The Darker Side (30 page)

He pauses for some time, studying me. I don’t feel uncomfortable or violated by his scrutiny. There’s too much kindness there.

He stands up. “Follow me.”

“I’ll wait here,” Alan calls after me. “Maybe do a little praying about getting enough sleep tonight.”

I give him a halfhearted wave as I follow Father Yates toward the confessional booth. Two things are happening at the same time here; the thing I’m trying to see is getting clearer, stronger, brighter, and the voice in my head, the one that makes my stomach do loop-de-loops, is back.

I feel a cold, greasy sweat break out on my forehead.

“Let’s give you the full experience,” Father Yates says as we approach the confessional booth. “I’ll take up my normal position and you take the place of the penitent.”

“Sure,” I say, but I can hardly hear my own voice. Too many bat wings flapping around in my head.

I open the door and enter. There’s little light here. The booth is small and sparse, made of dark, poorly stained wood. A kneeler is set on the floor below the lattice screen that divides priest and penitent. I close the door and stare down at the kneeler.

In for a penny, in for a pound, I think. I want to laugh and cry at the same time.

This time the voice speaks out loud: See me.

I kneel in an instant. For some reason, this makes the voice go silent.

Father Yates slides the window open.

“Smaller than I remember,” I say.

“I take it you were much younger the last time you confessed,” he replies, amused.

“Well, let’s see…bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been—hmmm—about twenty-seven years since my last confession.”

“I see. Do you have anything to confess, my child?”

I freeze. I feel something rising inside me. It’s angry and ugly and bitter.

“Is that what you were thinking when you were looking at me back there, Father? That you’d get me in here and I’d spill my guts and find my faith again?”

“Just the spill your guts part,” he says, calm. “I think it’s a little too soon for the last.”

“Screw you.”

He sighs. “Agent Barrett, you are here, I am here, and inside these small walls, you’re safe. You can rage in here, you can weep in here, you can tell me anything, and it remains between you, me, and Christ. Something is troubling you, I can tell. Why not talk about it?”

“The last guy I told all my secrets to tried to kill me, Father.” I’m surprised at how cold my voice sounds.

“Yes, I read about that. I can understand your misgivings. Perhaps if you can’t extend your faith to God, you can extend it to me? I’ve never broken a confidence.”

“I believe you,” I allow.

I do. I can’t deny that with this environment comes a yearning. It’s deep and piercing and the fact of that is the cause of a lot of my anger.

See me,
the voice had said. The problem was not that I couldn’t see what it was asking. The problem was that I could never
stop
seeing it.

The need to tell someone my secret, finally, to get it off my chest, the possibility that it would bring me some peace—God or no God—promises a relief so strong that I can feel it crawling across my skin like an army of ants.

I breathe in and out, fast. My heart is racing. My hands are clenched together, more in desperation than supplication.

“I don’t know if I believe in God anymore, Father,” I whisper. “Is it right to confess if I’m so unsure He even exists?”

“Confession, so long as you are truly contrite, can only be a good thing, Agent Barrett. I truly believe that.”

“Smoky. Call me Smoky.”

“All right. Smoky, do you have any sins to confess?”

I have many sins, so many, Father, sins of pride, sins of envy, sins of lust. I have murdered men. In self-defense, it’s true, but some part of me enjoyed killing them. I love that I got to kill the man who took my Matt and my Alexa from me. It pleases me forever.

Sins?

I have sinned against my family, my friends, those who loved and trusted me. I have lied—a lot. I drink in the night. I have only lain with two men in my life, but I have done it with abandon. Sometimes for love, sure, but sometimes just for the pleasure they could give me. Is it a sin to have taken joy at the feel of cock in my mouth, to have whispered into Matt’s or Tommy’s ears “fuck me fuck me fuck me, dear sweet God, fuck me”? Does God appreciate my bringing Him there, making Him a part of that sweaty moment?

I have gazed on the suffering of others, on their victimization, on their murdered and mutilated corpses, and I have taught myself how to turn away. How to shut off the images and the emotions, to go home and eat spaghetti and watch TV as though their pain never existed or didn’t matter. I have made a job out of hunting evil men. I get paid a salary because people die.

Are these sins?

I shift on the kneeler. All those things that had run through my head may or may not be sins. None of them are the thing that wakes up the monster in my mind.

See me,
it says, but the voice is gentle this time, and the voice, of course, is me.

I feel tears running down my face. I’m going to tell him, I realize. I was always going to tell him, I knew it the moment I walked in here. That’s why the sweat and nausea went away.

“I did a terrible thing, Father,” I whisper. “I think because I did this thing I’ll never let myself feel real joy. I’ll never let myself really love someone again. Because I don’t deserve it.”

Saying it aloud brings out the anguish in earnest. The grief-monster tries to crawl up and out of my throat as a wail. I fight him down, let him detonate inside me. It’s too quiet here; Alan would hear me. I clench my hands together in a single fist and I push it against my mouth. I bite down till I break the skin. I taste a little of my own blood and shiver with my own pain.

Father Yates has been quiet, waiting. He speaks again. His voice is gentle. Safe. He reminds me, for a moment, of my real father, not God, but my dad, who always kept the creatures under my bed at bay.

“Put it into words, Smoky. Just let it go. I’ll listen, I won’t judge. What you say here will never be repeated by me to another. Whatever burden you’re carrying, it’s time to put it down.”

I nod, tears still running down my face. I know he can’t see me nod, but my throat has closed up, and I can’t speak. He seems to sense this.

“Take your time.”

I sniffle and he waits. As the moments pass, the hand clenching my throat loosens. I’m able to speak again.

“After the attack, I was in the hospital for a while. Sands had cut my face down to the bone in most places. He’d sliced me on other parts of my body and had burned me with a cigar. None of it was life threatening, but I was in a lot of pain and they were concerned about infection because some of the wounds were so deep.

“I was set on dying, Father. I had absolutely, positively, one hundred percent decided that I was going to be blowing my own brains out. I was going to get out of that hospital and I was going to go home, get my affairs in order, and kill myself.”

“Go on.”

“This is all stuff everyone knows. I had to see a shrink—and you know how that turned out. The point is, people know I wrestled with the whole suicide thing. They know about the rape, and they can sure see the scars. That’s all safe stuff. Stuff they can understand and excuse. ‘Of course she was suicidal, look at what she went through, poor thing!’ You understand?”

“Yes.”

“And some part of me, Father, some part of me ate it up. All that sympathy. Poor, poor Smoky. Isn’t she strong? Isn’t it admirable how she overcame and went on?”

The bitterness is rising in me like black coffee, or sour milk. I can almost taste it in my mouth. It’s the flavor of self-loathing. No, that’s not strong enough. Self-hate.

“So tell me that thing they didn’t know, Smoky. The thing that wasn’t admirable.”

The rush of hostility makes me a little dizzy with its ferocity. Heat blooms in my cheeks and forehead. Pure anger, the do-or-die of an animal with its back against the wall. This secret is going to go down fighting. It can see the light, and the light makes it rage and scream.

“Fuck God,” I breathe, and love the taste of the words, the thrill of them.

“I’m sorry?”

“Fuck God and His forgiveness. Why should I ask that asshole to forgive me for anything? What did my mother need to be forgiven for? Did you know that in the last days she begged us to kill her? She was in so much pain, she begged us to do it, to take her life. And she was the most devout Catholic I knew!”

“And did you?” he asks, his voice calm.

“What? Fuck you. No.” The rage is a tidal wave, it has swept me up and I am helpless against it.

“Then tell me what you did do, Smoky. You don’t have to ask God for forgiveness, if you don’t want to. But you do have to ask yourself.”

I grind my teeth and grip my hands together until they’re numb.

“Forgive myself?” I snarl in a whisper. “What, just because I say it out loud here, it’s suddenly going to all be okay?”

“No. But it’ll be a start. I can’t tell you why it makes a difference to tell someone else what we’ve done, Smoky, but it does. It’s only words, but yes, you will feel better. You need to tell me what you did and then realize that the world didn’t end because you told me.”

That calm is unstoppable. It’s a little juggernaut of faith, patient and inexorable. If he had to empty a swimming pool with a spoon, he’d do so without complaint, however long it took. It makes me feel safe and hostile in tandem. I want to hug him and slap him all at once.

“I was pregnant,” I blurt out.

Silence.

I think, for a moment, that he’s judging me already, but I realize he’s just waiting.

“Go on,” he says.

“Just a few months. It was a big surprise. I used a diaphragm. Matt and I weren’t old, but we weren’t exactly spring chickens either. It just…happened.”

“Did your husband know?”

You’re too smart for me, Father.

“No. I wasn’t sure I was going to tell him either. I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep the baby.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Selfishness, I guess. I was in my late thirties, career on the rise, all the usual excuses. Don’t misunderstand, I hadn’t decided to get rid of it, not for sure. But I was thinking about it, and I was hiding it from Matt.”

“Did you have a lot of secrets in your marriage?”

“No. That’s the thing. Well, part of the thing. Matt and I, we were lucky. I know all about the ways a marriage can go off the rails. Men cheat, women cheat, men lie, women lie. Mistresses kill the wives, wives kill the husbands, or maybe they’re fine, but cancer kills them both anyway. Sometimes it’s a long, slow death. Years of little secrets turn into big distrusts, and the marriage is less about love than endurance.

“Matt and I? We never had that. We had fights. We could spend days not talking to each other. But we always came back together in the end, and we loved each other. I never cheated on him, and I’m sure he never cheated on me.”

“This moment then—hiding this from him—this was unusual.”

“Very. You hide little things. It’s part of living with someone. You have to keep some things for yourself. But you don’t hide big things. You don’t hide a pregnancy, and you sure as hell don’t hide an abortion. That’s not who we were.”

“Did he know before his death?”

“No.”

“Do you think you would have told him?”

“I like to think so. But I’m not sure.”

“What happened to the baby, Smoky?”

It’s THE question, of course.
See me,
the voice said. I do, I do, in bright neon, under the light of 10,000 times 10,000-watt lamps.

“It’s not so much that I aborted the baby,” I say, “but why.” My voice sounds empty. I am exhausted. I think I’d rather be anywhere than here, right now. “See, I wanted to kill myself, but I knew I could never do that with a baby inside me. So I asked the doctor to take care of it.” Tired, tired, so tired. “It was the last little bit of Matt, right there inside me, ready to grow and be born and live. He didn’t have to end there, we didn’t have to end there, do you understand? Sands didn’t take that from me. He didn’t kill my baby. I did that. Me.”

I start to weep.

“Is there more?” Father Yates asks.

“More? Of course there’s more. I’m here, don’t you see? I got rid of that baby so I could kill myself, but in the end I didn’t even
do
it! The baby died for nothing! For no reason at all! I—I—” I don’t want to say the words, but I need to. “I murdered that baby, Father. M-m-murdered.”

I can’t talk anymore. All I can do is cry. I don’t cry for myself. I cry because one of the last actions in my marriage was to lie. I cry for the idea of Alexa having a baby brother or sister. Most of all, I cry for that child. She, or he, had been a chance to put something back of the things Sands had stolen. I threw that chance away in a moment of agony. It’s not about the right and wrong of abortion. It’s about the reasons for the decision, the pain, the selfishness, the maybes, might-haves, could-have-beens. It’s about the misery of realizing you’ve done something terrible you can never take back, can never make up for.

I cry and Father Yates lets me. He doesn’t speak, but I can feel his presence, and it comforts me.

I don’t know how long it goes on. The grief blows itself out, not gone, just quieter.

“Smoky, I’m not going to throw a lot of scripture at you, here. I know that your faith isn’t up to that. I’ll simply say, yes, what you did, why you did it, was wrong. You know this. But what is the real sin? What is it that makes what you did so terrible? It is the fact that you threw away the gift of life. I don’t care where you think that gift came from—God, primordial soup, a little bit of both—but life is a gift, and I think you know that. I think you know it more than most people, because of what you do.”

“Yes,” I whisper.

“Then, don’t you see? Continuing to deny yourself forgiveness, continuing to deny yourself love, is to continue the same sin—because all of it means to deny yourself
life
.”

“But, Father—how can I let myself be happy, really happy? I can’t change what I did.”