California(49)
He tried to kiss her again, but she moved away.
By the time Micah came to pick them up that evening, Cal was hungry again. Frida wasn’t complaining, but he wanted her to be eating as much as possible. Didn’t morning sickness strike in the first trimester? If it did, she’d need all the calories she could get while she was well enough to get them.
Micah had changed his clothes. He wore a button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up.
“Sunday’s finest?” Cal asked.
Micah laughed. “Man, I didn’t realize how much I missed you.”
Cal couldn’t help but laugh, too. Maybe this would be okay. Maybe all he’d needed was some rest and a little more information.
“Where’s my stuff?” he asked.
Micah raised an eyebrow. “I told you. I’m sure Dave just took them to get washed or something.”
“And the flashlight?”
Micah nodded. “Oh, don’t worry, he probably didn’t put that in the wash.” When Cal didn’t laugh, Micah said, “I’ll look into it.”
“Please do,” Cal replied. “And can we get Frida some jerky or something?”
Micah frowned and looked at his sister. “Are you hungry?”
Frida said she wasn’t.
“We won’t be long,” he said to Cal.
They peed in the bushes behind the Hotel. “It’s not prohibited, but not really encouraged, either,” Micah explained afterward, as they walked to the Church.
People were coming out of the buildings now. They were done making themselves scarce, Cal supposed. He recognized a lot of them, not just Fatima and Peter and Dave but the heavyset man who had given him a dirty look earlier and the blond-dreads guy.
Others were strangers, and their newness made him feel strange. He wanted to start giggling, but he held back and tried not to look at one face too long. There was a woman with long black hair and an open, round face; the guy she was with was tall and very pale, with a slump to his shoulders that made Cal’s neck hurt just looking at him. He was younger than the woman, probably by about ten years. Right behind them was an Asian man, not much older than Sailor, who walked with a slight limp and smiled at Cal and Frida when they passed. He was the exception; most of the people tried not to look as Micah led them onto the main road to join the procession.
The sun was going down, and it was getting chilly. Cal had forgotten his sweatshirt in the room—he could see it balled like a possum at the bottom of his backpack—and now he crossed his arms to keep in the heat.
“Cold?” Micah asked. “By the time we’re done, the Church will be sweltering.”
It sounded to Cal like a threat, but he couldn’t figure out how exactly.
The outside of the Church had been lit up with torches, and they lined the walls on either side of the entrance. As he got closer, Cal saw that they weren’t handmade, as he’d imagined, but the cheap tiki ones that people used to purchase for their outdoor parties, their ersatz luaus, so many years ago. He hadn’t seen the things in a long time. How was it that the Land had any? Cal tucked the question into his mental file of things to ask Micah.
He peered at the building before him. Except for two small windows near the roof, the Church looked like a big, enclosed square. There had to be two floors, Cal surmised, or an attic. Perhaps it was windowless on the bottom floor so that it could be used year-round, despite the weather, or it could be a place to hide during a tornado or a hailstorm.
He wondered if the double front doors were more secure than the door at the Miller Estate. If a town of people crowded into this church at night, without candles or tiki torches or solar lighting to illuminate the space, would they be able to see one another?
The small windows on the upper floor were, miraculously, intact. Miraculous, indeed. More like unbelievable, Cal thought. Micah had probably had them replaced in the last year or two, the panes coming from the same source as the razors, the tiki torches, and his Polo shirt.
It looked like the outside of the Church had been painted professionally, and though its surface was chipped and stripped in sections, patched here and there with mismatched colors, it certainly wasn’t a nineteenth-century undertaking. Roaming bands of settlers must have defaced the building in the years since the town had closed, and the Land’s solution to this vandalism had been to paint over it; here and there, the Church’s stark white surface was marred by squares of beige, eggshell, and even pistachio green. It looked a little sloppy, but Cal liked the bedraggled quality it lent the building. Now it was less somber church and more local high school. Besides, the steeple rising into the sky looked as unscathed as it must have been two centuries earlier; the barbed wire around its body merely confirmed its glory, made its pierce into the heavens more powerful.
A sign at the front welcomed visitors. In the fading light, Cal couldn’t read the text clearly, but it was obviously for tourists, most likely describing the religious life of the town before it had been abandoned. Micah pulled him along, said, “You’ll have plenty of time to read that later.” With his thumb and index finger, he flicked the air between him and the sign. “Besides, those moron amusement-park developers didn’t care about this place’s history. They f*cked this building up. It doesn’t look as old as it should, as it is.”
Inside, it was so bright that Cal’s eyes watered. He hadn’t seen light like this since leaving L.A., and even then, electricity had been scarce. He thought of gas stations in the middle of the night; of his mother’s desk lamp, which she’d fed with high-wattage lightbulbs, despite the threat of fire; of the streetlight that used to burn into his bedroom window unless he secured the curtain closed. All that, years ago.