Good as Gone (26 page)

I haven’t talked to Julie since I was arrested, so I still don’t know what’s in that black hole, but I’m ready to accept what’s on either side of it. Julie, before; Julie, after.

In the pretrial hearing, the prosecutors ask to have the trial date pushed back. At first I think it’s more intimidation—keep me stewing longer—but then I hear the words “River Oaks murder victim,” and I know Alex Mercado must have gotten my phone message. The lead attorney on my case asks again for bail while the police investigate a link between Maxwell, Julie, and Charlotte Willard, a thirteen-year-old girl who disappeared from her home just across the Louisiana border in Beauregard Parish about six months after Julie did. It’s Charlotte Willard whose DNA they eventually matched to the remains in the bomb shelter, and it was Maxwell’s grandmother who originally owned the house; I imagine Alex has left me messages to that effect on my phone, but I’ll have to wait to check them. I remember what Julie called the house:
our old place.
Alex was wrong about Julie being dead, but he wasn’t wrong about everything. He just had the girls mixed up—who’d escaped and who was dead. It could have gone either way, really. I think of the awful photograph again, and the horror that befell this girl who is not my daughter suffocates me. I cry for her mother and wish once more my shot had killed him.

The judge denies bail again, but my attorney looks hopeful. In the hallway, she tells me of an anonymous blog post whose writer claims to have been sexually molested by Maxwell at the Gate, her mother allegedly ejected from church membership for bringing a complaint. A former member of Springshire Methodist, this one named, alleges that Maxwell was fired from a briefly held leadership position in the youth group nine years ago after abusing her daughter. Both women were immediately served with cease-and-desist orders from the Gate’s attorneys.

But by this time, other people’s daughters have started coming forward.

As an inmate at Harris County Jail, I can’t receive phone calls, uncensored letters, or unapproved books, but I have unlimited access to legal documents related to my upcoming trial. At our next meeting, my attorney hands me a fat folder. “A transcript from the deposition,” she says. “I think you should read this, Anna.”

Any distraction is welcome, and I tell her so.

She sighs. “What’s in there—I want to warn you, it’s not an easy read.”

Thumbing through what look to be hundreds of pages in Q-and-A format, I see one name after another highlighted in yellow. I feel a surge of horror. “Are these all Maxwell’s victims?”

“No,” she says. “Just one.”

still feels like someone else.

She’s me. I’m her. I don’t mean to say I don’t know that.

Maybe I’m just embarrassed. Julie seems like such an idiot to me now. She used to have an imaginary friend when she was very young. It was a horse from a book, I don’t even remember which one. A white horse with a silver mane. When she rode the bus in elementary school, she used to look out the window and imagine the horse galloping alongside the bus. She’d make little motions under her backpack like she was feeding him sugar. It was more than a fantasy; she could almost see him.

I
could almost see him. It was me. I have to tell Julie’s story as if it were my own. For her sake, I’m going to try.

I must have been about five when I asked my mom who God was. It’s one of Julie’s earliest memories.
My
earliest memories.

She laughed and said, “Just some guy.” When I asked where he lived, she said, “Probably San Diego.” Then she told me to go ask Dad.

I did, but I don’t remember what he said. I liked the idea of God living in San Diego. That’s where Grandma and Grandpa retired to—which I guess was the joke, how much better it was than Houston. At the time, I knew there was a joke somewhere in her answer, but I didn’t understand where. I knew she was laughing, but I thought she was laughing at me.

Anyway, that summer—or maybe this happened before, I’m not really sure—we actually went to San Diego to visit Grandma and Grandpa. They had these special buckets shaped like sand castles, so if you packed them with wet sand and turned them over, they looked like towers, with tooth-shaped ridges around the top and dents on the sides for windows. I remember I got sand stuck in my eye trying to look in through the pretend windows, and it hurt really bad. Dad helped me rinse the grit out, and after I was done crying, he said, “It’s more fun anyway to just imagine what’s inside.” So I did. By the time Jane put her fist in one of the towers and the whole castle crumbled to the beach, I didn’t mind. I had already built a new one in my mind, and it was better, because nobody could destroy it.

I’m not saying that these things had anything to do with what happened later on. I’m just bringing them up to say Julie had a history of belief. She wanted to believe there was an inside to the castle, even though she’d packed it full of wet sand herself. She wanted to believe God was a beautiful man who lived with her beautiful grandparents on a beautiful beach, and maybe someday they could all live together inside that beautiful imaginary castle.

On the same trip, Dad told me glass was made out of melted sand. How was God any harder to believe than that?

I keep trying to find the
before
. But once something like that happens to you, there is no
before
anymore. It takes the before away. And if there’s no before, then there’s no order I can tell it in that makes any sense, and no reason to choose one particular place over any other.

I’d start with the shame, but everything gets there eventually. So, no hurry, I guess.

I met Charlie in Sunday school the summer after the seventh grade, when I went to church with Candyce.

I don’t know if my parents would even remember Candyce. She always wore these big bows in her hair that her mom made with a hot-glue gun to match her outfits. Julie was a little jealous of them. I was jealous, I mean. I can’t imagine caring about that, but Julie did. Candyce’s mom bought her pretty clothes and made pretty bows to go with them. My mom just sort of looked at me when I wore pretty clothes, her lips pressed together. She’s very serious; she’s a professor.

Anyway, I went to Sunday school for the first time with Candyce, and there he was—not Chuck Maxwell from the article I found all those years later, not even John David yet, just Charlie, a skinny guy with a guitar leading the class in a half hour of songs. I liked school fine, but this was different. There was one kid at school who was, I don’t know what you’re supposed to call it, but in seventh grade they said “retarded” and threw French fries at him in the cafeteria. His name was Jason. In Sunday school Jason sat with the cool kids in the front row, and nobody bothered him, not even the boys. He looked so happy, singing along and doing the arm motions that went with the songs. It was almost like he had friends. Charlie made everyone feel that way.

The rest of church was confusing to me. The hallways were hung with felt banners showing scenes from the Bible: women putting babies in baskets and floating them down the river, women carrying water jugs on their heads, women washing Jesus’s feet with their hair. But the sermons were always about traffic or primetime television or an article in
Newsweek,
which didn’t seem to have anything to do with the banners and the hymns and the Bible readings. Candyce and I would tune out and write each other notes on the church bulletins using the golf pencils in the backs of the pews, make little cartoons with speech bubbles. Her parents didn’t care as long as we stayed quiet.

After the service, Candyce and I would link arms and walk down to the Sunday school room, which had sofas and a big-screen TV and posters on the wall that looked like graffiti but with Bible verses. There was no sermon in Sunday school, just goofy songs, and then what Charlie called “real talk,” where we sat on the floor in a circle.

Sometimes it would start with a Bible verse, but pretty soon kids would begin talking about their problems. A lot of the problems were about girls: what they wore, who they danced with, whether they were godly and how godly were they and how much did it matter. One week they spent the whole time debating if it was okay for a girl to lie and say she liked her friend’s outfit if she actually hated it. I remember one guy in the eighth grade wanted to ask a Jewish girl out, and they talked for an hour about whether or not Jews were going to hell and, if they were, whether it was their responsibility to share Jesus’s message with them. Some kids were concerned about the silver James Avery crosses that were popular, whether girls should be wearing them if they were wearing them only for looks.

I watched from the sidelines. In our house, my mom was all-knowing, and my dad could answer any question in a way I understood. But it turned out there were questions I didn’t even know needed asking, a whole world happening in another dimension, and my parents didn’t seem to know anything about it. It turned out there were battles being fought all around me, that every word and action had a deeper meaning, and even the jewelry that a person wore could be related to something called salvation.

Charlie didn’t egg them on; he just sat on the floor and listened, nodding when the arguments got more heated. Then, toward the end of the hour, he’d finally start talking, and everybody would shut up. He’d explain that God was watching us, and that He loved us more than we could possibly love ourselves, and that all we had to do was try to be worthy of that love. Jesus, he said, had become a man so He could understand what it was like. He understood how hard it was not to sin, and He paid the ultimate price so we wouldn’t have to. Class dismissed.

In other words, Charlie didn’t give us any answers at all.

Candyce was happy to supply the answers that Charlie wouldn’t. “No offense,” she said one day while we were walking down the hall after service, “but the Bible says your parents are going to hell.”

That was the day I cried in Sunday school. I was so embarrassed I couldn’t even speak when Charlie asked if I wanted to stay afterward and talk. But I nodded:
Yes
.

There’s no before anymore. Everything in my memory is colored by what happened, like one of those old photographs where the tints are all weird. His offer to drive me home after Candyce rolled her eyes and said her parents were waiting in the breezeway, so could I please hurry up? His smile when he said Candyce and I shouldn’t tell our parents or anyone else he was driving me home, because there was a lot of insurance paperwork he’d have to fill out first. His assurance, when Candyce left the room, that he was willing to risk it—because I was special.

I mean, he didn’t come out and say that, but he implied it. I was special. Me, Julie, unchurched child of unchurched parents. Not even Easter-and-Christmas parents but never-ever parents.

When Charlie and I sat together in his office with the door cracked open, and I asked how God could damn my parents and Jane to hell, he told me that only God could judge, and anyone who said anyone else was going to hell was trying to do God’s job. And that wasn’t right.

“But not believing in God isn’t right either,” I said. “The Bible says you have to believe in Jesus.”

“The Bible also says it’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven,” he said with a smirk. I wasn’t sure whether we were rich or not, but I knew for certain Candyce was; I’d slept over at her house enough times.

Then he said the important thing wasn’t whether anyone else was damned but whether you yourself were saved. He said I was very brave to come to church on my own. He said I had the soul of a seeker.

My whole life, ever since I could remember, I’d always hated the thought that no one could ever know what anyone else was feeling or thinking. The fact that no one could ever be inside my head with me seemed like the loneliest thing in the world. I wanted so bad for there to be something that could make those boundaries just disappear. Something so big it was like air, a magic flowing across the planet, connecting everyone and everything.

When Charlie spoke to me, I saw the boundaries disappearing.

Now I see a careful distance narrowing.

Charlie drove me home from church three times. Each time he dropped me off in the parking lot at the CVS at Kirkwood, and I’d buy something cheap—candy or a magazine—so that when I walked the four blocks home, I’d have an explanation for why Candyce’s parents had dropped me off there. I had the answer all worked out, but my mom never asked. It was spring, and she was usually doing something in the yard when I got home with my plastic CVS bag. I guess she never thought about how uncomfortable it was to walk four blocks in church flats.

In the parking lot of the CVS, my conversations with Charlie went deeper than the ones we had in his little cubby in the church office, where the church secretary kept barging in to use the copier. In the CVS parking lot, Charlie told me that he wasn’t sure he even believed in hell. He told me everybody wants a rule book, that people want an instruction manual to life. They want to be told exactly what to do. But Jesus came to destroy all that. Jesus came to erase the laws that were written on the stone tablets and write them on our hearts instead. He told me Jesus wants us to
feel
what’s right, inside, when we pray to Him. “God sent Jesus as a man,” he said. “To teach us how to be men.”

His hand rested on the back of my seat, and I could smell that he used some kind of prickly aftershave and see that he had blue eyes and that his blond eyelashes were longer than I’d thought.

“Never forget this,” he told me, and I haven’t. “People will always let you down. Candyce will let you down. Your parents will let you down.
I
will let you down. Only God will always be there for you.”

I nodded, staring into his eyes. His thumb was touching my shoulder, just a little. He took his hand off the seat back, letting out his breath.