Good as Gone

by Amy Gentry

  We invite to the Circle of Healing all who feel broken.

  When we ask forgiveness in the Circle of Healing,

  God will show us that we have already been healed.

  At the bottom of the screen, a series of faces fade in and out, each with a testimonial: an elderly woman blinded by cataracts until the Circle of Healing taught her she could already see. An African American teenager saved from dropping out of school by the Circle of Healing. A man, once homeless, discovered the path to financial security through the Circle of Healing. God’s plan is for abundance, the quote says. The Lord makes His Kingdom great!

  I scribble the meeting times on a Post-it note and go back to the search screen, where another listing is a link to a recent magazine profile of Reverend Chuck Maxwell, the man whose face looms over our local urban landscape on billboards at every bottleneck. The article is called “‘It Ain’t Luck, Chuck’: How Rev. Chuck Maxwell Landed the Biggest Pulpit in Texas”:

  Chuck Maxwell is handsomer in person than on the billboards for his Houston megachurch, The Gate. The 42-year-old pastor with the grizzled beard and piercing stare is 6 foot 2 and unexpectedly graceful. It’s easy to see how this man has built a spiritual—and financial—empire.

  Oh, it’s going to be one of those profiles.

  Maxwell has never been ordained in any denomination, nor does he hold degrees in religion or philosophy; indeed, he never finished college. Yet every week he stands in what was once the Houston Astrodome and delivers a sermon to 30,000 parishioners and up to 10 million remote viewers via his television and Internet ministries.

  I skip down a few paragraphs.

  After dropping out of Texas Christian University, he snagged a production job for Houston’s fire-and-brimstone televangelist Jim Wilton. It was there that Maxwell says he began to have strong ideas for a Christian message he felt uniquely suited to deliver.

  “I wouldn’t say I had a falling-out with the Baptist Church,” he says. “But the message was so negative: ‘You’re messing up! Get right with God!’” He laughs. “But God doesn’t want you to focus on your sins of the past! God says, make it new!”

  My English-professor eye snags on make it new, Ezra Pound’s modernist slogan, and I enjoy a brief moment of imagining the elitist, anti-Semitic old creep rolling in his grave. I keep skimming, and Maxwell keeps preaching endless reinvention, spreading the word that nothing matters but the present moment. Could that be what Julie’s after? The profile goes on for three more pages, covering Maxwell’s massive donations to a nonprofit for missing children—that, of course, catches my eye—but I can’t stomach reading to the end. The thought of Julie needing Maxwell’s message—Erase the past, live in the now!—is too repellent to dwell on. Jane and Tom and I are, after all, Julie’s past. Or we’re supposed to be.

  Which brings me to my final call.

  I get out the piece of paper Jane gave me, still wadded up in my pocket, and stare at it. The area code looks familiar, but I can’t quite place it until I look it up: Seattle.

  Jane must be playing some kind of trick on me. This is the phone number of a friend of hers, her roommate, somebody she’s put up to this. I feel a hot rush of anger, followed by a guilty twinge. I’ve neglected Jane—willfully ignored her, at times—over the past eight years. Every time I looked at her, all I could see was her failure to scream in the closet that night, the three hours she spent huddled among her shoes with tears and snot streaming down her face while Julie—I know it wasn’t Jane’s fault, but I couldn’t help it. Casting doubts on Julie’s identity would be a particularly cruel way to get back at me, but effective. My hand is shaking.

  I dial the number and wait. It rings half a dozen times, as if someone on the other end is staring at the caller ID, deciding whether to pick up. Then someone does.

  “Stop this,” Julie says.

  I’m shocked into silence.

  “Well, say something, Cal,” she says, her voice weary. “I finally picked up one of your mystery numbers, so say something. I know it’s you. Calling from every stop on your grand tour of my life, aren’t you?” She pauses. “Well, you found me. You’re here. So what is it you want to say?”

  I hold my breath.

  “What dirty little secret have you found out about me now? I guarantee, no matter what it is, there’s something worse about me you still don’t know.”

  I know nothing, absolutely nothing.

  On the other end of the connection, Julie says, “Fuck you, Cal. I left. It’s over. Go home.” The call ends.

  Charlotte

  sat in a dingy room with the social worker and a bearded man who kept trying to get her to tell him the name of her pimp. Officer Pete used that word too, but she didn’t know what it meant, just that there was a thrill of secrets around it, like a curse word. It made her think of pimples, but she wasn’t telling the bearded man that.

  “I don’t have one of those,” she said, unable to make herself repeat the word.

  “Come on, what did he tell you?” said the bearded man. “He told you you were special, he’d treat you right?”

  The only person she could think of who fit that description was John David. Was he a pimp? Her pimp? She wasn’t sure. There was no way this bearded man could know about John David, was there? But a deep black well hovered just under that thought, waiting for her to slip and fall in. She shook her head.

  “He convinced you to start trading it for money, right? Only he gets all the money.”

  Now she understood, and a wave of heat exploded just under her jaw. “I’ve only done that a couple times,” she mumbled.

  “Okay, just once or twice,” he said in a too-nice voice. “Just to help him out. So you want to protect him, because he protects you, right? You think he’s your friend? Maybe your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said, the heat spreading up from her jawline until even her eyeballs felt hot. She pushed all her hate out through her eyes and straight into his bushy brown beard. At least Officer Pete believed her. She drew a breath to say so but realized she didn’t know Officer Pete’s real name.

  “He bought you things at first?” the beard continued to prompt her. “Maybe he got your nails done.”

  She pulled her hands off the table self-consciously. There were lines of black beneath the ragged nails, and one had a red, puffy bump of skin around the corner where it was torn. She noticed the social worker, a brown-skinned woman with a pair of glasses on a chain around her neck, shake her head and roll her eyes quickly, then look away.

  But the bearded guy went on for another five or ten minutes before finally standing up. He flipped a card onto the table in front of her, pressing one finger down on its corner as he said, “If you remember anything, call me at this number. Just remember, he’s a predator. You’re the victim here.” As he lifted his hand away, his sweaty finger tugged the corner of the card just enough to knock it out of its perfect alignment with the fake wood grain on the table. She watched the card settle into its skewed position in front of her, memorizing the angle to keep from reading the name. When she looked up, the man was gone, and the social worker had taken his seat across the table from her with an expression of clear relief.

  “I’m Wanda, Charlotte.”

  She almost jumped. Although it was the name she’d put on the paperwork, the first one that popped into her head, nobody had called her that yet—the cops who’d shuffled her from room to room had said “you” or “young lady” or, when they were talking about her like she wasn’t there, “the juvenile.” Hearing the name said out loud for the first time, she realized how weak and stupid she had been to use it just because it made her feel brave to claim it as her own. Now it sounded like an accusation.

  “Charlotte,” Wanda went on, as if determined to damn her as often as possible, “I was told you’d like to be in foster care. We call it out-of-home care these days. Do you have a safe home?”

  She tried to think of home, but instead she saw a pai
r of blank, staring, upside-down eyes. Their un-wet opacity.

  “No.”

  “You don’t have a home?” Wanda prodded. “Or you feel it’s not safe for you there?”

  It sounded like a trick question. This Wanda wasn’t like Officer Pete, mouthing off after a long day, or the asshole with the beard, drilling down in hopes of finding something in her he could use. No home, or not safe? She stared at the corners of Wanda’s mouth, watching for a flicker to tell her which one the social worker wanted to hear, but Wanda only waited, her face relaxed and expressionless.

  “I’m. It’s.” Where to begin? “Not safe.”

  It wasn’t exactly a lie.

  Wanda just nodded, an expression not so much of approval but of completion, a box ticked off. “And Charlotte, are you hoping to be in out-of-home care for just a short time or for a longer while?”

  Multiple choice again. She’d been good at tests, once. “I want an emergency placement,” she said, remembering what Officer Pete told her to say.

  “I’d like that for you too, Charlotte,” the social worker said. “Unfortunately we have a shortage of options just at the moment. Child Protective Services will handle all that, I’m just making the referral. But I have to tell you something. If you’re entering out-of-home care right now, you’re very likely going to have to stay in a group home for a time while they look for a placement for you.”

  She nodded. Group.

  “It’ll only be temporary, but I just want to prepare you for that. Are you sure there’s not a friend or family member you could stay with? Somewhere you’ll be safe? Think.”

  She thought, hard this time. All the places she could go, she’d need to be a kid, and she wasn’t a kid anymore. Kids didn’t go to dirty apartments and have babies scraped out of them. Kids didn’t do with Petes what she’d done with Petes. Kids didn’t do to other kids what she’d done to the girl in the basement.

  She didn’t know what she was.

  “I’ll go to group,” she said.

  As the two of them left the police station, she said, “What about my things?” But even before Wanda opened her mouth to say the words, Charlotte knew the stolen knife was gone forever.

  It didn’t matter, because in group, only the biggest kids got to have knives. They hid them in their mattresses or taped them to the bottoms of drawers. Nobody stole them and nobody told on the kids. One of the scrawny little boys tried making his own out of a plastic butter knife that he snapped in half. He showed it around, bragging, until one of the big kids took it away in the night and did something to him that didn’t show.

  Because of obvious rules like that, group was easier than she’d thought it would be. In her mind she called the biggest kids Enforcers. She herself tried to be an Invisible, obviously the safest course of action.

  Her roommate Beth was an Eager. Eagers played along with whatever the counselors asked, volunteering in group sessions and earning gold stars and sparkly toothbrushes and puffy stickers for good behavior. The stars and puffy stickers were worse than pointless; too permanent, they left a hard, sticky gum behind that ruined clothes and had to be scrubbed off skin with a scouring pad. The undersides of the chairs and the walls behind the beds were lousy with them.

  Toothbrushes were different. She’d lived without one before, and the flimsy plastic stick they handed her when she first arrived was better than nothing, but its thin row of stiff, hard bristles hurt her gums. One day she picked up Beth’s toothbrush and flipped it over, looking into the pink translucent depths of the sparkly plastic, letting her eyes slide along the buried bubbles and shimmering threads that caught the light as she turned it from side to side.

  “Hey, put that down. That’s mine,” said Beth from the doorway.

  “It’s nice,” said Charlotte, but she didn’t put the toothbrush down. She waited to see what Beth would do. Beth, who was only eleven, wriggled uncomfortably. “It’s pretty,” Charlotte added encouragingly.

  “Thanks,” said Beth. After a brief interior struggle, her wide eyes almost filling with tears, she said, “You can have it.” Her teeth dragging on every syllable.

  Charlotte put it down with a thwack. “That’s gross. I don’t want your used toothbrush.”

  But later on, she took it anyway.

  11

  Monday afternoon, I get in the car and head to the Gate.

  Ironic, isn’t it? I’ve been telling Tom for two weeks I’m going to work, and Julie’s been telling us she’s going to therapy, and now we’re both lying to go the same place. I turn into the parking lot, where new construction shields the former Astrodome from the neighboring NRG Stadium, and take note of the aerial walkway between the two buildings. The Gate must get a healthy amount of foot traffic during playoff season. As if on cue, the digital marquee flashes—WITH GOD, ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE—and I give an anxious snort of laughter.

  There are a hundred or so vehicles clustered around the entrance. It’s not Julie’s therapy day, so I know she doesn’t have a car, but I still feel nervous that I might see her, or she might, at this moment, be seeing me. The parking terrain is vast and includes a five-level garage that looks empty from here. I park and approach the modern, streamlined, steeple-and-stone façade that has been added to the gargantuan inverted bowl in an unsuccessful attempt to bring it down to human scale. I open one giant glass door and enter a lobby as airy and clean as an airport VIP lounge. Screens hang from the ceiling at regular intervals, their resting faces the church’s glowing-gate logo. The sea-green carpet is dotted with pristine rugs of white shag across which clean-lined chairs face one another in decorous intimacy. Very soft music is being piped in over invisible speakers, and off in the corner of the vast lobby, a vacuum cleaner drones. Monday must be a slow day.

  There’s a mounted map of the church just to the right of the entrance, and a brief consultation points me in the direction of a corridor with the word FAITH hanging over it in brushed steel. The room number I’m looking for is 19F, and I find a moment to wonder whether there’s a LOVE wing where all the room numbers have Ls in them. The vacuum cleaner shuts off, and, looking back, I see my tracks, a line of slightly darker sea-green footprints trailing across the sea-green carpet. That must be where God carried me, I think. I’ve always had trouble taking religion seriously, but this place seems like a massive joke.

  The heavy wooden door to 19F is closed and windowless, and after only a moment of hesitation, I push the door open on one end of a room the size of a high-school gymnasium. A hundred or so people stand hand in hand in a flattened-out oval that runs the length of the room, eyes closed, heads bowed, some rocking back and forth rhythmically, others stock-still. I enter and close the door softly behind me, and the low murmuring of the circle enfolds me. I had imagined chairs or somewhere to sit and observe, but there is no room for anything in the windowless hall except the humming, breathing circle. Without opening their eyes or looking at me, the two supplicants nearest the door release each other’s hands and take a half step outward, opening the circle and extending their arms. My stomach turns over. This feels much more real than I was expecting and at the same time embarrassingly fake. When I step forward and grasp the hands on either side of me—one the dry, rough, thick-jointed hand of an old man, the other the horrifyingly moist and malleable hand of a teenage boy—I am officially an impostor.

  At first I can’t tell where the murmuring is coming from; amplified around me on all sides and in all keys, it doesn’t appear to originate from any one place. I keep my eyes open and run them over as many members of the circle as I can see, but if there’s a starting point for the praying, it must be somewhere close to the other end of the oval, the part hidden by its longer side. Looking around, all I see is an endless train of sweatshirted senior citizens, pimpled teenagers, and ponytailed women in yoga pants, all echoing one another’s words. I close my eyes, and after a moment one of the voices seems to separate itself from the muddled sea of noise it’s been swimming in and rise a few
inches above. It’s an ordinary man’s voice, the vowels pinched by that indefinable Houston accent. Nevertheless, I can hear the words, crystal clear, as if they were being spoken directly into my ear.

  “Found.” The word drops like a stone into the pool of murmurs. “What was lost has been found. Furthermore, it was never lost.”

  “Furthermore, it was never lost,” echoes the rest of the circle.

  “Do you look to your Heavenly Father, who offers you armfuls of blessings, and ask for a single favor? If you are handed a plate of food at a wedding, do you beg the giver for a bite? You have what you need right in front of you. Do the lilies of the field cast their faces down in supplication? Do the sparrows moan to the heavens in despair? No. The lilies raise their faces to the Lord in awe and delight. The sparrows lift their voices in songs of praise. They decorate God’s creation with their thanks. Does a grateful daughter clothe herself in rags? No—she shows the world her father loves her. She is thankful for his love. What was lost has been found. It was never lost. What was lost has been found. It was never lost. What was lost has been found. It was never lost.”

  “What was lost has been found. It was never lost.” Some of them continue to chant the phrase while others move on with him, repeating his words just a few seconds after he says them, as clumsily as wet sand on a beach casting itself in the image of the waves that roll over it.

  “What you need is already in your life,” the speaker goes on. “Christ was wounded forever that we might be whole.”

  Some of the chanters change their mantra at this. One begins weeping loudly.

  “Our Lord has a hole in His side so that we can be whole inside.”

  At this abjectly dumb wordplay I stifle a snicker, but as the phrase ripples through the circle, taken up by the chorus of voices, the suppressed hiccup undergoes some kind of emotional alchemy in my stomach. Unbelievably, I feel my eyes start to prickle.