by Lisa Samson
“No,” she says. “I don’t think so.”
“Do you think you’ll ever go back?”
“I will never go back.”
That has an air of finality. “Never?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I don’t want to talk about me, I want to talk about you, Sara. We have so much catching up to do. But not all at once.” She clenches her hands together, the tips of her fingers squeezing against the backs of her hands ever so slightly.
“Are you all right?” I ask. “It can’t be easy coming home after so long. All the people you left behind back there, twenty-some years of work … ?”
As I say this, Aunt Bel starts looking over her shoulder, scanning faces at the other tables. Is she worried about being overheard? She leans forward a little and under her breath asks, “Is it okay to smoke in here, or is that not allowed?”
When Finn walks up, I am sitting on the stoop next to my missionary aunt, who is on her second cancer stick since we left Grove Street. She holds it delicately between two fingertips, resting her elbow on her knee, and when she blows smoke she tilts her neck back, releasing it toward the sky. If you put a gif of it on Tumblr, it would probably go viral. My husband pauses on the sidewalk, giving me a what’s this? grin. I can tell as he approaches that he hasn’t put two and two together yet.
“Hey,” Finn says.
“Hey, yourself, Mr. Fix It. How did it go?”
“Oh, there’s plenty of time to catch up about that.”
Is there something in the water around here?
Aunt Bel glances up, then flicks her cigarette to the curb before standing. They must be as casual about littering in Kazakhstan as they are about smoking.
“This is my aunt,” I tell him. “Aunt Bel, this is Finn.”
“You’re—” he begins, then stops himself.
“You can say it.” Aunt Bel laughs. “The Nun.”
I can’t believe it. She’s making a joke. And he’s most likely thinking that missionary aunts aren’t supposed to be hot in their own special way. He’s shifting gears in his mind, but being an aesthete like I am, I know what he’s thinking: Better this than what I was picturing. Old lady brogues. Gray hair in a short, mannish do. Definitely not those gorgeous legs.
Finn puts the guitar down and reaches his hand out, then seems to decide that long-lost aunts probably merit a hug. I almost stop him, thinking Aunt Bel might shrivel at the touch, but she hugs him back, and by the time we’re up the stairs and inside, I find myself envying Finn’s easy way with people, free of the constraint, the uncertainty I can never seem to shake.
The questions I’ve been reluctant to ask he poses right off the bat, and instead of evasive monosyllables, he gets answers out of Aunt Bel. Of a sort.
“So what’s your plan?” He pulls out a kitchen chair for her. “You’re starting all over, is that the thing?”
She nods her thanks and sits down. “Oh, I have a lot of plans. Nothing but plans. I don’t know what half of them are yet, but I could do anything, be anything. That’s how I feel.”
“Well, that’s a fantastic place to start.” He pulls out a chair for me. “I guess you have people to touch base with. Supporters, that kind of thing. I know a lot of missionaries come back on leave, raising funds before they go back. That’s not what you’re doing—or is it?”
“Deputation,” I say, marveling at how easily the term jumped up from its seat at the back of my mind.
“Nothing like that,” she says. “I told Sara. I won’t be going back. This is the beginning. There is no one to see or touch base with. A fresh start.”
Unlike me, Finn doesn’t seem to find Aunt Bel’s intensity draining. Instead, she injects air into the fire of his own intensity, which comes out blazing.
“Wow,” he says. “That’s pretty brave. Do you have any ideas as far as work goes, the job market?” He grabs the kettle and begins to fill it.
Good luck with that tea, dear heart.
“Lots of ideas,” she says. “I thought of being a painter.”
“You mean, like houses?” He gives me a look.
“Painting pictures.”
“As in—art? That’s more of a hobby than a job, though. Unless you’re like Picasso or something. You’re not a Picasso, are you?” He reaches into the cabinet and pulls down the tea tin.
Really? How did I not see that earlier?
“I don’t know what I am anymore. We’ll have to see.”
They’re like two gamblers at the poker table, raising each other’s bets.
My cell phone rings. Dad. “Excuse me,” I say, heading into the living room.
“You surviving, Sare?” he asks.
“You’re right. She’s a little … unusual.”
He barks out a laugh. “You asked for it.”
“Mom did, actually.”
“Look, the couch here isn’t the best of situations, but if you ever need to get away—”
I laugh. “I thought you were going to offer to have Aunt Bel return.”
“She’s all yours. By the way, how’s that pound cake?”
“What pound cake? Mom must have driven off with it.”
“Big shocker there.” He pauses. “Well, at least I can still do something right.”
“Daddy, you do most things right.”
“Thanks, doll. So do you.”
He’s wrong, but I don’t mind one bit that he believes it.
The kettle is screaming when I hang up. From the hallway, I watch as Finn lifts it off the burner and pours it into a French press we use for tea, all the while describing to Aunt Bel our little creative agency and telling her that if she’s serious about painting, he could introduce her to some people. I have no idea who he means, but Finn’s circle is much wider than mine, thanks to his role at the Firehouse.
And, let’s face it, his general easygoing, caring, confidently friendly personality goes a long way too.
I listen unbeknownst to Aunt Bel, who fiddles with her pack of smokes. “What I really want is to know Sara more. I’ve wanted to meet her a long time. Living over there sometimes, I would imagine all this, what her life must be like.”
“And how does it compare to what you imagined?” Finn asks.
“I don’t know yet,” she tells him. “I only just arrived. But so far so good.”
I make my entrance and sit at the table.
Finn drops some shortbread on a plate and sets it down in the middle of the table. “Are you coming tonight?” he asks me.
“Aunt Bel’s probably tired, and I don’t want to leave her on her own.”
“What is tonight?” Aunt Bel reaches for a cookie.
“Church,” Finn says.
“Oh, I’d like to go.”
“It’s not like normal church,” I blurt. “You might not be—” I struggle for the word and end up with: “Comfortable.”
Aunt Bel narrows her eyes. “I don’t want to be comfortable.”
“Then you’re going to love this.” Finn grins and starts his well-rehearsed missive about St. Rick, the Big Idea, and the Microchurch.
I know the story already, so I pour a cup of tea, grab a couple of cookies, and head upstairs to change my clothes. Why would anybody not want to be comfortable? Why would she say that?
At the door to the spare bedroom, I glance inside to see whether Aunt Bel has unpacked. She has. Two framed pictures rest atop the dresser too. Whose pictures would she have?
My curiosity propels me into the room.
The first one isn’t a picture at all; it’s a framed greeting card. A cartoon bird executed in shiny blue foil perched on a branch, with a speech bubble coming from his beak. Inside the bubble, the bird says, @TWEET, @TWEET.
Looking at the card, I get goose bumps. What is she doing with this? I designed it two, almost three years ago, the first card we managed to get into retail shops. Compared to the work we do now, thanks to Huey’s expertise, this one looks a little crude, the kiss of the plate cutting deep but unevenly into the
card stock. I pulled them all myself on the Pilot, and Finn helped me fold them. There were two hundred altogether, and I think half of those are still sitting in a box somewhere at the studio. How did she get her hands on this in Kazakhstan of all places? Daddy, I suppose.
Underneath the card, however, is a photo turned around. I peel it away.
It’s my graduation picture. Now that probably did come from my father. But … why me? Why the fascination?
Next to the bird sits a framed black-and-white photo of a boy, about five or six years old, his back against a tree, with a leafy field over his shoulder. He might be at a park, or in a rural backyard. Features slightly out of focus seem burdened by a dull, almost sleepy expression, his eyes half closed. Only visible from the shoulders up, he appears to be wearing a T-shirt too large for his body. A contrasting color circles around the wide collar opening, revealing his clavicle and the right side of his neck. Honestly, he would be perfect on the cover of a memoir about a childhood of deprivation, sorrow, and life in postwar poverty.
Only there’s a certain little flame in his eyes as if to say, I may look miserable to you, but I’m happy where it counts.
I open this one too, looking for writing on the back. Finn’s still talking downstairs, which means neither one of them is about to walk in on me. This feels like a violation, but I do it anyway. The back of the photo is blank. Maybe it’s from Kazakhstan, or maybe it’s one she has kept with her since before she left. Hard to tell.
Sometimes I wonder whether a photograph stared at long enough can retain a kind of resonance. Like a battery soaking up and storing energy, the photo stores the emotion invested in it by the human gaze. Sounds silly, I know, but this boy’s picture radiates sadness. He doesn’t seem unhappy in the photo. If anything, he seems listless. But that’s not what I’m feeling. There’s something else, something the image itself does not convey, something coming from the gaze that beheld the image before me, not from the boy himself.
I feel like a voyeur all of a sudden, put the photo back in the frame, then scurry away to change. Finn enters our bedroom and closes the door behind him. He leans against it and shows me what he has in his hands: the porcelain doll I left downstairs.
“What’s this all about?” he whispers in that “conspiracy of the odd” voice we get when we’re talking to the person who doesn’t get what we don’t get either.
I shake my head. “She gave it to me. It has sentimental value.”
“I sure hope so. Yeesh.” He sits next to me on the bed, arranging the doll on my nightstand, back up against my lamp.
I don’t want the doll there, but I ignore it. “What do you think?”
“She’s not what I expected.”
“You mean she’s pretty.”
“Well, yeah,” he concedes. “Especially for a woman her age.”
Good boy.
“And kind of … not all there? I guess I imagined her like one of those nuns who hits your knuckles with the ruler.” This from a man who didn’t grow up Catholic and, as far as I know, has never met a real nun in his life. “Instead, she’s kind of cool, but kind of spaced out, you know? But I like her. I think. She did ask me if it was okay to smoke in the bedroom.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t know what to say. We haven’t had that conversation. I told her you were in charge of things like that. You didn’t tell me she smoked.”
“How was I supposed to know? I didn’t think missionaries were allowed.”
“Maybe she was like some badass, twisted missionary.”
I lean over and rest my head on his shoulder, sighing. “A twisted missionary. I am sure that’s not allowed.”
“How much time before we have to leave?” he asks.
“Enough,” I say, turning to face him and pushing my fingers into his curls. Realization strikes. “Wait. We’re not alone in the house.”
“Oh, baby. Really?”
“Really. Look at it this way, she won’t be here forever.” Not like kids are. Chew on that a little bit.
“Where’s she going to go?” he asks.
“I think that’s up to us to help her find out.”
“I’m on it.”
6.
Microchurch
Behind the studio, at the very back of the Old Firehouse, a long narrow room runs the length of the building, open all the way to the ceiling but without any windows along the outside wall. To bring in light, Chris had his contractors put in a row of skylights and turned the room into a gallery. As the building manager, one of Finn’s jobs is to recruit local artists interested in showing their work. He’s a natural-born networker, so fresh pieces are installed every couple of months. Thanks to the ethereal mood created by the high ceiling and the skylights overhead, the gallery was also the perfect space for Finn to realize his Big Idea.
It came to him one weekend when I was out of town. After playing in the band at The Community, he had gone home with Pastor Rick and his wife, Beth, for lunch. And Rick started telling him about this revelation he’d had after locking himself in his backyard shed for a month, or something crazy like that. People had nicknamed him St. Rick, because some painter had used him as the model for a church mural. A Catholic church mural. So we’re not talking something worthy of a dilapidated Greek diner or a Sunday school room. After the shed episode, he decided to leave his job at The Community and start some kind of inner-city church—or maybe it was a halfway house. I’ve heard a couple of different versions.
Anyway, Finn hears all this, and he feels his chains fall off. That’s how he described it afterward: iron hitting the floor. Here’s this authority figure in his life, this guy who was his youth pastor and then became the men’s pastor at the church, and Rick’s telling him that the way they’re doing things just doesn’t make sense.
“I already knew that,” Finn said, “but hearing it out loud made the difference.”
So my husband starts thinking, if the problem with The Community is how big it is, how bloated, how out of touch with anything the early Christians might have recognized as church, if it’s what people call a “megachurch,” then the solution is to cut off the prefix. Lose the mega.
“The megachurch is like Budweiser,” he tells St. Rick. “Nobody drinks that unless they don’t know any better. What they drink is a microbrew—assuming they care anything about beer. So apply the same logic to church. If you care anything about church, what you want is not the Budweiser. You want the Microchurch.”
That was his Big Idea.
What makes St. Rick different from the people Finn usually advises is this: instead of running with the idea, Rick told him, “You should do this.”
He didn’t mind helping, didn’t mind throwing his weight behind the concept, but Rick thought that since Finn had had the vision, it must have been meant for him.
This was almost seven months ago. Finn drove me up to Towson for dinner with Rick and Beth. We met their boys, we took a tour of the famous shed out back and even walked over to the Catholic church where Rick’s face was commemorated on the mural. To my surprise, he wasn’t the only saint in the picture. Everybody on the wall had a halo too, and there were plenty of them.
“After that,” I tell my aunt as we walk to the Old Firehouse, “Finn did what designers do. He started making posters. He put them up around the neighborhood and started opening the gallery late on Sunday afternoons. I don’t know if you’d call what we do a church service, but it begins in the daylight and ends when the sun goes down.”
“I want to see this,” she says.
“You will.”
About a block ahead of us, Finn is double-timing so he can open the doors. There are usually a couple of people waiting on the street. He doesn’t like to keep them out there too long.
“It’s beautiful,” I tell her. “The only light in the room by the time we finish will be the art lights hanging over the paintings. Just being in the space feels really different from what people are accustomed to. I
t feels sacred and set apart.”
“And you, Sara? You believe in this—in what you’re both doing?”
“Finn’s the one doing it, with Rick’s help. God is God no matter what. I don’t have to have the perfect experience. Because, let’s face it, I’m not the perfect Christian. But I do know what happens here isn’t for show. There aren’t any microphones or flat screens, there’s no production value at all. It’s the church unplugged, I guess.”
“Unplugged?”
Okay, that expression sure got deep into the vocabulary quickly, didn’t it?
“Nontechnical?” I supply.
“Like it used to be.” She nods.
“Maybe,” I say. Although how far back she’s taking “used to be,” I don’t know. Acts 2? Well, there’s always that hope.
We enter the Old Firehouse through the back, just as Finn turns on the art lights. The whole gallery is flooded with soft gray light from above, the evenly spaced paintings, colorful abstracts, popping against the dark walls like tiny jewels. A rustic farm table holds down the center of the gallery surrounded by a large semicircle of stamped aluminum chairs—very trendy of Chris to have chosen, but not especially comfortable. “You said you didn’t want to be comfortable,” I whisper to Bel. “No problem there.”
Finn sits on the edge of the table and starts picking out a tune on the guitar. Sounds don’t exactly echo in the gallery, though they take on a metallic edge and tend to seem farther off than they are, as if the waves rise upward instead of out.
People wander in as Finn plays, moving their chairs around, nodding silent greetings. Once six or seven of us have arrived, Finn starts to sing. His singing voice matches the space, simple and bright but with no extra embellishments. I love hearing him sing.
He’ll have chosen the verses beforehand, a few lines from one of the psalms, and come up with a simple tune to accompany them. As he repeats the refrain, the rest of us join in. Next to me, Aunt Bel coos the words. When I glance over, she appears to be crying. I can hardly carry a tune, so I contribute my rhythmic whisper:
Let the words of my mouth
and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable in your sight, O Lord,
