The Soul Hunter (8 page)

Childhood imaginings had long been abandoned. My father, for better or worse, was my father. My brother and I both shared his best and his worst qualities: his quick mind, his ambition, his fanatical attention to detail, and most horribly, his stunning capacity for selfishness. It was this last trait that had kept me from marrying and Guthrie from parenting. Neither of us had much optimism about purging this bit of sewage from our DNA.

And now here was my father with a thirty-year-old, silicone-enhanced wife, the two of them with the combined maturity of a
thirteen-year-old—not that I was in any position to talk, I suppose—and they had decided to procreate. I could not imagine what they were thinking. Why they felt it necessary to do so would remain, for me probably, one of life’s stubborn mysteries.

I had endured my father’s affair with his scrub nurse Kellee, an affair that began long before he and my mother divorced, with barely concealed hostility. I had skipped their wedding—a Disneyesque affair complete with matching white horses—without bothering to make up an excuse.

Unbelievably, the possibility that they would have children had never occurred to me. But Kellee was only thirty. And my father was handsome, successful, and wealthy Of course she would want to have his babies.

I was too horrified to speak.

“Well?” my father asked.

“Well what?” I said.

“Congratulate us.”

“Oh. Congratulations.” I turned to Kellee. “Thanks for the shirt. It’s really a sweet gesture. When are you due?”

“July 27.” She began prattling about the intricacies of calculating ovulation and due dates. I tuned her out and did the math. July 27. This was January. I had seven months to wrench my attitude into place and get ready to be an aunt. I mean, a sister.

“Well,” I said at last, raising my water glass. “Congratulations.” What else was there to do?

They raised their glasses and we clinked. I asked some obligatory baby questions—Do you want a girl or a boy? Have you thought about names?—until the waiter brought our drinks and stood over us, refusing to leave the table until we’d ordered. The two of them returned to their menus, oblivious to my distress.

My father’s self-absorption can be a blessing sometimes.

My dad finally ordered a steak, which seemed to meet with Kellee’s approval. She spent five minutes ordering a broiled
chicken breast, specifying in intricate detail the cooking instructions and side dishes she wanted, apparently subjecting every item and procedure to the smell test she’d applied to my father’s order.

We ate our meal and, as usual, I made it through the entire affair without anyone at the table asking me anything about myself. Which was just as well.

What was there to say? Someone left a bloody ax on my porch last night? Some poor girl named Drew was found dead in the trunk of a car? The guy could be coming after me? I’m being chased by a demonic lumberjack? I’ll be a sister, not an aunt?

Sometimes it’s better just to keep your mouth shut.

G
od is in the details, someone once said. An architect, I think it was. Le Corbusier? Or Van der Rohe, maybe. I get them mixed up. It’s an apt observation coming from one who creates secure, carefully structured space. I spent the rest of my birthday trying to restore structure and security to my space. Paying attention to the details that might summon peace to my house and my mind.

First order of business was to clean the blood off the walls and floor of my entryway. I believe in the sanctifying power of Pine Sol. Just the smell of it gives me a wonderful (if false) sense of security, a comforting sense of denial. I smiled serenely as the familiar fragrance wafted off my mop. By the time I was done scrubbing, I could almost pretend the blood had never been there in the first place.

I swept up the pantry-bomb debris in my kitchen, reorganizing cans and boxes on my shelves with meticulous, Dewey-decimal exactitude. And after a few more attempts to light the water heater and a couple of fits of wildly creative cussing, I repented, conceded defeat, and called a plumber.

When I heard his Sunday rates, we agreed he’d come first thing Monday and take a look at it. If I had any shot whatsoever of regaining my sanctification, I was going to need hot water. I was not capable of maintaining even a passable attitude without it.

I put off supper with David. Celebration seemed inappropriate
to me that night. Instead, I ate alone in my newly disinfected and de-moused kitchen, and lit a single birthday candle for myself, poking it into a toasted, chocolate fudge Pop-Tart, cracking the icing just enough to perch the candle upright. It was a nice evening, actually. I spent the solitude trying to come to terms with the last twenty-four hours of my life.

Strangely, my father’s news had trumped everything else, at least for the moment. It was selfish and immature of me, I know, to focus on what was truly a trivial personal issue.
Selfish
and
immature
—both adjectives I routinely applied to my father and to Kellee. The irony didn’t escape me. If anything, it amplified my distress.

But when I teased away my petty little resentments and tuned out my own whining, it boiled down to this for me. It seemed almost sacrilegious, a puerile affront to my mother’s memory and to that of our ragged little family, such as it was, that my father would so blithely create a second family. It was almost as if he’d simply opened up a new kit, complete with steps and procedures and shiny, new interchangeable parts.

Kellee was Other-Woman Scrub Nurse Barbie, my dad was Handsome-but-Unfaithful Doctor Ken, and now they were going to produce a little duplicate of themselves. Beautiful Midlife-Crisis Baby. As though my mother, my brother, and I were replaceable. Or maybe even disposable. We were just the old dolls, tossed under the bed and forgotten, hair uncombed and legs askew.

Not that I got the feeling, through the entire excruciating lunch, that my father cared two hoots about having more children. It was clearly Kellee’s agenda, not his. My father went along to get along, shoveling out to Kellee whatever little bauble or indulgence she wanted.

Kellee, with her manufactured beauty, her petulant bossiness, and her enormous wedding ring—a ring that would choke a farm horse, the jeweler had said to me—raked it all in. Any of my
father’s scant available affection, any microscopic drop of otherness he possessed, he doled out to her. And she snatched it up and gobbled it with a sense of entitlement that sent me reeling.

Why did he care more about Kellee than he had my mother? Or—and this was the muddy bottom of it for me—why did he care more about Kellee than he did about me? This was a man whose chief interactions with me had always seemed to be afterthoughts. My father’s leviathan ego—at once immense and primitive and insatiable—had consumed our relationship for most of my life.

Why did I care so much? Why, at thirty-five years old—a speed-limit birthday, my mother would have said, always a milestone—why at thirty-five did I still chafe in the face of my father’s apathy?

The more I thought about it, the more ashamed I felt. Ashamed of being a reject and ashamed of caring. Both.

As I contemplated my father’s defection, I was flattened by an old, unappeasable deficiency, a nagging urge I’ve spent my life trying to overcome—not for my dad, for I was determined to finally outgrow my girlish need for him. But for Father, for God. For someone to sign up to care about me and to promise not to leave me alone in the world.

God as Father—now there’s a concept that continues to baffle me. I’ve wondered often why God chose to introduce Himself as Father. It’s a uniquely New Testament idea. The idea shows up only a few times in the Old Testament, faint traces of foreshadowing. Which must have been why Jesus’ contemporaries were shocked at such an ambitious claim. Son of God indeed. Yahweh had sure ratcheted up the intimacy level with that one.

In spite of my better knowledge, I tend to conduct myself in my relationship with God as I do in my relationship with my own dad. Independently.

I am secretly convinced that God thinks, as I know my father
does, that I am fine on my own. Or had better learn to be. I am certain, in that lonely place in some dusty corner of my soul, that help is indeed NOT on the way, and that, generally speaking, I am not on God’s to-do list. That He, like my father the heart surgeon, has other people to attend to, people who need Him more than I ever should.

People whose hearts are far more important to Him than mine.

This is absurd theology, of course. I went to seminary. I studied the Bible. In the original languages. I majored in systematic theology I graduated with a 4.0.1 should be a spiritual genius.

After all that study, I know the drill. All about how God sees me as His child. All about how I am, though not divine like Jesus, nevertheless a fellow-heir, a sister of the King. Yep, that’s me and Jesus, sitting in the way back of the station wagon while God points out the historical markers on the highway.

Unfortunately for me, there’s a primal tie, psychologically speaking, between one’s experience of God and one’s experience of an earthly father. And I just cannot seem to pick that knot out of my stubborn, twisted brain. The God I know, often, is not a product of theology, but one of biology. I look at heaven and I see my dad.

Indifferent.

Powerfully, thoroughly, immutably indifferent.

The Peter Terry incident the year before had forced me out of this posture for a while. I’d had no choice but to ask for help. Desperation does that. Flattens me out and sends me begging. And now again, spiritual forces more malicious than I could contemplate were invading my life. So, how about it, God? Father, Abba, Eloi…
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani
? Or more appropriately, in my case, my God, my God, don’t bail out on me.

God was driving me to my knees. And he was using my narcissistic father, his vapid wife, a bloody ax, and a demon dressed as a lumberjack to do it.

Whoever said the Lord Almighty didn’t have a sense of humor?

I cracked my Bible again that night, poking around in Isaiah. Isaiah must have had a crummy father too. He seems to spend a lot of time reminding himself that God gives a hoot.

It was ten o’clock before I finally washed my supper dishes. My house was meat-locker cold, my water practically coming out in cubes.

Rarely in my life have I gone to bed at night without a hot bath first. I’ve been doing the bubble bath thing since I was three. Bath, jammies, bed, read, sleep. That’s the ritual. Leaving out the bath part threw me off completely. Instead of getting to sink into a warm tub of bubbly water, I sank quickly back into cranky self-pity. I switched on my electric blanket, brushed my teeth, warming my flannel jammies and socks over the flame in the bathroom before I put them on. I read with mittens on to keep my hands from turning blue.

Tired as I was, I was edgy and couldn’t concentrate on my book. My mind wandered, flitting first to Peter Terry, then to my father, then to Drew Sturdivant and the ax. But exhaustion won out, eventually, and I turned out the light and slept hard.

Until 3:30 a.m.

At three thirty, right on schedule, I was jolted out of my dreams and sat bolt upright in bed.

By my stereo. Which came on full blast. By itself.

I threw back the covers and stomped into the living room, more furious than afraid. I checked the locks and looked in all the closets to make sure no one was in the house. But I knew the whole time I wouldn’t find anyone. No one had broken in.

I popped the CD out just to double-check my theory, but it wasn’t really necessary. I knew what was in there. I’d recognized the song immediately, even at stentorian volume.

Peter Terry had selected a CD I hadn’t listened to in maybe
ten years—a leftover from a reject boyfriend who was into metal music. The CD was an old one, released in 1991.
Use Your Illusion
by Guns N’ Roses. The first cut on the record, the one Peter Terry chose to wake me with, is called “Right Next Door to Hell.”

Guns N’ Roses’ lead singer is a man named William Bailey, a choir-boy turned criminal turned rock-star with an astonishing vocal range, passable guitar technique, and a powerful ability to claim an audience.

His stage name is Axl Rose.

I turned off the stereo and unplugged it.

“Very funny,” I said out loud.

I snapped off the light and went back to bed.