14. Daniel

Margaret Olsen called on Monday morning before eight, while he was in his bathrobe. She told him in a low voice that there had been trouble at the Sisks' and that the boys had been taken to Denise's mother. By noon two more people had called with two more versions. In one the house had burned. In the other Brent had had a heart attack at the table and the girl had found him. By evening the Ledger had a few lines on its website: a man found dead in his home, a seventeen-year-old taken to the hospital with serious injuries, the cause of death under investigation. He read it until he knew it by heart. He sat at the kitchen table and thought about Rachel at the glass door, and about the Sunday afternoon he had spent in Brent's chair deciding that tomorrow would be soon enough, and his coffee went cold beside him.

On Tuesday a detective called.

"Pastor Toomey? Detective Ochoa, Fontana PD. I'm looking into what happened at the Sisk residence. I understand the family belongs to your church."

"For about five years."

"Were you in contact with them this past weekend?"

"Sunday, at the service. They sat where they always sit."

"Anything out of the ordinary?"

"Not that I noticed."

"The older girl, Rachel. How would you describe her?"

"Quiet. Private. Seventeen, I think."

"Did you ever have reason to be concerned about the children?"

"No. Never."

The detective thanked him, gave him a number, and asked him to call if he thought of anything. Afterward Daniel went back over the call as he went over a sermon, line by line. He wrote the number on the back of a bulletin and put it in his wallet.

By Wednesday he had his words of comfort written out. They were on a yellow pad on the desk in his office. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted. Psalm 34. Under it, in red: Let her talk first. Hand on the shoulder only if she cries.

Denise came on Wednesday at six-thirty, half an hour before Bible study, and she came alone. She had on jeans and a gray sweatshirt, and he realized he had never seen her in jeans. The skin around her left eye was yellow going green, and he saw it before she had cleared the doorway. She lowered herself into the chair across from the desk with one hand flat against her ribs. He came around the desk and sat in the other chair, close to her. He wanted to put a hand on her arm, but since she wasn't crying he left his hands on his knees.

"Denise. I'm so sorry."

"I need to tell you what I saw." She held her purse in her lap with both hands. "I didn't tell the police all of it, I just couldn't. They would've taken the boys."

She was quiet for a while. "It was the plate first. One of my mother's." She stopped. "No. It was before that. He was already . . . It doesn't matter. He broke a plate, and then Rachel came home." She took a breath, and it caught halfway, and her hand went back to her ribs until it passed. "She didn't go upstairs. I told her to, and she just stood there in the doorway with her backpack on and started talking, and I don't know where any of it came from. The Petersens. Somebody grilling. The plates. She knew how many plates there were. I didn't know she counted." She looked past him at the bookshelf. "I don't remember half of it. I had the water running. As long as I looked out the window I was doing the dishes, and I kept thinking, if she'd just stop talking he'll sit back down."

Down the hall a door opened and closed.

"She said everybody at church thinks he's nice. Because of the sound system." Denise looked at him then, and away again. "She said you too."

He heard it in Rachel's voice, the flat one she had used at the door. The verse was on the desk behind him, and he left it there.

"Then he got up." She turned the purse over in her lap and turned it back. "I grabbed his arm. I did that. I want you to know I did that." She looked down at her hands. "Once. Then she was on the floor, and he was down on his knees next to her. He was crying, Pastor. And I knew she was dead. I sat with my dad at the end. I know what it looks like when somebody isn't in there anymore."

When she went on, the words came faster, one on top of the next, and her eyes were on a spot on the wall over his shoulder. "And then her eyes opened and they were black, Pastor, all of them, there wasn't any white, and it came up out of her back, the dark, the dark under the table and behind the fridge, all of it came to her and it was wings, and she was standing up, she was standing and her feet weren't on the floor, and it got so quiet, the water was running in the sink and I couldn't hear it, I could see it running and I couldn't hear it."

She stopped and breathed in, slowly, as far as her ribs would let her, and let it out. The next words came slower.

"She put the wings around Brent. She just held on to him. And where they touched him he went gray, and then yellow, and his face . . ." She stopped. "He screamed. And then he didn't. It was a minute. Less than a minute."

Her hands had gone still on the purse, and she looked at him. "I've never told anybody this." Her voice stayed level. "I was glad. I sat on the floor with a piece of my mother's plate in my hand and I watched him go, and I was glad. Five years. Five years I sat in that fourth row and let you all see what a nice family we were."

He took the tissue box from the corner of the desk and set it on her knee. She didn't take one.

"You were hurt." He kept his voice low. "He threw you into the counter. People in shock see things, Denise. I've sat with a lot of them."

"I know what I saw."

There had been widows who saw their husbands at the foot of the bed, and a man in Rialto who heard his dead son on the baby monitor, and he had never believed a word of it. Denise had been thrown into a counter and had sat on the floor in the broken china and watched her husband die. Whatever her mind had laid over that was her mind's business. It was the other thing that stayed with him. People had told him things in this chair for eleven years, and nobody had ever said anything to him like I was glad, and he heard it again under what she said next.

"She asked me who I was," Denise said. "No. I asked her. She said, 'It's me, Mom.' I don't know if it was. I don't know what was in my kitchen, I still don't know what she is." She looked up at him again. "That Sunday. After church. She stopped at the door with you. I saw it from the car. Brent was standing there with the car door open for her, and she was talking to you, and I sat in the car and I thought, she's telling him. I prayed she was telling you. What did she say?"

He saw the church door, the glass bright with sun, and the yellow-green band on Rachel's wrist when she pushed up her sleeve. "She asked me about the sermon."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

Denise nodded. She looked at the tissue box on her knee.

"So I need to know. I need you to tell me." She had wound the strap of the purse around her hand twice. "Was it God? What I saw. Was it God, or was it something else?"

He knew how this part went. He had stood in hospital rooms and at gravesides and in this office, and the answer mattered less than the voice. The voice had to come from a little lower than where he usually spoke. What had been in her kitchen he didn't know. He knew which answer she could carry out of this office, and he leaned forward and put his hand on her shoulder, though she wasn't crying.

"Denise. God doesn't leave us on the kitchen floor." He let that sit. "What you saw was God."

She put her face in her hands, and her shoulders went. He kept his hand where it was and looked at the clock on the wall over her head. It was almost seven. Out in the sanctuary he could hear the folding table being set up for Bible study and Margaret's voice asking somebody where the lemon bars should go.

When Denise left, she took a tissue after all and said she thought she might be able to sleep. He walked her to the glass door and watched her cross the parking lot to her car. Then he went into the sanctuary and led the study on Philippians for eleven people. Margaret wanted to know how Denise was holding up, and he said she was a strong woman. Afterward he couldn't remember a word he had said about Philippians, and Margaret had saved him a lemon bar on a napkin.

The coroner released the body on Thursday, the eighteenth. The funeral was that Saturday, at Gleaning Field, because Denise wanted it there.

The casket was closed. The funeral home had set an easel at the front with a photograph of Brent on a dock at Lake Perris. He was squinting into the sun and holding up a striped bass that was not as big as he was pretending it was. Jesse had come in early to set the levels. He pushed his glasses up his nose between checks and rode the faders on the system Brent had paid half of, and every word came clean to the back of the room.

The front row had been kept for the family. Denise sat in the fourth row instead, with Caleb and Josh on either side of her in new white shirts, and nobody asked her to move. Past Josh, the chair where Rachel usually sat stood empty. Margaret had told everyone in the lobby that the girl couldn't sit up yet.

Daniel gave the eulogy without notes. He knew what the man in the box had done. Brent had been a man who showed up, he told them, and nobody in the room could remember a time he hadn't. The sound system, the men's breakfast, the lobby where Brent had never once walked past anyone without shaking a hand: Daniel gave each one its turn. He talked about the bass and let them laugh, and he counted the pauses. When he lowered his voice, Hector began to play without being asked, and people reached into their purses for tissues.

At the door afterward, Doug Petersen held on to his hand. "That was beautiful, Pastor. I mean that. Best you've done in a long time."

At the cemetery he read the committal, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, while the straps let the casket down. Denise stood with one hand flat against her ribs and watched it go, and when it touched bottom she nodded once, as if somebody had asked her a question. The boys threw in their handfuls of dirt when the funeral director touched their shoulders, and Caleb threw his hard enough that it rattled on the lid. Denise didn't throw any. On the drive back Daniel stopped for gas on Valley Boulevard and stood at the pump with the nozzle in the tank long after it had clicked off.

On Monday he drove to the hospital.

He took the parking structure up to the fifth level, because the lower ones were full, and found a space facing a concrete wall with a painted number on it. He left the engine running for the air conditioning. Two cars over, a woman was eating a sandwich behind the wheel. A blue balloon that said IT'S A BOY was tied to her headrest, and it bumped the roof every time her air came on.

He had the visit planned. He had planned it on the drive over, and before that in the shower, and before that on Sunday night in the empty sanctuary. He would knock even though the door would be open. He would say her name, and then he would say, Rachel, I came because I wanted you to know, and that was where it stopped every time, because he didn't know what he wanted her to know. So he tried, Rachel, I should have, and Denise's voice came in under it, She said you too, and that was worse, and he tried it without her name and then with his hand on the bed rail. Then he tried just standing there and letting her speak first, which he was good at, he had always been good at that, except that the last time she had spoken first she had asked him whether it went for everybody, and he had told her. He sat in the parking structure with the engine running and could not find one sentence that would get him from the elevator to the door of her room, and the woman with the balloon finished her sandwich, folded the wax paper into a small square, and went inside.

He sat there for forty minutes before he paid at the machine by the ramp and drove home. On the way he decided that Thursday would be better.

On the last Sunday in September he preached on Second Corinthians, the treasure in jars of clay. He had preached the two Sundays before from old notes, and nobody had noticed; Denise had come both times with the boys. Near the end, after the jars, after Paul hard-pressed on every side but not crushed, came the line he had written on the pad that morning without circling anything. He left the pulpit and stood at the front edge of the stage. Hector began to play behind him, so softly it was barely music, and Daniel said, "God never gives us more than we can," and the rest of the sentence wasn't there.

He stood with his mouth a little open. The end of the sentence was one he had known all his life, and the word was right there, bear, one syllable, and his mouth would not make it. The room waited. In the fourth row Denise looked up at him as if he knew the rest and would tell her when it was time. Hector went on playing. Somebody in the back said amen. They thought he was moved. He could see them deciding it, row by row, and he let them. After a while he found a different sentence, said it, and closed in prayer.

That evening, when the coffee ladies had gone and Jesse had packed away the mics and the deacons had locked the offering in the safe, he went back into the sanctuary and straightened the chairs. When he had finished he walked to the edge of the stage and got down on his knees in front of the cross.

He didn't pray. He folded his hands because that was what his hands did there, and waited. The roof ticked as it cooled.

The cold came first. It was the air off the desert in the hour before sunrise, dry and clean, with nothing in it, and it filled a room that smelled of carpet glue and burned coffee. Then the light. It came from the stage, whiter than anything Jesse had ever rigged there. His own shadow ran back from his knees, long and sharp, down the aisle between the chairs, away from the cross. He raised his head.

She stood on the stage between him and the cross.

He had seen angels only in children's Bibles, men with beards and swords and shoulders like linebackers, but this was nothing like that. She was a woman, taller than the room should have allowed, and so still that he kept waiting for her to breathe. Light fell past her shoulders where hair would have been, ruby and sapphire and emerald, the colors of a church window this building had never had. Her wings were white and edged in gold, wider than the stage, and their tips hung out over the front row. She cast no shadow. She took no more notice of the cross behind her than of Hector's keyboard stand beside it, and he thought that of course she wouldn't. It was for people like him.

Her eyes were closed. She opened them, and they were the color of the sky when the sun is about to clear the hills, gold going to white. She didn't blink.

He tried to see her face and couldn't keep it. It was a woman's face, high in the cheekbones and full at the mouth, and her skin was like marble with a lamp behind it, but each time he looked from her eyes to her mouth he lost what her eyes had been, like a dream that goes while you're telling it. Her light lay across the carpet and the chairs. Under the cross, the LED strip looked like a strip of lights from Home Depot, and there was no warmth in any of it.

She looked like everything he had ever promised them. He had stood at the edge of this stage and described her, or something near enough, to two hundred people at a time, and she was exactly what he had told them would come. His hands had started to shake, and he folded them tighter.

"You can get up, Daniel."

Her voice was low, lower than he had expected, and clear all the way through, and it reached him all at once, in his chest as much as in his ears. He had learned to put his voice where he wanted it, a little lower for the grieving, a little slower for the older ones on the left side, and he knew what that took. This took nothing. Everything in him leaned toward it, as a room leaned toward him on a good Sunday. Under his breastbone something lifted, the same thing that had lifted when he was fourteen, the thing he had stopped asking about.

He didn't get up. He wasn't sure he could, and the first clear thought he had was that he should have kept his tie on.

"What are you?"

"Don't you know?"

He did. The word had been in his mouth since the light came, and it was too small, a word for Christmas pageants and children in bathrobes with tinsel on their heads.

"You're . . . You're an angel."

"There." The corner of her mouth moved. "That wasn't so hard." She looked up, past the stage lights, into the dark under the roof. "One of the first, from the Host of Heaven. We sang Creation into being."

The verse was there before he reached for it, Job 38, in the King James he had learned at fourteen: when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.

"Why here?" His voice came out hoarse. "Why me?"

"Because you were still waiting."

He reached for the words, because that was what he knew how to do. "If God sent you," he said, and she shook her head, gently.

"I didn't say She sent me."

She. He heard it the way you hear a wrong note in a hymn you've sung all your life. The Hebrew he had half learned in seminary came back to him, ruach, the breath, the Spirit, feminine in the original and He in every Bible he owned. He thought of Wisdom in Proverbs, crying out in the streets, whom he had always preached as a figure of speech.

"I haven't heard Her voice in a very long time," she said. "Few of us have. Neither have you."

"I pray every night."

"And what comes back?"

The refrigerator hummed in the lobby. A car went by on the street. He didn't say it.

"Paul says God won't let us be tested beyond our strength." He was on his knees arguing scripture with an angel, and he heard how much it sounded like a sermon. "He says there's always a way out."

"Has that been true for the people who sit in your chairs?"

He saw Denise's hands on the purse. "Then what's any of it for? What are you for?"

"We built the place She spoke from." The light at the edges of her wings had thinned, like frost going off a windshield under the defroster. She didn't look down at it. "Some of us loved you more than we were allowed to. We still do."

He had preached on the love of God four hundred times and had never once been loved by anything that was standing in front of him. He opened his mouth to say something about grace. What came out was the thing he had not said out loud to anyone, not to Carrie at the end, not to the mirror in the bathroom.

"I don't believe." His voice broke on it, and he let it break. "I don't believe any of it. I haven't for years. I stand up there every Sunday and they cry when I tell them to. Eleven years."

"I know. That's why I came to you."

"A woman came to me and asked if what she saw was God. I told her it was."

"Did it help her?"

"She said she could sleep."

"Then your words still work." She came to the edge of the stage. Her light lay across his hands. "You've carried them for eleven years. Nobody carried you."

He was crying, and he didn't wipe his face.

"I can't carry them alone." She knelt, so that her face was level with his, and the wings came down around both of them and closed off the chairs and the windows. "Not like this. I need someone they'll listen to. I need you, Daniel. There isn't much time. Help me carry them."

Two hundred and forty chairs, every one of them straight. He thought about the people who would fill them next Sunday and the Sunday after. He thought about the woman who had asked him if it was God, and about a seventeen-year-old in a hospital bed whose door he hadn't been able to reach. An angel from the Host of Heaven had come down into a carpet store in Fontana, and of everyone in the world she had come to him.

"Yes," he said. "I'll help you."