes from me for a second. “Maybe a tan.”
“It’s something.”
“Speaking of shit, you’re looking . . . well.” It wasn’t untrue, and the way she said it wasn’t unkind. I’d probably lost some weight since the last time I saw her, wasn’t shaving. I was still so exhausted my face felt numb most times, and my jaw ached. It had been over a year since we first met, but I looked like I’d aged five.
“You are what you eat,” I said.
That made her laugh, but it was bitter and she cut it short. “God damn it. I shouldn’t have gone to Angelo’s that day. I’d have been better off at Denny’s.”
“Not likely,” I said. “The geriatric Oceanside Chamber of Commerce surf team goes there for Grand Slams and games of waitress grab-ass. One of them would have lent the wrong kind of hand.”
She rolled her eyes, and her smile puckered like a jacaranda bloom a day after it’d fallen to the sidewalk. “Fine. I should have gone to the grocery store and bought myself a bag of salad, is that what I should have done?”
“I don’t regret getting you a burger.”
Her laugh was dismissive. “Maybe you should. Anyway. Sorry I fucked up your house.”
After the bunker and the hospital, once the paranoia and wish for meaning had faded, I could see there were e
nough clues that my ransacked house wasn’t done by Sammy’s people sending me a message. It wasn’t even clear if Sammy had people; it was more likely that he was someone else’s person, a tool in its own compartment in the toolbox. But someone had wanted me to think he did. Someone wanted me motivated to get Sammy locked up.
“Figured that was you,” I said. “No apology needed. Nothing there, nothing to fuck up, I mean. Only took a couple hours and some air freshener to put it to rights. The bed was maybe a little too far.”
“Maybe. But doing the fridge was fun.”
“My poor Tapatío.”
She smirked and looked down the beach in either direction, a trickle of water running from her hair down her cheek.
“No one else is here,” I assured her. “I haven’t told anyone.”
“Then what do you want?”
It was a fair question. I’d been thinking about this since the hospital. I never told the cops about Lambert giving Emily the money or how he’d lied about seeing her so recently. I’d wanted to ruin whatever he had, but when Tuitele told me to take out a new lease on life, I remembered finding the rental agreement in Daniella’s car. It had a San Clemente address, Elena Lane, Daniella’s name and signature in the right spots. It hadn’t meant anything at the time, but Elena stuck because of Ellen, my sister. Then, in the hospital, I saw it: Daniella claimed her life was the work she did at Canaan Hills and in the community around the border. She was getting married, doubling down on that whole life, the antithesis of the one she might have had if she and Emily had been united in their response to Lambert—a life that would be hard to live from a tiny apartment in San Clemente, an hour and a half away without traffic. The rental couldn’t have been for her new abode of marital bliss. I’d at least read those signs well.
And Emily had admitted to ransacking my house, likely figuring that if I thought Sammy was sending me a message, I’d have more of a fire lit under me. She’d read my signs well, too. At the end of the day, it got Sammy locked up. Emily was safer, living quietly up here. So what was it I wanted?
The Churchgoer Page 29