The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  He said, “When you wake up, don’t worry about this. It’s been a good trip, right?”

  “Sure,” she said. “For you.”

  In the morning, Yale ordered pancakes and coffee. He’d written Cecily a note last night, in case she couldn’t remember the plan, and propped it on her dresser when he saw her to her room: I’ll be downstairs whenever you’re ready.

  He read the Door County Advocate and the Tribune, and in the latter he found two articles to mention to Charlie: one on the proposed anti-Happy Hour legislation, the other an editorial on Congress’s paltry AIDS spending. A minor miracle that people were still talking about it, that the Trib was giving it space. Charlie had been right; he’d said what they needed was one big celebrity death. And poof, there went Rock Hudson, without the courage to leave the closet even on his deathbed, and finally, four years into the crisis, there was a glimmer of something out there. Not enough, though. Charlie had once sworn that if Reagan ever deigned to give a speech about AIDS, he’d donate five dollars to the Republicans. (“And in the memo line,” Charlie said, “I’m gonna write I licked the envelope with my big gay tongue.”) But at least now Yale was overhearing the word on the El. He’d heard two teenagers joking about it in a hotel lobby where he went to pick up a donor. (“How do you turn a fruit into a vegetable?”) He’d heard a woman ask another woman if she should keep going to her gay hairdresser. Ridiculous, but better than feeling like you lived in some alternate universe where no one could hear you calling for help. Now it was like people could hear and just didn’t care. But wasn’t that progress?

  Cecily finally showed up at 10:30, crisply dressed in slacks and a sweater, makeup and hair done. She said, “It’s much nicer out!”

  “You feel okay?”

  “I’m fabulous! I have to tell you, I’m not even hung over. I really wasn’t drunk. It was sweet of you to worry.”

  He drove, Cecily leaning her head against the passenger window. He tried to avoid bumps, to take the curves softly. They didn’t talk much, except to discuss strategy if the art turned out to be real. Yale would deal with Nora and her family until the time came for the actual bequest, when Cecily would step back in if needed.

  Yale glanced at the yellow purse at Cecily’s feet, which he now knew contained a baggie of cocaine—unless she’d used it up this morning, which it didn’t appear she had. If they got pulled over, if a cop searched the car, they’d both be arrested. He drove even slower.

  He reached into his blazer pocket and pulled out the M&Ms. He offered them to Cecily, and she took just one.

  Cecily said, “You knew her nephew.”

  “Her grandnephew. He was my first real friend in the city.”

  She said, “I hope that doesn’t cloud your judgment.”

  2015

  Fiona wasn’t aware that she had any preconceptions about the detective until they were face to face with him, she and Serge, across a round table at Café Bonaparte. What she’d pictured, she realized, looking at this small, quiet man, was a bumbling person in a trench coat, a sweaty former gendarme who’d turned out to be a genius. But Arnaud (“You can call me Arnold,” he offered in perfect British English, as if she couldn’t handle a simple O sound) was like a freshly sharpened pencil, a pointed nose the primary feature of his small, dark face. Not that she needed a movie detective. This wasn’t a movie case. If Claire was really in Paris, she shouldn’t be hard to find. Convincing her to meet was another matter.

  Arnaud accepted the check she handed him, folded it into his breast pocket. He hunched over his fruit salad, ate, asked his questions quickly.

  “How is her French? Your daughter’s?”

  Fiona looked at her cheese omelet; she’d been so hungry earlier, but now she couldn’t bring herself to take the first bite. “She studied it in high school.”

  “Lycée,” Serge clarified. Serge, having driven Fiona there (she’d clung to his waist with her eyes closed), had stuck around and ordered an espresso and now seemed to feel the need to justify his presence.

  When Claire was in sixth grade, Fiona had tried the same tack her mother had taken years before: “You’re part Cuban, you know. Don’t you think Spanish—” and Claire had said, “I’m French too. And I share ninety-nine percent of my DNA with a mouse. Do I need to learn to squeak?”

  Fiona continued now: “But I don’t know how long she’s been here. Three years, possibly.”

  “Three years is when she left the cult?”

  “Yes,” Fiona said, “but—” and she didn’t know how to finish. Something about how you never really leave a cult. How there was the cult itself, and then there was Claire’s own private cult, her devotion to Kurt Pearce. One leader and one follower.

  “And now you believe she’s in Paris.”

  “Well—” And suddenly she couldn’t remember why she’d been so convinced the video showed Paris. Was the Eiffel Tower in the background? No, but—it was a video about Paris. She was so tired. When she turned her head, it took her vision a second to catch up. She said, “You saw the video?” She’d sent him the link when they first communicated earlier this week.

  He nodded, pulled a slim laptop from the bag at his feet and, in one fluid motion, opened it and clicked to start the video. That a French café would have Wi-Fi seemed wrong. In her mind, Paris was always 1920. It was always Aunt Nora’s Paris, all tragic love and tubercular artists.

  “The three-minute mark,” she said. It was ten days ago that Claire’s college roommate Lina had emailed a YouTube link and a cautious note: “Someone sent me this,” she wrote, “wondering if that could be Claire, three minutes in. I can’t tell—do you suppose?” And Fiona’s stupid computer hadn’t been able to speed forward, so she’d sat through seven minutes of “family friendly travel tips” for the upper middle class tourist looking to drag children to France. Carousels, hot chocolate at Angelina, little boats on the pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg. And then the pixie-cut host began walking backward on a bridge, talking about the artists “capturing the scene for you to bring home.” And there, behind her—and here, again, on Arnaud’s screen—was a woman on a folding stool, squinting at a small canvas, daubing a paintbrush as if she’d been directed to. Did it look like Claire? Yes. But a bit heavier, a stylish scarf knotted around her hair. “Who knows?” the host chirped. “They might even have their own enfants in tow!” This was in reference to the little girl, a toddler really, playing with some small red toy by the woman’s feet.

  “This is her?” Arnaud said, and tapped Claire’s face on the screen.

  “Yes.” It did no good to say that she was almost sure, that her nightmares had been full of women on bridges who turned to show rotted faces, animal faces, faces that just weren’t Claire’s. If he was going to look for her, Fiona wanted him to believe he’d find her.

  “The scarf doesn’t look religious.”

  “No, but the cult didn’t do that anyway.”

  He said, “I know this bridge.”

  “Is it the Pont des Arts?”

  “What? No, no. Pont de l’Archevêché. Right by Notre Dame. You see the cars passing? No cars on Pont des Arts.”

  It must have been obvious that she wanted to jump up, to steal Serge’s motorbike and drive there recklessly.

  “It’s unusual for an artist to set up on this bridge. I suspect”—he looked at Serge as if for confirmation—“she was put there for the film.”

  Fiona said, “But she might be in that neighborhood. Or the filmmakers might know her!”

  Arnaud nodded gravely. “Small American production company, based in Seattle. Could she be living there? She could be part of the film crew and they asked her to pose on the bridge.”

  And although this was a possibility—Claire did love filmmaking—it was one Fiona could deal with later. So she said, “It’s much more likely that she’s painting than working on films. Her cult—they w
ere antitechnology. I don’t know.”

  “But she left the cult.” Arnaud closed his laptop and picked up his fork, so Fiona figured she was meant to give the full story now, the one she’d only roughly sketched in her emails.

  “I actually introduced her to this guy,” she said. “Kurt. He’s older, sort of a family friend. He’d be forty-one now.”

  “I have the photos,” Arnaud said, strawberry at his lips.

  “I didn’t mean for them to get involved, it’s just that she was spending the summer in Colorado to wait tables and explore, and he was living there. This was 2011, right after her freshman year of college. And before I know it, she’s in love, and then she isn’t going back to school in the fall, she’s going to stay in Boulder and work on some kind of ranch. And then I don’t hear from her, and I don’t hear from her, there’s no phone there, no Internet, just mail, and finally I write and tell her I’m coming to visit, and she says I can’t. Which is when I panic.”

  Not that it was the first time Claire had shut her out. For an entire semester of high school, she wouldn’t speak to either parent. And one day, back when Fiona and Damian first split—Claire was nine—she ran away to the church down the street. Claire hadn’t set foot in a church at that point outside of one wedding, but Fiona had always told her that if she ever needed help in an emergency, she could go to a church and ask. By the time Claire went missing, though, Fiona had forgotten she’d said it.

  When the secretary at the Episcopal church finally called, Claire had been missing for five hours, and Fiona and Damian had been combing the streets with a police officer. It was a week after 9/11, and people still watched police cruisers from the sidewalks with concern. Oddly, it was a comfort—that her crisis was part of the general trauma. They found Claire in the church office, drinking chocolate milk and sitting with two women who positively glared at Fiona and Damian. What Claire had told these women about them, about the divorce, Fiona never knew. She handed the women a twenty and grabbed Claire’s arm and marched her out while the officer and Damian stayed behind to ask questions.

  It was only when Claire was in bed that night that Fiona looked at Damian, sitting there on the sofa that used to be his, too, and said, “Why do you suppose she ran away?” She kept her voice pleasant, but really she already had an answer.

  He laughed and said, “Maybe it’s genetic. I mean, why did you and your brother run away?”

  “I left home,” she said, “when I was eighteen. And Nico was kicked out, and you don’t ever get to mention him again.”

  Damian raised his hands in surrender, if not apology.

  “And my parents,” she said, “my mom showed my brother’s sketchbook to the priest. It was—Okay, I’m not talking about this to you. Do you think it’s possible, Damian, that she overheard what you said?”

  And Damian looked at the carpet instead of at her, because of course that’s what had happened. The night before, after he’d dropped Claire off, he’d stayed to talk—to fight, really—and Claire hadn’t been asleep yet when he shouted at Fiona, something he hardly ever did. It had been about the divorced man Fiona had been sleeping with, or, more specifically, about the fact that this man had two children, that Fiona had spent a weekend with them in Michigan that summer. About how it was bad enough that she’d cheated on him, but was she trying to replace their whole family?

  “I’ll talk to her,” Damian said. And, stupidly, she’d let him be the one to go into Claire’s bedroom. Maybe because he was the only one who could take it back, being the one who’d said it. She should have gone in herself. Why hadn’t she?

  Fiona didn’t relay this all to Arnaud, but she told him about her trip to Boulder in 2011. It was winter, long enough after Claire hadn’t returned to school that, in retrospect, her own delay was inexcusable. At the time it had seemed right, though—giving Claire her space. Damian was living in Portland by then, and she only spoke to him when they were in crisis mode over Claire. They finally talked in early January about how neither of them ever heard a word, how Claire had cashed the check Damian and his new wife had sent for Christmas, but never wrote to thank him. Worrying alone, Fiona had been able to tell herself this was just how Claire was, that she needed time, needed to realize on her own that she missed school. But listening to Damian, who never panicked, say that he didn’t like this, that something felt wrong, it suddenly became clear it was wrong. Fiona flew out the next week. She rented a car in Denver and drove past Boulder, following her GPS.

  It clearly wasn’t the right address. This wasn’t a ranch. A narrow, uneven road wound through woods to some sort of discount campground—trailers and cottages around a rundown yellow house, no lake or other natural attraction to explain their convergence.

  Fiona wanted to leave, look things up on a proper map, figure out where the ranch really was, but she couldn’t take off without knocking, without checking that her daughter wasn’t being held captive inside. She called Damian just so there would be a witness if something horrible happened, and—with him on the line, the phone clutched to her chest—she approached the door.

  “The man who answered,” she told Arnaud now, “he was dressed like they do. I didn’t understand at the time. Beard, long hair, clogs. They look a lot like hippies, especially the men.” The men came off better than the poor women, who wore long sleeves, long dresses, no makeup.

  “So even when it turned out Claire was there, when they called her to the door, that’s what I thought it was—a hippie commune. I guess they don’t really have those anymore.”

  She told him how Claire first backed up when she saw her, then hugged her like you might hug an ex you’d run into when you were both on dates with other people. Damian was still on the line, but Fiona couldn’t stop to tell him everything that was happening. Claire grabbed a coat and came out to talk on the driveway, and soon Kurt joined, stood beside her like a bodyguard.

  “He seemed so possessive,” she said, “his hand on her back.” How had Fiona forgotten his height? She’d been struck by it the first time she’d seen him grown, towering above his own mother. He must have been six foot five, and now he was paunchy too. His face was leathery from the sun and wind, and his blond hair brushed his shoulders.

  “They didn’t lie about what the place was, exactly. They said it was a planned community, and they gave me the name Hosanna Collective, which—well, you can tell right away it’s not just an organic farm, right?”

  Fiona didn’t remember the details of the conversation. It was confusing and she was upset, and although she asked them about these people they were living with, she was more concerned with Claire’s demeanor, her dull eyes and twitching foot, than with the answers. She remembered saying, lamely, “There are churches you can explore in Chicago too,” and Kurt shaking his head at her. “The modern Christian church is the Whore of Babylon,” he said.

  Claire wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t even get in the car with her to have dinner in town, wouldn’t take the phone to speak to her father, wouldn’t step away from Kurt Pearce.

  Kurt said, “This really is an intrusion.” Calmly, as if he were the voice of reason here.

  And Claire said, “Mom, we’re fine. You didn’t worry about me at college, and I was miserable at college. I’m much happier here.”

  “I did worry about you at college. But at least I knew what was going on there.”

  “No, you didn’t.” Fiona wasn’t sure which fact Claire was refuting. Three adults and a child looked down at them from the porch of the big house, waiting.

  Fiona knew better than to force the issue, to elbow her way in the door. She said, “I’ll come back in the morning. I’ll bring doughnuts.”

  “Please don’t.”

  When Claire returned the next day, a wooden barricade blocked the end of the long driveway. A man with a waist-length ponytail leaned against it, and as Fiona drove up, he made a “turn around” sign with
one finger in the air. And she did, because Damian was already on a plane, and it was better to come back here with him, anyway.

  Over the next insomniac week, asking around Boulder and scouring the Internet, the two of them discovered the things Fiona was now telling Arnaud: The Hosanna Collective was the small and restrictive offshoot of an already restrictive parent cult from Denver. It was ostensibly Judeo-Christian, but also astrological, vegetarian, antitechnology, male-dominated. They believed that the church needed to return to a pure state described in certain chapters of the book of Acts, that everything since Paul had been corruption. They called Jesus “Yeshua” and celebrated no holidays but Easter. No money of their own, the communal life made possible by the near-constant labor of the women and children. The men sold honey and salad dressing at farmers’ markets, and did occasional construction work in town, contributing all their wages to the group.

  Fiona and Damian went to the police, but there was nothing illegal going on. Damian reminded her of what she already knew: The more they chased Claire, the more she would shut them out. They tried once more in person, this time approaching the compound in the squad car of a sympathetic police officer—Fiona was so sure that Damian, too, was remembering their desperate ride around Chicago nine years back that she didn’t need to mention it—but the same man who’d been at the barricade came out and unleashed an impressive string of legal language at the cop. And no, there was no warrant.

  Fiona and Damian sat at a bar in the Denver airport with bags under their eyes, both of them crying, then stopping, then crying. They must have looked, to other travelers, like lovers parting for the last time. He with a wedding ring, she without. Fiona said, “We should stay.” But there were more productive ways to spend their time and money. Damian would talk to lawyers. Fiona would contact Claire’s high school and college friends, even offer to fly them out. She’d track down Cecily Pearce and see if she might talk some sense into her son.