Good as Gone (20 page)

This slow, syrupy world gave her all the time she needed to understand what to do next. It was like she was in a bubble with the man named Pete and the sleeping bag and the pigeons and the cars, whose headlights never illuminated the place behind the pillar for more than a quarter of a second, but in those flashes she saw that Pete had fists and that there was a knife concealed in his pockets, and why wouldn’t there be? It wouldn’t be the first wicked blade she had stolen.

Baby lay still, waiting for it to be over. Nothing watched for an angle.

I watch her all week long, waiting for something to happen.

Now I am thankful for her short red hair, which both reveals and defamiliarizes her face. I retrace its contours, not with a mother’s intimate knowledge but with a stranger’s curiosity. I try not to superimpose the real Julie over the false Julie, compare line to line, but rather to learn every curve and dimple anew. Her chin is fine and pointed, but her jaw is sharper and squarer than it looks at first glance, her forehead higher and shadowed with the very first creases that no amount of blank-facing will completely smooth away. I try to determine the degree of the slight angle between the bridge and the tip of her nose, trace the flanges of her nostrils.

I do not look at her eyes if I can avoid it. Too dangerous. She’ll feel me looking, and I’ll feel something that may or may not be real.

Even so, I’m making her uneasy. She drops a glass in the sink Wednesday morning and it shatters; Tom has to take her by the shoulders and move her aside so he can clean it up. She runs to her room and closes the door, dramatically but as quietly as if she’s performing a role in a silent film. She can get up and down the stairs with hardly a creak or thump. I wonder if she is pacing in her bedroom; if so, we hear nothing of it downstairs.

Tom and I don’t talk about it. We haven’t spoken since Monday, and he sleeps in Jane’s empty room, where he has moved his computer desk. I assume he works in there during the day. Perhaps Julie comes and goes while Tom stares at his screen and tries not to notice.

As for me, I go to work too. Once I’m in my office, door locked against the department secretary, I’m oblivious to faculty and students passing in the halls; nothing can hurt me. I put my cell phone on my desk and lay my head down next to it, waiting for Alex to call, waiting for news about the DNA test. Sometimes I grow impatient and imagine calling the police myself, telling them my doubts about the woman in my house. Things would move much more quickly after that. But I threw Overbey’s number away and finding it again would take more willpower than I have at my disposal.

Besides, this way, like Alex said, I don’t have to be involved. She’ll never know it was me. That’s the beauty of ID’ing a corpse rather than a living girl.

And what will happen when they get the results? I imagine the police bursting into the house, ready to cuff her and drag her away. She’s sitting on the sofa under the afghan, watching a movie; she turns around at the noise. I try to inoculate myself against the expression on her face as they come for her. Shock? Rage? But I never see it. Instead, I keep seeing her expression illuminated by the ultrasound screen: bottomless grief, hopeless despair.

And what if I’m wrong?

But these are the habits of denial. When I feel myself starting to indulge them, I force myself to think of the photo.

It’s a short trip from there to thoughts of Tom’s gun. When did Tom take the classes, when did he get a license to own a handgun? Just another thing he was doing on his own, though I know it doesn’t take long. I know, because I once planned to buy one. I told myself that’s why I went to the firing range: I was practicing to get my license, firing rounds into a piece of paper shaped like a man for entirely pragmatic reasons. If something like that ever happened again, I told myself, I wanted to be ready.

It was a lie. I wanted to pretend, in every possible scenario, that I was killing him. Every time the gun discharged and I felt the jolt go through me, I felt exhilaration at the thought that maybe I had missed the heart, hit a shoulder or a knee or the groin, so I could have the chance to do it again and again. I wanted to kill him forever.

One day when I drove to the firing range, I realized it wasn’t really Julie’s abductor I wanted to kill. It was someone else, the person who was really to blame for Julie’s death—and even if she wasn’t to blame, she was the only person I could hold accountable. A firing range is the easiest place in the world to kill yourself; you don’t have to own a firearm to shoot one. It was raining hard, one of those summer downpours where the air feels inside out, like a monsoon, and I almost wrecked the car getting there. I was too drunk to write my name on the sign-in sheet that day, and they turned me away.

I never went back. That was the beginning of the end of the drinking, and when I sobered up, I decided not to buy a gun.

But there are laws of inevitability at work in our lives. While I was crying drunkenly in my car, shuddering away from the brink, Tom, somewhere across the city, was making a different decision. And now the gun is in our house, like it was always meant to be.

Now that I’ve lost her again, I can always use it.

Friday night after dinner, Tom goes up to Jane’s room and shuts the door while I sit on the sofa and idly browse the cable channels. Something has to give; something has to break. I believe it will happen tonight.

Halfway into a rerun of
Roseanne,
Julie confirms it by striding quickly past the sofa on her way out. I hear the garage door open, catch a glimpse through the kitchen window of Tom’s car backing out. Leaving the television on, I wait a few seconds and follow her in my car.

At night, the freeway is less clogged, and the rosary beads flash past instead of scrolling slowly by. The faded awnings and new construction and apartment buildings look flat and dull at night, irrelevant. I can barely distinguish one from the other. Up ahead, the Range Rover weaves expertly around slower cars, in and out of lanes—
Julie’s a good driver for someone who’s only just learned,
I think to myself with some sarcasm. Though there are plenty of cars on the road, I can always see her. The SUV sticks out over the other cars, highly visible even to me in my squat little Prius. I know where she’s going before she puts on the turn signal.

At night, the Gate is a bald hill wreathed in glowing glass. The surface parking lot is full—there’s something going on, one of the nighttime services that are among the church’s most heavily attended offerings. I turn into the garage, where suited attendants direct a line of creeping cars farther and farther up, and a steady stream of people flows back down a central staircase from the roof. I go where I’m directed, ascending past thousands of cars to the top level of the garage.

Every time I pass the staircase, I glance at the line of people, and just as I’m turning the corner to the top level, driving toward the open spots in the distance, I finally catch a glimpse of Julie heading downward with the rest of the crowd. She’s wearing a long skirt and cardigan I bought her just a few weeks ago, when things were so different.

I park and walk down the staircase with the rest of the stragglers: a lean older couple wearing matching denim shirts and shining belt buckles, the woman carrying a leather purse dangling fat silver charms; a black woman about my age, in jeans and a ruffled blouse, herding two children in front of her; an elderly woman with a cane; a towering Latino man with a potbelly and a bullet-shaped head who pushes past everyone impatiently. All of us emerge together onto the surface lot, then stream down a walkway to the lobby, which is teeming with people. The hanging monitors and clerestory lighting feel different at night, surrounded by the faintest hint of a stadium echo that no amount of plush carpet and soft, shaggy area rugs can dampen. It makes the air feel a little fizzy, so that it’s obvious this structure was originally built for excitement.

The escalators that cleave the entryway in half are covered with people, but I don’t see Julie anywhere. I hurry past the information desk and step onto the escalator to avoid the enthusiastic greeters, only to be delivered straight into the hands of a thin woman with large, bright-awake eyes behind oversize glasses at the top of the escalator. “Program?”

I take the glossy trifold, still scanning the crowded horizon for Julie, and she spots my hesitation.

“Is this your first time visitin’?” she asks with a heavy Houston accent, flattening the vowels, chewing and pinching off the consonants.

“Um, yes.” I nod, and she puts her hand on my forearm.

“Well, listen, honey, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going right back down this escalator and—you see that desk on your right? Well, now, usually Sheena is up here at the top of the stairs with me, but you can see her down there—”

I start to panic. What if Julie sees me, stopped here at the top of the escalator? “Can I just seat myself?”

“Of course, honey,” she says but then calls after me as I’m moving away: “It’s just since you’re new, we’d rather you got one of the
really good
seats.”

For my money, a good seat is one where you can see the lay of the land without attracting attention. I walk around the stadium’s curve on the second floor, following the flow of people past a room with a sign saying
COMMUNION,
more video screens, and an unmanned, recessed information booth that used to be a concession stand or bar when this was a stadium. Then I step into the sanctuary itself.

It is cavernously huge. Cluster lights illuminate dust motes a hundred feet away against the bluish-black vault of what used to be the Astrodome, only the intricate starburst pattern of rectangular skylights on the ceiling hinting at its former identity. Gone is the Astroturf, replaced by acres of beige carpet; the folding seats lining the walls have been tastefully reupholstered in navy. Jumbotron screens flank the stage, and a TV camera on a crane swoops over the red-carpeted dais as if it’s limbering up for the show. I find a seat halfway down the top section, close to the aisle, and sit down.

After a few minutes, the lights dim and the stadium, still steadily filling with people, erupts into applause. Audience members stand in waves, shouting, “Jesus lives!” and “Praise Him!” over the band, which has started up a dramatic, throbbing hum. Seven singers emerge from the depths of the altar, dressed in television-friendly stage outfits and holding wireless mics. All at once, the music bursts out, a heavy beat thrumming through the whole stadium, as loud as any rock concert, basketball game, or monster-truck rally. The laser light show begins, brilliant beams of green and blue sweeping the stadium. One moves across my face for a split second and I feel a shot of adrenaline, the chemical response to being bathed, suddenly and forcefully, in a powerful light. My heart feels as if it’s actually leaping up, like in the Wordsworth poem; I’ve always wondered what that would be like.

The music thuds explosively onward. It’s a soaring pop anthem, the song you hear near the end of a film about teenagers in love. The Jumbotrons cut between the singers’ faces, the band sweatily playing their instruments, and a montage of images: fast-motion sunsets and sunrises, flowers opening in a tenth of a second, young people driving a jeep across dunes, a beautiful blond girl lying on her back beside a campfire, a black baby stumbling forward on chubby legs while a white woman kneels with her hands out, a sailboat speeding across a giant lake in time with the clouds. After a few minutes of this, the singers part and recede around a lone figure who walks to the front of the stage. The people begin pumping their fists, the cries of “Praise Him!” louder and louder.

“I’m here for you,” he says simply. “And so is the Lord.”

I recognize the voice from the Circle of Healing, but this is my first glimpse of Chuck Maxwell in person. He looks like a country-pop singer at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo or the long-lost father on a soap opera. The Jumbotron gives me a close-up of the kindest, crinkliest pair of blue eyes I have ever seen.

“I’m here to tell you, the Lord has great things in store for you, His children,” Maxwell says to screaming and applause. “And you’re here for one reason: to listen, to know, and to praise His Holy Name. Because nothing happens by chance in this great universe the Lord has made. He’s bigger than your problems. And when He calls your name, they’ll be
gone!
”

“A-
men!
” a voice just behind me yells out.

Maxwell pauses and lets them scream for a while, a smile crinkling his beard around his neck. “Listen,” he says. Another dramatic pause. The music is swelling and people are shifting from side to side, shaking their heads back and forth. “Tell it, Chuck!” a voice rings out.

“I will tell it! I will!” he yells. “Why are you here today, people? Let me just ask you that, why are you here?” He puts the microphone out and cups his other hand behind his ear as the audience yells in one voice: “It ain’t luck, Chuck!”

He puts the mic back by his beard and says, “That’s right, y’all. It ain’t luck. Nothing is luck in this universe the Lord has made for us. He loves each and every one of us, we are all His very special favorites, and He will bring us something that is beyond our imagining very soon. And whatever it is He has in store for us, y’all”—he pauses again—“it’s gonna be
worth
it!”

The screaming and clapping erupts once more, and the singers melt forward to begin a song, obscuring him from view temporarily. The man sitting to my left taps my shoulder and hands over a blue plastic bucket filled with envelopes and cash, a crisp hundred-dollar bill sitting at the top of the pile. I pass the bucket to the usher at the end of the aisle, who smiles beatifically at me although I haven’t put anything in.

“Y’all, His blessings are gonna rain down upon us,” says Maxwell confidingly as the music subsides. “I know you’re worried. I know you’ve got the day job or the sick kid or the people coming after you about the bills. I know you’ve got the son-in-law who hasn’t come to Jesus yet. You turn on the news, and you think this world is getting darker, turning its face from God. I’m here to tell you some of the best news of all:
Don’t worry about it!
Let the Lord look after your neighbor and your kid and your landlord and your boss. What you’re waiting for is coming, and the only reason it hasn’t come yet is your faith ain’t
strong
enough yet!”