“Have you given any thought to outing Atlas?” I asked. “Talk to Daley, get a lawyer? Call that reporter who asked about Daley? Get it all out there once and for all?”
She glanced at me, then looked straight ahead for a long while. “Someday. Roland, that’s pretty much all I’ve thought about for fourteen years. That, and how to stay away from him. As I explained to you, I don’t want Daley to grow up knowing that her father’s a monster and her mother’s a victim. She believes her father and mother were kind and loving parents. There’s a hole in her, but that merciful illusion helps to fill it. Each year the hole becomes smaller. I want to wait until she’s ready. And you know Reggie said he’d kill me if I speak out. On four separate occasions he promised to. I know him well enough to believe him.”
“That’s part of the story you need to tell,” I said.
“Not until Daley is ready.”
“And you.”
“Yes. And me.”
“Times are better, Penelope. If you act now, you can take him down before he can hurt you. You can blow him out of the water with one tweet. You could do it in less than the time it takes us to get to Oceanside. You two can stay with me while the cops investigate and the courts order a paternity test. Then it’s all she wrote for Pastor Reggie Atlas. SNR is broken and Battle will die in prison.”
She gave me a long, frank gaze. I returned it in parts, trying to read her expression in the colored glow of the traffic lights. I wondered again if the paternity test was stopping her. If she knew it would reveal the innocence of Reggie Atlas.
I couldn’t read her face or her mind. My heart believed Penelope because it wanted to. My reason doubted her because it had to.
I parked in her driveway, behind the cheerful yellow Beetle. A motion light came on. The night was damp again and the streetlamps glowed through feints of fog.
Her eyes were gray and cool in the dashboard light. “Come on in, Roland. This won’t take long.”
She unlocked the front door and we went inside. A lamp was already on, weakly illuminating the little living room and its plaid couch and director’s chairs, the upturned orange crate/CD stand, the small collection of photos on the wicker stand, the TV.
“Getcha a drink if you’d like,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
She walked into the hallway and a light came on. I heard her footsteps on the old wooden floor, the creak of boards, a closet rolling open.
I poured a conservative drink, added an ice cube. Sat in the living room, where I could keep an eye on the yard and the street. Sipped the good, smooth bourbon. Heard the Amtrak Surfliner groaning into the Transit Center just a few blocks away. Then Penelope, coming back up into the living room, clothes on hangers dangling from each hand. She laid them over one of the director’s chairs, balancing the load so as not to tip it over. Gave me a matter-of-fact nod.
“One more load,” she said. “Daley’s.”
I sat in the still, small room and listened to her bumping away in Daley’s room. Her sister’s room. Her daughter’s room. I told myself it really didn’t matter, but of course it did. One was ordinary human grace, the other a rape of it. I wondered if there was a deeper wisdom in Penelope’s refusal to tell her daughter this alleged and awful truth. If I was failing to see the bigger picture. I tried to think what it might be. But I was a childless widower with a history of willing violence and an incomplete understanding of this world.
Penelope brought out another handful of clothes on hangers, Daley’s — lots of black and pink — and a paper shopping bag of toiletries.
“Almost,” she said. “And how’s that drink?”
I made her one and away she went.
I heard her shower go on. A few minutes later she came padding down the hallway, feet bare, by the sound of them, and stood at the threshold of the living room. She was wearing a brief pink robe with white daisies and a price tag dangling from one sleeve. Matching slippers. A black camisole. The empty highball glass in hand.
“I’m not sure what to do next,” she said. “Will you take over?”
“You left the price tag on the robe,” I said.
“Maybe in case I have to do that.”
“Don’t do that.”
Sex can be tender, passionate, urgent, formal, animal, awkward, sudden, kind, brief, long, sad, alien, familiar, punitive, unselfish, inspiring, competitive, exhausting, heart-pounding, electric, empowering, embarrassing, ornate, dreamy, martial, surprising, disappointing, rambunctious, lonely, purposeful, greedy, funny, furtive, loud, languorous, acrobatic, ambitious, required, frequent, rare, once.
Or many combinations thereof. Dealer’s choice.
If I had to describe those hours with Penelope Rideout, I would start with wonderful.
45
We dressed, Penelope remarking that consensual, undrugged sex wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I thought she was being funny, then wasn’t sure. In the living room Penelope got her house key out, then shouldered her purse. I took all four hanger loads in one hand — feeling like a strong and capable man after all that loving — and picked up the toiletries bag. Managed to turn the knob and elbow open the door.
Atlas put the gun to my forehead, walked me back, and slammed the door with his foot. His eyes were wrong and he smelled bad.
“If you go for your gun I’ll blow your brains out,” he said. “Don’t move. Don’t let go of that stuff. Penelope, you drop the keys or I’ll shoot you, too.”
I measured my chances. If I tried to draw, Atlas would have drilled out my life before the hangers hit the floor. Penelope next. The desperate energy on Pastor Reggie Atlas’s face made these things appear certain. His gun looked to be a semiauto .40-caliber with a short barrel.
“Nice to see you, Pastor Atlas,” I said.
“Don’t start in on me,” he said.
He considered Penelope briefly and I saw an expression on his face that I couldn’t fathom.
I heard Penelope’s keys hit the floor behind me. I dropped the clothes and the bag of toiletries well away from my feet.
Atlas lowered his aim to my chest. The gun was shaking. “I didn’t tell you to do that,” he said.
“Reggie,” said Penelope. “You stop this right now.”
“Leave your hands up and out like that,” he said to me. “And remember how far away from your gun they are. Remember that.”
In the academy, they teach you to keep them talking.
“Been waiting long?” I asked.
“Cruising, mostly,” he said. “I had this vision you two would be together here tonight. I’m still capable of visions.”
“You must have seen PBS, too,” I said.
“Yes.” He sneered at Penelope. “You, so eager to tell Daley’s story.”
“Atlas,” I said. “What you want is to not spend the rest of your life in prison for murder.”
“And how do I go about that, considering I’m going to kill you both?”
His gun barrel was now moving in a small slow circle, my chest the bull’s-eye. Sweat filled the lines of his face and he wiped his brow with his free hand. His wad of fine blond hair was soaked at the temples and the stink of fear came off him.
“Haven’t you already destroyed enough for one lifetime?” asked Penelope. “Go. Go away, Reggie Atlas.”
“I gave you everything you love,” he said. “I gave you the true path and a child.”
“It astonishes me every day that she could have come from you,” said Penelope.
A minor smile on Atlas’s face, then, filled with what looked like genuine pride.