The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  Arnaud nodded along to all this but didn’t write it down. Fiona worried he was going to ask why she hadn’t refused to leave Boulder, why she hadn’t battered down the door. It was because she didn’t believe Claire could really stay long with those people. And because on some level, she wanted her daughter to learn something the hard way, and from someone other than her. For once, she wanted Claire to crawl home hurt, not run away from Fiona claiming she’d been gravely wounded. At least, this was what Fiona had worked out since then with her therapist. But maybe it was more complicated. Something about being done with unwinnable battles. After the bloodbath of her twenties, after everyone she loved had died or left her. After her love itself became poison.

  Fiona wrote letters almost every day, saying Claire could always come home, that there would be no judgment. After a few weeks, the letters started returning, unopened.

  And then when nearly a year had passed—a year of talking to cops and lawyers and some people from postcult support groups—they went back together, Damian and Fiona. They brought along a bodyguard they’d hired in Boulder. No squad car, no police. They weren’t planning to kidnap her, just insist on a conversation. But Claire and Kurt, they were informed by the eczema-covered woman who answered the door, had left a month ago. No, she had no clue where; no one did.

  Damian went to the Boulder Farmers Market, where some of the Hosanna men had a stand, and told them, casually, that he’d worked out a trade last time with a guy named Kurt. Was Kurt here today, by any chance? “Brother Kurt’s not around anymore,” one of them said. Another rolled his eyes.

  And Fiona thought, Well, at least they got out. Even if she’s still with him. She thought maybe she’d hear from Claire soon. She didn’t. They hired a PI in Chicago, and he gladly took their money but turned up nothing. They looked into a missing persons report, but an adult who simply didn’t want to be in touch with you was not missing.

  Instead of asking why Fiona hadn’t done more, Arnaud asked, “Was this typical of your daughter? To latch onto different religions?”

  “No,” Fiona said. “That was the oddest part. She was always a rebel. She quit Girl Scouts, she quit orchestra, she wouldn’t date anyone longer than a month or two. Until Kurt.”

  “Does she have a reason to avoid you?”

  Fiona stuck her fork into her omelet and pulled it out, watched the cheese ooze from the four holes. “We’ve had our issues, but there was no big fight.” She could have gone into more detail about their head-butting, about how Claire was always closer to her father but then, after the divorce, was close to no one, about the guilt and second-guessing Fiona lived with every day—but it would only distract from the main point. She said, “Some people are just born difficult. That’s a hard thing to say.”

  She didn’t feel great. She was thirsty, but the water they’d given her was sparkling, which she hated. She took a tiny sip and it was worse than the thirst.

  “Does the boyfriend hit?” This was from Serge, and although it was a legitimate question, Fiona resented the intrusion into Arnaud’s line of reasoning.

  “I don’t think so. Some of the stories we found online, about the Hosanna—it sounded like they hit their children. For discipline. And I’m sure it went beyond that. But I’ve known Kurt a long time. Since he was a kid. He’s good with animals, you know? I don’t think you can hit women and be good with animals. Animals would sense it.”

  Arnaud nodded slowly. “Let’s assume she left the cult when she discovered she was pregnant.”

  Fiona was impressed. She and Damian had come to a similar conclusion, but only days after she’d found the video, after they’d stayed up past midnight drinking wine in two different cities, planning and theorizing over the phone. The best they’d gotten along in fifteen years, but who cared about that now? Occasionally she’d hear Damian’s wife in the background, and then he’d say, Karen thinks we should do X, but it was never anything helpful.

  Karen had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, a treatable kind, and was starting radiation next week—which, along with his class schedule, was the reason Damian wasn’t here too.

  Arnaud said, “And the boyfriend’s family? Have they heard from him?”

  She said, “I only know his mother. She doesn’t really—she doesn’t want anything to do with him.”

  Her chest was tight, and her head was filling with gray noise. She felt Serge’s hand on her arm and realized she was closer to her omelet than she should have been. She had fallen forward.

  “She flew just this morning,” Serge was saying.

  Arnaud said, “She hasn’t eaten her food.”

  “I’ll take her home.”

  “I can hear you,” she said. “I’m right here.”

  “I bring my motorbike around.”

  “No!” she said. “We’re not done!”

  Arnaud folded his napkin into a neat triangle, tucked it under the rim of his plate. “But we are. Now what I do is look.”

  1985

  No one wanted to do much in the weeks after Nico’s memorial. Whoever you called was busy taking food to Terrence’s place, or you yourself were taking food to Terrence. Or people were sick, just regular sick, with coughs brought on by the drop in temperature. Guys with families flew home for Thanksgiving to play straight for nieces and nephews, to assure their grandparents they were dating, no one special, a few nice girls. To assure their fathers, who had cornered them in various garages and hallways, that no, they weren’t going to catch this new disease. Charlie and his mother, being British, had no investment in the holiday, despite Yale’s protests that it was a day for immigrants. British immigrants, in particular! Yale wound up cooking Cornish game hens for himself and Charlie, plus Asher Glass and Terrence and Fiona. Teddy and Julian would drop by for dessert.

  Asher arrived first, and after he handed over the loaf of bread he’d baked (still warm, wrapped in a towel), he shoved a manila envelope at Yale. “Don’t let me force this on them till the end of the night,” he said. “Keep it from me. Not till there’s coffee in my hand, okay?” Yale didn’t understand, but he stuck the envelope on top of the refrigerator, found a serrated knife for the bread. Asher had a New York accent, and the way he pronounced certain words—coffee, for instance—made Yale want to mouth them in his wake.

  Charlie poured a gin and tonic for Asher without asking. “You really pulled the plug,” he said. “No going back?” The Howard Brown clinic, where they both were on the board, had finally, after much debate, decided that next month it would start offering the HTLV-III test, the one doctors had been giving since the spring. Asher had quit, vocally. According to Charlie, he’d stabbed a ballpoint pen into the table as he made a point, and the thing had burst, so that when Asher finally stormed out of the board meeting it was with blue hands.

  Yale had harbored a crush, an occasionally overwhelming one, on Asher for years. It was quite specific: It would flare up mostly when Asher was angry about something, when his voice grew stentorian. (The most ridiculous of Yale’s first loves was Clarence Darrow, as portrayed in Inherit the Wind, which he’d read in tenth grade. He’d avoided speaking in class for two whole weeks, terrified his cheeks would redden if he tried to discuss the play.) Funny, because when Charlie got similarly agitated, Yale wanted to stuff his own ears with cotton. And his attraction would flare up when Asher’s dark hair got shaggy, which it was right now, making him look like a young, unkempt Marlon Brando. Stockier and clumsier, but still.

  Asher ran his law practice out of his own apartment on Aldine, and what had started out as housing equality work had quickly turned into wills and insurance battles. He was a daytime friend, not someone to hit the bars with at night. His love life, in fact, was a mystery, and Yale could never figure out if Asher would approach sex with the same intensity with which he approached his work, or if, having spent all his passion on the day’s battles, he’d rather just cal
l an escort once a week. He’d been talking a lot lately about the difference between activism and advocacy, and Yale couldn’t remember which Asher was in favor of, or if he wanted everyone to do both. He had shoulders like barrels, and his eyelashes were long and dark, and Yale required a valiant effort not to stare at his lips when he talked.

  Asher’s voice had already started to boom, loud enough that Yale worried Terrence might hear if someone had let him in downstairs and he was already out in the hallway. “Look. We all have a death sentence. Right? You and me, we don’t know what that is. It’s a day, it’s fifty years. You wanna narrow the range? You wanna freak yourself out? That’s all the test gives you. I mean, show me the line for the miracle cure and I’ll take the damn test, I’ll make everyone else take it too. Meanwhile, what? You want to end up in a government database?”

  Charlie said, “You know where I stand.”

  “I do, and listen.” Asher’s hands were flying, gin spilling down the side of his glass. Yale leaned back against the sink, watched those hands like a fireworks show. “If your priority is safe sex, the test isn’t helping. Half these guys get a false sense of security, the other half know they’re dying. They’re depressed, they get drunk, and what the hell do you think they do? They don’t run out to the rubber store.”

  Charlie was still laughing over “rubber store,” riffing about Helmet Hut and Trojans R Us, when Terrence and Fiona buzzed up. In the time it took them to get upstairs, Asher cleared his throat and deftly turned his ranting to the opinion that there was no decent Chinese food in Chicago. Yale argued that you just had to go to Chinatown and be willing to eat chicken feet.

  Terrence and Fiona walked in, arm in arm.

  Terrence handed Charlie a bottle of wine and said, in his whitest voice, “The wife and I got stuck in the worst traffic, driving in from Sheboygan. Thank God we’re fixing up that infrastructure with the trickle-down and whatnot, God bless the USA.”

  They seemed to be doing well, both of Nico’s bereaved, but what could you tell from the outside? Fiona’s blonde curls always lent her a vibrancy, an alertness, that compensated for any fatigue. And Terrence—he looked thin, but you’d never know he was sick if it weren’t for the test. And what good had the test done, really? Maybe he was drinking less. Maybe he was getting more sleep. Which was something.

  “That envelope,” Asher whispered to Yale. “Not till coffee.”

  Yale was antsy all night, unable to focus. It was partly that it was late November—he always grew agitated as the sun grayed its way into hibernation—and maybe it was partly Asher’s presence, too, although usually that was a pleasant kind of agitation. Maybe it was the fact that Teddy would show up later, and this was the first time he’d seen Teddy since Nico’s memorial, when his phantom self had vanished upstairs with Teddy’s phantom self.

  And beneath all that was the fact that he was still waiting for Nora’s Polaroids to arrive, that as soon as he’d gotten excited about this project, it had stalled out. He’d written her a nice note, sent the lawyer a carbon copy. Then separately, as promised, he sent some photos of the gallery space. And heard nothing. He’d messed up; he’d assumed her number was in the file, and now Cecily said she’d never had it, that they’d communicated entirely by mail. Information didn’t have it either. He wrote to Nora’s lawyer, asking if he’d heard from her, suggesting that he’d love her number. Stanley wrote back that he’d learned better than to bother Nora, but she was sure to be in touch. No number. Yale called Stanley, whose phone was on his letterhead, but the secretary said that since he was semiretired, he only worked some days, and no, she couldn’t predict which days, but she’d take a message. Yale called again, and she said she’d repeat the message. He was afraid of seeming pushy, of the lawyer telling Nora he had a bad feeling about those Northwestern folks.

  And so, over the main course, while everyone else debated Live Aid, with which Asher had some arcane quibble, Yale brought Nora up with Fiona.

  “Isn’t she incredible?” Fiona said. “I want to be her when I grow up. She had affairs with so many artists! Seriously.”

  “You could run out and have sex with artists right now.”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. She had this life, you know? She was the only one in the whole family who didn’t shut out Nico. She sent him a check for fifty dollars every month.” Nico hadn’t even needed to come out to her, Fiona said; Nora had known all along. But no, Fiona didn’t have her number. She’d seen her at a family wedding up in Wisconsin in August, and as they sat there talking about art, about Paris, that’s when Fiona had told her about Yale’s position, told Nora she should write to him soon. Nora had called her, she said, to say how much she liked Yale. “And she must love you,” she said, “because it’s the only time she’s ever called me.” Maybe her father would have the number. She promised she’d try to get it. Yale knew better than to expect follow-through.

  Down the table, Terrence was talking about his new meditation practice, his crystals, his stress-relief cassettes, and Asher was laughing, shaking his head. “Listen,” Terrence said, “you keep figuring out how to save the world. I’m gonna work on buying myself a few extra months. If I have to eat the damn crystals, I’ll do it.”

  Asher said, “I can tell you a couple other places you can put your crystals.”

  Fiona punched his arm, hard enough that Asher winced. She told him to behave.

  Fiona was the one who helped Yale clear the dishes, or at least held open the swinging door that separated the tiny kitchen from the apartment’s main room. The others migrated to the living room so Terrence could catch the second half of the Cowboys game.

  Once the water was running, Yale lowered his voice. “Hey, did you tell Charlie I went upstairs with Teddy? After the memorial?”

  “Oh! Oh God, Yale, I’ve been meaning to apologize.” She backed up to the counter and launched herself up to sit there, her feet dangling. “You know how you get surer of things when you’re drunk? I was drunk, and he couldn’t find you, and I’d seen you go upstairs, and someone else said they’d seen Teddy go upstairs, and I kept saying, ‘Yale is upstairs with Teddy,’ because I thought I was being helpful. I guess I wasn’t.”

  “I thought so,” Yale said. “That’s what I thought. Teddy wasn’t even there. He left when the slide show started.”

  “Oh Yale, I didn’t mean to make a problem. I heard later that Charlie was—oh, God.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s the least important thing about that night.”

  Yale scraped the plates while Fiona joined everyone in the living room. If he didn’t do it now, while Charlie was busy entertaining and pretending to understand American football, then Charlie would insist on doing every dish.

  When Yale finally walked into the living room, the conversation abruptly stopped. “What?” he said.

  Charlie said, “I’ll tell you later.”

  “No, what?”

  “Cowboys are winning,” Terrence said.

  Asher tried to drink from his glass, but his glass was empty.

  “Just tell him,” Fiona said.

  Charlie patted the couch, bit his lip, stared at the TV. “I thought I saw your mum.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, I did see her. She was a nurse, in—it was a Tylenol advert. She said some stuff. Not much.”

  Asher said, “We didn’t know your mom was a movie star.”

  He felt dizzy. “She’s not.”

  This hadn’t happened in a couple of years, this kind of ambush. There was a commercial for Folgers Crystals a while back, in which she was a waitress. She’d been a receptionist for an episode of Simon & Simon. He hated it—which Charlie must have told them, or why were they looking at him like that?—hated, on a gut level, the humiliation of being afforded only the same two-second shots of his mother that the entire rest of the country was given. Hated that he
needed to watch, that he couldn’t look away in indifference. Hated that he’d missed seeing her just now, hated that they’d all seen her without him, hated that they were pitying him, hated that he hated it all so much.

  When Yale was seven his father had taken him to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s—and Yale, knowing his mother was an actress, and that actresses disguised themselves for their roles, became convinced that his mother was the one playing Holly Golightly. He wanted her to be the one singing “Moon River,” which seemed like just the sort of song his mother might sing to him if she were still around. He soon outgrew the fantasy, but for years, when he had trouble sleeping, he’d imagine Audrey Hepburn singing to him.

  He said, “It’s nice to know she’s alive.”

  He grabbed his legal pad from the shelf under the coffee table. He’d been drafting a letter for the Annual Fund that morning. He snatched up a pen and started circling things that didn’t need circling.

  Fiona said, “Are you okay?”

  He nodded, and as the game came back on, Charlie twisted one of Yale’s curls around his finger. Asher picked up the TV Guide and flipped through it as if they might change the channel at any moment.

  And then the door buzzer sounded, thank God.

  * * *

  —

  Teddy was alone. “Julian has as emergency rehearsal, whatever that means,” he said. “He sends his regrets. Oh my god, it smells amazing.” Teddy always talked like he’d just done a speedball, but it was just the way he was.

  “So he’s not coming at all?” Charlie said. “What did he say, exactly?”

  Terrence said, “I hope this ‘emergency rehearsal’ is smoking hot.”

  Teddy acted normally, throwing his coat on the back of the couch, hugging everyone. Well, sure. He didn’t know anything odd had happened the night of the memorial. It was like having a sex dream about someone, then seeing him the next day. You felt like he had to know; he’d been right there in the dream, so how could things ever be the same between you again? But they always were.