Chapter 12
BELL
She stares at me with those giant, prairie sky eyes as I stroll deeper into her barn, running my fingers lightly over the board she still has half routed on the table.
Seven years.
Seven years, and I don’t know how many thousands of dollars, and she was right here all along. Thirty minutes away from Evelyn, forty minutes away from where I sleep at night. She was right here, in one of the very first places I looked.
And now I’m right here too. I smile at the thought.
She swallows.
“Mr. Bell,” she says, and oh my God, her voice, her fucking voice. Soft and shy and sincere. Hearing it makes my hands shake.
I slide them into my pockets so she can’t see, and I take a step forward. “I think I told you once to call me Ry.”
She takes a deep breath, like I’ve asked her to hand over the deed to the farm. “Ry,” she says softly. It’s nearly a whisper.
I’m getting hard and I’ve only been in the same room with her for about two minutes. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this conversation.
“Why are you here? Are you looking for Busy?”
“Your sister?” I’m genuinely puzzled by this. I mean, yes, I’ve looked for her sister over the years but only to find her.
She drops her eyes as soon as they meet mine.
She’s so far beyond shy, so lonely and strange, and my hands are shaking so hard, all of me is shaking.
I want her so badly, and now I have her and it’s only the barest fucking shred of decency keeping me from letting her know right now on the ancient floorboards of this fucking barn.
“Someone said you were looking for her at the bar downtown.”
“I was looking for you,” I say. “Red hair, Cooper. They must have assumed I meant your sister.”
Blue eyes dart up to me and then dart back down. “Then why are you looking for me?” she asks.
I dare to move a step closer. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” I say. “Since that night. You left before I could find you again.”
A flash of anger at the memory. They’d shuttled me into a dim room to initial some kind of safe student protocol—a gesture to show how Evelyn goes above and beyond to protect its students.
Admirable, I suppose, although I was half a second from asking them why I was supposed to give a shit.
Did they want a cookie for protecting legal adults while they still passed around predatory priests like a baton at a relay race?
Did they want me to be grateful when no one had ever bothered to protect my sister when it mattered?
But I’d allowed myself to be trauma-informedly deposed and handed paper after paper about all the reports I could file, all the resources available to me for counseling and whatever the fuck else, because I thought playing along would get me back to Birdie faster.
I thought my cooperation and honest recounting of what had happened would make them see that they’d totally misunderstood.
Birdie Cooper was still the same reclusive, pious genius they’d thought she was.
I’d been the one to follow her, approach her…
press her. I’d kissed her. I’d tried to fuck her.
I wasn’t innocent. She was.
But the safe student protocol team didn’t see it that way.
They told me that there were too many power dynamics at play for me to have truly consented to kissing her or pocketing her underwear.
She was seven years older; she’d been my studio teacher; there was no way that her power over the grade book couldn’t have been a factor.
And regardless, with her age and position at the college, it was her responsibility to keep things appropriate.
I’d wanted to laugh at that. They were so intent on the minutiae of consent that they’d cheerfully somersaulted right back into rape culture.
It was her fault. She should have stopped me.
She should have fought me off, but she didn’t, so now the blame and the consequences would be poured over her like boiling oil while the boy with such a bright future walked away with some brochures and the personal, heartfelt apology of his dean.
I hated them for it. For this theater of transparency and safety when they did nothing about the frat functions where girls left in the early hours of the morning with smeared mascara and trembling chins, nothing about the econ professor who sometimes insisted on driving his students home to their apartments and then wouldn’t leave, nothing about the deacon who’d been briefly suspended and then reinstated with no explanation as to why.
Of everyone there, I did think Father Alvarez genuinely wanted to keep his students safe and wanted to steer the Church toward reparative justice or whatever one of the brochures had called it.
But even a very good man rarely knows the failings of his own goodness, and Father Alvarez didn’t seem to appreciate that the only sexual sin he was intent on litigating was the sin that had been witnessed by his donors.
Everything else that happened was happening offstage, and apparently that was the limit of God’s caring.
When I finally escaped and found Birdie gone, I’d been livid.
Livid with the people who’d kept me trapped in a room, yes, but with Birdie most of all, because where did she think she was going without me?
After I’d fed her pomegranate seeds and then unraveled her pure little heart with two fingers and some teeth on her neck?
And then she wasn’t there the next day or that Saturday, at my commencement ceremony.
I endured Sean’s bossy questions and Aiden trying to knock my graduation cap off my head while I searched the massive crowd spilling down the auditorium steps and onto the sodden green that stretched between the old brick buildings of the former monastery.
I took the requisite pictures with my dad and brothers, briefly appreciated that Jesuit college was one of the few places where Aiden’s monk robes didn’t garner stares, and then made a point to circulate aggressively through the cloud of chatting faculty off to the side.
No sign of Birdie.
When I managed to sneak off to her studio, I found the door unlocked and the space emptied of carvings, wood, and tools. The paper and clay remained, but the worktable was empty and even the floors had been swept bare of sawdust.
I accrued answers over the next hour as I went to the graduates’ reception and made myself a charming and irresistible bearer of champagne.
The Fine Arts Department would be too discreet or awkward or defensive if I’d asked them myself, so I went straight to the department of gossips: the student life team.
They were next door to administration and knew almost everything, but I’d been assured by the counselor and dean in my interview that my identity would be kept confidential.
It seems like they kept their word because the director of student life and her secretary appeared to have no idea that I was involved in any fashion and were all too happy to spill the sordid story to me.
Admitted misconduct. Suspended without pay.
An investigation that everyone knew was a formality.
Even the lecturer knew it—she’d already cleaned out her studio.
The secretary drained the last of her champagne, lowered her voice, and told me that she’d heard from her friend in general counsel that the lecturer’s roommate had even kicked her out of her house.
I could feel the fury tickling the palms of my hands and the back of my throat, but I’d still smiled and cajoled and teased out the last of the information I could.
The roommate’s name was Kaitlyn Masterson, who was regarded as both deeply abrasive and good at her job.
No one knew much else about Birdie Cooper, other than how quiet she was and that her statues were some of the most incredible things they’d ever seen.
Isn’t it a shame that she turned out to be like this? they finally said, shaking their heads. That her talent is now forever polluted by this?
What this was, the this doing the polluting, was vague.
When I’d asked them about the particulars—if there’d been coercion or a quid pro quo or even just a sustained length of time that this had been going on—they’d shaken their heads.
It doesn’t matter, the director told me.
If there’d been one instance, there were probably more.
The students came first at Evelyn; that was the commitment Evelyn was making to the world.
I’d kept smiling. I didn’t mind the commitment itself, merely the hypocrisy in its implementation.
You know, at least I knew there was something wrong with me. At least I didn’t pretend to myself that I was good. A shame Evelyn couldn’t make that commitment to the world too.
I left the commencement furious with the college and furious with Birdie for leaving that night and for not coming back, for not finding me so I could finish what I’d started.
So I could feed her more fruit and watch the entire world move inside those giant eyes…
wonder if I could see God inside there too.
But I had no doubt that I’d find her the next day or the day after.
How many people named Birdie made religious carvings in the Kansas City area?
How many people named Birdie under the age of thirty could there be in the entire Midwest?
My hubris had not accounted for her humility.