Another Life

by Robert Haller

  When he stopped at an intersection, Paul realized he was now on Grant, the street the Swansons lived on. He slowed when he came to the house he remembered. The light was still on in the window, illuminating a small pocket of front lawn. All the other houses on the street were dark. He drove past. Reaching the end of the street, he circled around again.

  The second time he reached her house, Paul stepped on the brake. The adrenaline running through his body was augmented by a generous dose of impulsiveness. He parked across the street, killed the engine, and walked up to April Swanson’s front door.

  The instant he rang the doorbell, Paul regretted it. The sudden sound, so jarring in the silence, seemed to scream how crazy it was for him to be here at this hour, but he couldn’t very well go back now. So he stood there, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, scratching at the back of his neck.

  The door opened only an inch, enough for April to see through and not much more. When she saw who was standing on her doorstep, she did not smile and open the door wider. To the contrary, she looked a little frightened. Paul suddenly realized that he could be a terrifying image for a woman alone, when standing at her doorstep in the middle of the night. He felt instantly ashamed. April didn’t say anything, just looked at him with wide, confused eyes. Paul cleared his throat. “Ms. Swanson … April, I’m not … I just came here to apologize for my behavior earlier.”

  “It’s after one in the morning, Paul,” she said in a voice just above a whisper. “You should go home.”

  Paul nodded. “Yeah, okay. Sorry, I just … I was passing by and I saw your light on. I thought I’d come say sorry.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Huh? Oh, nowhere in particular.” He lifted one shoulder. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come here now. It was a bad idea. Sorry.” He gave her a stupid wave, then turned and headed back down the drive.

  He was halfway down when he heard her call his name. He stopped and turned. April had come all the way out of the house and was standing on her front step. She was wearing baggy sweatpants, an old T-shirt, and slippers. A small blanket was wrapped like a shawl around her shoulders.

  “Paul,” she said, “are you driving?”

  He nodded.

  She shook her head. “You shouldn’t be. You can’t be sober enough to drive.”

  “Oh, no.” He waved his hand dismissively. “I’m totally fine. Not drunk at all, I—”

  “Shh,” she hissed, cutting him off. He realized how loud he must have been talking. She looked from her left to her right, but the street remained quiet. A noise did begin to come from within April’s house, though—a steadily rising squeal. Not having grown up in a house where people made tea, Paul didn’t at first know what it was. April looked back into her house, then around the street, then at Paul. Then she quickly waved him inside and turned and went into the house.

  The noise had stopped by the time Paul came into the kitchen. April was standing over the stove, where a red enamel kettle was steaming. “I’ll drive you home,” she said without looking at him. “Just let me get on some shoes.” Then, after a moment: “Actually, do you want some tea before we go? I was just about to have some.”

  Paul stood in the kitchen, hands at his sides. “Um, okay,” he said.

  “Great, just give me a second.” She still wasn’t looking at him. She told him to take a seat and went about making the tea, moving around quickly. He sat down at the kitchen table and watched her back as she filled two mugs with steaming water.

  “I’ve never actually had hot tea before,” he said.

  When she finally turned and looked at him, the two mugs in her hands, she was smiling, although the smile looked a little forced. “Really?” she said. “You’ve never had tea? How is that possible?”

  Paul shrugged. “My mom raised me on coffee. I guess I’m a little deprived.”

  She took the seat across from him at the table and slid one of the mugs his way. “You’ve gotta let it steep for a few minutes.”

  He looked at the mug in front of him.

  “Put your hands around it like this while you wait,” April instructed. She had her fingers laced around her mug. “That’s the whole point.”

  Paul did as he was told and felt the warmth seep into his fingers. She smiled at him. This time, the smile looked real. “So is that, like, your thing? Driving around town in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t sleep much,” he said. “I have to find ways to keep myself occupied.”

  She nodded. “Well, I guess it was a good thing you were out driving that one night, anyway, to save my wild daughter.”

  Paul chuckled. “Is she locked in her room now?”

  April shook her head and let out a long breath. “No, both my children have flown the coop for the night, actually. Won’t be back till tomorrow.”

  He glanced up at the clock above the refrigerator. It was now close to one thirty in the morning. “You’re up pretty late yourself.”

  “I couldn’t sleep, either.”

  Paul looked down at his mug. “Look, I’m sorry for whatever I might have said at the bar. I’m not a good person when I’m drunk. That’s not a real excuse, I know, but anything I said back there, I didn’t mean.”

  “Do you remember anything you said?” April asked after a pause.

  He looked up at her and shook his head.

  She looked at him for a long moment, as if deciding something. “You said that I was very pretty,” she said finally. “You said that you always thought I was.”

  He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he just stared at her. She gave him a quick, pinched smile and then stood up. “I’ll go get my shoes,” she said, and hurried out of the room.

  He sat there watching the steam escape from his mug. A minute later, he heard her sneakers squeaking on the kitchen tiles. “Ready?” she asked, zipping up her windbreaker and avoiding his gaze.

  She was taking her car keys from a hook on the wall when he got up and stood beside her at the door. “I do think you’re pretty,” he blurted.

  April shook her head and laughed, fingering the keys. “Paul, stop. I just thought it was kind of funny and sweet, that’s all.”

  “But I do think you’re pretty. You are pretty.”

  She had to look at him because his body was there, against the door. She gave the keys in her hands a halfhearted shake and looked up at him, her eyes big and a little frightened. “Ready to go?” she asked.

  He took a step toward her, and she stiffened but did not back away. He took another step, and then he placed his hands on her shoulders and kissed her. At first, she didn’t respond; her lips remained closed and her shoulders were still and tense under his hands. Then she opened her mouth and wrapped her arms around his neck.

  Even as he pushed her up against the refrigerator, knocking magnets and coupons and photographs to the floor in a clatter, even as she dug her fingernails into the back of his neck and he placed his hands on her thighs and lifted her up against the wall, in some part of his head he kept thinking, Any second now she’s going to realize what she’s doing and who she’s doing it with, and stop.

  But she didn’t stop. They moved down the short space of hallway, pressing each other up against the wall, and when they got to the empty sea of living room, with no tight spaces, April took his hand and led him through the room and into her bedroom, where she closed the door and turned and looked at him, smiling slightly. Paul reached down and unzipped her windbreaker, and she arched her back so that it fell to the floor.

  “Take off your shoes,” April said.

  Looking at her, with those searching eyes and that faint smile still playing on her face, Paul felt something leap up inside him, some sort of emotional spasm. And the most irrational and stupid things forced their way to the very edge of speech. I love you, April. Will you marry me?
Let’s have kids. He could have said any of those things in that moment, and in that moment, he would have meant them all.

  Instead, he knelt and began frantically untying the laces of his Converse All Stars.

  On the bed, she ran her hands through his hair. He helped free her of her sweatpants. He no longer felt any shock that this was happening. It felt like the only thing that could happen. There wasn’t any other way it could be. It had to happen that he put his lips to her breasts. It had to happen that she laced her arms around his back, her fingernails pressing into his skin, and wrapped her legs around his waist. He was inside her, panting, her breath beating against his face, when she lifted her head and gasped into his ear, “You can’t come inside me.” So when he felt the rising surge, Paul rolled onto his back and lay beside her on the bed, both of them staring up at the ceiling and breathing heavily.

  The second time Paul woke up that night was because of sweat. Sweat sticking to his body and bleeding from his skin onto the sheets. He sat up in the darkness and looked around. The place in the bed next to him was empty. There was no one else in the room. His pants and underwear lay in a heap on the floor. He got up and put them on. Shirtless, he went into the adjacent bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He looked at himself in the mirror. His face was red and wet. Two framed Norman Rockwell prints hung on the wall behind him. The bathroom was white and cheerful.

  He found her sitting out on the living room sofa, upright and erect, hands placed on her knees, staring at the far wall.

  “Hey,” he said, coming into the room.

  April looked at him and nodded, then turned back to the wall.

  Paul sat down beside her on the sofa. “Can’t sleep?” he asked.

  She nodded. He wanted to touch her, put an arm around her, but her stiffness suggested she might snap upon physical contact. She had changed into a new T-shirt and gym shorts. “You?” she asked after a moment.

  “I don’t sleep much, remember?”

  She nodded. “That’s right,” she whispered, still gazing straight ahead.

  They stayed this way for a long while: she sitting forward on the sofa, eyes ahead, motionless, like some avid member of a congregation listening to a preacher; he beside her, his body turned slightly toward her, hands placed on the sofa cushion, trying to read her inscrutable expression. Finally, when he could no longer stand the stillness, Paul took the TV remote from where it lay on the coffee table in front of them and turned on the TV.

  He flipped through channels until he found a grainy black-and-white. Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. “This is a good one,” he said. “You ever seen it?”

  April shook her head. He couldn’t tell whether her eyes were on the TV or still on the wall beyond it. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  He leaned back and stretched his arm out across the back of the sofa. Eventually, she sank into him. Eventually, she rested her head on his chest and he put his arm around her, and they watched what was left of the movie.

  BEN

  “Please turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Acts, chapter nine.”

  Dr. Sheldon Langston wore a suit the color of a rotting plum. He looked down at us from the stage, an old man with thin white hair, a stern expression on his face. We’d had guest speakers before; it was nothing new. But something about this guy was different. For half a minute, all you could hear in the gymnasium was the soft stir of pages turning as people searched their Bibles—a sound I’d always liked for some reason. Then Dr. Langston picked up the glass of water sitting on the lectern and took a long drink. The microphone hooked up to his suit collar meant we could hear him as he gulped and then wetly smacked his lips. He took a deep breath and looked at us.

  “It’s in the book of Acts that we first meet Saul the Pharisee, better known to us as Paul the Apostle. How many of you know that God’s plans are not our plans, that his ways are higher than our ways? Think about this: Paul the Apostle, the great leader of the early church, author of over half the New Testament, one of the most recognizable figures in scripture—when we first meet him, he’s on his way to Damascus to terrorize and imprison followers of Christ. Verse one: ‘Saul was breathing murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples …’ Verse nine: ‘If he found any there who belonged to the Way, he’d take them as prisoners.’”

  Dr. Langston had only just started his sermon, and already he was getting red in the face, his voice booming through the huge, echoey room. Usually, this was my cue to zone out—Bethany and me, zombie survivors in California, building a cabin on the beach, watching the sunset every night. But today my imagination wasn’t working. These days, it was getting harder and harder to drift away—where I was in real time and space wouldn’t always let me go. It was warm and stuffy in the sanctuary, and my ass was stiff from sitting on the hard chair. I was starting to get a wedgie, too, but there wasn’t enough room to readjust my crotch without looking like I was playing with myself. My mom was on one side of me, DeShawn on the other.

  “How many of you ever wished for a fresh start, a clean slate? How many of you have thought at one point in your life, ‘If I could just take everything back, start over, if I could have a new name, I’d do it all differently’? Well, brothers and sisters, let me tell you something: if the Lord Jesus Christ can do it for this miserable man who at one point was dead set on destroying forever the very message of Christ and his church, then he can do it for every single one of us. It wasn’t just Paul’s name that was changed; it was his life.”

  The Bible my parents had given me as a birthday present a few years ago sat under my chair. I bent over, picked it up, and began flipping through it for something to do. I liked how thin the pages were—more like silk than paper—and I liked the rough feel of the leather binding. I didn’t like reading the Bible, but I did like to hold it. I wondered if, for some men, that was the reason they became preachers.

  “Now, when I was a young man, I might not have been persecuting Christians like our friend Saul here, but let me tell you, brothers and sisters, I was on the express train to destruction. I thought I was smarter than God, folks. I thought I could outrun him. How many of you know that the Lord sometimes lets us learn the hard way, amen? Every day, we get on our own private road to Damascus, don’t we, brothers and sisters? You see, I believe that in his heart, Saul knew—he knew—the truth, but he just wouldn’t let himself believe it. The Lord had to appear to him in broad daylight before he got the message, just as the Lord appears to us every day, in our hearts, when we know the truth but won’t let ourselves understand it. How many of you are on the road to Damascus this very morning? How many of you have something that the Lord is speaking to you about, convicting you about, and you’re not sure if you want to listen? Let me urge you, brothers and sisters, to stop. Stop and listen. You can’t outrun the Lord. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  I looked up from my Bible. Dr. Langston was pacing back and forth on the stage, holding his Bible tightly in his hand. Of course, he wasn’t looking at me. Of course, he didn’t know what I was thinking—so why did it feel like he was talking to me? Why did it feel like any second now, he might stop pacing, turn and look me straight in the eyes, then slowly lift one of his wrinkled white fingers, point straight at me, and, in front of the entire congregation, expose all my secrets?

  “You see, names mean something in the Bible. When Saul’s name is changed to Paul, we know that his heart and soul have been transformed as well. God cares about our actions, but how many of you know that our actions are dictated by our hearts, amen? Before we do anything, we must change our hearts, and how do we do that? By listening, brothers and sisters. By listening to the voice of the Lord and letting ourselves understand.”

  It felt like the sermon would never end, and when it finally did, I felt relieved, like I had been holding my breath the entire time. It was something I’d never felt before with any of Pastor Eric’s sermons.


  I was hot and sweaty and needed to take a dump. I pushed through the crowded sanctuary to the back hallway where the bathrooms were. Nothing beats the feel of smooth molded plastic against your bare ass, in an empty bathroom, when you’ve been holding it for a long time. I let myself just sit there and breathe, staring at the floor tiles.

  When I heard the steady trickle of someone pissing in the nearest urinal, I started. I’d thought I was alone and hadn’t heard anyone come in through the door.

  The trickle continued. “And in the last days, God said, ‘I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.’ The sun will be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the coming of the great and glorious days of the Lord.”

  It was Dr. Langston, I was sure, but how had he gotten back here so fast, and why was he quoting verses in the bathroom?

  He didn’t say anything more, and I waited in the stall with my hair standing on end and my breath coming sharp until I heard him zip up his pants, wash and dry his hands, and go out the door. I was sweating again.

  It took me a while to finish my business after that, and when I finally did, I found Jason, Dylan, and DeShawn waiting for me in the hallway. We were going to see a movie, they told me—they’d already checked it with my parents. I nodded, not looking at DeShawn.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Jason asked me, looking more annoyed than concerned. “You look weird.”

  I wiped my forehead and told him I was fine. Jason shrugged, and I followed them out of the church. I told myself I wasn’t bothered that they’d invited the Weight to the movie before talking to me—I was in the bathroom; it made sense—but as we piled into Dylan’s parents’ van and I was forced to sit in the back with Dylan’s little sister, the other guys up front, I felt something crawling inside me. My friends never even mentioned the fight between DeShawn and me, pretending like it never happened, but somehow it felt like they were secretly taking my foster brother’s side. As for DeShawn and me, we hadn’t spoken to each other since Friday.