He turns toward the window, head shaking imperceptibly.
“You want to find this girl, right? So help me out. Don’t hold anything back. It’s not fair to Hannah.”
He lets out a breath. “Hannah? You don’t even know her.”
“Then tell me about her, Carter. Fill me in.”
His breathing comes hard and heavy, the muscles in his forearms flexing, struggling to hold himself together.
“Come on.”
Then I hear it, the sound I love. The gasp of capitulation, a long exhale that leaves him smaller than before, hunched over and broken. In the interview room, this would be the moment the guys on the far side of the glass slap each other’s backs. When they give that sigh, it means everything is about to come out all at once.
“This,” he says, his voice quiet, “this is all my fault.”
“Meaning what?”
“I encouraged her. I thought I was doing the right thing.” There’s a plea in his eyes. “You have to understand, when I first came to the church, nobody was on my side. What I found here wasn’t at all what I expected. You’ve got this big, famous church – all my seminary friends, when they heard I was coming here, said I’d hit the big time. But what I discovered… It was all so comfortable. So complacent. The kids go to nice schools, they drive nice cars, they have nice lives to look forward to. It was all so nice.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I say.
“Christianity, it’s not about being nice. It’s about sacrifice. All they wanted, though, was an ordained baby-sitter, like I said before.”
“I thought you were trying to be funny.”
“I was, but it’s still true. The parents… The church, what they all wanted was some help with keeping the kids in line. Keeping them insulated. Sheltered and safe. ‘You’re young,’ they’d tell me. ‘The kids relate to you. They look up to you.’ And they wanted me to use that to help them out, you know? Or they’d get me to lay down the law, then behind my back the parents and kids could bond by talking about how unreasonable I was. That kind of shocked me, but it happens.”
As interesting as all this is, I don’t need a lecture on how hard being a youth pastor is. “Can we steer this back to Hannah?”
“Like I said, Hannah was different. Her mom was, too, at first. They understood God didn’t put us on this planet to be cozy and quiet. We have to be outward-focused. We have to be missional.”
Cavallo would know what that means, but I don’t – and I’d just as soon not find out. “Again, could we stick to the matter at hand?”
He stops me with a raised finger. “It’s relevant. There was a sermon I did – I speak to the youth group on Sunday nights, I think I mentioned that. Anyway, you know the Narnia movies started coming out, and all the kids were eating that stuff up, so I did a talk about that line from C. S. Lewis – you know, about Aslan? ‘He’s not a safe lion, but he’s a good one’?”
My eyes glaze over.
“Anyway,” he says, realizing I’m not tracking, “the point is, God doesn’t want us to be safe. He wants us to do good. There’s a big difference.”
“Right.”
“So Hannah hears this, and it’s like a light bulb goes on in her head. This was – what? Three years ago? She would have been, like, fourteen. But she really woke up and started living her faith.”
I’m not looking for ancient history, but sometimes there’s no choice. You have to let them tell the story in their own way.
“There was this girl,” he says, “named Evey, short for Evangeline. She and her mom relocated here from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the kid was really messed up. Evey ran away from home, got into drugs and who knows what else. She was Hannah’s age – but that’s all they had in common. I don’t know the whole history, but I think there’d been some kind of abuse, she’d been sexualized way too young and had this weird, kind of creepy maturity. The other kids in the youth group, they wouldn’t go near her. I think they were afraid, and to be honest I was, too.”
“But not Hannah?”
He shakes his head. “She befriended Evey, the way she did everyone. The same way she did him.” He jabs his thumb at James Fontaine’s house. “She didn’t judge. She tried to show Christ’s love to everyone, no matter how hard it was.”
“So she struggled with this love thing? And confided in you?”
“Yeah,” he says. “She grew up without a dad, you know, and I think I came along at a certain time in her life when she really needed one. A youth pastor’s always acting in loco parentis, but it was more than that.”
“You have any kids of your own?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not yet.”
I’m not surprised. Telling other people’s kids it’s better to be good than safe is one thing. No matter how much you like them, or even feel responsible for them, they aren’t yours. Losing them isn’t always at the back of your mind. If Robb had a child, he might understand the attraction of keeping her “sheltered and safe.” Parents want to raise future doctors and lawyers – above all, future candidates for happiness. They do not want to nurture martyrs, whatever the cause.
“You can ask a lot of people,” I say, “but you can’t expect them to sacrifice their own kid. You’ll understand that when you have kids of your own.”
“But that’s exactly what Christianity is,” he says, “a father sacrificing his son.”
There’s a flash of passion in his voice, transforming him for a moment, giving me a glimpse of what he might be like in action. I can see how the teens in his charge might be inspired, and why their parents might get a little nervous. It’s one thing to talk the talk, but when you put your kid into someone else’s hands, you’ve got to believe that underneath all the radical rhetoric, there’s a check in place, some restraining impulse or inner voice to rein him in: All this is great, and you need to hear it, but in real life, in the everyday world, you’ve got to look out for yourself. Carter Robb doesn’t seem to have that restraint, or if he does, he thinks rooting it out is an obligation of faith.
“And Donna,” I ask, “did she encourage this bond between you and her daughter?”
“She thought it was great. Just like Hannah, she really got behind me. Considering what a great man her husband was, she could have let people at the church put her on a pedestal, but that’s not her way. She works hard. She mentors women at the church. She’s written books, you know. Quite a few of them. And speaks at women’s conferences, that kind of thing. So when I came along, she said it was just what ccc needed.”
“CCC?”
“Cypress Community Church.” He smirks. “Sometimes we speak evangelicalese instead of English. Sorry about that… Where was I?”
“Donna supported you.”
“Right. When I first got there, the youth group would have these annual retreats every summer. They’d pack up the vans and go to this adventure camp in Tennessee. Bungee jumping all day and preaching all night. It was a tradition. But I went to Pastor Mike – that’s my boss, the associate pastor – and said, ‘Hey, look. Instead of driving all the way to Tennessee, let’s stay right here. There are ministry opportunities all over town, places where the kids can volunteer for a week and really advance the Kingdom.’ He looked at me like I was crazy, but Donna got behind it. Without her, we’d still be wasting that week. Now we do inner-city mission work, help at shelters, that kind of thing.”
“That’s really great. But why did you say Hannah’s disappearance was your fault?”
He takes a deep breath. “Because. She took it so seriously. I mean, she really got into the mission work. She’d take an interest in people, you know? Not safe people – and not necessarily good ones, either. Not that any of us are good, but you know what I mean. At school she started having some trouble. She was making friends with the wrong people – ”