Reed Coleman - Gun Church

“Sara says the girl who put the package on the porch had hair like Mommy’s. So I guess that means she was blond.”

“A girl. Was she a little girl like you?” I asked in a quiet but serious voice. I was often terrible with adults, but I was good with kids. Amy used to say that was because I’d never actually grown up. I repeated the question. “Was she a little girl like you?”

Sara clamped her mouth shut and shook her head no. The girl who had delivered the package was not a kid. This was progress of a sort.

“Was she a grownup lady like your mom?”

Same response.

“Was she pretty like your mom?”

Rachel blushed and even Sara’s disdain abated a bit, but she didn’t answer. Instead, she ran into the apartment and came back holding a magazine. She held it out to me. It was a woman’s magazine like Elle or Vogue , and the cover girl was a neutral-faced blond, her skin masked in elaborate makeup. She had soft blue eyes and the cheekbones of a goddess. I got lightheaded, but tried to hold it together.

I asked, “The girl who put the package on the porch looked like this?”

Sara nodded yes, finally smiling with pride.

“Sara, if I showed you a picture of someone I think might be the girl, would you recognize her?”

“Uh huh.” She spoke directly to me for the first time.

It took me about fifteen minutes to dig through the boxes and find what I was looking for. It was a copy of the Brixton Banner from the day after Frank Vuchovich had held my class hostage. A reporter had taken a shot of my students as they emerged from Halifax Hall. It wasn’t the greatest photo, but you could make out their faces well enough. By the time I got back downstairs, Rachel had managed to brush her hair and put on some makeup.

“Listen, Sara, I really appreciate this. You’re a smart girl. I’m going to show you a picture from a newspaper. If you see the girl in the picture, point to her. But if you don’t see her, that’s okay too. I mean it. You’ve done a great job whether you see her or not.”

I folded the front page in half to hide the headline and held it out to Sara. Without any hesitation, she pointed at the picture.

“That girl,” she said, tapping her finger on the paper.

Indeed, it was the girl, the St. Pauli Girl.

“Thank you, Sara. Thanks, Rachel. I really appreciate the help.”

“Is anything wrong?” Rachel asked.

“Not at all,” I lied. “Just an old friend playing a practical joke on me.”

“Okay, then, is there anything else we can do for you?” There was both hope and disappointment in Rachel’s question.

“Not right now, no. Thanks again.”

My walk back upstairs was a long and shaky one. So I hadn’t been imagining things. Well, at least not everything, though I wasn’t sure that was necessarily a good thing. Renee was here. Maybe Jim, too, and I was being followed. Their presence suggested all kinds of questions that were making my head pound, but the questions worried me a lot less than their potential answers.

A week had come and gone since the chapter arrived and only I seemed to have taken notice. The world kept spinning and no one, as far as I could discern, was losing sleep over the yellow envelope on my kitchen table. After three days of frying my brain with wild scenarios and conspiracy theories, I too moved on. What choice did I have, really? I’d finally unpacked all my boxes and set up shop like a man who meant to stay put for a little while. I had cable TV and Internet installed. The snowstorm that had paralyzed the area for days was no longer a subject on everyone’s lips. All that remained of the two feet of snow were soot-blackened lumps where great mounds of it had been piled up and compacted by the plows. The rest of the snow had melted away, Jim and Renee receding along with it.

It’s not like I hadn’t searched for them at every turn and around every corner. God, my neck was sore from snapping my head about to look behind me. Sometimes, usually after a few hours of writing, I’d purposely go for long, leisurely runs to make myself an easy target for prying eyes, but it was a wasted effort. I didn’t hear the scrape and rattle of Jim’s truck or catch sight of a mysterious blond lurking in the shadows. No one on the street or in Prospect Park particularly reminded me of anyone else.

I’d nearly convinced myself that Sara had gotten it wrong and that she’d picked Renee in the newspaper photo because she looked like the model on the magazine cover. I knew enough about little kids to realize that they have trouble separating fact from fantasy-me too, apparently-that kids can be suggestible, and that they sometimes do what they think grown-ups want them to do. Still, there was no explaining away the chapter. And though I’d done my level best to ignore the damned envelope, it, unlike Renee and Jim, hadn’t melted away with the snow.

Meg called several times to check in with me to see if I was still at loose ends or if I’d broken my promises to her. One of the ways I knew I’d killed off the Kipster was that it hurt me now to hear the expectation of disappointment in Meg’s voice. It had once been a point of pride with me, my ability to disappoint those closest to me beyond their wildest dreams. I’d disappointed so many people in my lifetime, but only a few of them mattered. I wondered if there were some debts so large they could never be paid off, if I would ever again be able to prove myself worthy of trust. It was easy to understand why some people in my position would just give up and slide back into their weaknesses.

One weakness of mine that had been rearing its head lately was my addictive nature. I think my running again, combined with my writing and re-establishing a sense of routine, is what caused it. I missed shooting. I did. I knew it was fucked up, that I’d shot a man dead only five weeks before, but since when did knowing count for anything? When I was putting enough white powder up my nose to keep a small town sleepless for a week, I knew it was bad for me, that I was probably killing myself. Junkies are God’s greatest rationalizers, but they know the truth of what it is they are doing to themselves. They see their sunken cheeks, sallow complexions, bloodshot eyes, the blood dripping from their noses. They know. I knew. It just didn’t matter. It didn’t matter then. It didn’t matter now. I missed shooting. And fuck me if I didn’t miss Renee too.

Of course, it was at that precise moment, the moment I let myself fully consider what I’d given up to come up here, that Amy called. I didn’t much believe in God and the things people labeled as miracles did little to convince me otherwise, but it was at times like these that made me consider which was the more cruel: a cold and random universe or a god with a perverse sense of humor? With all due respect to Blaise Pascal, I chose to believe that no god was better than a cruel one.

“Hey, Ames, what’s up?” I asked as if last week hadn’t happened, as if the last twenty years hadn’t happened.

There was silence at her end, but a noisy and weighty silence. Then she said, “I need to see you.”

“It didn’t work out so well the last time. I seem to remember you sneaking out of your own studio.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s more complicated than I thought it would be. I love you, Kip. Like my art, it’s like an affliction. I was so happy to see you and be with you again that I never realized how much it hurt, all the shit you pulled when we were together. When you were inside me … ” There was silence again. “It never felt that way before, even when I was furious with you. Last week it was as if I was orgasming in spite of myself.”