Cash Burn (33 page)

The pastor hadn’t moved. The guy didn’t even blink.

“So you’ve got a little intervention going here, is that it?”

“Something like that,” Serena said.

“And you decided to do this in my office.”

“You’ve been a little unpredictable at home.”

“So have you.”

She didn’t take the bait. Only a flicker of fight in her eyes before she mastered it. “I’ve told you a dozen times, I did not cheat on you. I did not write that letter. But this isn’t about that anymore. It’s about what you’re using it as an excuse to do.”

“An excuse.”

“That’s right. Let’s face it—you’ve been looking for a way out for a long time.”

Jason was afraid he was going to crush his teeth from clenching. He had to force his jaw open. “Go on. Say what you’ve got to say. That’s why you brought all this support, right?”

She didn’t look away. “You can’t escape, Jason.”

Could she know? He and Brenda had done nothing but plan. No, it was impossible. His imagination was taking over. “I’m waiting.”

“You’ve built your own little prison for yourself,” Serena said. “If you don’t get over your past, you’re never going to have a present.”

“That’s pithy. Did you get it from a positive-thinking guidebook?”

“I’m serious, Jason. What happened with Danah was twenty years ago. You’ve lined your walls with plaques showing all the ways you’ve tried to make up for it, but you can’t. It’s done. You have to move past it.”

“This is classic Serena. It couldn’t possibly be about you, about what you did. It must be something else. Nice try.”

“This is what it’s about, Jason. It’s why we’re here. No matter what happens with our marriage, you’re never going to be happy until you deal with what you’ve done.”

Images flicked through his mind. Danah’s face. It somehow mingled with Brenda’s. He was again struck by how Brenda reminded him of her. But this thing with Brenda couldn’t end the same way. He wouldn’t let it. He remembered Danah looking at him that night as they fled, the expression on her face, her whole world wrapped up in him. And his in her. Their lives were beginning that night. They thought nothing could stop them. Their love was impregnable. Nothing could separate them. No one.

Except themselves.

The pastor finally spoke. “There can be healing, Jason.” His words rumbled into Jason’s chest. He felt them more than heard them. A promise. Those big, spectacled eyes had seen things. That mind knew things. He spoke words blocked together differently, as if he were reciting them out of some ancient manuscript. This man occupied some other plane of understanding.

But Jason didn’t live on that plane. He was here. And he was a man who long ago had done something that could never be forgiven, something this pastor with his insulated holiness could never abide.

“You can’t heal everything.”

“Not me. God.” Gates’s thick, steepled fingers held their upward point.

“God. That’s your answer for everything.”

A smile broke out on the pastor’s face, but he didn’t bother affirming.

Jason turned back to Serena. “I’m not going to have this conversation. I’m not going to let you use against me what I’ve told you in confidence as my wife.”

“I’m not using anything against you. I love you, Jason. I’m trying to save our marriage. I’m trying to help you. Trying to help us.”

A current moved through the room between them. Like a furious wind, in an instant their history swirled like a palpable thing out of her eyes, and every pore of that fine, good face pleaded with him from across the room. He had loved that face. He had cupped her chin in his hand, had felt her eyelashes flutter against his cheek. He had at times held her so closely and so intimately that the pounding of her heart in counterpoint to his was a single consumption of flesh. He had loved her truly and with all his hopes. Had committed his life to her. How could he throw their marriage away, no matter what she’d done?

Tears pressed against his eyelids. He tried to beat them back.

Her head tilted. Auburn hair trickled forward past her cheek. That was hair he’d kissed, caressed.

His phone rang. Brenda’s name appeared on the readout.

“Jason,” Serena said from the sofa.

Another ring.

His wife’s eyes sharpened. He knew that look well. He’d seen it in arguments and debates. The look itself was a command. She was saying,
Don’t you dare answer that phone.

He lifted the receiver.

53

“You’re not leaving?” Jason asked the pastor.

The big man shook his head.

The door swayed on its hinges from Serena’s retreat. Kathy had run off too after casting a look at Jason meant to shrivel him on the spot. She’d opened her mouth to say something, but Jason would never know what it was.

So now only the two of them remained.

A trill from his phone. He let it ring this time, kept his eyes on Pastor Gates.

Miles said, “Now you don’t answer it.”

Jason let it go.

“Let’s take a walk.” The pastor slid in the chair and rocked forward to get to his feet.

“I just got back from a walk.”

“Yes, but I didn’t. I’ve been sitting here for an hour.” He stood over Jason, looking at him across the desk.

Jason considered telling him to buzz off like the ladies. Insult him. Get rid of him forever. The words swam around in his head, but something about the pastor’s eyes and rounded shoulders kept the words from coming out of Jason’s mouth.

“All right. We’ll walk.”

They left the office. Jason told Brenda he’d be back in a few minutes and endured another frown of disapproval.

A few blocks north, a city park ran along Santa Monica Boulevard. The narrow space of grass and trees gave an illusion of someplace outside the city’s grasp. They arrived at the path, and Jason took in the place for what would be the last time.

The pastor slowed. He chuckled. “That was probably the least-effective intervention I’ve ever been in.”

Jason glanced up at him. “You think it was funny?”

“I wouldn’t call it that.”

“Then what’s there to laugh about?”

“Wonder.”

Jason waited for him to explain what that meant. “What is that, an inside joke or something?”

“Yes. Between me and Jesus. But let’s talk about you.”

“Do we have to?”

“No. We could talk about anything you like. But you’re an interesting topic.”

“How so?”

“A man bent on his own destruction. Do you have any awareness of what you’re doing?”

“If you think I want to destroy myself, you’ve got another thing coming. That’s the last thing I want.”

“The last thing. Well put.”

Jason stopped. The pastor turned to him, eyebrows lifted like a scientist peering through spectacles into a petri dish. He should have been wearing a lab coat. All this was just a big research project to him.

“All right, Miles. Let’s have it.”

“When you’re ready to hear it.”

“I’m not looking to destroy myself.”

“You talk like I’m the first one to bring this up.”

“Serena doesn’t know what she’s talking about either.”

The pastor nodded. “Sure. On the other hand, who knows you better than your own wife?”

Jason tried to keep his feet still, but the awkwardness of his body was impossible to ignore. It was as if the path constantly shifted underneath him. The need to stay in motion got the better of him. His feet shuffled. His hands weren’t at home in his pockets or hanging loosely at his sides.

He stepped away. He wanted the pastor to stay behind. But at the same time, he wanted nothing more than the pastor at his side.

The path jutted to the right. They followed it, and after a left turn Jason found himself in front of Good Shepherd Catholic Church. One of the doors stood open. Inside, he could make out pews filing toward the front of the sanctuary, where Jesus was nailed in drooped agony, rendered in shining metal against a smooth wooden cross.

The pastor stopped. “Do you want to go in?”

“Not really.”

“I only ask because I noticed you were looking inside.”

Jason moved on. “I’ve always been interested in architecture.”

“The master of diversion.”

“What does that mean?”

“Someone gets close, and you move in another direction.”

They checked for traffic and crossed Bedford. After the carefully groomed grounds of the church, they now passed into a desert of dirt and yuccas and cacti in this part of the park.

“So, am I ready yet?”

Miles went to a white rock and eased his bulk down onto it. He looked to the sky, breathed deep, and crossed his arms. He looked back up to Jason. “I’d like to help you, Jason. But the fact is, without Christ, there’s nothing to be done. Without him, you’re at the devil’s mercy.”

“Now I’m the one amused.”

“Yes, that’s one of his schemes. To try to keep you from believing in him. All this has been your idea, has it? Trust that ridiculous letter over the word of your wife. Pursue another woman instead of pursuing reconciliation. And whatever else.”

What did he mean by
whatever else
? “So in your world, if I don’t believe in God or the devil, I’m at the devil’s mercy?”

“You don’t believe in God?”

“Maybe I do; maybe I don’t. If he exists, he sure makes himself scarce.”

“He’s as scarce as you want him to be. Or as close. Like I told you before, it’s your choice.”

Jason’s shoes were losing their shine in the dust. Who had chosen this landscaping? He kicked at the dirt and watched the brown flecks cloud into the air and settle on the black of his shoes and the gray cuffs of the big man’s slacks.

“Can I tell you something, Jason?”

“You’re asking permission now?”

The pastor smiled. “I’ve been studying something recently you might find interesting. I imagine you like statistics, being a banker.”

Jason didn’t bother answering.

“Have you ever thought about how many people have been on earth? I’m not talking about the six and a half billion here right now. That we’re pretty sure about. But how many have ever lived?” The pastor shifted on the rock. He put his elbows on his knees and made that steeple with his fingers again. “Now, the thing about questions like this is that they lead to many more questions. Like when did the first humans live? The fossil record isn’t really very good, so we don’t know for sure. And how long did they all live? How fast did they reproduce? All this is guesswork. We have population information that’s even remotely accurate for only the past few centuries, and even that just covers the developed world. But the most conservative estimate I’ve found is around a hundred billion.”

He unclasped his hands and crossed his arms.

Jason said, “I have no idea where you’re going with this.”

“Stay with me for just a minute. I know this seems off subject. But now, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Don’t tell me what it was, just have it in your mind. Do you have it?”

Jason was back to high school. Back to Danah. Back to Philip. Back to his father and a dark room behind a bar. The images circled in his mind for the second time in an hour. Why couldn’t he put this behind him? He nodded.

“Now take that memory. That’s your worst?”

Jason nodded. He wanted to take that memory and ball it up and throw it away forever.

“Now consider this. To God, every sin is level with every other sin. From that thing in your mind to the worst thing in mine, to the vilest offense ever committed, to what you or I would consider a little nit. A white lie, a cross word. A prideful thought. We classify them and rank them because it helps us rationalize them. But to God, they’re all offenses.”

“That’s one offended God.”

Miles was not distracted. “Now say you’re what you’d call a really good person. Say you can go through a whole day and just tell one little white lie. That’s your only sin. Say you can hold yourself to just one sin a day. Say everybody could keep their sin in check like that. So that’s 365 sins a year. Say every person over the course of history lives an average of fifty years. A hundred billion people, times 365, times fifty years. You’re a banker. You can probably do that math.”

“Yeah, all right. I get it. A lot of sinning. So?”

“So that is what Jesus Christ took on himself on the cross, Jason. The sins of the whole world. Throughout history—past, present, and future. And I don’t know about you, but I sin a lot more than 365 times a year. Did you know the UN says world population could reach ten billion in forty years?”

“Can we move on?”

The pastor reached a hand forward. Jason took it and leaned backward to help the big man up off the rock. They walked back toward the church. The smell of the yucca and dust pricked at Jason’s nostrils.

“I thought you might be interested in the statistics.”

“It makes my sins seem pretty insignificant.” Jason realized he was about to say something he could never take back. He pressed his lips closed, but the words pressed against them.

“That’s where everyone seems to go with that information, Jason. It’s human nature to use data to your advantage. What’s the expression? ‘Figures don’t lie, but liars figure’?”

He didn’t want the words to escape, but he couldn’t contain them. “I was just a kid. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was only nineteen.”

The pastor stepped more slowly than Jason, but his strides covered more territory, giving the impression of a stroll next to Jason’s clomping gait. Jason’s neck tensed with the effort of holding back the emotions rocking him. He stopped.

“We were in love, and we wanted to get away together. My whole world was wrapped up in her. I didn’t want anything besides her.”

He saw her face in profile, glowing under passing street lights as he drove. He saw her face turned to him, saw her speak words he would never remember because his attention was focused on the movement of her lips and the love he held for her. Her hand pressed into his. Love loosed from every joint and cell and vessel in his body, urgent love with more meaning than the universe could contain, more righteousness than any rules imposed on them by the dispassionate world. Their love would propel their lives forever. It had more power than anything stacked against them.