18. Ethan
EIGHTEEN
Ethan
“Why are you going to church?” Patrick asks, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.
“Just am,” I reply, staring at my phone, hoping that Patrick will take the hint and drop it.
He doesn’t.
“In the ten years I’ve known you, you’ve never gone to church. I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
I scroll blindly through my email. “I do and I don’t. And church has nothing to do with God.”
“What’s going on, Ethan?”
“It doesn’t concern you, Patrick.”
Patrick doesn’t let it go. “And Levi is still in the penthouse?”
“He’s fine,” I snap, even though it’s not really true. Levi wasn’t happy about me leaving this morning. He didn’t say much, but I could tell. He doesn’t hide his emotions well. I like that about him, but it frustrated me this morning. Everything is frustrating me.
“Are you?” Patrick asks, his eyes in the rearview again. “Fine?”
“I’m busy,” I tell him and focus on my phone.
“You hate her, Ethan.”
My jaw clenches. I’ve never told Patrick that. I’ve never told him much of anything.
I’ve been physically vulnerable with him, and I know he’s seen my emotions. He’s seen me at my lowest. But whatever he thinks took me there, it’s a guess, and it couldn’t possibly be the truth.
No one knows the truth, not the full truth anyway. No one but me and Ruby.
It’s probably not fair that I hate her more than Paul, but I do. I absolutely fucking do. But then Paul is… not someone that I know how to think about.
So I blink him away. I blink it all away.
And when Patrick pulls up in front of the High Castle Church, which looks like any other grand event space in the city, complete with a gold and white awning, I get out without meeting his eyes.
I button my suitcoat. I lock in my expression.
And I walk through the open glass doors into a place I haven’t been in sixteen years.
God, it’s surreal. Like a dream. Like Hell in technicolor, masquerading as Heaven.
There’s a coffee shop in the atrium. There’s a gift shop too. The employees are all young, attractive women, mostly blondes, with bright white smiles.
There’s flowing golden script on the walls with corrupted Bible verses. There’s a white marble bust of stern-faced Byron Castle, Paul’s father and founder of High Castle Church. He was dead before my adoption, but Paul used to make me watch old recordings of his sermons.
All of it is familiar but upgraded. Same structure with new colors and new faces. But one thing definitely wasn’t here before, and I’m drawn straight to the golden statue as though it has its own gravitational pull.
That’s where I am when Ruby finds me.
“A good likeness, isn’t it?” she inquires in her sweet, Sunday voice.
I don’t look at her. I just keep staring up at golden Paul, standing quiet and dignified, with one hand clasping a golden lectern and the other open toward the viewer, toward me, in a way that has my scalp prickling. His face, TV-handsome, somehow expresses both caring and condemnation.
I shiver and close my eyes and find myself in a cold, dark room. Here, he isn’t smiling and he isn’t golden. Usually, he’s behind me, unseen, but this time he’s beside me, curled up on his side, pale and limp and dead.
I open my eyes and find him golden again. And he was, once, in my eyes.
He loved me, I think, before I made him sin.
Ruby slips her hand through my arm at the elbow. I manage not to flinch. I manage, in fact, to smile.
A good thing too, because when we turn, there are cameras.
There are always cameras.
That’s why Ruby has her dark hair in its church updo with the piece coiled and pinned at her temple. It’s her signature, that and the pearls around her neck. She knows the value of appearances. She knows how much they can hide.
We walk into the theater. It really can’t be called a nave. It has stadium seating, and the multilevel stage is big enough for a game show. It has to be, to accommodate the choir and other musicians, the interview couches, and secondary speaking platforms behind the pulpit.
The High Castle Church started smaller, of course. Byron Castle was a fire-and-brimstone televangelist in the 80s, popular for his booming voice and chilling sermons. He died famously of a heart attack during one of his sermons, right there on live TV in the mid-90s.
Paul, taking over, had a different style, quieter, colder, and even more terrifying. He was compassionate and threatening. He knew your secrets. He knew your sin.
Despite his compelling presence, Paul might easily have run High Castle into the ground, diminished the fortune that his father had amassed. Paul wasn’t a businessman like Byron. Fortunately, though, Paul married one.
Ruby did all this. The stadium. The dynamic angles. The transition to the digital and streaming age. Even the infiltration of High Castle into community spaces, like at the charity dinner. She’s widened its net.
Ruby isn’t wrong that the doubling of the High Castle fortune was her doing. She’s not wrong that she should have gotten all of it. But Paul, with his blind spot for business, died without a will, and by state law, the fortune got split between us.
Of course, no one expected Paul to die at 48.
Ruby and I walk down the steps to the family section, front and center. Paul’s sister is here, and she gives me a tight smile. Her daughters are here too. Her son, though, will be preaching, along with Pastor John Clifford. No women speak in this church, at least not from the pulpit.
Ruby tries to get me to sit beside Paul’s sister, but I resist, forcing her to either make a scene or sit there herself. Of course, she takes the seat and leaves me on the aisle.
There’s a hum of voices around us, and the cameras move along the tracks in the ceilings, swiveling and zooming, capturing the energy of the audience. In the control room, the footage is being expertly spliced and captioned before streaming onto the internet.
The sermon is free to entice new viewers, but at the end, it will cut off with prompts for viewers to subscribe to access the pastor’s post-sermon interviews and chats and all the other extra content. The live bands. The reality TV access to the Castle family dinner.
Fortunately, that shit didn’t begin until after Paul’s death, when Ruby had to get creative to retain subscribers. By then, I’d been sent away to boarding school.
I think Ruby was glad to send me away. She never liked having me in the spotlight with Paul. I’m an ugly reminder of the children she couldn’t have. I’m an ugly reminder of other things too.
I’m sure this moment is sickening her as much as it’s sickening me. But that sickness is always with me. This is only a flare in a chronic disease.
Eventually, the lights dim.
The crowd quiets to a murmur.
Footsteps ring out in a measured tread across the darkened stage. The figure is shadowy in the track lighting. Silence falls when he reaches the lectern, four perfect heartbeats of it. Then a spotlight blazes on, revealing Paul’s nephew, Peter.
The last time I saw Peter was at a family dinner the week before I murdered Paul.
He was scrawny then and just starting to get pimples.
We were always seated next to each other, and he always found some moment to whisper some shit to me when no one else could hear.
His favorite subject was my mother, who was in Hell, he said, because she killed herself.
I wish I would’ve hit him. Maybe if I’d unleashed some of my anger on him instead of locking it up, I wouldn’t have stabbed Paul six times.
“Sin,” Peter begins, “cannot be hidden from God. What use, then, to bury it inside yourself and pretend it isn’t there?
God is not fooled, and you have made it impossible for the Holy Blood to cleanse you.
So draw it up now, into your mind. See it, as God sees it.
Know it. You cannot prosper until you are cleansed.
” Peter allows a moment of gravid silence as his eyes sweep across the congregation.
His gaze settles on me for a moment then he looks to one of the cameras and delivers the High Castle line: “Praise Him that you are here.”
Peter drops his head in practiced reverence as the congregation echoes, “Praise Him.”
I do fine for a solid twenty minutes, long enough that I think I’m going to make it, long enough that I’m not even sure what triggers me.
I’m not actively registering the words. I’m not really even here, not in the present.
There are so many layered pieces, so many places in this room that I’ve been.
I see from a dozen vantage points. The choir, where I used to sing.
The pulpit even, where sometimes Paul brought me to stand beside him as he spoke about good works.
I was Paul’s good work. My adoption was the proof of his charity and his commitment to bringing people to God.
But I was also his sin, and he was mine.
He kissed me there at the pulpit once, when I was eleven and it was just us here on a Saturday night, rehearsing. He said he would help me repent later, for tempting him.
That was the first night I spent in the cellar of the Castle mansion, when Paul was still on his knees beside me instead of behind me, when he was still fighting the Devil.
It was another year before he started fucking me.
I have no recollection of standing up. All I know is that I’m on my feet and Ruby is hissing at me to sit down.
When she grabs my hand, my whole body convulses.
I yank free, and my feet start moving. They carry me up the steps, past the murmuring, shifting crowd, past all the cameras.
The ushers sway in front of the doors like they’re going to stop me, but they change their minds and skitter back as I fling open the double doors.
I don’t know why I don’t simply walk out of the building.
I could. The exit is right in front of me.
But I find myself walking through the atrium in some kind of fugue state.
I’m not really feeling anything. I’m not even fully in my body as I walk past Paul, immortalized in gold.
I’m so detached that I realize I’m moving toward the bathroom before I’m even aware of the nausea rolling up inside my gut.
I make it.
Out of habit, I even save my tie as I throw up into the pristine toilet. I’ve thrown up here before, plenty of times.
When it’s over, when there’s nothing inside me but an empty twisting, I flush away the sickness.
Then I scoot back and back and back until I find the wall.
My phone starts vibrating in my jacket pocket.
I feel it, vaguely, through the numbness.
I can’t make my hands work now, so I don’t check it or even silence it. I just let it buzz until it stops.
I don’t close my eyes because I know what’s behind my closed lids. Instead, I let them unfocus. I let everything unfocus until all that exists is the vague, numb grayness that filled me that night when I was sitting naked on the floor in his blood.