Authors: Amy Gentry
The music starts up again, but this time slower, more hymn-like. “Now, this next song, I and my team of prayer leaders will descend down off this stage, and anyone who wants to can come on up here and pray with us. Just go on up to the head of your section, and a prayer leader will listen to you and pray with you, pray you get the wisdom to see what the Lord is already giving you. And the rest of you can take your seats and just listen to these inspired singers tell you about God’s love.”
As the crowd rises as one and surges toward the dais, I begin to understand what the “
really good
seats” are good for. Lines form, filling the stadium floor and trailing up the aisles, while Maxwell and a handful of other elders begin quietly conferring with the first few who make it to the stage. I sweep my eyes back and forth, searching for a redhead in the crowd, but the stadium floor is rapidly becoming an undifferentiated mass of people milling forward for their personalized prayers.
Just as I’m deciding this is an impossible task, there she is, on the prayer-cam, the features I’ve been studying so minutely blown up and hanging overhead on a Jumbotron screen. I watch, transfixed, as Maxwell appears next to her, his face tilted down toward hers, his eyebrows bent into a serious, compassionate expression, one hand resting on her shoulder. The redhead turns her face up toward his, stands on tiptoe until she’s almost his height, and draws so close it looks like she’s about to kiss him. She puts her lips to his ear and whispers something. Maxwell’s expression changes dramatically. His eyes go suddenly wide, his eyebrows shoot upward, and his mouth opens in a gasp, like he’s been kneed in the groin.
The camera cuts to someone else.
I drag my gaze from the screen down to the stadium floor, desperate to find her before the moment is over. There she is, one hand steadying herself on Maxwell’s padded jacket shoulder so she can stay on tiptoe, the other pointing a finger at his chest. He jerks backward as she sinks down to her heels and turns to walk away. Two men in suits who have been standing nearby emerge from the crowd and start moving toward her, but Maxwell gets there first. He lunges, grabs her forearm, and leans in close, his whole body tensed toward her, enfolding her in a terrible intimacy. He gives her arm a single shake, and she tears out of his grasp and pushes off to the side, losing the two bodyguards, and my gaze, in the crowd.
When I look back at Maxwell, he’s already talking to the next woman in line, their foreheads so close they’re almost touching, and yet even I can tell his mind isn’t with the woman he’s absolving. It’s with Julie, and Julie is gone.
I start up out of my seat to follow her but then stop myself and sink back down again. She’s on the ground floor, and I’m upstairs; by the time I get out of the Gate, she’ll be halfway to Tom’s car, and I’m parked farther away than she is. Anyway, I have no idea what I’ve just seen and thus no idea what I’d say if I caught up to her now. Only one thing is clear: Judging from Maxwell’s alarmed expression and the ferocious intimacy of his body language on the stadium floor, they know each other. What did she whisper in his ear? A threat? What could Julie possibly have on Maxwell?
Not Julie,
I remind myself.
As the service comes to a close, the music swells and thunders, the screens flash and go black again, the slices of red dawn outline the Gate logo, and, in the grand finale, it opens. When the praise band finally decrescendos, the people around me look happily exhausted by the barrage of positivity. I stumble out, feeling emptied. Out in the night air, I check my phone; there’s a new voicemail from twenty minutes ago. The signal must be spotty inside the concrete stadium, because I never felt it buzz. Then I see the number and hurriedly put the phone to my ear to listen to the message.
“Hi, Cal. It’s Gretchen.”
It’s the same voice that cried, “Mom, Dad,” when she hugged us in the emergency room, the same voice that whispered, “You must have really wanted to find me,” before breaking into tears. And now this voice confesses out loud that she, the woman living in my house, is not my daughter. After everything I know, it shouldn’t surprise me. But this is more damning than a fuzzy YouTube video, more damning even than a crime scene photo. Only now do I realize I’ve been holding on to some last, slender thread of hope. These words—
It’s Gretchen—
are the sound of it snapping.
The message continues. “I need your help, Cal. I’m scared.” She starts crying. “If you’re still at this number, you’re in Houston. And if you found me here, maybe you already know everything about me. Maybe you know the worst.” She sobs thickly. “If you come for me after finding out the worst, I’ll know you still love me. I’m going to the Water Wall to confront the man who did this to me. He’ll be there at midnight. Please come. I don’t want to go alone.”
On the voicemail, there’s the sound of a horn honking, followed by a clatter, as if she’s dropped the phone. Then: “Cal, I don’t know if this makes any difference, but for a few weeks, I was—we were—I think it was a girl.”
The voicemail beeps. “Press seven to repeat this message. Press eight to delete this message. Press nine to save—”
I press 9. When I confront her, I want to have her own voice in my pocket as proof. By the time I reach my car, it’s 11:35, and I know I have to find her now, tonight, before I lose my nerve, and demand to know what she’s doing here, why she’s tormenting my family.
Now that I know Julie is only Gretchen after all, a blurry face on a YouTube video, a second-rate performer, an impostor, a fake, I have no choice. It’s been Gretchen this whole time. And soon it will be midnight.
didn’t feel the blow but she felt the black. It was like water she was sinking into, or that was sinking into her. There was a redness at the top of it, and the closer she got to the red the more it hurt. Whereas the black was as soft and lustrous blue-black as clouds of birds taking flight. The black was as soft and lustrous green-black as the ocean floor. The black was as soft as the black velvet pillow that swallows the diamond ring. The black was as black as her sleeping self.
She swam toward the red, she fought red-ward even though the black was trying to swallow her like a diamond, it was wrapping eyeless tendrils around her ankles and dragging her gently down, it was surrounding her with silent caws and carrying her into a blue-black sky. But every time she rested into its softness, she heard Charlotte screaming. Then there was a blow and the screaming stopped.
Then another noise, a mewling, that didn’t sound like Charlotte or like anyone. Was it her? Her tongue was dead in her mouth, a dead bird with blue-black wings. The noise went on, a gurgling and then another thud that she felt inside her eyelids.
If she concentrated every red particle of energy to her fingertips, she could just feel the ground. It was slick and hot and red; she could feel the red stinging her fingertips. Or maybe it wasn’t a feeling but a smell, a pointed smell that was both clean and dirty at the same time. It was the smell of losing a tooth, which was also a taste, warm electrified metallic.
She tried to pull her fingers back but the birds had all been clubbed out of the air one by one and she must be made of them from head to toe. So her dead-bird fingers rested in the electric red pool that smelled like teeth.
There were words being said, a litany, a prayer. They were being said in a voice she knew well, John David’s voice, but they were angry. Maybe they were God’s words, and it was God who was angry.
“You little shit. Goddamn little shit” were the words said over and over again.
The bird in her mouth twitched and she knew it was alive after all. It wanted to scream. She clamped down hard.
“What am I going to do. What am I going do. What am I going to do.”
Thumping, retreating, ascending, and fading. He ascended into heaven. He had rolled the stone away and now He was climbing the basement stairs into the sky.
She opened her eyes.
Charlotte lay crumpled before her, upside down, four feet away, staring at her through eyes filled with blood.
She stared into Charlotte’s upside-down eyes. They seemed full of wisdom.
Charlotte was trying to tell her something. Charlotte was the brave one, Charlotte was the smart one. She had even stolen the wicked little blade from John David’s trash can to saw through the duct tape.
No, that was Julie who had stolen the blade.
Charlotte wasn’t looking into her eyes after all. She was looking at Julie’s right hand, curled an inch from her face. She was staring at something Julie could feel lying under the back of her hand, digging into one knuckle with a sharp corner. A wicked little corner.
When she moved her hand, the blade scraped the floor underneath and then there it was, a cold slice of air a few inches from her face, doubled and blurred but unmistakable. Her left hand slid toward it, fingertips dragging electric trails through the red liquid that was even now less hot than it had been, even now just barely warmer than the air itself. Her bloody fingers closed around one side of the blade.
Feet appeared on the stairs and, next to them, the head of an ax.
For just a moment, she squinted her eyes shut again. Just to remember what life was like when she didn’t know that Charlotte was dead, and she was next.
An unexpected noise of retching came from the corner. She opened her eyes and John David was on his knees, facing away from her and Charlotte. He was not praying. A puddle of vomit snaked away past John David’s knees toward the place where the blood was, where she was.
Before the puddle reached her, she was up on her feet. She hardly knew how she got there; her head was like a cinder block, but she stacked it on top of her body and stacked her body on top of her legs and then she was standing, towering over the broken doll that was Charlotte and the hunched figure of John David groaning in the corner. He spat, groaned again, and gasped for breath. A wave of dizziness swept over her suddenly, the red coming back to cloud her vision with blue-black dots swimming around the edges, threatening to rise up again like smoke. She put a bare foot out to steady herself, and the noise made the emptied-out John David whirl around on his knees, one hand still on the ax handle, one foot already making contact with the floor to push himself to standing. But as he pulled the other foot up, the heel of his boot came down in the snaky trail of vomit and his boot shot out from under him like a Russian dancer’s, and he landed hard on the hand still holding the ax, so hard that his full weight crushed his fingers between the ax handle and the floor and he yelped in pain.
She stood, holding the razor blade out in front of her, but as he scrambled for purchase on the floor that was slippery with so much blood and vomit, she gave a cry and ran up the narrow stairs, not quite on all fours because she was still clutching the razor in her left hand but almost, using her arms like in dreams of running on all fours, some kind of throwback, maybe, to a time when hands were useful for something more than holding a feebly small razor blade that, although wicked, was nothing in comparison to the vast, smiling cruelty of an ax. Her knees, her everything, was slippery with blood.
“Esther! Esther!” The voice was behind her, beneath her, but how far? “Esther, come back! I won’t hurt you!”
She was at the top of the stairs, and he was at the bottom. She looked at him there, so tiny, and saw the beginnings of a bald spot coming out at the very top of his head. She had never been taller than him before.
“Esther!” he cried again, but his hand was still on the ax, choked up now near the head. His voice grew wheedling. “I never meant to hurt you, Esther. Charlotte was the bad one. I only knocked you out so you wouldn’t have to see.”
“My name’s not Esther,” she shouted, but it came out in a whisper.
“No,” he agreed.
She was shocked.
“It’s Ruth. For you have seen much.”
She stood stock-still.
“Ruth,” he said, “you have passed the test. You have made a blood sacrifice.”
His tone had lost its frantic edge and grown soothing, honeyed. “You did the right thing, Ruth. She tried to run away, and you stopped her. Now we can be a happy family again, just you and me.”
“I—”
“You called for help. She overpowered you, and you called for help. And I came.”
Although her head was swimming she knew that was not what had happened at all.
She shook her head to clear the cobwebs. “My name is Julie.” That was the only thing that made sense, but it made his hands tighten around the ax handle. She turned and ran just as he sprang up the stairs after her.
His legs were longer than hers, but she darted around the corner just as he reached out to grab her ankle, the ax handle clattering clumsily against the stairs. She got around to the other side of the kitchen table as he appeared at the top of the stairs, but then realized she had pinned herself against the wall. He held the ax with both hands, shifting its weight from one to the other as if he enjoyed the feel of it in his palms. “Don’t make me kill you, Esther,” he said.
“I thought my name was Ruth now,” she said, this time forcing the words to come out loud and strong.
“Whoever you are!” he yelled. “Don’t make me kill you, because I will if I have to, but God does not want you dead.”
“God is shit,” Julie said.
“God is love, and
you
are shit,” he returned. “Never forget that.” He slammed the ax blade into the middle of the table, and the Formica cracked down the center with the blade stuck in it. She grabbed the table from her side and shoved as hard as she could, just hard enough to make John David fall on his ass, the ax still in the table, and she almost laughed at how funny this was, but now John David was scrambling along the floor after her, grabbing for her ankles with his bare hands, knocking aside the chair she threw back at him until finally she was at the door.
She managed to get one foot onto the concrete step before a hand grabbed the pitiful bedsheet that was still tangled around her like a robe. She tried to slam the screen door behind her, but it bounced on his arm. She leaned back as hard as she could, hurling her entire weight against the door. His hand jolted loose for an instant, but then the fingers gripped her upper arm and squeezed hard.