“I had to come,” I say, and he shakes his head, waves a finger.
“Devil, know your place. Not here. Do you understand? Not here.” He’s still swaying, but he’s also nodding at the people around him, touching their shoulders. “It’s okay. He’s an old friend. I’ll see you all tomorrow, yes?” Meeting each worried glance with a smile and a squeeze of his hand, Spencer steers his parishioners out the oak doors into the night.
The last to go is the man who’d rescued the former prostitute in his clerical robes. He is easily the oldest of the Shepherds, sixty at least, and his jowls lie in uneven folds like sheets on an unmade bed.
“Are you going to be up later?” I hear Spencer ask.
“All night, brother,” he says. I keep expecting him to turn on me and stare me down, but he looks only at Spencer. “All night.”
Then Spencer and I are alone in the great room. For a while, we just look at each other. He says nothing. I wait, letting him dictate the tone for whatever’s to come. After all, I’ve spent years making the decision to come back here. He deserves at least a few minutes to adjust.
Finally, he reaches out and plucks at my crumpled sleet-streaked overcoat, stares at my jeans. “You are one lost puppy.”
I grin. It’s him, all right. My Spencer. “Always was.”
“Always was,” Spencer murmurs, but instead of answering my grin, he squeezes his eyes shut one more time and shudders. Then he waves me out the door.
Rattling home three dead bolts with a long gold key, he directs me toward his waiting Caddy, one of those hideous early eighties Sevilles with the bulge in the trunk. As I climb into the passenger seat, his eyes slide away from mine, and he slips into the driver’s side without a word.
We don’t speak. Spencer stares out the windshield; then he starts the car and heads down the street, which is already deserted. “Moon,” he says, and I remember how surprising it was to see the moon in the middle of winter here. Most nights, the cloud cover locks down like the top of a coffin, and the only light comes from the streetlights reflecting off the snow.
We slip through silent side streets, and gradually the ragged bushes knit themselves into neatly trimmed hedges that line recently shoveled footpaths and driveways. The zoo water tower glows gray-white like a monument to the moon, and I know we’re back in Ferndale, not far from Spencer’s old house. I recognize the PAWN, GUNS signs in the shop windows and the oak and pine trees on one of the corners where Mrs. Franklin made us meet her on the night of the lions.
“Ah, home,” Spencer mutters, and we pull up in front of a low cement building on the corner of a residential street with a lit-up Pabst display in the window. A red neon sign across the entrance identifies it as the Spindle. Red Rolling Stones-style lips pout over the double doors. There is one other car, an anonymous late-seventies Pontiac, in the tiny parking lot.
Inside, oak tables and benches are nailed into the red carpeting like furniture on a ship. A jukebox is playing a Stevie Wonder song to an empty room. Behind the bar, the bartender appears to float on his own rolls of fat like a frog on a lily pad. He nods at Spencer and pours him a plain tonic water, saying, “Evening, Shep.” Out of Laura-inspired habit, I order a Rolling Rock, and when the bartender stares at me blankly, I ask for whatever’s on tap. He draws a draft and then floats down the bar again.
All the booths along the wall have curtain rods hung above them with red beaded curtains dangling down. Along with our drinks, the bartender hands Spencer a bowl of steaming somethings that look like coals but turn out to be walnuts, grilled almost to ash. I trail him to a table in the back, where he waits for me to sit, then draws the curtains shut around us.
To my astonishment I discover that I’m in tears. There is no particular feeling attached to them, they’re just there. “I don’t know what this is,” I say.
“That’s how it hits you sometimes,” says Spencer. His fingers dig around in the dark nuts and draw two from the bowl. Shells fall away like snakeskin, and just as I’m about to speak he gets up, throws the curtains to the side, and walks to the jukebox. He drops in some coins, punches a number without consulting the play list, and by the time he returns and draws the curtains once more, The Nightspots’ “Down in Downtown” has kicked in. All my life, I have loved the sweet, strutting Motown stomp of that song, and it seems both comforting and strange to be sitting here with Spencer and listening to it now.
A slow smile spreads over my face, and I begin to sing. “’Got those gravy-good women there. Think I’ll...get me one.’”
“Crazy,” says Spencer, shelling more walnuts and dropping them in the bowl or on the table without eating them. “Crazy-good women. Not gravy. Jesus dog.”
“Not in my house. That’s how my brother Brent used to sing it, so we all sang it that way.”
“Your brother Brent,” says Spencer. Then, for the first time, he looks right at me, takes in my adult face. Even in this dead light, with no piano rumble beneath him, his eyes flare like raked embers. “Jesus dog. I always knew you’d come.”
“You could sound happier about it.”
“If I did, I’d be lying.”
My stomach twists in its cavity as though it’s trying to find its proper place. I am queasy and achy and sad, and sick of being all three.
“I thought it’d be sooner,” he says. “For a while, every time I opened the mailbox I expected to see a letter or a postcard. Right until the end of high school, every time the phone rang, I kept thinking it might be you.”
“You could have called me, you know.”
“Yep.” His chin drops to his chest. “There’s lots of things either one of us could have done. Look, Mattie—” Then he stops, shakes his head, and smiles for the first time. “Mattie Rhodes. Jesus dog.”
“Hi, Spencer.”
His smile disappears. “It’s not you, understand? The way I’m acting. I don’t mean to be nasty. We were what, eleven years old? It’s not personal.”
I stare at him while he sips his tonic water. He’s sweating, seemingly from the effort necessary to stay in this booth with me. There are tears in my eyes again, but this time, they’re mostly from frustration.
“Spencer. How the hell could it be anything but personal?”
“You don’t know everything,” he says. “You don’t know anything. You just left.”
“I was eleven. I didn’t leave. I was taken away.”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“Like what?” When he doesn’t answer, just sits there and shakes, I have to clench my fists in my coat pockets to keep from grabbing one of his wrists; I want to yank him out of wherever he is so we can talk-just talk. But all I can think of to say is “How?”
For a few minutes, we don’t talk, just ride the rhythm of another Stevie Wonder song. I sip my beer and think of Louisville and Laura. Both seem like utterly insubstantial fragments of someone else’s life.
“When did you start believing?” I ask. “In God, I mean?”
Surprisingly, Spencer is still looking at me. He’s still sweating too, but he’s not squirming quite so much. “I always did a little, I think. And I’m not sure if what I feel now is belief or gratitude or relief or joy or something else I don’t even have a name for. But it is powerful, and it is real, and whatever it is, it gets in my bloodstream like oxygen, and I breathe it, Mattie. I breathe it.”
He takes a breath now. Then he continues.
“They found me in an alley, you understand? I had a syringe hanging out of my arm, because I thought maybe a few more drops would dribble out of it eventually. My veins were popping out all over, and my memory was gone. Gone. Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
His expression darkens toward outright hostility. “For a brief blissful time, pretty much nothing at all.”
“How’s your mom?” I ask quickly, hoping to find common ground, the familiarity that came so easily with Jon.
Nothing moves on Spencer’s face. He stares at me until I
look away, then picks up his paper napkin, unfolds it carefully, and presses it hard over his eyes like a compress. “She has more up days lately,” he says, “now that she’s back on medication. I have to take her word for it, of course. She doesn’t like to see me.”
I can feel my cheeks redden, as if I’m facing into a wind. I have spent the better part of my life imagining myself as a sort of Gatsby in reverse. Instead of a mansion and a future, I have clung to a ruin and a past. But it has been my choice, all along. I had the opportunity to leave it all behind, whereas no one who stayed here ever did. Maybe that’s why I can’t leave this booth. With Spencer here, tabletops and peanut shells and plain everyday survival have a tangible quality all their own. I don’t want him more than five feet away from me any time soon.
“I dreamed you, Mattie,” Spencer says. “In a heroin dream. You and the Cory twins switched heads a few times, then looked at me and said Boo while I just lay against the fender of an abandoned Olds and laughed and laughed.”
“I think of them every day,” I say. “Courtney Grieve. Peter Slotkin.”
“Mattie, for God’s sake. Was it necessary, really, to hunt me down and tell me that? You haven’t changed at all.”
“What do you think I’m doing here, Spencer?”
“That’s wha—”
“Do you think I imagined you’d be happy to see me?”
His mouth hangs open, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Well, I did,” I say suddenly.
He grabs for his tonic water, knocks it over, and spills it across the table. I look at this man who was my first real friend, nervously sopping up water with a napkin. “Spencer. I have a plan.”
“Devil,” Spencer murmurs. “I need to make a phone call.” He gets up and throws open the curtains. He is gone for almost twenty minutes. When he comes back, he slumps into his side of the booth and looks at me for another little while. I wait, patient and determined as a fisherman casting a lure.
“You know what I can’t forgive you for?” he says.
Only now do I realize that I’m sweating profusely too. We’ve been here at least half an hour, and I’ve yet to shed my coat.
“Go ahead,” I say.
“Spoons.”
“Spoons?”
“How you can’t see yourself reflected right side up in a spoon, no matter which way you turn it. That gave me nightmares for years. I’m not kidding.”
I watch his hands rise toward his face, watch him force them back down. I don’t remember telling him anything about spoons, but I probably did. So many things I learned when I was a kid stuck in me like shrapnel.
“Spencer, I want to find Theresa. I need your help.”
One of his arms flies off the table and stays poised in midair between us, as if he’s trying some sort of judo blocking move. After a few seconds, he draws the arm to his chest and says nothing.
“I can’t believe I found you. I can’t believe you’re here. I’ve missed you.”
“Please,” says Spencer. His hair has lost its early-evening spike and is beginning to droop. “Please.” His eyes flash. The ache inside him is even older than mine, I think. I watch as his shoulders slump and his hands twitch.
“Look,” I say. “I don’t know about your life, but Theresa is pretty much an adjunct member of my marriage. When Laura and I start to talk about having kids, I see Theresa lying on her back in a snowdrift, staring at nothing. You remember how long she could lie there, as if she didn’t even feel the cold? Like she was already frozen?”
“Mattie.”
“Or we’re eating dinner, having a perfectly normal conversation, and there’s Theresa at the end of the table, scrawling answers in the middle of a Mind War. She never looks at me. She never talks to me. But she followed me to college, and she follows me to work and sucks whole hours out of my life, and I don’t even feel them go. I tell Laura the story over and over and she just plays her banjo and listens, sort of, but she’s heard it before, and she doesn’t understand—how could she?—and sometimes she’ll ask why I spend so much more time daydreaming ghosts than talking to her, and I have no answer. I don’t want to lose my wife, Spencer. I’m tired of losing people.”
“Wife,” says Spencer. “Someone actually married you?”
I smile a little. “Yep.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s a bluegrass musician, if you can believe it. How about you?”
Spencer rolls walnut skins in his fingers, looks at the table. “No,” he says.
“Girlfriend? I guess I figured that’s who you called before.”
“I called Shepherd Griffith-Rice. The guy I was talking to right before we left the church.”
“The one who rescued the prostitute?” I ask, and he winces.
“Rescued the woman from prostitution. Better, no?” He glares at me for a second, then drops his eyes. “He’s been my mentor for years. He taught me how to get over people like you. Days like this. You don’t go back, Mattie. You don’t relive. You say your apologies and mean them. You let your regrets hammer at you until they’ve exhausted themselves. And then you fill up your days with activities that help people. And after a long time, you don’t mind the dead moments so much.”
The jukebox has gone silent. No glasses clink, and no one speaks. I watch Spencer stare at the booth cushion behind me, and his eyes well up.
“You said you don’t mind the dead moments,” I say, trying to communicate my affection without launching him out of the booth. “That means you still have them.”
“Everyone has dead moments.”
“I don’t think everyone sinks into them the way we do. At least, not without waving their arms and calling for help and getting pissed off about it.”
“Mattie, we can’t go find her.”
“Why not? Maybe then you could sleep.”
“We can’t, Mattie,” he whispers. “I can’t. You don’t want to see her, even if you could. Trust me. Please. I am praying here. I’m praying to God, and I’m praying to you, if that works. Leave it be.”
I can feel him giving way in our unspoken tug-of-war. One more good pull might just do it. “Did you know the Doctor died? Drove himself into Cider Lake, and drowned.”
At first, Spencer continues to stare at the cushion behind me. Soon, though, his head starts to swing back and forth, and his eyes close. “I did not know that,” he says. For a second, I think he’s lying, but I dismiss the idea. Why would he bother?
“Jon Goblin told me this morning.”
“Jon Goblin,” he says, as if he has swallowed a stone. “You rousted him too?”
“He didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he seemed perfectly happy to see me.”
“How lovely for you both.”
“He’s a sweet guy. He walks with a cane now. He broke his leg falling out of a tree. He married Corrinne Kelly-Dade—the ice-skater, remember? They have a six-year-old son. He became an electrician and refers to himself as Mr. Alight. How Jon is that?” Spencer nods dully, makes a sort of groaning sound. “Spencer, let’s say we find Theresa. What’s the worst thing you could imagine? If she’s in trouble or she’s still screwed up, maybe we can help her. Maybe we’re the only ones who can.”
Spencer’s eyes grab mine. Both of his hands drop flat on the table-top and twitch. He really is terribly thin; his cheekbones protrude like the tops of cliffs.
“You’ve got guts, Mattie,” he whispers. “You always did.” He picks up a spoon and stares into it. “You want to know what you’ve done? You want to know it rather than just daydream it? Well, sir.” He pauses a moment. Mock-dramatic effect. “This is your life. Not mine anymore, just yours. I know more than I ever wanted to know already.” He makes that sound again, like a fluorescent light buzzing, and something in his eyes goes blank before flickering back to life. “I saw her once.”
His voice is almost a growl, and he bursts into a cough. A premonition trickles down the back of my throat, a physical thing, icy cold.
“I don’t know.” Spencer shakes his head. “I’ve never told anyone about this. Of course, there wasn’t any goddamn reason to tell anyone before. You’re the only one still stupid or lost enough to ask. So just sit there and listen. I am the Ghost of Christmas Fucked, and what I’m going to tell you will hurt, and there’s not a thing in this world that can change it. Try to understand. You might save yourself and, more importantly, the people you say you care so much about, some very real pain and truly horrendous dreams.”
I can almost hear pianos rumbling beneath him.
“I want you to picture my house, Mattie. My mom’s house, I mean. See it? The little Tonka trucks in the yard? They’re still there. Those old yellow curtains with the cigarette burns from whoever owned the house before us? They’re still there too. My mother is at work. My father is long, long gone. He abandoned us right about the time you did.”
I let that go. I’m too busy seeing Spencer’s house. I can smell it, too—a faint but permanent burnt-popcorn smell. Not quite enough light ever came through those curtains.
“I was eighteen, maybe. Nineteen? The beginning of the real bad time.” He’s clenching shells in his hand, breathing hard. “That’s a lie. I was well into the bad time by then. I’d already discovered needles. I’d already stolen every last dime of my mother’s emergency money out of the sock hamper in the attic, though she didn’t know it was gone, at this point. On the afternoon you’ve come all this way to hear about, I had a needle in my arm. I was pushing the junk in real slow. You do it right, you can actually feel it bloom in your vein. I was staring through the yellow curtains at the snow. It was midday, middle of the week, and magnificently silent. Not a soul moving out there. Then I heard a knock on the door. Not hard.”
He taps the table with his fist and goes silent again. But with the rap of his hand, every bone in my body freezes, as if I’ve been dropped in dry ice. Tiny fissures open at the joints and trace down muscles and arteries. If Spencer tapped on me now, he could shatter me like glass.
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