Chapter 10
Ten
MARIS
When I ran from the graveyard, I wasn’t thinking about where I was running. My legs carried me on instinct into the church. Maybe it’s because the church has always felt safe. It’s where I spent my early days mourning my parents.
For a lot of people it might have made them sad, the church where her parents were laid to rest but it wasn’t like that for me.
I felt peaceful as a kid sitting there in the big chapel next to my granny.
We knelt and prayed together, she let me hold the hymnal and light the candles for her after she slid her money into the giant iron candle rack with rows and rows of flickering candles in their glass cups.
The smell of sulfur, of that moment when the match strikes the side of the matchbox, still makes me feel safe.
Ironic given the fact that for the past twenty years I’ve sat in these pews and listened to Father Paretti threaten me with brimstone and sulfur fires. I’d probably fit right in down there.
“Tell me more,” he says and I startle. My brain is here and not at the same time.
Like I’ve been split into multiples, sliced neatly into three and let loose.
Part of me is still sobbing at my parent’s graves, the other is angry and screaming at Brian’s prone body, and then finally, there’s me sitting here alone on the floor of the confessional booth with this priest who is not Father Paretti.
I know it’s not him but I pretend it is anyways.
My hands shake. I tuck them under my thighs and lean my head against the wall between us. “He was a shit man.”
“The man you killed tonight or…”
The or is an obvious question. He means tonight or Mike.
“Both of them,” I answer softly. “Mike Sheep was weak, some nobody who got laid off by my dad two decades before for stealing from the paper. It wasn’t a lot, just a few hundred every other week but at the end of the years that’s a lot of money, and you know how it is in this town.
Once you’re labeled as something, there’s no beating it.
Mike was a thief, a liar, no one wanted him on their payroll. Brian was just as bad as his father.”
“And Mike blamed your father?”
“He blamed my family. That’s why he came to our house that night, even though he knew he wouldn’t find anyone but me.
How could he? Everyone else is dead, right?
” I ask. Tears spill over my cheeks. I squeeze my eyes shut and drop my head as I continue to talk.
“There was never going to be anyone there to stop him but me. He came for me.”
“And you…killed him?”
“It was either him or me,” I say, repeating the lie that I’ve now said a hundred times out loud. It sounds just as hollow as it did the first ninety-nine times. “I had to do it.”
“It being killing a man.”
The voice on the other side of the confessional screen isn’t like Father Paretti’s. He isn’t even trying to sound like the priest that I’ve confessed my darkest secrets to, so why the fuck do I keep talking?
I don’t know.
Maybe I’m that lonely, or maybe there’s a thrill in telling someone else. Someone that I haven’t known all my life. He isn’t from Vesper Point. I don’t know his voice but the feeling I’ve heard it before rattles around in the back of my mind, but where?
Where?
“Cat got your tongue?” he asks, reminding me that I’m sitting in a confessional booth with a man that I don’t know, confessing to the fact that I killed Brian Sheep.
“No,” I croak. I clear my throat and try again. “No cats here, but yes, I did have to kill a man. He broke into my home. He came after me. It was self-defense. Everyone in town knows that. You know that,” I say, playing into the lie that he’s Father Paretti.
The man on the other side of the screen hums thoughtfully. “So I do,” he says, doing his part to carry on the lie with me. We’ve both grabbed onto the lie with both hands, each of us holding up our part of the burden to keep the conversation from ending.
“But this man was different."
It’s not a question. It’s a statement. A fact.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t have to do it,” I whisper, fresh tears prick my eyes and I hate that I’m crying for Brian Sheep.
The dick head stalker that terrorized girls in town for over a decade.
The town is going to be better without him.
Women are going to wake up tomorrow free without ever knowing why.
I know that. None of this changes the fact that I didn’t have to do it.
“It wasn’t like that night. I could have walked away,” I tell the stranger.
“But you didn’t. Why?”
“I was angry. I felt so fucking angry because none of this is fair.”
Father Paretti would give me some pithy platitude. Something meant to soften the blow of the particular hand I’ve been dealt. This stranger has no such desire.
“You’re right. Nothing in life is fair. We’re born, we live, we die.” He sighs and I hear him settle closer to the separating wall. “Where did it happen?”
“Out back,” I tell him and then clarify what that means to this stranger. I bet he doesn’t know. “The graveyard behind the church.”
“Did this man do something to anger you?”
I nod, even though he can’t see it. “He did.”
“And you killed his father who tried to kill you?”
“I did.”
“Father and son,” he pauses for a second before he asks me. “What did it feel like?”
Emotion wells up in me at his question. I thought I calmed down since realizing this isn’t Father Paretti but I guess not. The anger I felt against Brian comes to life as easily as a flame I’ve tended.
“Like I was being consumed, eaten alive from the inside,” I tell him.
It’s true. In the moments when I confronted Brian, when I made the decision to go after him, it was like a monster coming to life and clawing its way out of me.
I remember how I felt when my anger boiled beneath my skin like thorns cutting and piercing my body until I felt like a weapon.
“I wanted to kill him. I decided on it, and when I decided on it there was no stopping me. Not even when he fought back.”
“Ah, so he did fight?”
I scoff. “He did. He tried. It didn’t make a difference. None of it mattered. Not even god himself could have stopped me. He tried to kill me, cut me with a knife but it didn’t matter. And the thing is that when I saw the knife, I was relieved,” I confess.
“Why?”
“Why?” I let out a bitter laugh. It sounds hollow in the confines of the confessional. “Because I could do what I wanted once he gave me a reason. That knife freed me. A lot of people will do anything to survive, even kill to do it. It’s their last resort, you know?”
Not Father Paretti hums like he knows what I’m talking about. “Yes…I do know.”
“It wasn’t like that with me an-and those men. I was always going to do what I did to them. I didn’t have to, I told you that before, remember?” I ask. It’s silly to play along with him that he’s the priest I know, but in for a penny, in for a pound, right?
“Refresh my memory,” he says. That’s all the initiation I need to tell him what’s been weighing on me.
Eating on me like decay and rot that’s settled into the abandoned houses down by the docks.
Those houses were some of the first lodgings built in Vesper Point for the longshoremen and whoever built them did it with no thought to providing a safe and warm place for the souls that called them home.
There’s nothing safe or warm about those houses.
Those houses are too wet, too cold, too cheaply built that anyone staying in them inevitably fell ill. Even the strongest sailors couldn’t fight against it. My soul is like that. Too wet, too cold, too cheaply built. Nothing warm or safe about it. I’m dying.
“It wasn’t out of survival when I attacked Brian tonight.
I could have left. Gone home and he never would have known I was there, and I didn’t have to kill Mike either,” I tell him, my words come faster as I speak, because I know even if this man is not Father Paretti, he might do what the priest did two years ago.
He might assure me that I acted out of necessity, out of survival.
He might swear that I “did nothing wrong”, that what happened that night isn’t my fault.
I know differently. It’s all my fault. I know what I want to say now.
I’ve thought the words so many times, but never said it to anyone.
“You asked me how it felt earlier and I want to change my answer now.”
There’s a beat of silence and I hear the scrape of a boot as he moves.
There’s a sound of cloth and a soft thump like something heavy rolling over.
The confessional booth creaks and I wonder if he’s up against the separating wall.
I lift my face to look through the screen between us but I can’t see much.
The only light in the church is the moonlight coming in through the big windows on the opposite side of the room.
It’s enough to make out his shape, but only just. I see a flash of teeth in the dim light.
Is he smiling at me?
A shiver rolls down my spine and I scoot away from the divider.
There’s an edge to everything that wasn’t there before.
I wasn’t scared of Brian but now fear pools in my belly.
It wraps itself around me like a snake and it’s hard to breathe.
Why do his teeth look wrong? His smile is sharp like a knife, teeth longer than they should be but that can’t be right.
I’m seeing things in the dark. That’s all it is.
I swallow hard and drop my eyes from the not Father Paretti’s smile.
“I did it because it felt good,” I tell him.
“I did it because I wanted to. I was happy they were gone and that I was the one to do it, and that knife. That fucking knife. When he swung it at me like the spineless loser he was, it was perfect. That knife became my reason and he was perfect for that one shining moment. He wasn’t a waste of space, he was mine.
Just like his father. He gave me the excuse everyone else will understand when they find out because I know they can’t understand me.
I’m not normal, I-” my voice cracks and I swallow past the lump in my throat, “I was normal before but I’m not that woman. Not anymore.”
I’m crying when I finish speaking. I don’t wait for Father Paretti’s imposter to answer me.
I get up and stumble out of the confessional.
I almost fall when I trip over something, a bottle, I think.
I hear it clatter and skitter across the floor of the empty church.
The sound echoes in my ears as I flee home.