If the world had carried on as it was, I might have given Pastor Dan a second chance after he showed me his demon collection. He was handsome after all, and I felt safe with him since he was a pastor. Most of the women at church wanted to marry him because marrying a pastor was a quick and relatively easy way to raise their social status in our group of friends. I felt so embarrassed for him, though, about his demon jars.
Like all the pastors, Dan made a good salary, and he’d bought a house in a nice part of town. It had three bedrooms, one of which he'd made into a charming little sanctuary with a stained-glass window and an altar with a padded kneeling rail. Since our church had a contemporary design, more like a movie theater, I figured he wanted some old-time religion.
When he insisted on showing me his basement on our third date, I was nervous. I never like to be underground, and how many good dates have ended in basements? But to show I wasn’t afraid, I descended with him.
His basement was all concrete and cobwebs lit by bare bulbs. He directed me to the far wall, where two heavy wooden bookshelves were stocked with mason jars covered in sleeves of bright construction paper. Weird, he didn’t seem like the type of guy who made his own fruit preserves.
“This is something very special, Jane,” he assured me, plucking a jar from its shelf and displaying the label for me. The words “Ted Bundy” had been written in black marker on the sunny yellow paper, like it was a first-grade craft project filled with imaginary bumble bees. “Since I got saved, I’ve taken a special interest in suppressing and upsetting demons, keeping them in jail until the time of wrath comes. This one’s special. That is, especially evil. It was once inside Ted Bundy, the serial killer.”
“But didn’t he die before you were born?” I said, trying to sound confused instead of sarcastic.
“Yes, but this demon had been wandering the earth after his execution, until the day it landed on the rail of my front porch. Can you believe it?”
I hoped it was a practical joke. Youth pastors loved to joke around. But he didn’t crack a smile this time.
Pastor Dan was vague on his methods, maybe because he didn’t want any competitors, but it seemed that through the power of his connection to God or something, he had subdued and captured the demon that had once been inside Ted Bundy.
He showed me more of the jars, telling me about the different kinds of demons, small ones and large ones, ones that looked like apples and ones that looked like rats. They could appear and disappear, run faster than cars, fly in the air like birds. Once a demon possessed someone, it carried a piece of that person’s soul forever after. Like a souvenir.
“But now these little demons are trapped all alone,” he said, “and that’s how they’ll remain until the rapture and final judgment when Jesus throws all evil creatures into a lake of fire. I’ll be right there beside him, tossing in the ones I caught. I think he’ll be proud, Jane. I really do.”
“Do you think you’ll live long enough to see the final days?” I asked. “Won’t you be raptured or something?”
“Jane, surely God won’t deprive me of the great pleasure of throwing these little suckers into the eternal lake of fire to be burned beside their master, the great dragon Satan. God’s always been good to me, and I’ve got to bet he’ll keep on with his goodness. He will preserve me as one of His own. A demon-catcher and destroyer.”
His eyes were like stones smoothed by a river, so striking that I forgot to ask how he’d transport so many jars to that important fire at the end of time. There were way too many of them for one person to carry. I hoped he didn’t expect me to help, because I wouldn’t. Not even if I’d loved him all my life.
“Do you really hate these demons, or are you kind of…interested in them?” I said. I’d met too many people who were fascinated by evil. Especially too many men.
He recoiled at my question. I’d managed to shock him.
“I definitely hate them… but I guess I’m also interested in them, the way you’d be interested in a science project. Don’t you ever get curious about why terrible things happen, or why bad people are the way they are?”
I agreed with him to be polite, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t like to think about evil. I was raised by my Grandma to believe in the power of thoughts. She used that power, but it seemed better to me to avoid it.
I pretended to have a good, normal time for the rest of the night while we ate pizza and watched a movie about cartoon penguins rescuing a seal, but the next morning I texted him: “I’m afraid that we aren’t right for each other. I’m sorry!”
He replied: “I got the same message from God. God is good! ;) Let’s be friends.”
Two days later, when I was telling Melissa and Alison at our Sunday small group what happened, I found out that he always reveals the demon jars to women on third dates. Unlike me, they were fine with the demons. What bothered them was his past as a dancer for bachelorette parties. That was his other third-date revelation. I didn't mind that, but it made some women feel uncomfortable given the church’s teachings about the importance of purity, especially for future wives. “Purity” was too esoteric for me, like a fairy in a fairy tale. I was glad to know he could make a living if his pastor gig ever fell through.
The following Friday night, he was off on another first date with Tiffany Belle who headed up the greeting ministry, and I was having dinner with Grandma in her little house in the middle of the woods. I ended up telling her everything that had happened with Pastor Dan, even though I didn’t want to.
Grandma’s most prominent sign of age was that her brow had grown heavier and heavier, putting pressure on her hooded eyes, so that over the years she’d lost the ability to look surprised. Her heavy lids made her seem both world-exhausted and canny, though her face was otherwise relatively unmapped.
In spite of everything, I felt surprisingly jealous of Tiffany Belle and so desperate about my dating life that I started wondering if I could get old Pastor Dan back. Maybe I could live with demon jars in my basement. I could tell him that God had a change of heart about us. Grandma kept me honest, though. She was the only person I knew who made fun of my terrible decisions to my face.
“You keep trying to escape who you are,” Grandma said. “You think you can put on and take off masks all the time without changing the face underneath. It’s a dangerous game.”
“It’s not like that exactly,” I said. “What I’m doing is putting on masks to see which one feels right. Then my face underneath the mask will know how to go.”
Grandma listened, though I could see she didn’t understand. She didn’t seem to remember what it was like to need people.
“What is it you want from the world?” she said. “What are you chasing after?”
“Does that even matter? Didn’t Jesus give to the world instead of taking?”
Grandma hadn’t been inside a church for years, but she kept up a knowledge of such things. “You aren’t Jesus,” she told me.
“I never said I was! But I’m supposed to try, right?”
“I bet Jesus wouldn’t waste time with Pastor Dan like you just did.”
“He’s supposed to love all of us. That must mean wasting time with everyone.”
She shook her head. “That’s the thing I never understood about him.”
I didn’t try to proselytize. I’d learned to leave her to her own theology, a muesli of beatitudes, one-liners, intuition, and ancestral paganism.
She sprang to her feet—one flesh and one plastic—to put foil over her casserole dish of roasted sausages, potatoes, and apples. She wouldn’t tell me how she lost her other leg, but I’d never seen any old pictures of her where she had both legs. Maybe she’d always been missing one. Her prosthetic had improved in quality over the years, but even when it was blocky and creaky in my earliest days, she was faster than me or Mom. As far back as I could remember, Grandma never got tired.
Outside, a bad storm had swept up, and since she worried about me driving the winding forest roads with poor visibility, I agreed to stay overnight in her guest room. As far as I knew, I was the only guest she ever had.
“It would be cheaper for you to live here and be done with it,” she told me, just like she always did.
“It’d take me half an hour to drive to the library every day if I moved here. I can walk to work in ten minutes from my apartment.”
“And you think you’ve got to find a husband, too, don’t you? You think you can’t do that out here.”
“I don’t make the rules.”
“I do,” she said. “You could make them too if you were more like me.”
Poor Grandma. She couldn’t help that she was a narcissist. Life had shaped her into one, just like it had shaped me into a dutiful and obedient woman, following men right into their basements.
My friend Mallory had organized a brunch party the next day, so I set my phone alarm for 7:30. That would give me time to get home, put on makeup and curl my hair, and pick up pastries to bring along.
As it turned out, I’d never hear that phone alarm again.