The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  “To see you,” I said. “Just to see you.”

  Emily laughed dismissively. Her nose creased at the bridge, and though I couldn’t see them from where I sat, I pictured the freckles that ran across her face, saw how they related to the ones on her mother’s face. “So you’re going to tell me,” she said scornfully, “that under all that you’re just another sentimental asshole?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Probably not. I just needed to see with my own eyes that you weren’t gone for good. That you hadn’t just up and vanished.”

  “I don’t know, man. That seems like bullshit to me,” she said, shaking her head. “You don’t want to know what was happening with Sammy? Why I was in Oceanside that day? What’s happening now? You’re good at playing quiet, but I bet you’re looking to meddle some more. It’s the dad in you.”

  I took a breath and let it out. “I doubt it,” I said. “I was never much of a dad. And I could ask you a bunch of questions, but what would I get? The whole story? I don’t think so. Even if we spent the whole day talking, I wouldn’t know it all. I’ve got a decent sense, though. I can make some solid guesses, and maybe it’s better to leave it at that. San Diego’s a small town, and the evangelical scene is even smaller. After Lambert broke your heart, I can see how you would fall in with some people who’d eventually lead you to Sammy.”

  She nodded confidently, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes now. “Sure, close enough.”

  “Fine. Then you get hooked on whatever Sammy was selling. You start doing what you need to do. Maybe you trade sex for room and board. Maybe not.”

  “Eh, not,” she said. “Sammy’s a big, stupid baby. He can barely look at his own dick, let alone get a girl to do much with his or anyone’s. He’s really not good at much of anything. I’m organized, can think ahead, keep track of things. I helped him get organized.”

  “So everything I heard, from that kid Shaw and from Daniella, the forced prostitution, or at least using sex for—”

  “That was my own shit,” she said. A wash of stale pain passed over her face, and she looked away, fixing her features to glare into the setting sun for a moment.

  “Fine,” I said. I knew something of what she was feeling, that hard blade a person can wield against oneself. It was sharp, and unbreakable, and knew exactly which tender places to pierce, exactly how to maximize the pain it could render from the flesh and more than flesh. But I knew enough about what I didn’t know, too, and how foreign her life was from mine.

  “Then maybe you figured you’d had enough,” I said, “or felt backed into a corner. Maybe you just couldn’t shake your feelings for Daniella. You’d buried them deep, but they kept growing anyway, without water or light. You had to see, now that you were both adults, if there was something still there. So you left Sammy and tried her. But I talked to Daniella. I got a good sense of her take on what happened between you, and she was engaged, so you got hurt all over again.”

  Now Emily set her board down next to me and sat on it. She curled her toes again and again in the sand and looked out at the piddly waves that had crossed half an ocean to do their next to nothing against the shore and then recede. She kneaded one palm with the other hand’s fingers, and I thought about the cartoon she’d left on my patio—the ad for fate line plastic surgery. They weren’t her hands she’d drawn, I saw now. They were Daniella’s. A joke, a wish, something more complex.

  “So then you figure it’s a good time to leave town,” I said, quieter now that she was next to me. “Maybe you end up having a little too much fun first. Some habits are hard to kick, and you’d talked a good chunk of change out of Lambert.” She scoffed under her breath but not in a way to stop me. “Somehow your money’s gone before you can split. Maybe you never really wanted to get to the Space Needle.”

  She smiled thinly. “I just don’t look good in flannel.”

  “Sure,” I said, glancing at her. “Maybe that.” She was rubbing her knees where they’d been scuffed red by the wax on her board. She was beautiful, and beside me, but I felt nothing but an aching tenderness for her now. No, I had to admit, even then some of the attraction that had mingled with paternal affection still lingered. Nothing goes away completely. But some things can fade for so long they might as well have, and others you’re just too tired to be ashamed of, when you know they’re too weak to act.

  “I thought I could start a new life,” she said. “But then none of them sounded good. No version seemed worth the hassle.”

  “So then back to Sammy’s?”

  She nodded, pursing her lips. “That wasn’t worth it either.” She picked up a small blade of kelp with one dangling bulb and fidgeted with it. “But I couldn’t think of where else to go, and I couldn’t keep staying with you. I could see the way you were looking at me. I knew where that was going. The way every other one had gone.”

  My heart stuttered a beat, and I felt pierced, accused. It was true, of course. It was no use hiding from the fact. There was a new kind of pressure inside me. A dislocated sense of shame, like fog, settled over everything. She was right, and that was all. I’d tried to help, but still I was there, part of the lineup of figures that fit what she’d learned to expect from men. Maybe only a shadow of it, among the longer shadows cast by those others. I hated feeling on the hook for it. But on the hook was where I needed to be, like a fish, and always.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “If I did or said anything—if I could have said or done anything different, so that you would have stayed. So that I could have helped you.”

  “Forget it,” she said firmly, popping the kelp bulb between her fingers and tearing it from the blade. “You were low grade, compared to . . . you know. But I couldn’t handle the halfway, the not-knowing—”

  “The decent enough.”

  “Right.” She threw the blade of kelp, which caught in the early evening breeze and landed a couple feet away in the sand. “At least I knew the way shit went down at Sammy’s. I wasn’t going to slip up and get the rug pulled out from under me.”

  “Unlike Lambert.”

  “You have no fucking idea.”

  There wasn’t anything to say to that. We sat together in silence, or at least next to each other in it—it’s hard to tell the difference. I would accept either.

  “But still, for some reason Daniella started to help you,” I said softly.

  Emily laughed derisively. “I made her.”

  “Blackmail?” I asked, without thinking.

  “Fuck you,” she said, facing me. She held a fistful of sand—not to throw at me, I think. She’d just grabbed for something when the anger hit. I could understand that. “What Eddie did to me, what he’s done to her? That’s fucking blackmail. With the fate of your eternal soul as the price, for fuck’s sake. I’m not like that.”

  I held my hands up defensively. “I didn’t mean—”

  “You meant what you meant. Don’t get all fucking holy and judgmental on me.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing. It just came out.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  I tried to touch her shoulder but stopped myself when she flinched away. “I don’t need to know,” I said. “Like I said, I just want to know you’re okay.”

  “Okay?” she said, voice rising, tears coming to the brinks of her eyelids but refusing to spill. “What does that even mean to someone like you? How do you define it? Is okay getting clean? Fine. I’m in a program here. I’m getting clean. Is okay never speaking to my parents again? Okay for me, but maybe not for a guy like you. I don’t give a fuck. They made that bed. And what about mine? I get Daniella here with me a couple days a month. I’m getting what I always wanted, right? The other twenty-eight days a month she’s off singing worship songs and planning her wedding. But she’s thinking about me. She’s thinking about my lips when she kisses his. I can fucking live with that. But does it fit your definition of okay? Because I never thought she would admit to feeling anything for me again. But she did. Dealing with those twent
y-eight days a month? I can do that. That’s okay. For me. And she can deal with it, too.”

  I regretted making her so mad. But I couldn’t undo it, couldn’t go back. All I could do was try to untangle it. It wasn’t blackmail, but still I could sense there was some pleasure in there, in making Daniella’s life harder, in hurting her by driving her to admit her love. “So when you say you made her, you meant . . .”

  “I just kept showing up.” Emily was speaking emphatically now. This was a narrative she’d been playing and refining in her mind often enough, running rehearsals at least twenty-eight days a month, a way of justifying herself. “I kept writing her letters after I went back to Sammy’s. Kept pushing her. Kept reminding her of who she was, of what we’d felt. Maybe I just liked making things weird for her. She needed a little more weird. Then you, you fucking moron, you show up at Sammy’s. But it was my chance, too. I’d been thinking about taking his money. I was the one handling the books anyway. I’d gotten the laptop ready, and when that didn’t work, I could get Daniella to help me, and then you’d get Sammy locked up, and then I’d be free. I thought that was what I wanted. I hid out in the garage underground for a few days, until the cops cleared out. Then I went to Daniella, and something had changed. She’d changed.”

  “But she’s only changing about as often as a full moon,” I said.

  She stared hard at the horizon, felt about that far away from me. “I’m not going to explain it. But who she is down there”—she pointed to the south, to San Diego and Canaan Hills—“is who she is, too, as much as when we’re together in my apartment here. It’s not supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to be this hard. And she’s reminding me of some things, too. I thought I’d be getting free after I left Sammy’s, but freedom doesn’t look the same now. We’re not going to change our beliefs because of who we are. We aren’t going to turn our backs on God like that.”

  “We?” Now I was starting to understand, when it was too late to wish I didn’t. This was two-way ventriloquism, then: Emily had coaxed another voice out of Daniella, but now I was hearing Daniella’s words come out of Emily’s mouth. “You can’t even go to the church. Who’s the we?”

  “Fine. Daniella. It’s who she is. Can I change that? It’s in her heart as much as I am. They’re all part of the person who’s helping me, the one who’s looking out for me when no one else does. So fuck you if you think I’m the first person to do this to herself for love. That is love. Compromising yourself for someone more important than you. I’m ready to do that. Daniella is.”

  I looked at the people on the pier, couples and families and teenagers throwing french fries to the seagulls. It gave Emily what little privacy I could while she fought back her emotions. I heard her stifle a sound in her throat—a guttural, heart-wrenching sound. She didn’t think anyone understood her. I don’t think I got it all—who does?—but I got the gist. It wasn’t all good, and it wasn’t easy, but who was I to judge whether or not this ground would prove fertile, for now, maybe for longer. She was making a go of things in the only way that seemed available to her, in the only terms that were real as she understood them. Even if I wouldn’t take that leap, she was convinced it was worth the risk. I hoped that willingness to place her heart in another’s chest—the risk, if not the reward—would be good for her, but I hoped, too, that her feet would find purchase and not air.

  In the late light, a fisherman on the pier reeled in his line. A stingray squirmed in the open air among the pylons, water rushing from its back. “This is what you want?” I asked Emily, without looking at her yet.

  “It’s what I want now anyway,” she said. Her voice was small, fragile, childlike, still a little petulant, a little lost.

  “Then all I have to say is good luck.” I stood, still looking out for a minute, letting my peripheral vision linger on the form of her next to me. “And go easy on yourself, if you can.” Then I turned and held out my hand for her to shake. Goodbyes should be formal.

  She grabbed my hand and pulled herself up instead, then held it past when she was on her feet. Her eyes were raw rimmed, her lips red and chewed. She lowered her head to watch me in that cautious, canine way she had. “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I was trying to help, too. It didn’t go the way I wanted it to, and I don’t think I did you much good. But I wanted to. And thank you for that.”

  She let go of my hand. A chilly onshore had come up, another premonition of fall. She folded her arms across her chest, and I felt how cold the rash guard must be growing. “I know, man,” she said. “If it helps, I don’t know if I could have made the jump if you hadn’t shown up at Sammy’s. Maybe you didn’t mean to, but you gave me the push.”

  It was a kind thing to say, but I wasn’t so sure. I nodded, though, feeling neither good nor bad about it. There was no way for me to know if any of this was good or bad for her—no way to know anything. But she wasn’t being tossed around by other people, wasn’t being hassled by her life. She knew how the swells came in, and from where. She knew the break, how it shaped the waves. She knew where she’d chosen to paddle out, and what wave she’d caught, even if there was time left for surprises in the unraveling. She was riding it, come hell or high water—had found the nerve, in fact, to paddle back out after the last one and ride it again.

  Emily shivered and held herself tighter. Her smirk settled into a tight, wary grin.

  “You’re cold,” I said finally. “Go have a hot shower. I’m going to stay down here a little longer, and then I’m out of your hair forever.”

  “What hair?” she said, running her fingers through the short, blonde strands. The water in them sprayed into the air, and I felt a few drops dash against my face and lips. My soul groaned, or the array of misfiring neurons that made up the respiration of my mind, what the Greeks called the anime, or breath, and what I called a goddamn diagnosable condition. Then she picked up the board and turned to go. With the board in one arm, her gait was functional and solid. Her hips chugged linearly, and the muscles across her back flexed every time the wind blew against the length of her board and threatened to turn her. She moved like she had a purpose and no room for wasted gestures, like the flirtatious ones she’d used on me in Angelo’s.

  She stopped a few yards away and turned back. “Hey,” she called. “Give it a few weeks. Let things cool down a bit more. But then stop by. I still need to get you back for that hamburger.”

  I nodded solemnly, and she smiled. It was a dark smile, a mouthful of sadness framed by sarcasm. The setting sun was now full on her face. Her eyes were rose hued. The freckles on her damp cheeks showed like the dim stars you sometimes see at dawn, the ones that aren’t stars but planets, reflecting. It was strange to see her mother in her face, her father, too, and to know how in the dark they’d remain. I wanted to ask about them, but it was too late and it would have done no good. I’d been wanting to ask if Aracely still carried anything good of me from her childhood. Probably not. Probably lost years ago. And this was Emily’s darkness to dole out. The wind dragged at her board, causing her to twist at the waist. She let it pull, turned with it, and then was walking away again.

  I sat back in the sand. My brain hummed wordlessly. Everything my eyes chanced on was rendered in sharp lines, vivid colors. The marbling swirls where the water thinned against the sand. The divots in this surface where sandpipers goose-stepped and dipped their beaks. The lamps on the pier flickering to life. Surfers bobbing in the break like otters. The old, wiry-haired woman in the Lycra sports bra and bicycle shorts doing some kind of earth goddess dance to the setting sun, for fuck’s sake. I laughed. I was alive. That’s what had filled my mind over these last days, cloud-like and blocking the light of all the usual nonsense of my passing, familiar life. And so was Emily. And that was good. Good enough.

  The sand I sat on retained the day’s heat, even as the air grew colder. It was almost time to leave. Gabby was expecting me. Maybe Aracely, maybe even my daughter’s son. I didn’t know. I hadn’t brought myself to
ask. It was better not to know. But even the prospect meant more than I could say. That there were people who expected something of me, and not only insignificant things, and not only hurt. The world could work a person over until he stopped asking anything of it. But the expectations in my power to meet, I would meet them. I would try. The drive was fifteen hours along dark highway. But on the other end, maybe by the next evening, three faces would be there for me to see: one who knew me well, one who’d needed me once, and one I would recognize without ever having seen it before.

  The light went from bright to golden to orange. The sun sank behind the horizon. No mythic green flash, just there, there, there, and then not there. I waited for the blues to settle onto the surface of things. Then I got back on the road.

  Acknowledgments

  I AM so grateful to so many people that this will inevitably be an incomplete list. But first, my warmest thanks to Tim Wojcik, my agent, for believing in this book and for invaluable encouragement and insights along the way. To Sofia Groopman for seeing something in Haines, and Mary Gaule for all kinds of editorial wisdom and guidance. And to everyone at Harper Perennial for the warm welcome, hard work, and enthusiasm. Thank you.

  FOR TEACHERS, mentors, and guides who’ve helped me see this was possible and how: Terri Meier, Susan Pope, Galaxy Force writers in the late 1990s, Joshua Ferris, Michelle Latiolais, Michael Ryan, James McMichael, Alex Espinoza, Charmaine Craig, Tod Goldberg, Romayne Rubinas Dorsey, Samrat Upadhyay, Tony Ardizzone, Lydia Davis, Dan Chaon, and the much missed Don Belton, who pushed me to “work it” (and grow a bohemian goatee). Special thanks to Bob Bledsoe, for helping me into this novel, and for encouraging me to stay with it—I wouldn’t have without your encouragement. Sending love and gratitude to fellow writers who’ve shared support and feedback over the years, including Michael Andreason, Jacob Angelo, Juan Aragon, Ramona Ausubel, Tina Bartolome, Bradley Bazzle, Devin Becker, Caroline Diggins, Jesus Duran, Michael Hartwell, Kurian Johnson, Deborah Kim, Jenny Liou, D.A. Lockhart, Nina Mamikunian, Leila Mansouri, Pablo Piñero-Stillman, Ashley Rutter, Andrés Sanabria, Rick Sims, Lana Spendl, Alexander Weinstein, and especially novel crew Catalina Bartlett, Aya Bassiouny, Nancy Coner, Rachel Lyon, Michael Manis, and Sana Younis.