Онлайн чтение книги Оставленные The Leftovers
SPECIAL SOMEONE

TOM GARVEY DIDN’T HAVE TO ask why the girl was standing on his doorstep, suitcase in hand. For weeks now, he’d felt the hope leaving his body in a slow leak—it was a little like going broke—and now it was gone. He was emotionally bankrupt. The girl smiled wryly, as if she could read his thoughts.

“You Tom?”

He nodded. She handed him an envelope with his name written across the front.

“Congratulations,” she said. “You’re my new babysitter.”

He’d seen her before, but never up close, and she was even more beautiful than he’d realized—a tiny Asian girl, sixteen at most, with impossibly black hair and a perfect teardrop of a face. Christine, he remembered, the fourth bride. She let him stare for a while, then got tired of it.

“Here,” she said, pulling out her iPhone. “Why don’t you just take a picture?”

Two days later, the FBI and Oregon State Police arrested Mr. Gilchrest in what the TV news insisted on calling a “surprise early-morning raid,” even though it was no surprise to anyone, least of all Mr. Gilchrest himself. Ever since Anna Ford’s betrayal, he’d been warning his followers of dark times ahead, trying to convince them it was all for the best.

“Whatsoever happens to me,” he’d written in his last e-mail, “do not despair. It happens for a reason.”

Though he’d expected the arrest, Tom was taken aback by the severity of the charges—multiple counts of second-and third-degree rape and sodomy, as well as tax evasion and illegal transportation of a minor across state lines—and offended by the obvious pleasure the newscasters took in what they called “the spectacular downfall of the self-styled messiah,” the “shocking allegations” that left his “saintly reputation in tatters” and “fast-growing youth movement in disarray.” They kept showing the same unflattering video clip of a handcuffed Mr. Gilchrest being escorted into the courthouse in rumpled silk pajamas, his hair flattened on one side of his head, as if he’d just been hauled out of bed. The scroll bar at the bottom of the screen read: HOLY WAYNE? HOLY S**T! DISGRACED CULT LEADER BUSTED ON SEX RAP. FACES UP TO 75 YEARS IN PRISON.

There were four of them watching—Tom and Christine, and Tom’s housemates, Max and Luis. Tom didn’t know either of the guys very well—they’d just been rotated in from Chicago to assist him at the San Francisco Healing Hug Center—but from what he could tell, their reactions to the news were completely in character: sensitive Luis weeping softly, hotheaded Max shouting obscenities at the screen, insisting Mr. Gilchrest had been framed. For her part, Christine seemed oddly unruffled by the coverage, as if everything were unfolding according to plan. The only thing that bothered her was her husband’s pajamas.

“I told him not to wear those,” she said. “They make him look like Hugh Hefner.”

She got a little more animated when Anna Ford’s milkmaid face appeared on the screen. Anna was spiritual bride number six, and the only non-Asian girl in the bunch. She’d disappeared from the Ranch in late August, only to turn up a couple of weeks later on 60 Minutes, where she told the world about the harem of underaged girls who catered to Holy Wayne’s every need. She claimed to have been fourteen years old at the time of her marriage, a desperate runaway who’d been befriended by two nice guys at the Minneapolis bus station, given food and shelter, and then transported to the Gilchrest Ranch in southern Oregon. She must have made a good impression on the middle-aged Prophet; three days after her arrival, he slipped a ring on her finger and took her to bed.

“He’s not a messiah,” she said, in what became the defining sound bite of the scandal. “He’s just a dirty old man.”

“And you’re Judas,” Christine told the television. “Judas with a big fat ass.”

IT WAS all in ruins, everything Tom had worked for and hoped for over the past two and a half years, but for some reason he didn’t feel as heartbroken as he’d expected to. There was a definite sense of relief beneath the pain, the knowledge that the thing you’d been dreading had finally come to pass, that you no longer had to live in fear of it. Of course, there was a whole slew of new problems to worry about, but there would be time to deal with them later on.

He’d given his bed to Christine, so he stayed in the living room after everyone called it a night. Before turning off the lamp, he took out the picture of his Special Someone—Verbecki with the sparkler—and pondered it for a few seconds. For the first time since he could remember, he didn’t whisper his old friend’s name, nor did he make his nightly plea for the missing to return. What was the point? He felt like he’d just woken up from a sleep that had lasted way too long, and could no longer remember the dream that had detained him.

They’re gone, he thought. I’ve got to let them go.

THREE YEARS ago, when he first arrived at college, Tom had been just like everybody else—a normal American kid, a B+ student who wanted to major in business, pledge a cool frat, drink a ton of beer, and hook up with as many reasonably hot girls as possible. He’d felt homesick for the first couple of days, nostalgic for the familiar streets and buildings of Mapleton, his parents and sister, and all his old buddies, scattered to institutions of higher learning across the country, but he knew the sadness was temporary, and even kind of healthy. It bothered him when he met other freshmen who spoke about their hometowns, and sometimes even their families, with casual disdain, as if they’d spent the first eighteen years of their lives in prison and had finally busted out.

The Saturday after classes began, he got drunk and went to a football game with a big gang from his floor, his face painted half orange and half blue. All the students were concentrated in one section of the domed stadium, roaring and chanting like a single organism. It was exhilarating to melt into the crowd like that, to feel his identity dissolving into something bigger and more powerful. The Orange won, and that night, at a frat kegger, he met a girl whose face was painted the same as his, went home with her, and discovered that college life exceeded his highest expectations. He could still vividly remember the feeling of walking home from her dorm as the sun came up, his shoes untied, his socks and boxers missing in action, the spontaneous high five he exchanged with a guy who staggered past him on the quad like a mirror image, the smack of their palms echoing triumphantly in the early-morning silence.

A month later, it was all over. School was canceled on October 15th; they were given seven days to pack up their stuff and vacate the campus. That final week existed in his memory as a blur of baffled farewells—the dorms slowly emptying, the muffled sound of someone crying behind a closed door, the soft curses people uttered as they pocketed their phones. There were a few desperate parties, one of which ended in a sickening brawl, and a hastily arranged memorial service in the Dome, at which the Chancellor solemnly recited the names of the university’s victims of what people had just begun to call the Sudden Departure. The roll call included Tom’s Psych instructor and a girl from his English class who’d overdosed on sleeping pills after learning of the disappearance of her identical twin.

He hadn’t done anything wrong, but he remembered feeling a weird sense of shame—of personal failure—returning home so soon after he’d left, almost as if he’d flunked out or gotten expelled for disciplinary reasons. But there was comfort as well, the reassurance of returning to his family, finding them all present and accounted for, though his sister had apparently had a pretty close call. Tom asked her about Jen Sussman a couple of times, but she refused to talk, either because it was too upsetting—that was his mother’s theory—or because she was just sick of the whole subject.

“What do you want me to say?” she’d snapped at him. “She just fucking vaporized, okay?”

They hunkered down for a couple of weeks, just the four of them, watching DVDs and playing board games, anything to distract themselves from the hysterical monotony of the TV news—the obsessive repetition of the same few basic facts, the ever-rising tally of the missing, interview upon interview with traumatized eyewitnesses, who said things like He was standing right next to me …, or I just turned around for a second …, before their voices trailed off into embarrassed little chuckles. The coverage felt different from that of September 11th, when the networks had shown the burning towers over and over. October 14th was more amorphous, harder to pin down: There were massive highway pileups, some train wrecks, numerous small-plane and helicopter crashes—luckily, no big passenger jets went down in the United States, though several had to be landed by terrified copilots, and one by a flight attendant who’d become a folk hero for a little while, one bright spot in a sea of darkness—but the media was never able to settle upon a single visual image to evoke the catastrophe. There also weren’t any bad guys to hate, which made everything that much harder to get into focus.

Depending upon your viewing habits, you could listen to experts debating the validity of conflicting religious and scientific explanations for what was either a miracle or a tragedy, or watch an endless series of gauzy montages celebrating the lives of departed celebrities—John Mellencamp and Jennifer Lopez, Shaq and Adam Sandler, Miss Texas and Greta Van Susteren, Vladimir Putin and the Pope. There were so many different levels of fame, and they all kept getting mixed together—the nerdy guy in the Verizon ads and the retired Supreme Court Justice, the Latin American tyrant and the quarterback who’d never fulfilled his potential, the witty political consultant and that chick who’d been dissed on The Bachelor. According to the Food Network, the small world of superstar chefs had been disproportionately hard hit.

Tom didn’t mind being home at first. It made sense, at a time like that, for people to stick close to their loved ones. There was an almost unbearable tension in the air, a mood of anxious waiting, though no one seemed to know whether they were waiting for a logical explanation or a second wave of disappearances. It was as if the whole world had paused to take a deep breath and steel itself for whatever was going to happen next.

NOTHING HAPPENED.

As the weeks limped by, the sense of immediate crisis began to dissipate. People got restless hiding out in their houses, marinating in ominous speculation. Tom started heading out after dinner, joining a bunch of his high school friends at the Canteen, a dive bar in Stonewood Heights that wasn’t particularly diligent about ferreting out fake IDs. Every night was like a combination Homecoming Weekend and Irish wake, all sorts of unlikely people milling around, buying rounds and trading stories about absent friends and acquaintances. Three members of their graduating class were among the missing, not to mention Mr. Ed Hackney, their universally despised vice principal, and a janitor everybody called Marbles.

Nearly every time Tom set foot in the Canteen, a new piece got added to the mosaic of loss, usually in the form of some obscure person he hadn’t thought about for years: Dave Keegan’s Jamaican housekeeper, Yvonne; Mr. Boundy, a junior high substitute teacher whose bad breath was the stuff of legend; Giuseppe, the crazy Italian guy who used to own Mario’s Pizza Plus before the surly Albanian dude took over. One night in early December, Matt Testa sidled up while Tom was playing darts with Paul Erdmann.

“Hey,” he said, in that grim voice people used when discussing October 14th. “Remember Jon Verbecki?”

Tom tossed his dart a little harder than he’d meant to. It sailed high and wide, almost missing the board altogether.

“What about him?”

Testa shrugged in a way that made his reply unnecessary.

“Gone.”

Paul stepped up to the tape mark on the floor. Squinting like a jeweler, he zipped his dart right into the middle of the board, just an inch or so above the bullseye and a little to the left.

“Who’s gone?”

“This was before your time,” Testa explained. “Verbecki moved away the summer after sixth grade. To New Hampshire.”

“I knew him all the way back in preschool,” Tom said. “We used to have playdates. I think we went to Six Flags once. He was a nice kid.”

Matt nodded respectfully. “His cousin knows my cousin. That’s how I found out.”

“Where was he?” Tom asked. This was the obligatory question. It seemed important, though it was hard to say why. No matter where the person was when it happened, the location always struck him as eerie and poignant.

“At the gym. On one of the ellipticals.”

“Shit.” Tom shook his head, imagining a suddenly empty exercise machine, the handles and pedals still moving as if of their own accord, Verbecki’s final statement. “It’s hard to picture him at the gym.”

“I know.” Testa frowned, as if something didn’t add up. “He was kind of a pussy, right?”

“Not really,” Tom said. “I think he was just a little sensitive or something. His mother used to have to cut the labels out of his clothes so they wouldn’t drive him crazy. I remember in preschool he used to take his shirt off all the time because he said it itched him too much. The teachers kept telling him it was inappropriate, but he didn’t care.”

“That’s right.” Testa grinned. It was all coming back to him. “I slept over his house once. He went to bed with all the lights on, and this one Beatles song playing over and over. ‘Paperback Writer’ or some shit.”

“‘Julia,’” Tom said. “That was his magic song.”

“His what?” Paul fired off his last dart. It landed with an emphatic thunk, just below the bullseye.

“That’s what he called it,” Tom explained. “If ‘Julia’ wasn’t playing, he couldn’t go to sleep.”

“Whatever.” Testa didn’t appreciate the interruption. “He tried sleeping at my house a bunch of times, but it never worked. He’d roll out his sleeping bag, change into pj’s, brush his teeth, the whole nine yards. But then, just when we were about to go to bed, he’d lose it. His bottom lip would get all quivery and he’d be like, Dude, don’t be mad, but I gotta call my mom.”

Paul glanced over his shoulder as he extracted his darts from the board.

“Why’d they move?”

“Fuck if I know,” Testa said. “His dad probably got a new job or something. It was a long time ago. You know how it is—you swear you’re gonna keep in touch, and you do for a little while, and then you never see the guy again.” He turned to Tom. “You even remember what he looked like?”

“Kinda.” Tom closed his eyes, trying to picture Verbecki. “Sorta pudgy, blond hair with bangs. Really big teeth.”

Paul laughed. “Big teeth?”

“Beavery,” Tom explained. “He probably got braces right after he moved.”

Testa raised his beer bottle.

“Verbecki,” he said.

Tom and Paul clinked their bottles against his.

“Verbecki,” they repeated.

That was how they did it. You talked about the person, you drank a toast, and then you moved on. Enough people had disappeared that you couldn’t afford to get hung up on a single individual.

For some reason, though, Tom couldn’t get Jon Verbecki out of his mind. When he got home that night, he went up to the attic and looked through several boxes of old photographs, faded prints from the days before his parents owned a digital camera, back when they used to have to ship the film off to a mail-order lab for processing. His mother had been bugging him for years to get the pictures scanned, but he hadn’t gotten around to it.

Verbecki appeared in a number of photos. There he was at a school Activities Day, balancing an egg on a teaspoon. One Halloween, he was a lobster among superheroes and didn’t look too happy about it. He and Tom had been T-ball teammates; they sat beneath a tree, grinning with almost competitive intensity, wearing identical red hats and shirts that said SHARKS. He looked more or less as Tom remembered—blond and toothy, in any case, if not quite as pudgy.

One picture made a special impression. It was a close-up, taken at night, when they were six or seven years old. It must have been around the Fourth of July, because Verbecki had a lit sparkler in his hand, an overexposed cloud of fire that looked almost like cotton candy. It would have seemed festive, except that he was staring fearfully into the camera, like he didn’t think it was a very good idea, holding a sizzling metal wand so close to his face.

Tom wasn’t sure why he found the picture so intriguing, but he decided not to put it back in the box with the others. He brought it downstairs and spent a long time studying it before he fell asleep. It almost seemed like Verbecki was sending a secret message from the past, asking a question only Tom could answer.

IT WAS right around this time that Tom received a letter from the university informing him that classes would resume on February 1st. Attendance, the letter stressed, would not be mandatory. Any student who wished to opt out of this “Special Spring Session” could do so without suffering any financial or academic penalty.

“Our goal,” the Chancellor explained, “is to continue operating on a scaled-down basis during this time of widespread uncertainty, to perform our vital missions of teaching and research without exerting undue pressure on those members of our community who are unprepared to return at the present moment.”

Tom wasn’t surprised by this announcement. Many of his friends had received similar notifications from their own schools in recent days. It was part of a nationwide effort to “Jump-Start America” that had been announced by the President a couple of weeks earlier. The economy had gone into a tailspin after October 14th, with the stock market plunging and consumer spending falling off a cliff. Worried experts were predicting “a chain reaction economic meltdown” if something wasn’t done to halt the downward spiral.

“It’s been nearly two months since we suffered a terrible and unexpected blow,” the President said in his prime-time address to the nation. “Our shock and grief, while enormous, can no longer be an excuse for pessimism or paralysis. We need to reopen our schools, return to our offices and factories and farms, and begin the process of reclaiming our lives. It won’t be easy and it won’t be quick, but we need to start now. Each and every one of us has a duty to stand up and do our part to get this country moving again.”

Tom wanted to do his part, but he honestly didn’t know if he was ready to go back to school. He asked his parents, but their opinions only mirrored the split in his own thinking. His mother thought he should stay home, maybe take some classes at community college, and then return to Syracuse in September, by which time everything would presumably be a lot clearer.

“We still don’t know what’s going on,” she told him. “I’d be a lot more comfortable if you were here with us.”

“I think you should go back,” his father said. “What’s the point of hanging around here doing nothing?”

“It’s not safe,” his mother insisted. “What if something happens?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just as safe there as it is here.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she asked.

“Look,” his father said. “All I know is that if he stays here, he’s just gonna keep going out and getting drunk with his buddies every night.” He turned to Tom. “Am I wrong?”

Tom gave a shrug of nondenial. He knew he’d been drinking way too much and was beginning to wonder if he needed some kind of professional help. But there was no way to talk about his drinking without talking about Verbecki, and that was a subject he really didn’t feel like discussing with anyone.

“You think he’s gonna drink any less in college?” his mother asked. Tom found it both troubling and interesting to listen to his parents discuss him in the third person, as if he weren’t actually there.

“He’ll have to,” his father said. “He won’t be able to get drunk every night and keep up with his work.”

His mother started to say something, then decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. She looked at Tom, holding his gaze for a few seconds, making a silent plea for his support.

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m pretty confused.”

In the end, his decision was influenced less by his parents than his friends. One by one over the next few days, they told him that they would be heading back to their respective schools for second semester—Paul to FIU, Matt to Gettysburg, Jason to U. of Delaware. Without his buddies around, the idea of staying home lost a lot of its appeal.

His mother reacted stoically when he informed her of his decision. His father gave him a congratulatory slap on the shoulder.

“You’ll be fine,” he said.

The drive to Syracuse felt a lot longer in January than it had in September, and not just because of the intermittent snow squalls that blew across the highway in swirling gusts, turning the other vehicles into ghostly shadows. The mood in the car was oppressive. Tom couldn’t think of much to say, and his parents were barely speaking to each other. That was how it had been since he’d come home—his mother gloomy and withdrawn, brooding about Jen Sussman and the meaning of what had happened; his father impatient, grimly cheerful, a little too insistent that the worst was over and they needed to just get on with their lives. If nothing else, he thought, it would be a relief to get away from them.

His parents didn’t stay long after dropping him off. There was a big storm coming, and they wanted to get on the road before it hit. His mother handed him an envelope before leaving the dorm.

“It’s a bus ticket.” She hugged him with a tenacity that was almost alarming. “Just in case you change your mind.”

“I love you,” he whispered.

His father’s hug was quick, almost perfunctory, as if they’d be seeing each other again in a day or two.

“Have fun,” he said. “You only get one shot at college.”

DURING THE Special Spring Session, Tom pledged Alpha Tau Omega. Joining a frat was something he’d wanted to do for so long—in his mind, it was synonymous with college itself—that the process was well under way before he was able to admit that it no longer mattered to him in the least. When he tried to project himself into the future, to envision the life that awaited him at ATO—the big house on Walnut Place, the wild parties and nutty pranks, the late-night bull sessions with brothers who would go on to be his lifelong friends and allies—it all seemed hazy and unreal to him, images from a movie he’d seen a long time ago and whose plot he could no longer remember.

He could’ve withdrawn, of course, maybe rushed again in the fall when he felt better, but he decided to tough it out. He told himself that he didn’t want to bail out on Tyler Rucci, his floormate and pledge brother, but in his heart he knew that the stakes were higher than that. He’d pretty much stopped going to classes by the end of February—he was finding it impossible to concentrate on academics—so the pledge process was all he had left, his only real link to normal college life. Without it, he would’ve become one of those lost souls you saw all over campus that winter, pale, vampiry kids who slept all day and drifted from the dorm to the student center to Marshall Street at night, habitually checking their phones for a message that never seemed to come.

Another benefit of pledging was that it gave him something to talk about with his parents, who called almost every day to check up on him. He wasn’t a particularly good liar, so it helped to be able to say, We went on a scavenger hunt, or We had to cook breakfast in bed for the older brothers, and then serve it to them in flowery aprons, and to have details at the ready to back up these claims. It was a lot harder when his mother grilled him about his schoolwork, and he was forced to improvise about essays and exams and the brutal problem sets in Statistics.

“What’d you get on that paper?” she’d ask.

“Which paper?”

“Poli Sci. The one we talked about.”

“Oh, that one. Another B+.”

“So he liked the thesis?”

“He didn’t really say.”

“Why don’t you e-mail me the essay? I’d like to read it.”

“You don’t need to read it, Mom.”

“I’d like to.” She paused. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.”

Tom always insisted everything was fine—he was busy, making friends, keeping up a solid B average. Even when discussing the frat, he made sure to emphasize the positive, focusing on things like the weekday study groups and the all-night intra-frat karaoke blowout, while avoiding any mention of Chip Gleason, the only active ATO brother who’d gone missing on October 14th.

Chip loomed large around the frat house. There was a framed portrait of him in the main party room, and a scholarship fund dedicated to his memory. The pledges had been required to memorize all sorts of personal information about him: his birthday, the names of his family members, his top-ten movies and bands, and the complete list of all the girls he’d hooked up with in his sadly abbreviated life. That was the hard part—there were thirty-seven girlfriends in all, starting with Tina Wong in junior high and ending with Stacy Greenglass, the buxom Alpha Chi who’d been in bed with him on October 14th—riding him reverse cowgirl-style, if legend were to be believed—and who had to be hospitalized for several days as a result of the severe emotional trauma brought on by his sudden midcoitus departure. Some of the brothers told this story as if it were a funny anecdote, a tribute to the studliness of their beloved friend, but all Tom could think of was how awful it must have been for Stacy, the kind of thing you’d never recover from.

One night at a Tri Delt mixer, though, Tyler Rucci pointed out a hot sorority girl on the dance floor, grinding with a varsity lacrosse player. She was tanned and wearing an incredibly tight dress, leaning forward as she moved her ass in slow circles against her partner’s crotch.

“You know who that is?”

“Who?”

“Stacy Greenglass.”

Tom watched her dance for a long time—she looked happy, running her hands over her breasts and then down over her hips and thighs, making porn star faces for the benefit of her friends—trying to figure out what she knew that he didn’t. He was willing to accept the possibility that Chip hadn’t meant much to her. Maybe he was just a one-time hookup, or a casual friend with benefits. But still, he was a real person, someone who played an active and reasonably important part in her life. And yet here she was, just a few months after he’d disappeared, dancing at a party as though he’d never even existed.

It wasn’t that Tom disapproved. Far from it. He just couldn’t figure out how it was possible that Stacy could get over Chip while he remained haunted by Verbecki, a kid he hadn’t seen for years and probably wouldn’t have even recognized if they’d bumped into each other on October 13th.

But that was how it was. He thought about Verbecki all the time. If anything, his obsession had deepened since he’d returned to school. He carried that stupid picture—Little Kid with Sparkler—everywhere he went and looked at it dozens of times a day, chanting his old friend’s name in his head as though it were some kind of mantra: Verbecki, Verbecki, Verbecki. It was the reason he was flunking out, the reason he was lying to his parents, the reason he no longer painted his face blue and orange and screamed his head off at the Dome, the reason he could no longer imagine his own future.

Where the hell did you go, Verbecki?

A BIG part of the pledge process was getting to know the Older Brothers, convincing them that you were a good fit with ATO. There were poker nights and pizza lunches and marathon drinking games, a series of interviews masquerading as social events. Tom thought he was doing a decent job of hiding his obsession, impersonating a normal, well-adjusted freshman—the guy he should have been—until he was approached one night in the TV room by Trevor Hubbard, a.k.a. Hubbs, a junior who was the frat’s resident bohemian/intellectual. Tom was leaning against a wall, pretending to be interested in a Wii bowling match between two of his pledge brothers, when Hubbs suddenly appeared at his side.

“This is fucked,” he said in a low voice, nodding at the wide-screen Sony, the virtual ball knocking down the virtual pins, Josh Freidecker flipping a celebratory double bird at Mike Ishima. “All this fraternity bullshit. I don’t know how anybody stands it.”

Tom grunted ambiguously, not sure if this was a ploy designed to catch him in an act of disloyalty. Hubbs hardly seemed the type to play that sort of game, though.

“Come here,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

Tom followed him into the empty hallway. It was a weeknight, still pretty early, not much going on in the house.

“You feeling okay?” Hubbs asked him.

“Me?” Tom said. “I’m fine.”

Hubbs regarded him with a certain skeptical amusement. He was a small, wiry guy—an accomplished rock climber—with scraggly facial hair and a sour expression that was more a default mode than a reflection of his actual mood.

“You’re not depressed?”

“I don’t know.” Tom gave an evasive shrug. “A little, maybe.”

“And you really want to join this frat, live here with all these douchebags?”

“I guess. I mean, I thought I did. Everything’s just kinda fucked up right now. It’s hard to know what I want.”

“I hear you.” Hubbs nodded appreciatively. “I used to be pretty happy here myself. Most of the brothers are pretty cool.” He glanced left and right, then lowered his voice to a near whisper. “The only one I didn’t like was Chip. He was the biggest asshole in the whole house.”

Tom nodded cautiously, trying not to look too surprised. He’d only ever heard people say nice things about Chip Gleason—great guy, good athlete, six-pack abs, ladies’ man, natural leader.

“He kept a hidden camera in his bedroom,” Hubbs said. “Used to tape the girls he fucked, then show the videos down in the TV room. One girl was so humiliated she had to leave school. Good old Chip didn’t care. Far as he was concerned, she was just a stupid whore who got what she deserved.”

“That sucks.” Tom was tempted to ask the girl’s name—it must have been among those he’d memorized—but decided to let it pass.

Hubbs stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. There was a smoke detector up there, red light glowing.

“Like I said, Chip was a dick. I should be happy he’s gone, you know?” Hubbs’s eyes locked on Tom’s. They were wide and frightened, full of a desperation Tom had no trouble recognizing, since he saw it all the time in the bathroom mirror. “But I dream about that fucker every night. I’m always trying to find him. I’ll be running through a maze, screaming his name, or tiptoeing through a forest, looking behind every tree. It’s got to the point I don’t even want to go to sleep anymore. Sometimes I write him letters, you know, just telling him what’s going on around here. Last weekend, I got so hammered, I tried to get his name tattooed on my forehead. The tattoo guy wouldn’t do it—that’s the only reason I’m not walking around with Chip Fucking Gleason written on my face.” Hubbs looked at Tom. It almost felt like he was pleading. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”

Tom nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

Hubbs’s face relaxed a little. “There’s this guy I’ve been reading about on the Web. He’s speaking at a church in Rochester on Saturday afternoon. I think he might be able to help us.”

“He’s a preacher?”

“Just a guy. He lost his son in October.”

Tom gave a sympathetic groan, but it didn’t mean anything. He was just being polite.

“We should go,” Hubbs said.

Tom was flattered by the invitation, but also a little scared. He had the feeling that Hubbs was a little unhinged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Saturday’s the hot dog–eating contest. The pledges are supposed to cook.”

Hubbs looked at Tom in amazement.

“A hot dog–eating contest? Are you fucking kidding me?”

TOM STILL marveled at the humble circumstances of his first encounter with Mr. Gilchrest. Later he would see the man speak in front of adoring crowds, but on that frigid March Saturday, no more than twenty people had gathered in an overheated church basement, small puddles of melted snow spreading out from each pair of shoes on the linoleum floor. Over time, the Holy Wayne movement would come to be associated primarily with young people, but that afternoon, the audience was mostly middle-aged or older. Tom felt out of place among them, as if he and Hubbs had wandered by mistake into a retirement planning seminar.

Of course, the man they’d come to see wasn’t famous yet. He was still, as Hubbs had said, “just a guy,” a grieving father who spoke to anyone who would listen, wherever they would have him—not just in houses of worship, but in senior centers, VFW halls, and private homes. Even the host of the event—a tall, slightly stooped, youngish man who introduced himself as Reverend Kaminsky—seemed a bit fuzzy about who Mr. Gilchrest was and what he was doing there.

“Good afternoon, and welcome to the fourth installment of our Saturday lecture series, ‘The Sudden Departure from a Christian Perspective.’ Our guest speaker today, Wayne Gilchrest, hails from just down the road in Brookdale and comes highly recommended by my esteemed colleague, Dr. Finch.” The Reverend paused, in case anyone wanted to applaud for his esteemed colleague. “When I asked Mr. Gilchrest to provide a title for his lecture so I could list it on our website, he told me it was a work in progress. So I’m just as curious as all of you to hear what he has to say.”

People who only knew Mr. Gilchrest in his later, more charismatic incarnation wouldn’t have recognized the man who rose from a chair in the front row and turned to face the meager crowd. Holy Wayne’s future uniform consisted of jeans and T-shirts and studded leather wristbands—one reporter dubbed him the “Bruce Springsteen of cult leaders”—but back then he favored more formal attire, on that day an ill-fitting funeral suit that seemed to have been borrowed from a smaller, less powerful man. It looked uncomfortably tight across the chest and shoulders.

“Thank you, Reverend. And thanks, everybody, for coming out.” Mr. Gilchrest spoke in a gruff voice that radiated masculine authority. Later, Tom would learn that he drove a delivery van for UPS, but if he’d had to guess that afternoon, he would’ve pegged him for a police officer or high school football coach. He glanced at his host, frowning an insincere apology. “I guess I didn’t realize that I was supposed to be speaking from a Christian perspective. I’m really not sure what my perspective is.”

He began by passing out a flyer, one of those missing person notices you saw all over the place after October 14th, on telephone poles and supermarket corkboards. This one featured a color photograph of a skinny kid standing on a diving board, hugging himself against the cold. Beneath his crossed arms, his ribs were clearly visible; his legs jutted like sticks from billowy trunks that looked like they would have fit a grown man. He was smiling but his eyes seemed troubled; you got the feeling he didn’t relish the prospect of plunging into the dark water. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY? The caption identified him as Henry Gilchrest, age eight. It included an address and phone number, along with an urgent plea for anyone who may have seen a child resembling Henry to contact his parents immediately. PLEASE!!! WE ARE DESPERATE FOR INFORMATION REGARDING HIS WHEREABOUTS.

“This is my son.” Mr. Gilchrest stared fondly at the flyer, almost as if he’d forgotten where he was. “I could spend the whole afternoon telling you about him, but it’s not gonna do much good, is it? You never smelled his hair after he just got out of the bath, or carried him from the car after he’d fallen asleep on the way home, or heard the way he laughed when someone tickled him. So you’ll just have to take my word for it: He was a great kid and he made you glad to be alive.”

Tom glanced at Hubbs, curious to know if this was what they’d come for, a blue-collar guy reminiscing about his departed son. Hubbs just shrugged and turned back to Mr. Gilchrest.

“You can’t really tell from the picture, but Henry was a little small for his age. He was a good athlete, though. Lotta quickness. Good reflexes and hand-eye coordination. Soccer and baseball were his games. I tried to get him interested in basketball, but he didn’t go for it, maybe because of the height thing. We took him skiing a couple of times, but he wasn’t crazy about that, either. We didn’t push too hard. We figured he’d let us know when he was ready to try again. You know what I’m saying, right? Seemed like there was time enough for everything.”

In school, Tom couldn’t sit still for lectures. After the first few minutes, the professor’s words blurred into a meaningless drone, a sluggish river of pretentious phrases. He got jittery and lost his focus, becoming intensely and unhelpfully conscious of his physical self—twitchy legs, dry mouth, grumbly digestive organs. No matter how he arranged himself on his chair, the posture always struck him as awkward and uncomfortable. For some reason, though, Mr. Gilchrest had the opposite effect on him. Tom felt calm and lucid as he listened, almost bodiless. Settling back into his chair, he had a sudden bewildering vision of the hot dog–eating contest he’d blown off at the frat house, big guys cramming their faces full of meat and bread, cheeks bulging, their eyes full of fear and disgust.

“Henry was smart, too,” Mr. Gilchrest continued, “and I’m not just saying that. I’m a pretty good chess player and I’m telling you, he could give me a run for my money by the time he was seven. You should have seen the look on his face when he played. He got real serious, like you could see the wheels turning in his head. Sometimes I made boneheaded moves to keep him in the game, but that just ticked him off. He’d be like, Come on, Dad. You did that on purpose. He didn’t want to be patronized, but he didn’t want to lose, either.”

Tom smiled, remembering a similar father-son dynamic from his own childhood, a weird mixture of competition and encouragement, worship and resentment. He felt a brief stab of tenderness, but the sensation was muffled somehow, as if his father were an old friend with whom he’d fallen out of touch.

Mr. Gilchrest pondered the flyer again. When he looked up, his face seemed naked, utterly defenseless. He took a deep breath, as if he were preparing to go underwater.

“I’m not gonna say much about what it was like after he left. To tell the truth, I barely remember those days. It’s a blessing, I think, like the traumatic amnesia people get after a car accident or major surgery. I can tell you one thing, though. I was awful to my wife in those first few weeks. Not that there was anything I could’ve done to make her feel better—there was no such thing as feeling better back then. But what I did, I made things worse. She needed me, and I couldn’t say a kind word, couldn’t even look at her sometimes. I started sleeping on the couch, sneaking out in the middle of the night and driving around for hours without telling her where I was going or when I’d be back. If she called, I wouldn’t answer my phone.

“I guess in some way I blamed her. Not for what happened to Henry—I knew that was nobody’s fault. I just … I didn’t mention this before, but Henry was an only child. We wanted to have more, but my wife had a cancer scare when he was two, and the doctors recommended a hysterectomy. Seemed like a no-brainer at the time.

“After we lost Henry, I kind of got obsessed with the idea that we needed to have another kid. Not to replace him—I’m not crazy like that—but just to start over, you know? I had it in my head that that was the only way we could live again, but it was impossible, because of her, because she was physically incapable of bearing me another child.

“I decided that I would leave her. Not right away, but in a few months, when she was stronger and people wouldn’t judge me so harshly. It was a secret I had, and it made me feel guilty, and somehow I blamed her for that, too. It was a feedback loop, and it just kept getting worse. But then, one night, my son came to me in a dream. You know how sometimes you see people in dreams, and it’s not really them, but somehow it is them? Well, this wasn’t like that. This was my son, clear as day, and he said, Why are you hurting my mother? I denied it, but he just shook his head, like he was disappointed in me. You need to help her.

“I’m embarrassed to admit this, but it had been weeks since I’d touched my wife. Not just sexually—I mean I literally hadn’t touched her. Hadn’t stroked her hair or squeezed her hand or patted her on the back. And she was crying all the time.” Mr. Gilchrest’s voice cracked with emotion. He wiped the back of his hand almost angrily across his mouth and nose. “So the next morning I got up and gave her a hug. I put my arms around her and told her I loved her and didn’t blame her for anything, and it was almost like saying it made it true. And then something else came into my mind. I don’t know where it came from. I said, Give me your pain. I can take it.” He paused, looking at his audience with an almost apologetic expression. “This is the part that’s hard to explain. Those words were barely out of my mouth when I felt a weird jolt in my stomach. My wife let out a gasp and went limp in my arms. And I knew right then, as clearly as I’d ever known anything, that an enormous amount of pain had been transferred from her body into mine.

“I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t blame you. I’m just telling you what happened. I’m not saying I fixed her or cured her, or anything like that. To this day, she’s still sad. Because there’s not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I’m just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn’t hurt me at all.”

A change seemed to come over Mr. Gilchrest. He stood up straighter and placed his hand over his heart.

“That was the day I learned who I am,” he declared. “I’m a sponge for pain. I just soak it up and it makes me stronger.”

The smile that spread across his face was so joyful and self-assured he seemed almost like a different person.

“I don’t care if you believe me. All I ask is that you give me a chance. I know you’re all hurting. You wouldn’t be here on a Saturday afternoon if you weren’t. I want you to let me hug you and take away your pain.” He turned to Reverend Kaminsky. “You first.”

The minister was clearly reluctant, but he was the host and couldn’t see any polite way out. He rose from his chair and approached Mr. Gilchrest, casting a skeptical sidelong glance at the audience on the way, letting them know he was just being a good sport.

“Tell me,” Mr. Gilchrest said. “Is there a special someone you’ve been missing? A person whose absence seems especially troubling to you? Anyone at all. Doesn’t have to be a close friend or member of your family.”

Reverend Kaminsky seemed surprised by the question. After a brief hesitation he said, “Eva Washington. She was a classmate of mine in divinity school. I didn’t know her that well, but …”

“Eva Washington.” Mr. Gilchrest stepped forward, the sleeves of his suit jacket creeping toward his elbows as he spread his arms. “You miss Eva.”

At first it seemed like an unremarkable social hug, the kind people exchange all the time. But then, with startling abruptness, Reverend Kaminsky’s knees buckled and Mr. Gilchrest grunted, almost as if he’d been punched in the gut. His face tightened into a grimace, then relaxed.

“Wow,” he said. “That was a lot.”

The two men held each other for a long time. When they separated, the Reverend was sobbing, one hand clamped over his mouth. Mr. Gilchrest turned to the audience.

“Single file,” he said. “I have time for everybody.”

Nothing happened for a moment or two. But then a heavyset woman in the third row stood up and made her way to the front. Before long, all but a few members of the audience had left their seats. “No pressure,” Mr. Gilchrest assured the holdouts. “I’m here when you’re ready.”

Tom and Hubbs were near the end of the line, so they were familiar with the process by the time their turns arrived. Hubbs went first. He told Mr. Gilchrest about Chip Gleason, and Mr. Gilchrest repeated Chip’s name before pulling Hubbs against his chest in a strong, almost paternal embrace.

“It’s okay,” Mr. Gilchrest told him. “I’m right here.”

Several seconds passed before Hubbs let out a yelp and Mr. Gilchrest staggered backward, his eyes widening with alarm. Tom thought they were about to crash onto the floor like wrestlers, but somehow they managed to remain upright, performing a precarious dance until they regained their balance. Mr. Gilchrest laughed and said, “Easy, partner,” patting Hubbs gently on the back before letting him go. Hubbs looked wobbly and dazed as he returned to his seat.

Mr. Gilchrest smiled as Tom stepped forward. Up close his eyes seemed brighter than Tom had expected, as if he were glowing from within.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Tom Garvey.”

“Who’s your special someone, Tom?”

“Jon Verbecki. This kid I used to know.”

“Jon Verbecki. You miss Jon.”

Mr. Gilchrest opened his arms. Tom stepped forward, into his strong embrace. Mr. Gilchrest’s torso felt broad and sturdy, but also soft, unexpectedly yielding. Tom felt something loosen inside of him.

“Give it here,” Mr. Gilchrest whispered in his ear. “It doesn’t hurt me.”

Later, in the car, neither Tom nor Hubbs had much to say about what they’d felt in the church basement. They both seemed to understand that describing it was beyond their powers, the gratitude that spreads through your body when a burden gets lifted, and the sense of homecoming that follows, when you suddenly remember what it feels like to be yourself.

SHORTLY AFTER midterms, Tom received a flurry of increasingly agitated voice, text, and e-mail messages from his parents, imploring him to contact them immediately. From what he could gather, the university had sent them some sort of formal warning that he was in danger of failing all his classes.

He didn’t respond for a few days, hoping the delay would give them time to cool off, but their attempts to reach him only grew more frantic and aggressive. Finally, unnerved by their threats to alert the campus police, cancel his credit card, and cut off his cell phone service, he gave in and called them back.

“What the hell’s going on up there?” his father demanded.

“We’re worried about you,” his mother cut in, speaking on a separate handset. “Your English teacher hasn’t seen you in weeks. And you didn’t even take your Poli Sci exam, the one you said you got a B on.”

Tom winced. It was embarrassing to be caught in a lie, especially one so big and stupid. Unfortunately, all he could think to do was lie again.

“That was my bad. I overslept. I was too embarrassed to tell you.”

“That’s not gonna cut it,” his father said. “You know how much it costs for one semester of college?”

Tom was surprised by the question, and a bit relieved. His parents had money. It was a lot easier to apologize for wasting some of it than to explain what he’d been doing for the past two months.

“I know it’s expensive, Dad. I really don’t take it for granted.”

“That’s not the issue,” his mother said. “We’re happy to pay for your college. But something’s wrong with you. I can hear it in your voice. We should never have let you go back there.”

“I’m fine,” Tom insisted. “It’s just that the frat stuff’s been taking up way more of my time than I thought it would. Hell Week’s the end of this month, and then everything’ll get back to normal. If I work hard, I’m pretty sure I can pass all my classes.”

He heard an odd silence at the other end of the connection, as if each of his parents was waiting for the other one to speak.

“Honey,” his mother said softly. “It’s too late for that.”

AT THE frat house that night, Tom told Hubbs that he was withdrawing from school. His parents were coming on Saturday to take him home. They had his whole life figured out—a full-time job at his father’s warehouse, and two sessions a week with a therapist who specialized in young adults with grief disorders.

“Apparently I have a grief disorder.”

“Welcome to the club,” Hubbs told him.

Tom hadn’t mentioned it to his parents, but he’d already seen a psychologist at the University Health Service, a mustachioed Middle Eastern guy with watery eyes who’d informed him that his obsession with Verbecki was just a defense mechanism, and a common one at that, a smoke screen to distract him from more serious questions and troubling emotions. This theory made no sense to Tom—what good was a defense mechanism if it fucked up your whole life? What the hell was it defending you from?

“Damn,” said Hubbs. “What are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t go back home. Not right now.”

Hubbs looked worried. The two of them had grown closer in the past couple of weeks, bonding over their shared fascination with Mr. Gilchrest. They’d attended two more of his lectures, each with an audience double the size of the previous one. The most recent had been at Keuka College, and it had been thrilling to see the way he connected with a young audience. The hugging session lasted almost two hours; when it was over, he was dripping wet, barely able to stand, a fighter who’d gone the distance.

“I have some friends who live off campus,” Hubbs told him. “If you want, you can probably crash there for a few days.”

Tom packed his things, drained his bank account, and slipped out of the dorm on Friday night. When his parents showed up the next day, all they found were some books, a disconnected printer, and an unmade bed, along with a letter in which Tom told them a little about Mr. Gilchrest and apologized for letting them down. He told them that he would be traveling for a while, and promised to keep in touch via e-mail.

“I’m sorry,” he wrote. “This is a really confusing time for me. But there are some things I need to figure out on my own, and I hope you’ll respect my decision.”

HE STAYED with Hubbs’s buddies through the end of the semester, then sublet their apartment when they headed home for summer vacation. Hubbs moved in with him; they got hired as detailers at a car dealership and did volunteer work for Mr. Gilchrest in their spare time, passing out leaflets, setting up folding chairs, collecting addresses for an e-mail list, whatever he needed.

That summer things really started to take off. Someone posted a clip of Mr. Gilchrest on YouTube—it was tagged I AM A SPONGE FOR YOUR PAIN—and it went viral. The crowds at his lectures grew bigger, the invitations to speak more frequent. By September, he was renting a mothballed Episcopal church in Rochester, holding marathon Hug-fests every Saturday and Sunday morning. Tom and Hubbs sometimes manned the merch table in the lobby, selling lecture DVDs, T-shirts—the most popular one said GIVE IT TO ME on the front, and I CAN TAKE IT on the back—and a self-published paperback memoir entitled A Father’s Love.

Mr. Gilchrest traveled a lot that fall—it was the first anniversary of the Sudden Departure—giving lectures all over the country. Tom and Hubbs were among the volunteers who drove him to and from the airport, getting to know him as a person, gradually earning his trust. When the organization began expanding that spring, Mr. Gilchrest asked the two of them to run the Boston chapter, organizing and promoting a multi-campus speaking tour and doing whatever else they saw fit to increase awareness among the local college population of what he’d begun calling the Healing Hug Movement. It was exhilarating to be given so much responsibility, to have gotten in on the ground floor of a phenomenon that had taken off so unexpectedly—like working at an Internet start-up back in the day, Tom thought—but also a little dizzying, everything growing so quickly, shooting off in so many different directions at once.

During that first summer in Boston, Tom and Hubbs began hearing disturbing rumors from people they knew back at the Rochester headquarters. Mr. Gilchrest was changing, they said, letting the fame go to his head. He’d bought a fancy car, started wearing different clothes, and was paying a little too much attention to the adoring young women and teenage girls who lined up to hug him. He’d apparently begun calling himself “Holy Wayne” and hinting about some sort of special relationship with God. On a couple of occasions, he had referred to Jesus as his brother.

When he arrived in September to give his first lecture to a packed house at Northeastern, Tom could see that it was true. Mr. Gilchrest was a new man. The heartbroken father in the shabby suit was gone, replaced by a rock star in sunglasses and a tight black T-shirt. When he greeted Tom and Hubbs there was an imperious coolness in his voice, as if they were simply hired help, rather than devoted followers. He instructed them to give backstage passes to any cute girls who seemed promising, “especially if they’re Chinese or Indian or like that.” Onstage, he didn’t just offer hugs and sympathy; he spoke of accepting a God-given mission to fix the world, to somehow undo the damage caused by the Sudden Departure. The details remained vague, he explained, not because he was holding out, but because he himself didn’t know them all yet. They were coming to him piecemeal, in a series of visionary dreams.

“Stay tuned,” he told the audience. “You’ll be the first to know. The world is depending on us.”

Hubbs was troubled by what he saw that night. He thought Mr. Gilchrest had gotten drunk on his own Kool-Aid, that he’d morphed from an inspirational figure to the CEO of a messianic Cult of Personality (it wasn’t the last time Tom would hear this accusation). After a few days of soul-searching, Hubbs told Tom that he was done, that while he loved Mr. Gilchrest, he couldn’t in good conscience continue to serve Holy Wayne. He said he would be leaving Boston, heading back to his family on Long Island. Tom tried to talk to him out of it, but Hubbs was beyond persuasion.

“Something bad’s gonna happen,” he said. “I can feel it.”

IT TOOK a whole year for Hubbs to be proven right, and during that time, Tom remained a loyal follower and valued employee of the Healing Hug Movement, helping to launch new field offices in Chapel Hill and Columbus before landing a plum job at the San Francisco Center, training new teachers to run Special Someone Meditation Workshops. Tom loved the city and enjoyed meeting a batch of new students every month. He had a few affairs—the novice teachers were mostly women—but not nearly as many as he could have. He was a different person now, more self-contained and contemplative, a far cry from the frat boy with the painted face, out to get laid by any means necessary.

On paper, the movement was thriving—membership was growing steadily, money was pouring in, the media was paying attention—but Mr. Gilchrest’s behavior was becoming increasingly erratic. He was arrested in Philadelphia after being found in a hotel room with a fifteen-year-old girl. The case was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence—the girl insisted that they were “just talking”—but Mr. Gilchrest’s reputation suffered a serious blow. Several of his college lectures were canceled, and for a while, Holy Wayne became a punch line on late-night TV, the most recent incarnation of that age-old scoundrel, the Horny Man of God.

Stung by the ridicule, Mr. Gilchrest abandoned his headquarters in Upstate New York and moved to a ranch in a remote part of southern Oregon, far from prying eyes. Tom had visited only once, in mid-June, to take part in a gala three-day celebration of what would have been Henry Gilchrest’s eleventh birthday. The accommodations weren’t much—the hundred or so guests had to sleep in tents and share a few nasty Porta-Johns—but it was an honor just to be invited, a sign of membership in the inner circle of the organization.

For the most part, Tom liked what he saw—big weathered house, swimming pool, working farm, stables. Only two things bothered him: the contingent of gun-toting security guards patrolling the grounds—there had supposedly been some death threats against Holy Wayne—and the inexplicable presence of six hot teenage girls, five of them Asian, who were living in the main house with Mr. Gilchrest and his wife, Tori. The girls—they were jokingly referred to as the “Cheerleading Squad”—spent their days sunning themselves beside the pool while Tori Gilchrest power-walked by herself around the outskirts of the property, breathing forcefully through her nose while performing an elaborate series of arm exercises with light dumbbells.

Tom didn’t think she looked too happy, but on the final night of the party, Tori was the one who stepped up to the microphone on the outdoor stage and introduced the girls as Mr. Gilchrest’s “spiritual brides.” She admitted that it was an unconventional arrangement, but she wanted the community to know that her husband had asked for—and received—her blessing for each and every one of these new marriages. The girls—they were standing behind her, smiling nervously in their pretty dresses—were all sweet and modest and surprisingly mature for their ages, not to mention completely adorable. As everyone knew, she herself could no longer bear children, and this was a problem, because God had recently revealed to Holy Wayne that it was his destiny to father a child who would repair the broken world. One of these girls—Iris or Cindy or Mei or Christine or Lam or Anna—would be the mother of this miracle child, but only time would tell which one. Mrs. Gilchrest concluded by saying that the love between her and Holy Wayne remained as strong and vibrant as it had been on their wedding day. She assured everyone that they continued to live together very happily as husband and wife, partners and best friends forever.

“Whatever my husband does,” she said, “I support him a hundred and ten percent and I hope you will, too!”

There was a roar from the crowd as Mr. Gilchrest bounded up the steps and made his way across the stage to present his wife with a bouquet of roses.

“Isn’t she the greatest?” he asked. “Am I the luckiest guy in the world or what?”

The spiritual brides began to applaud as Mr. Gilchrest kissed his legal wife, and the crowd followed suit. Tom did his best to clap along with everyone else, but his hands felt huge and leaden, so heavy he could barely pry them apart.

CHRISTINE SAID she was bored, trapped in the house all day like a prisoner, so Tom took her for a whirlwind tour of the city. He was glad for an excuse to get away from the office. It was like a funeral in there—no seminars in session, nothing to do except sit around with Max and Luis, answering e-mails and the occasional phone call, parroting the talking points they’d been given by headquarters: The charges are bogus; Holy Wayne is innocent until proven guilty; an organization is bigger than one man; our faith remains unshakable.

It was a classic San Francisco day, cool and bright, milky morning fog surrendering reluctantly to a clear blue sky. They did the usual stuff—cable car and Fisherman’s Wharf, Coit Tower and North Beach, Haight-Ashbury and Golden Gate Park—Tom playing the role of jovial guide, Christine chuckling at his lame jokes, grunting politely at his half-remembered facts and recycled anecdotes, just as happy as he was to think about something besides Mr. Gilchrest for a while.

He was surprised at how well they were getting along. Back at the house, she’d been a bit of a problem, a little too interested in pulling rank, reminding everyone of her exalted status within the organization. Nothing was good enough—the futon was lumpy, the bathroom was gross, the food tasted weird. But the fresh air brought out a previously concealed sweetness in her, a bouncy teenage energy that had been hidden beneath the regal attitude. She dragged him into vintage clothing stores, apologized to homeless guys for her lack of spare change, and stopped every couple of blocks to gaze down at the bay and pronounce it awesome.

Christine kept moving in and out of focus on him. Yes, she was a visiting dignitary—Mr. Gilchrest’s wife or whatever—but she was also just a kid, younger than his own sister and a lot less worldly, a small-town Ohio girl, who, until she ran away from home, had never been to a city bigger than Cleveland. But not really like his sister, either, because people didn’t stop and stare at Jill when she walked down the street, tripped up by her unearthly beauty, trying to figure out if she was famous, if they’d seen her on TV or something. He wasn’t sure how to treat Christine, if he should think of himself as a personal assistant or a surrogate big brother, or maybe just a helpful friend, a caring, slightly older guy showing her around an unfamiliar metropolis.

“I had a nice day,” she told him over a late-afternoon snack at Elmore’s, a café on Cole Street that was full of Barefoot People, hippies with bullseyes painted on their foreheads. The Bay Area was their spiritual homeland. “It’s good to be out of the house.”

“Anytime,” he said. “I’m happy to do it.”

“Sooo.” Her voice was low, slightly flirtatious, as if she suspected him of withholding good news. “Have you heard anything?”

“About what?”

“You know. When he’s getting out. When I can go back.”

“Back where?”

“To the Ranch. I really miss it.”

Tom wasn’t sure what to tell her. She’d seen the same TV reports he had. She knew that Mr. Gilchrest had been denied bail, and that the authorities were playing hardball, seizing the organization’s assets, arresting several top and midlevel people, squeezing them for damaging information. The FBI and State Police made no secret of the fact that they were actively searching for the underage girls Mr. Gilchrest claimed to have married—not because they’d done anything wrong, but because they were victims of a serious crime, endangered minors in need of medical care and psychological counseling.

“Christine,” he said, “you can’t go back there.”

“I have to,” she told him. “It’s where I live.”

“They’ll make you testify.”

“No, they won’t.” She sounded defiant, but he could see the doubt in her eyes. “Wayne said everything would be okay. He’s got really good lawyers.”

“He’s in big trouble, Christine.”

“They can’t put him in jail,” she insisted. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

Tom didn’t argue; there was no point. When Christine spoke again, her voice was small and frightened.

“What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “Who’s gonna take care of me?”

“You can stay with us for as long as you want.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

This didn’t seem like the right time to tell her that he didn’t have any money, either. He and Max and Luis were technically volunteers, donating their time to the Healing Hug Movement in exchange for room and board and a paltry stipend. The only cash in his pocket had come from the envelope Christine had handed him when she’d arrived, two hundred dollars in twenties, the most money he’d seen in a long time.

“What about your family?” he asked. “Is that a possibility?”

“My family?” The idea seemed funny to her. “I can’t go back to my family. Not like this.”

“Like what?”

She tucked her chin, examining the front of her yellow T-shirt, as if searching for a stain. She had narrow shoulders and very small breasts, hardly there at all.

“Didn’t they tell you?” She ran her palm over her flat belly, smoothing the wrinkles from her shirt.

“Tell me what?”

When she looked up, her eyes were shining.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. He could hear the pride in her voice, a dreamy sense of wonder. “I’m the One.”