by Amy Gentry
Tom and I don’t talk about it. We haven’t spoken since Monday, and he sleeps in Jane’s empty room, where he has moved his computer desk. I assume he works in there during the day. Perhaps Julie comes and goes while Tom stares at his screen and tries not to notice.
As for me, I go to work too. Once I’m in my office, door locked against the department secretary, I’m oblivious to faculty and students passing in the halls; nothing can hurt me. I put my cell phone on my desk and lay my head down next to it, waiting for Alex to call, waiting for news about the DNA test. Sometimes I grow impatient and imagine calling the police myself, telling them my doubts about the woman in my house. Things would move much more quickly after that. But I threw Overbey’s number away and finding it again would take more willpower than I have at my disposal.
Besides, this way, like Alex said, I don’t have to be involved. She’ll never know it was me. That’s the beauty of ID’ing a corpse rather than a living girl.
And what will happen when they get the results? I imagine the police bursting into the house, ready to cuff her and drag her away. She’s sitting on the sofa under the afghan, watching a movie; she turns around at the noise. I try to inoculate myself against the expression on her face as they come for her. Shock? Rage? But I never see it. Instead, I keep seeing her expression illuminated by the ultrasound screen: bottomless grief, hopeless despair.
And what if I’m wrong?
But these are the habits of denial. When I feel myself starting to indulge them, I force myself to think of the photo.
It’s a short trip from there to thoughts of Tom’s gun. When did Tom take the classes, when did he get a license to own a handgun? Just another thing he was doing on his own, though I know it doesn’t take long. I know, because I once planned to buy one. I told myself that’s why I went to the firing range: I was practicing to get my license, firing rounds into a piece of paper shaped like a man for entirely pragmatic reasons. If something like that ever happened again, I told myself, I wanted to be ready.
It was a lie. I wanted to pretend, in every possible scenario, that I was killing him. Every time the gun discharged and I felt the jolt go through me, I felt exhilaration at the thought that maybe I had missed the heart, hit a shoulder or a knee or the groin, so I could have the chance to do it again and again. I wanted to kill him forever.
One day when I drove to the firing range, I realized it wasn’t really Julie’s abductor I wanted to kill. It was someone else, the person who was really to blame for Julie’s death—and even if she wasn’t to blame, she was the only person I could hold accountable. A firing range is the easiest place in the world to kill yourself; you don’t have to own a firearm to shoot one. It was raining hard, one of those summer downpours where the air feels inside out, like a monsoon, and I almost wrecked the car getting there. I was too drunk to write my name on the sign-in sheet that day, and they turned me away.
I never went back. That was the beginning of the end of the drinking, and when I sobered up, I decided not to buy a gun.
But there are laws of inevitability at work in our lives. While I was crying drunkenly in my car, shuddering away from the brink, Tom, somewhere across the city, was making a different decision. And now the gun is in our house, like it was always meant to be.
Now that I’ve lost her again, I can always use it.
Friday night after dinner, Tom goes up to Jane’s room and shuts the door while I sit on the sofa and idly browse the cable channels. Something has to give; something has to break. I believe it will happen tonight.
Halfway into a rerun of Roseanne, Julie confirms it by striding quickly past the sofa on her way out. I hear the garage door open, catch a glimpse through the kitchen window of Tom’s car backing out. Leaving the television on, I wait a few seconds and follow her in my car.
At night, the freeway is less clogged, and the rosary beads flash past instead of scrolling slowly by. The faded awnings and new construction and apartment buildings look flat and dull at night, irrelevant. I can barely distinguish one from the other. Up ahead, the Range Rover weaves expertly around slower cars, in and out of lanes—Julie’s a good driver for someone who’s only just learned, I think to myself with some sarcasm. Though there are plenty of cars on the road, I can always see her. The SUV sticks out over the other cars, highly visible even to me in my squat little Prius. I know where she’s going before she puts on the turn signal.
At night, the Gate is a bald hill wreathed in glowing glass. The surface parking lot is full—there’s something going on, one of the nighttime services that are among the church’s most heavily attended offerings. I turn into the garage, where suited attendants direct a line of creeping cars farther and farther up, and a steady stream of people flows back down a central staircase from the roof. I go where I’m directed, ascending past thousands of cars to the top level of the garage.
Every time I pass the staircase, I glance at the line of people, and just as I’m turning the corner to the top level, driving toward the open spots in the distance, I finally catch a glimpse of Julie heading downward with the rest of the crowd. She’s wearing a long skirt and cardigan I bought her just a few weeks ago, when things were so different.
I park and walk down the staircase with the rest of the stragglers: a lean older couple wearing matching denim shirts and shining belt buckles, the woman carrying a leather purse dangling fat silver charms; a black woman about my age, in jeans and a ruffled blouse, herding two children in front of her; an elderly woman with a cane; a towering Latino man with a potbelly and a bullet-shaped head who pushes past everyone impatiently. All of us emerge together onto the surface lot, then stream down a walkway to the lobby, which is teeming with people. The hanging monitors and clerestory lighting feel different at night, surrounded by the faintest hint of a stadium echo that no amount of plush carpet and soft, shaggy area rugs can dampen. It makes the air feel a little fizzy, so that it’s obvious this structure was originally built for excitement.
The escalators that cleave the entryway in half are covered with people, but I don’t see Julie anywhere. I hurry past the information desk and step onto the escalator to avoid the enthusiastic greeters, only to be delivered straight into the hands of a thin woman with large, bright-awake eyes behind oversize glasses at the top of the escalator. “Program?”
I take the glossy trifold, still scanning the crowded horizon for Julie, and she spots my hesitation.
“Is this your first time visitin’?” she asks with a heavy Houston accent, flattening the vowels, chewing and pinching off the consonants.
“Um, yes.” I nod, and she puts her hand on my forearm.
“Well, listen, honey, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going right back down this escalator and—you see that desk on your right? Well, now, usually Sheena is up here at the top of the stairs with me, but you can see her down there—”
I start to panic. What if Julie sees me, stopped here at the top of the escalator? “Can I just seat myself?”
“Of course, honey,” she says but then calls after me as I’m moving away: “It’s just since you’re new, we’d rather you got one of the really good seats.”
For my money, a good seat is one where you can see the lay of the land without attracting attention. I walk around the stadium’s curve on the second floor, following the flow of people past a room with a sign saying COMMUNION, more video screens, and an unmanned, recessed information booth that used to be a concession stand or bar when this was a stadium. Then I step into the sanctuary itself.
It is cavernously huge. Cluster lights illuminate dust motes a hundred feet away against the bluish-black vault of what used to be the Astrodome, only the intricate starburst pattern of rectangular skylights on the ceiling hinting at its former identity. Gone is the Astroturf, replaced by acres of beige carpet; the folding seats lining the walls have been tastefully reupholstered in navy. Jumbotron screens flank the stage, and a TV camera on a crane swoops over the red-carpeted dais as i
f it’s limbering up for the show. I find a seat halfway down the top section, close to the aisle, and sit down.
After a few minutes, the lights dim and the stadium, still steadily filling with people, erupts into applause. Audience members stand in waves, shouting, “Jesus lives!” and “Praise Him!” over the band, which has started up a dramatic, throbbing hum. Seven singers emerge from the depths of the altar, dressed in television-friendly stage outfits and holding wireless mics. All at once, the music bursts out, a heavy beat thrumming through the whole stadium, as loud as any rock concert, basketball game, or monster-truck rally. The laser light show begins, brilliant beams of green and blue sweeping the stadium. One moves across my face for a split second and I feel a shot of adrenaline, the chemical response to being bathed, suddenly and forcefully, in a powerful light. My heart feels as if it’s actually leaping up, like in the Wordsworth poem; I’ve always wondered what that would be like.
The music thuds explosively onward. It’s a soaring pop anthem, the song you hear near the end of a film about teenagers in love. The Jumbotrons cut between the singers’ faces, the band sweatily playing their instruments, and a montage of images: fast-motion sunsets and sunrises, flowers opening in a tenth of a second, young people driving a jeep across dunes, a beautiful blond girl lying on her back beside a campfire, a black baby stumbling forward on chubby legs while a white woman kneels with her hands out, a sailboat speeding across a giant lake in time with the clouds. After a few minutes of this, the singers part and recede around a lone figure who walks to the front of the stage. The people begin pumping their fists, the cries of “Praise Him!” louder and louder.
“I’m here for you,” he says simply. “And so is the Lord.”
I recognize the voice from the Circle of Healing, but this is my first glimpse of Chuck Maxwell in person. He looks like a country-pop singer at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo or the long-lost father on a soap opera. The Jumbotron gives me a close-up of the kindest, crinkliest pair of blue eyes I have ever seen.
“I’m here to tell you, the Lord has great things in store for you, His children,” Maxwell says to screaming and applause. “And you’re here for one reason: to listen, to know, and to praise His Holy Name. Because nothing happens by chance in this great universe the Lord has made. He’s bigger than your problems. And when He calls your name, they’ll be gone!”
“A-men!” a voice just behind me yells out.
Maxwell pauses and lets them scream for a while, a smile crinkling his beard around his neck. “Listen,” he says. Another dramatic pause. The music is swelling and people are shifting from side to side, shaking their heads back and forth. “Tell it, Chuck!” a voice rings out.
“I will tell it! I will!” he yells. “Why are you here today, people? Let me just ask you that, why are you here?” He puts the microphone out and cups his other hand behind his ear as the audience yells in one voice: “It ain’t luck, Chuck!”
He puts the mic back by his beard and says, “That’s right, y’all. It ain’t luck. Nothing is luck in this universe the Lord has made for us. He loves each and every one of us, we are all His very special favorites, and He will bring us something that is beyond our imagining very soon. And whatever it is He has in store for us, y’all”—he pauses again—“it’s gonna be worth it!”
The screaming and clapping erupts once more, and the singers melt forward to begin a song, obscuring him from view temporarily. The man sitting to my left taps my shoulder and hands over a blue plastic bucket filled with envelopes and cash, a crisp hundred-dollar bill sitting at the top of the pile. I pass the bucket to the usher at the end of the aisle, who smiles beatifically at me although I haven’t put anything in.
“Y’all, His blessings are gonna rain down upon us,” says Maxwell confidingly as the music subsides. “I know you’re worried. I know you’ve got the day job or the sick kid or the people coming after you about the bills. I know you’ve got the son-in-law who hasn’t come to Jesus yet. You turn on the news, and you think this world is getting darker, turning its face from God. I’m here to tell you some of the best news of all: Don’t worry about it! Let the Lord look after your neighbor and your kid and your landlord and your boss. What you’re waiting for is coming, and the only reason it hasn’t come yet is your faith ain’t strong enough yet!”
The music starts up again, but this time slower, more hymn-like. “Now, this next song, I and my team of prayer leaders will descend down off this stage, and anyone who wants to can come on up here and pray with us. Just go on up to the head of your section, and a prayer leader will listen to you and pray with you, pray you get the wisdom to see what the Lord is already giving you. And the rest of you can take your seats and just listen to these inspired singers tell you about God’s love.”
As the crowd rises as one and surges toward the dais, I begin to understand what the “really good seats” are good for. Lines form, filling the stadium floor and trailing up the aisles, while Maxwell and a handful of other elders begin quietly conferring with the first few who make it to the stage. I sweep my eyes back and forth, searching for a redhead in the crowd, but the stadium floor is rapidly becoming an undifferentiated mass of people milling forward for their personalized prayers.
Just as I’m deciding this is an impossible task, there she is, on the prayer-cam, the features I’ve been studying so minutely blown up and hanging overhead on a Jumbotron screen. I watch, transfixed, as Maxwell appears next to her, his face tilted down toward hers, his eyebrows bent into a serious, compassionate expression, one hand resting on her shoulder. The redhead turns her face up toward his, stands on tiptoe until she’s almost his height, and draws so close it looks like she’s about to kiss him. She puts her lips to his ear and whispers something. Maxwell’s expression changes dramatically. His eyes go suddenly wide, his eyebrows shoot upward, and his mouth opens in a gasp, like he’s been kneed in the groin.
The camera cuts to someone else.
I drag my gaze from the screen down to the stadium floor, desperate to find her before the moment is over. There she is, one hand steadying herself on Maxwell’s padded jacket shoulder so she can stay on tiptoe, the other pointing a finger at his chest. He jerks backward as she sinks down to her heels and turns to walk away. Two men in suits who have been standing nearby emerge from the crowd and start moving toward her, but Maxwell gets there first. He lunges, grabs her forearm, and leans in close, his whole body tensed toward her, enfolding her in a terrible intimacy. He gives her arm a single shake, and she tears out of his grasp and pushes off to the side, losing the two bodyguards, and my gaze, in the crowd.
When I look back at Maxwell, he’s already talking to the next woman in line, their foreheads so close they’re almost touching, and yet even I can tell his mind isn’t with the woman he’s absolving. It’s with Julie, and Julie is gone.
I start up out of my seat to follow her but then stop myself and sink back down again. She’s on the ground floor, and I’m upstairs; by the time I get out of the Gate, she’ll be halfway to Tom’s car, and I’m parked farther away than she is. Anyway, I have no idea what I’ve just seen and thus no idea what I’d say if I caught up to her now. Only one thing is clear: Judging from Maxwell’s alarmed expression and the ferocious intimacy of his body language on the stadium floor, they know each other. What did she whisper in his ear? A threat? What could Julie possibly have on Maxwell?
Not Julie, I remind myself.
As the service comes to a close, the music swells and thunders, the screens flash and go black again, the slices of red dawn outline the Gate logo, and, in the grand finale, it opens. When the praise band finally decrescendos, the people around me look happily exhausted by the barrage of positivity. I stumble out, feeling emptied. Out in the night air, I check my phone; there’s a new voicemail from twenty minutes ago. The signal must be spotty inside the concrete stadium, because I never felt it buzz. Then I see the number and hurriedly put the phone to my ear to listen to the message.
It’s the same voice that cried, “Mom, Dad,” when she hugged us in the emergency room, the same voice that whispered, “You must have really wanted to find me,” before breaking into tears. And now this voice confesses out loud that she, the woman living in my house, is not my daughter. After everything I know, it shouldn’t surprise me. But this is more damning than a fuzzy YouTube video, more damning even than a crime scene photo. Only now do I realize I’ve been holding on to some last, slender thread of hope. These words—It’s Gretchen—are the sound of it snapping.
The message continues. “I need your help, Cal. I’m scared.” She starts crying. “If you’re still at this number, you’re in Houston. And if you found me here, maybe you already know everything about me. Maybe you know the worst.” She sobs thickly. “If you come for me after finding out the worst, I’ll know you still love me. I’m going to the Water Wall to confront the man who did this to me. He’ll be there at midnight. Please come. I don’t want to go alone.”
On the voicemail, there’s the sound of a horn honking, followed by a clatter, as if she’s dropped the phone. Then: “Cal, I don’t know if this makes any difference, but for a few weeks, I was—we were—I think it was a girl.”
The voicemail beeps. “Press seven to repeat this message. Press eight to delete this message. Press nine to save—”
I press 9. When I confront her, I want to have her own voice in my pocket as proof. By the time I reach my car, it’s 11:35, and I know I have to find her now, tonight, before I lose my nerve, and demand to know what she’s doing here, why she’s tormenting my family.
Now that I know Julie is only Gretchen after all, a blurry face on a YouTube video, a second-rate performer, an impostor, a fake, I have no choice. It’s been Gretchen this whole time. And soon it will be midnight.
She
didn’t feel the blow but she felt the black. It was like water she was sinking into, or that was sinking into her. There was a redness at the top of it, and the closer she got to the red the more it hurt. Whereas the black was as soft and lustrous blue-black as clouds of birds taking flight. The black was as soft and lustrous green-black as the ocean floor. The black was as soft as the black velvet pillow that swallows the diamond ring. The black was as black as her sleeping self.