by Ella James
That’s when I know I’m going to like this place.
Every room is inspired by a Janis Joplin song. The foyer’s done in rich, green velour wallpaper with a tree sketch pattern. Overhead is a recessed olive ceiling with a crystal chandelier that’s got these teardrop crystals shaped like leaves. On one wall, above an ornate, antique telephone table, someone hung brass numbers: 621. June 21. “Summertime.”
The foyer leads into a big, open living area that’s pretty mod but also sort of cozy. It’s done in mostly red and beige, with a white fireplace, a pillow-laden window seat, and what’s gotta be a custom red velvet couch shaped like a half heart. I grin as I realize this room must be “Piece of My Heart.”
The kitchen, on the back side of open space, looks like a 1950s diner, with a checkerboard floor, a black leather booth, and a jukebox by the stairs that must lead to the third and fourth floors. Framed Joplin records decorate the partial wall beside the jukebox. I can ID most of them from across the room. I own all her stuff in vinyl.
I’m headed toward the stairs when I realize they don’t just go up. They also descend into a little pool room. It’s done in blues, with wallpaper featuring the cover of the I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!
Back up the stairs, past the kitchen, to the third floor. Extravagantly fluffy white rugs cover blond hardwood. The rugs lead down a swath of hall that doubles as a library. Both walls are shelves, overflowing with trinkets and books related to Janice. At the hall’s far end is a door.
I open it slowly, my breath hung in my throat. Maybe I’m expecting him. Instead I’m greeted by the biggest bed I’ve ever seen—this massive, warm-wood canopy whose veils are white and gauzy. The room is big enough to suit the bed. One wall is a bookshelf stacked with books whose spines are shades of cream, white, and beige. Another—the one in facing the street—is nothing but that big curved window.
In one corner, there’s a record player. In another, a suede sectional. There’s a giant dresser with a giant mirror that looks like it might be made of pearl. I note the dresser’s knobs and realize—this is Pearl, the album.
Did Luke pick this place for me himself, having seen on my stories that I’m a Joplin junkie? Or was it Pearl the person, who, if her name is any indication, might well be a Joplin fan herself. Surely this can’t be one of Evermore’s properties.
I walk over to the wall-sized window, look down at the street. A cyclist zips by with a basket full of red flowers. Across the street, a man is dancing.
San Francisco.
Here I fucking am.
I sprawl on the bed and stare up at the canopy. Lana had a canopy. I hardly ever slept over, though. She liked to sleep on her stomach in a starfish pose. Also, I don’t think I ever wanted to.
I think about Maya and that dumb shit about Carolina. I think of all the fucks before her. It’s a blur. Mostly, my last year has been about Centaur. He’s a commissioned piece for a woman in France. When I’m finished, he’ll stand at the bottom of a grand staircase in a chateau.
That reminds me—he’s in transit. I check the tracking via my phone’s email. He’s in Denver right now.
Might have been a stupid move to haul him out here, but I can lose my vision. Too much time away and it gets blurry. I can’t let that happen. It’s the only thing I won’t give up for Luke.
I pace the room, stop in front of the mirror. I stick my hands in my pockets and think that I look like an all-right guy. My hair’s just below my ears now—chestnut brown and just a little curly. My face is beard-free, but stubbly on purpose. I’m wearing a black leather jacket, a beige Dead tee, wine-colored jeans, and my old black boots that I wear all the fucking time.
My reflection crosses his arms. “Fool.”
It’s better if I say that up front and don’t pretend I don’t know what the odds are. Still…my pulse picks up a little—because in an hour, I’m due at the church.
I lie on the bed again and rub my always-aching shoulders, then get up and pace around. I’m so distracted, I forgot about the fourth floor. It turns out, a ladder in the bedroom’s closet leads up to it. I hoist myself up into it, then freeze on my hands and knees.
It’s a fucking studio. Or was set up that way for me. I notice the walls just after my eyes move over the easel, canvases, and paints. They’re art, too: ocean waves. Dark waves, painted by someone with skill, a little dreamy, from an underwater perspective. You can see the bubbles and the shifting surf up near the top of the wall.
Near the bottom, spelled by some sea weeds that look incredibly realistic, is the word All. The underwater scene, with the sea floor bearing nothing but some kelp, offers the clues I need. This room is “All is Loneliness.” I look admiringly at the “All.” The texture is so good…and it’s so subtle. If I wasn’t looking for song titles, I might never notice anything but underwater flora.
I move around the space—it’s maybe 10 x 10—touching all the shit he bought me. Someone bought me, I correct. I want there to be a card, some kind of note, but there is nothing. Nowhere in the house.
I assume the same someone who left the paints left a car key on the kitchen counter. It goes to a pale blue Prius in the garage that dominates the ground floor. At about five forty-five, I drive from Haight toward Parkside.
I spot the church as soon as I pass 39th Avenue. It’s fucking massive—at least five stories—and it’s stately-looking, like a capitol or college. Other little buildings made of the same brown and pink stone crop up around me, and I realize it’s more like a college campus than a “church.”
That main building has to be the size of a small hospital. It’s built kind of like a cathedral, with stone walls, wooden shingles, and big, almost gothic-looking stained glass windows. Big trees tower all around, and there are grounds around it, like a castle. There’s a thick, stone sign on the front lawn, which says EVERMORE UNITED CHURCH in thick engraving.
Pastor Luke McDowell is carved below it.
I don’t notice that my foot has stalled out on the pedal till the Prius almost stops beside that sign.
Fuck me. This is his place. Why am I here? I laugh as I realize I feel ill.
I park in the stone deck behind that big building and draw my phone out of my pocket. Should have Googled before I said “yes.” For the longest minute of my life, I worry that somehow he’s gotten married. Maybe just married—under the radar somehow, so I didn’t catch it on TV.
I’m near panting with relief when Google turns up nothing like that.
Dammit, man. Pull it together.
You don’t even know the guy, I tell myself as I walk through a breezeway to the small door I was told to enter. He probably doesn’t know you’re here. He’s moved on. Why do you think he never answered all your texts that night on New Year’s? If he wanted to keep in touch after that, he would have.
I stop by the door, try to slow my racing heart. Then I punch my pass code in and stare at the door as it clicks open. I step into a hall and look around. High ceilings, rich beige walls, carved crown molding, sleek, dark marble floors…
My chest is too tight.
I walk back outside…kneel in the grass by the breezeway. My inhaler’s in my pocket. My hands fumble with it. Get it in my mouth…compress the top and draw the medicine into my lungs. The annoying fucking shaking starts, but I can breathe.
It’s okay.
I feel weird as I stand back up. Part of me wants to go to the rented townhouse, get my shit, and head on to the airport.
I swallow a few times. You know why.
Last year, I saw my dad again. The man who impregnated my mother, his mistress, between fathering children with his wife. I was at the Met of all damn places. Rainy April afternoon, just needed to get out and let my brain unwind a little.
We stood side by side in front of some big fucking mask at an exhibit about Treasures of the Ancient Americas. I realized we’re almost the same height. He moved on a little, and I followed him. He looked right at me once, and he looked so much
like me that it stole the air out of my lungs. Recognition never crossed his face. I’m reviewed now, with pictures of me sometimes, and he cares so little that he never even Googles me. Or he does know and ignored me.
So that’s it. I can’t stand to see Luke if it’s like that. I’m all fucked up, and it hurts. It’s like…an ache. A physical one.
So it seems crazy that I step back inside, shut my eyes, and stand there in the hall. I smell fresh paint...citrus cleaning shit…a hint of those bathroom air fresheners… There’s a sort of musty, putty scent.
You’re okay.
I’m gonna risk it—getting busted up. Because if his eyes spark when they land on me…if I get to rest my gaze on his face. If he knows me. Then I’ll catch on fire again.
I need it.
I am not a failure. I’m not what I sometimes fear. My solitary life is not devoid of meaning. There is richness in the day-to-day. There’s so much fucking opportunity. It’s sort of devastating when you realize every avenue is open. I’ve just never wanted any person the way I want him. That’s the long and short of it. I crave him. Him. The only person I can’t have. And so it doesn’t feel like a risk…the getting busted up.
I look down at myself and down the hall, and start to walk. It leads to a hexagonal atrium that’s filled with trees and benches; each of the five “walls” is the mouth of another hallway.
Following the map Pearl sent, which I open on my phone, I go down the second hallway to the right and follow signs toward the east wing. I pass bathrooms, benches, lamps. The hall picks up an oriental runner. One wall sports a cluster of ocean paintings. The work looks familiar, so I stop and check the siggy—and it’s someone I know: Simone Voors.
The hall widens, and the floors gleam in the light from domed glass fixtures situated on the ceiling every eight or so feet.
I pass doors with brass-plate labels: STUDY…MEDITATION…COUNSEL. Then my hall runs into another. The diagram Pearl sent isn’t clear, so I go right, and up six stairs, and through some double doors labeled FELLOWSHIP.
I find myself in a two-story space about the size of a tennis court. Windows punched near the top of the walls send rectangles of orange light streaming down to the tile floor. Chairs and tables are pushed against one wall.
There’s a warm cinnamon smell, like cinnamon apples, and the unmistakable aroma of fresh bread. I turn to my right and see a swinging steel door, and beyond it, someone in white garb and a hair net.
So this is where people eat. My eyes magnet-snap to a framed canvas on the wall beside the kitchen door. It’s a forest scene—pretty well-done; in a clearing in the middle of the painted grove, there is a table, and atop the table, text: Let him lead me to the banquet hall, and let his banner over me be love.
“May I help you?” I turn, and there’s someone standing in the kitchen door—a friendly my-mom’s-aged woman with large brown eyes and a slick pony-tail.
“Hey…hi.” I stride over and hold my hand out to shake hers, but she holds it up, revealing plastic gloves coated with something white and powdery.
“Can’t do that. Where are you trying to get to?”
“Uh…” I look at my phone. “Atrium G.”
“You’re a little off track, but not too much. See those doors?” She points to a set of double doors on the room’s other side—beige just like the wall, so I hadn’t noticed them. “Go through those and you’ll be in a garden. Indoor garden. There’s some halls. You’re going to take the one behind the fountain. You’ll be walking for a while. Go past all the prayer rooms. There’ll be a bank of windows. Take a right, and that’s your place.” Her thin brows narrow, and her mouth pinches. “I’m just going to guess that you’re the painter.”
I hoot out a laugh. “Am I that obvious?”
She winks. “It’s your accent. I heard that the painter’s from New York, and I can hear that New York in you.”
That makes me laugh again. “Oh yeah?”
“Oh yeah. You’re a city boy. I’m a city girl myself. Grew up in Oakland.”
Someone else—a younger boy, dressed like my new friend—appears behind her, and she holds her messy hands up. “Just do that. You’ll be all right, New York.”
I wonder as I push through the door if that’s true—if I’ll be all right, or if I’ve come here to a church to be destroyed.
The garden room is fucking crazy. Like a real garden—smells like dirt and looks like a rainbow of flowers, plus a few huge trees. I see an iron bench gleaming between the leaves and almost sit down. But a glance at my phone shows I’m already six minutes late, and I know Pearl is waiting.
I follow the cook’s directions and find myself in what I recognize from pictures as Atrium G. The domed ceiling rises up at least sixty feet above me, and the square footage seems about as much as an Olympic-sized pool—if the pool had square dimensions.
The ceiling is made of delicate wood beams, glass panes, and panes made of blue stained glass. There’s a partial wall over to my right—beyond the wall’s opening, I can see corridor, which I know from maps is the building’s main drag—and, to my left, a wall of windows with a door that leads to a fruit garden, if the church’s maps can be believed.
I look up at all the blue glass in the ceiling. Bluer than it looks in pictures. Then I drift toward the wall in front of me. It’s an ideal canvas…as wide as a movie screen, and 60 feet tall—about the height of two movie theater screens stacked. I requested it be covered with a layer of cement before I arrived, and I see they did as I asked.
I step close enough so I can touch it, my boots scrrushing on the plastic blanket they’ve got covering the floor. I tilt my head up, transposing the image in my head onto the wall.
That’s when I hear footsteps.
I know before I turn around. The way you always know when something unseen strings out taut between you. Warmth hits my cheeks like a slap. My neck starts to sweat, and when I try to drag air into my lungs, they burn, like I need the inhaler.
He says my name softly as I turn to face him. When my gaze hits his face, my stomach lurches, my pulse booms in my head, and my eyes go sort of blurry. I feel so fucking weird, it sort of scares me.
Then his hand is reaching for mine. His big hand is crushing mine—and my eyes fix anew on his face. Luke. Every thing about him grips me, sucking me into some sort of vortex where the want I feel for him—the sense of need—blows my goddamn mind.
Our gazes lock. His feline eyes are stark, and I can’t read them. His hand lets mine go.
“Vance.”
I know from just that word—from the hardness in it. To someone else, it might sound casual, but I can hear the hard clamp of his anger in the way he says the end part.
Again, this wave of…I don’t know what rolls over me. I blink at him as my heart pounds just like a fucking drum, and I feel like my legs might give way.
“So nice to meet you.” He smiles. “I’m not sure Pearl mentioned, but I’m a big fan of your work.”
My jaw locks, molars clenching as I suck a breath in through my nose and wonder if I might pass out. I’ve never passed out. I’m so shocked, there’s no thoughts rolling through my head as I hear myself say, “Oh yeah?”
“I have a piece at home. On the Ocean at Night.”
I feel sweat slick my skin as I wonder whether there’s a camera in this room.
“I remember that one. Yeah…I sold it,” I stammer. “Few years back.”
“When I heard Pearl had recommended you to the selection team, I was excited to see what you could do.”
My face is so hot, I fucking swear my eyes are watering. I take a long, deep breath and nod twice. “Yeah. She went over themes and there’s a lot of good ones. I’m sure it’ll come out good.”
“I’m sure.” He smiles. It’s hard and strange.
I hear Pearl’s shoes click on the floor before I see her. Luke takes a smooth step away. “Nice to meet you, Vance, and thanks for taking this on. Pearl will take care of anything you need.”<
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And then he strolls off like he owns the place.
Because he does.
Six
Vance
I find a spot off Centennial Drive and watch the water glimmer gold then pink and later black as the sun sets behind me. Then I turn the Prius on and head toward Haight.
I’ve decided that I’m staying. They hired me, and I’m here now, and so is centaur—well, will be tomorrow. Also…pride. My fucking ego. I don’t have a big one, but it’s there. It got kicked around today, but I can take it. I’m not leaving just because he wants me to. And he wants me to. He wore that on his face—the part of him that could speak freely in a room where, turns out, there are four cameras mounted on the ceiling.
I park in the townhome’s garage, then go out the garage door to a burger stand a few blocks down. I get a vegan burger in a paper sack and return to the house through the front door. There’s a bench in the foyer; I sit on it and unwrap the burger.
I take a big bite, and that’s when he clears his throat.
Something thick and hot and heavy fills my insides, making me feel slow and stuck in place. Like from where he’s standing behind me, Pastor Luke just pressed “pause.”
I turn my head, feeling light behind the eyes and heavy in my stomach. He’s got one thick shoulder propped against the arched doorway between foyer and living room. He looks flawless in his sleeves-rolled, pale pink button up and charcoal dress pants.
“Came right over, did you?”
I turn back away from him, so I’m staring at the front door. Luke saunters in front of me and folds his thick, tanned forearms.
“Yeah. I did.”
I keep my gaze fixed on the same spot as long as I can. Then it snaps to his face like a magnet. “Fancy seeing a stranger at my place. Little fucking weird, McDowell.”
His lips twitch a little. Then he does a real good goddamn job of wiping all the humanity off his saintly face.
I lift my brows. “Come out all this way to tell me to go home?”
