Another Life

by Robert Haller

  “We’d love to see you at church more,” said Pastor Eric. “Or does your family attend another church?”

  “Uh …” Nola glanced at Bethany, but Bethany wasn’t about to meet her eyes.

  Pastor Eric waved his hand. “It’s okay. You can be honest here. I’m not trying to interrogate you, or anything.”

  “We’re not out to get you, dear,” Mrs. Moyer said with a smile. “You can relax.” She and Eric both chuckled.

  Nola forced out an embarrassed laugh. “Yeah, no. Well, I live with my mom. But she doesn’t really go to church, or anything.”

  Pastor Eric nodded. “Well, just remember, you and your mother are always welcome at New Life, okay?”

  Nola nodded, and I watched her take a long drink of water. She wasn’t so tough now, without her boyfriends to boss around, without her weed and her punk rock to hide behind. She was nervous and frightened, and eager to please this pastor and his family.

  “Who is that man, honey?” Mrs. Moyer asked, nodding at Nola’s shirt. “I know I’ve seen that face before.”

  “It’s Kurt Cobain, Mom,” Bethany muttered without looking up from her plate.

  “Who?”

  “Kurt Cobain.” Nola put down her glass. “He was the front man for the band Nirvana.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Moyer said, still staring at Nola’s shirt. “You know, there’s something about him that reminds me of Vincent van Gogh, in a way. I think it’s the eyes.”

  “That’s kinda funny,” Nola said with a sheepish grin, “because they both shot themselves.”

  Mrs. Moyer gave a little gasp and put a hand to her mouth. “Really? Oh, that’s so sad!” From her expression, you would have thought she’d known Kurt personally.

  “Yeah.” Nola’s voice had lost most of its tremble. “He couldn’t handle the pressure of fame and success. Plus, he was depressed.”

  Mrs. Moyer nodded. “It just shows that everyone’s looking for something to fill that hole in their heart, and it’s so sad when people give up before finding the one thing that truly satisfies.”

  “Right,” Nola said. Beside her, Bethany was studying her untouched lasagna.

  “Some people think he was murdered,” I blurted.

  Everyone looked at me in surprise. Mrs. Moyer looked as though she was about to respond, and then thought better of it and turned back to her food. It was Jon who finally ended the uncomfortable silence. “That’s one of the reasons I think the studio at New Life would be such a great thing,” he said to Pastor Eric. “It would be an opportunity to get more positive music with uplifting messages out there.”

  “Jon has a vision to set up a recording studio in the church,” Eric said.

  “Oh, I think that’s a really great idea, Jon,” said Mrs. Moyer. “Eric, don’t you think so?”

  I was surprised to see that Pastor Eric looked almost annoyed. “We’d have to think about it, honey. It wouldn’t be cheap. And you’d need to be sure you were using it enough to justify the expense.”

  “If you decide to,” said Nola, “you should totally record Paul Frazier.”

  Who was this girl who thought she could talk to my best friend’s parents as if she were part of their family?

  “Paul Frazier?” said Mrs. Moyer. “Sharon’s son, who’s running sound? He’s a musician?”

  Pastor Eric nodded. “Apparently very talented. Doing a great job with sound, anyway.”

  “He’s, like, a genius,” said Nola.

  “Oh, Eric,” said Mrs. Moyer, “I didn’t know that. Why doesn’t he ever lead worship?”

  “I don’t think he’d be interested in doing that,” Jon said sharply. Then, seeming to realize his tone, he quickly began picking at his salad.

  Mrs. Moyer looked crestfallen and a little confused, but only for a moment. She turned to Nola again. “So, any big plans for this evening?”

  Nola shook her head. “Not really. My mom’s working late, so I just kinda came over to see what Bethany was—”

  “You mean you’re all alone tonight?” Mrs. Moyer cut her off. “Well, if it’s okay with your mom, you’re more than welcome to stay over tonight. Laura is, too. You girls could have a slumber party.” She tried to say the phrase with irony, but irony didn’t suit Mrs. Moyer very well. She gave me a smile and I did my best to return it, but I probably just looked sick.

  “And no pressure, of course, but if you’re interested, tomorrow is a very special Sunday at New Life. Dr. Sheldon Langston will be speaking, and later on this week, Thursday evening, we’ll be having a special service of prophetic ministry.”

  “What’s that?” Nola asked.

  “Dr. Langston will be prophesying over certain members of the congregation,” said Mrs. Moyer. “It’s a really incredible time.”

  “Prophesying?” Nola repeated. “Like he tells the future, or something?”

  Pastor Eric shook his head and smiled with easy patience. “We believe in giving the Holy Spirit room in our lives to speak to us, Nola. I know it probably sounds weird to you, but the Bible teaches us people are blessed with certain gifts—wisdom, healing, even miracles. The apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians tells us all about it. Dr. Langston is blessed with the gift of prophecy. Now, that doesn’t mean he can see the future or gets crazy visions or anything like that. It just means the Lord has given him the gift of being able to hear the Holy Spirit’s voice and discern what it’s saying to the individual, with more clarity and focus than most of us have. It’s still up to the individual to take the Holy Spirit’s word and apply it to their lives.” Pastor Eric stopped abruptly and looked around the table and grinned. “Sorry, didn’t realize I’d started preaching.”

  Mrs. Moyer placed a hand on Nola’s shoulder. “You’ll have to excuse my husband. Once he gets started, it’s hard for him to stop—force of habit.”

  Everybody laughed. We were all one big, happy family. I put down my fork to keep from reaching across the table and lodging it in Nola’s arm.

  APRIL

  About a year ago, Laura had asked her mother why she didn’t seem to have any friends. At the time, the question had surprised April. Of course she had friends. She was around people constantly. If anything, what she needed was less social interaction, more time for herself. She remembered giving her daughter a sarcastic and not altogether fair reply—something about being too busy paying Laura’s phone bill to worry about her social status. But that night, thinking about it in bed, April had realized that her daughter was right. She didn’t have any friends. There was her older sister, Sarah, in Florida. They made it a point to get together at least once a year and called each other on a regular basis, but it wasn’t the same as having her there across the street. And if the only friend she could name was a sister who lived over a thousand miles away, maybe that wasn’t a very good sign.

  When April had first started attending New Life, over ten years ago, dozens of women at church befriended her. They had brought her to all the events—the Bible studies, the game nights, the prayer meetings—and almost instantly she felt completely accepted. Never had she so swiftly or so thoroughly been thrust into a social circle. And most of those women who had made friends with her back in the late nineties were still there today, but things were different now. April no longer took part in most of the ladies’ meetings, and her conversations with them at church, while always friendly, were usually brief and limited, never daring to scratch below the surface.

  April hadn’t noticed exactly when this change started, but now she traced it back to her separation from her husband, Ray. Given the circumstances surrounding the demise of her marriage, there was no way to keep it private from her friends at New Life. And although everyone at church inevitably took her side in the divorce, she began to sense a subtle shift in how the congregation viewed her, starting not long after her marriage ended. Maybe it wasn’t so much the di
vorce itself that changed the way the women at church interacted with her, but how April had handled it. In the weeks and months after she and Ray separated, whenever she was forced to discuss the ordeal, April had assumed a resigned, what-are-you-gonna-do attitude toward it all.

  She remembered, in the June following her divorce, meeting with Pastor Eric in his office. He asked whether she still wanted to head up the VBS. He made clear that the question had nothing to do with her divorce, but with the fact that she was now raising two kids on her own, working a full-time job, and managing a household all by herself. Maybe it was a little too much?

  April had listened quietly, hands on her knees, until he was finished and waiting for her response. Then she smiled and said, “Well, Ray never really helped around the house, anyway. So there’s that.” Pastor Eric never again asked about her quitting the VBS.

  It wasn’t until much later that April realized her flippant attitude toward the divorce must have struck many at church as disconcertingly blasé—even heartless. The irony, of course, was that if April had betrayed even a fraction of the pain, confusion, and fear she was feeling in those initial months following her separation, she would have collapsed into the unsuspecting arms of those busybodies and forced them to hold her, forced them to tell her everything was going to be okay.

  When time passed and April showed no signs of looking for a new relationship, it seemed to her that the members of New Life had a harder and harder time knowing where to place her in their social context, and she herself had a harder time knowing where to go. Working single mothers, while abundant everywhere else in the country, were rare at New Life. And April acted so confident in her new position, so at ease with her singleness, that she denied the congregation the satisfaction of even feeling sorry for her. In social situations, she displayed a glib cynicism, a knowledge of the unfairness of the world that many people there had never been forced to confront. Women, especially those her age, seemed to find April’s jadedness off-putting and distressing. April discovered that she got along easier with men, but at church, a middle-aged woman couldn’t just be friends with a middle-aged man, especially if that middle-aged man happened to be married.

  While April continued to attend church without fail, her conversations with the other mothers at New Life became more and more limited to a few safe go-to subjects, usually the VBS. “So, April,” they would say when they felt they needed to say something, “any big ideas for the vacation Bible school this summer?” She got questions like this so often that it felt almost like the script for a bad play: We both know we have nothing to say to each other, so I’ll just ask you about the one thing I can think of. She found it more than a little irritating that after ten years, her one defining characteristic at church was a vacation Bible school. She wondered what would happen when she stopped heading up the program and they were forced to come up with something new to ask her. So, April, are you excited for summer now that you don’t have Bible school to worry about?

  She found it was easier outside church. She got along well with most of her fellow teachers, and for a year or so now—since not long after the time Laura had accused her of not having any friends—she had taken to going out with a few of her coworkers at least once a month. Always on Saturdays, always when her children were over at a friend’s house or away with their dad for the weekend. That way, if their mom came home a little tipsier than might be appropriate for the director of a vacation Bible school, she could be sure that at least her children wouldn’t see.

  The two women she usually went out with were Angie Walters, the social studies teacher, and Karan Manning, who taught English—both fellow veterans who’d been teaching at Grover Falls High as long as or longer than April. The assistant coach, Joe Cornish, a balding red-faced man whose bad back forced him to walk as if he were perpetually looking for something he had dropped on the ground, sometimes joined them. And when he did, he became the reluctant defender of the entire male gender whenever their conversations veered toward critiques of their husbands—or, in April’s case, ex-husband.

  He was with them now, at their usual spot, Maxy’s, a bar and grill that would become more “bar” and less “grill” as the night wore on and bars came into higher demand. Tonight, April was going through her wine a little faster than usual, watching Angie tease Joe in the battle of the sexes.

  “All I’m saying, Joe, is that a lot of men have a hard time with the concept of responsibility. It’s just a fact.”

  Joe shook his head. “And all I’m saying is, you can’t say things about all men just based on your experience. That’s what’s called a …” He snapped his fingers in the air to try to summon the right phrase.

  “Gross generalization?” April offered, putting down her glass.

  “Gross generalization!” Joe seized on the phrase with triumph and relief. “Thank you, April.”

  Karan slapped her on the arm. “April! Don’t help him out!”

  “See that?” said Angie. “Men rely on us even to make their arguments for them.” The women laughed while Joe shook his head and took a drink of his beer.

  They continued to argue, and April continued to laugh, but her mind kept drifting. She’d had a light dinner and felt drunk already—drunker than she’d been in a long time. She felt she deserved it, though. This past week had been a long one. Her mind and body had been tense and wound up for days, like a coiled spring pressed between two rocks, and this wine was the first thing that had done anything to help her relax.

  Since Friday, April had been chanting in her head, only one week left, only one week left, like some sort of mantra. But the end of next week was the camping trip, and she was dreading that Friday-through-Sunday ordeal in the Adirondacks. She knew she had no one but herself to blame for that. It had been her bright idea to implement a weekend in the mountains for all children ten and older. “Oh, April, what WILL you think of next?” And she had this groundless but uncomfortably persistent feeling that something bad was going to happen on those last three days of the program this year, and there was nothing she could do about it. This summer had already had its low points. Yesterday, Friday, an actual fight had almost broken out. She couldn’t remember anything like that happening since ’03 and the “slingshot incident.”

  Yesterday afternoon, April had been in the church greeting room, sitting with seven-year-old Michael Sanders. Lydia had caught the boy mooning the tribe of Asher again. It was the third time in two days. April had sat him down to give him a talk about how some things were private and not meant to be shared with others. When she had finished, the boy looked at her with a vacant expression on his face, his mouth hanging open and one hand stuck halfway down his pants. (She knew she should tell him to remove his hand, but at that point she just didn’t have the energy.)

  “Does that make sense to you, Michael?” she asked him at last.

  It was a full five seconds before he decided to nod his head.

  “Good,” she said, unconvinced.

  That was when Lydia rushed into the room, her face red with sweat, and her eyes wide. “Ms. Swanson, you’d better get out here. Something’s going on at the Cross of Repentance.”

  “Now what?” April groaned and stood up. She grabbed Michael by the hand that wasn’t down his pants and followed Lydia quickly out of the church.

  The seven-foot-tall plywood Cross of Repentance had been erected at the very edge of the church grounds. Throughout the program, kids were encouraged to write down on red or white slips of paper anything they felt guilty or ashamed about—all their sins and fears—fold it in half, and nail it to the cross. At the end of the program, these pieces of paper were taken off the now paper-covered cross and gathered up to be burned in the giant bonfire on the last night of the camping trip. The idea was that Jesus had taken away these sins and now you were free of them. It had been one of April’s first ideas when taking over the VBS, and Pastor Eric loved it.
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br />   At first, the brilliant summer sun was blinding. But as April crossed the field at a fast walk, with Michael holding her hand and trotting to keep up, she could see a cluster of kids gathered around the Cross of Repentance. As she got closer, she saw that they were circled around two kids in the middle: Benjamin Waid and his foster brother, DeShawn. They were standing inches away from each other, shouting. Jon Newman was trying to get them apart, approaching them timidly and talking quietly into their shouts, only to retreat a few steps when they ignored him.

  With Michael still in tow, April made her way through the circle of kids. Jon rushed over to her, looking relieved. “I’m really not sure what happened,” he said. “We were all nailing one of our sins to the cross, and suddenly these two were going at it.”

  “Jesus, DeShawn,” April heard Benjamin say, standing across from his foster brother, fists clenched, “you’re such a little shit. I don’t know why my parents took you in. You don’t deserve it.”

  April heard something like a collective gasp from the rest of the kids. She bit her lip. Ben was one of her son’s closest friends, and she knew him well. He got angry easily and said things he probably didn’t mean. Right now his face was red and wet, from sweat or tears or both. April cleared her throat and spoke loudly. “Okay, people, back to your tents. Team leaders, let’s get started on the next activity.”

  There was a slow, reluctant migration from the Cross of Repentance as team leaders shepherded their tribes back to the tents. Finally, only Ben, DeShawn, Jon, and April remained—and Michael, who had not yet let go of her hand. Ben and DeShawn were still glaring at each other, not moving, but at least they had stopped shouting. “Okay, boys,” April said when it felt safe to speak, “how about we sit down, get a drink of water. We can lose our heads in this heat.”

  They remained standing, staring at each other in the summer haze. The cross cast its foreshortened shadow on the grass behind them. April turned to Jon, who had his hands in his pockets and looked uncomfortable. “Jon, you wanna run over to the coolers and get some water bottles?”