Т Паркер - The Last Good Guy

I’m outta here.

I looked up and caught Penelope studying me. She had known Nick. She understood Daley’s proximity to his violent death, how close she had come to brushing up against it. I thought of Nick, too, and the gruesome end that Connor Donald and Eric Glassen had provided him.

Daley wondered how her former BFF Bellamy was doing. Wondered if Alanis and Carrie would turn out to be good friends. Said Nick had given her the ride home and said he could do that the next day, too, because Max’s mom’s car would be in the body shop the rest of the week.

It struck me that Daley Rideout was talking to herself and her CD recorder because she really had no one else to talk to. In Daley’s mind, her “sister” was paranoid and controlling. Bellamy was hundreds of miles away and Daley had had no social media to keep in touch with her best friend. She didn’t know Alanis or Carrie well enough to confide in them. Leaving her no one but stern grown-ups and nineteen-year-old Nick Moreno with the beautiful smile and eyes that had alluringly roamed her way.

“A good time for Reggie Atlas to show up in her life again,” I said.

“Interesting you would say that.”

I’m back!

Been three weeks now and I don’t love Monarch, but Nick is turning out to be pretty cool, and Alanis and Carrie really rock and there’s this teen club I’ve heard about that’s supposed to have good music. I’ve been playing a lot. I wrote, like, three songs since we moved to Oceanside! I get true satisfication from writing songs. I’m hoping Pen gets me the Martin Backpacker I’m totally craving. Only two hundred and twenty-nine bucks. Got a birthday coming up, baby. Funniest thing, I saw Reggie Atlas and two other guys at Monarch today. He gave me a big smile and said he was there to see Chancellor Stahl about a church-sponsored endowment thingy, which I think means money. I said what a small world to see you here, and Reggie said God works in mysterious ways. We all sat for a minute in the quad, had drinks from the cafeteria, then Chancellor Stahl had another meeting and Reggie told his friends let’s go see that new athletic field and we followed them over. I know Pen hates him and I don’t know why, other than she says he’s got cancer of the soul. Must be painful. We fell behind his friends and talked. He said he had been praying for me a lot and still felt like we were ghosts flying through each other and he’d really meant it when he said we could fly together side by side in Jesus. I told him I was still waiting for that ticket and he said can you come to my new church in Encinitas, it’s not finished yet, but I’ll show it to you and you can see what a beautiful home for Jesus it’s going to be. He said he could send a car and driver for me when Penelope wasn’t home from work yet. Pen just had to think I was going to go to some usual place for a few hours — like maybe studying at a friend’s house, or to the library, or maybe practicing in the music room after school. You’re still playing your guitar and writing songs, aren’t you? I said yes, and Reggie said, okay, your sister gets home from work tomorrow at five forty-five, so you just be at the corner of Seagaze and Myers at exactly five fifteen. You know where that is, don’t you? I said duh, like I haven’t lived here for almost a month. Don’t you harassinate me, Pastor Atlas! And Reggie smiled down at me and just when I’m getting irate that he’s treating me like a child my heart reaches out to him and I say, sure okay, I’ll be there, Pastor Reggie.

Later, ’gator.

“He played guitar for me,” said Penelope. “He has a beautiful voice. And he gave me the line about ghosts flying through each other, too. I thought it was haunting when I was twelve — these two beautiful wispy spirits moving through each other but not able to stay and unite. I asked Daley if he had ever said that to her. She denied it.”

“Did he have other favorites?”

“In Jesus. Everything was in Jesus.”

“Something concrete,” I said.

“Concrete?”

“I’m fishing here, Penelope. Something physical. Something I can see. That helps me understand what he’s doing.”

“Well, there was our mansion on the sand. That was physical.”

“Tell me about that mansion.”

“I don’t remember the first time he talked about it. I must have been very young. Eight or nine. I just kind of grew up hearing about it. At first it was a magnificent house he was going to build. On a beach. Maybe in California. Maybe in Mexico. Later, he told me he was going to build a holy mansion on the sand. Over the years, it became a place for him to live in, with all his friends and dogs and cats and whatever other animals he wanted. It would be huge, with a domed roof made of blue lapis, like temples in Jerusalem. White walls, with windows trimmed in shiny red paint. And it would sit on sand the color of gold in the sunlight, next to an ocean that would be always changing, from blue to green to silver to black to blue again. There would be tall palm trees all around. There would be flowers in planters beneath every window. And balconies where he could sit and watch the sun go down. Miles of beach. Whale spouts and seabirds in formation. And horses. Of course he would have pretty horses.”

“You were impressed.”

“I was awed . Over the years, the mansion on the sand became a place for me to live, also. My beautiful home. We would live there, together. A place of peace and beautiful things and love. Love everywhere. In every room. Morning and night and all the hours in between.”

A bemused look fell over Penelope’s face, then a bitter smile. She shook her head as if to clear a thought she didn’t want.

“He said we would come together in Jesus with all of our hearts. As husband and wife. Twelve beautiful children would appear, children in His — Jesus’s — image. And our family would become the foundation of the lost tribe of Israel, the true Israel — not the Israel of the Hebrews, who are only half human — but the Israel of Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten son.”

And so I glimpsed the depth of madness inside Reggie Atlas — if this was all true. Even mostly true. If Penelope was not spinning another convincing, self-justifying fiction.

“What did you make of all that, Penelope?”

She considered, a parade of emotions playing across her face. “I was still young enough to fall for it. He was such an impressive man to a little girl. To a little girl whose parents thought the world of him, who took her to hear him preach every time he was near us. Somehow, Reggie Atlas always found ways for us to be private. Just for a minute or two. In a chapel, while the choir rehearsed. In a church office, with the door open to the hallway. In a Sunday-school classroom, on the break between services. Walking in the woods around the tent. Even with other people around, he created this privacy for two. We talked and prayed. We had special sayings. We had looks and expressions. We never touched. Until. And Reggie would always bring up what was becoming our beautiful home. Like a parent telling a child a story. I know now that he was trying to shape my thoughts and dreams. My expectations and limits. He was measuring my portions and tenderizing me. Like a butcher.”

In the wake of Penelope’s painful memories, the ceiling fan whirred and the boom box sat silent and two boys with surfboards under their arms hustled down the sidewalk outside, voices raised. In that moment, their innocence seemed the most valuable thing on earth. I thought about how the world was made up of things that are here and seen, like the surfers, and also made up of things that are here but not seen, like a man walking in the woods on a warm spring morning with a girl too young to sense his menace, while the congregation gathered in the shade of the tent, awaiting the Word. I felt some of the weight of Penelope Rideout’s past bearing down across the years, and her growing torment as she saw it gathering over her daughter. Her sister.