Sinful Little Habit
The room in which Brooke Hawthorne spends the vast majority of her waking and sleeping hours is nicely, if humbly, decorated.
A twin-size bed behind her with a folded quilt and matching throw pillows.
A well-loved wooden nightstand hosting an old-fashioned brush, an alarm clock, a few ragged textbooks and a dog-eared copy of Waiting for Godot. It feels like a dorm room.
A matte canvas print hangs above the bed. The forest scene features a lost doe-eyed lamb crisply delineated in the foreground with an out-of-focus Jesus running to its rescue from behind.
The only new items in the room are the laptop on which Brooke is currently focused, the router beneath the desk at which she sits, and the dome spy camera on the ceiling next to the disconnected puck of the fire alarm.
Brooke is weeping quietly, shaking her head.
Freckles cover her face, a youthful profusion.
Her long mouse-brown hair is center-parted and puffy from brushing, a few strands stuck to her moist cheek.
Her polka-dot dress is conservative, high-necked and full-sleeved.
The hem drops to her ankles, though her legs are not visible to the webcam.
A ruffled collar hides the simple Latin cross inked on the back of her neck.
She has another small cross tattoo on the ulnar side of her hand, just beneath the pinkie, subtly displayed when she folds her hands beneath her chin.
“We don’t get perfect, you know.” She sips in air, gathers her composure, continues with the video call. “But he was my dad. So I had to count on him, na?ve as that sounds. To at least help. Books and a meal plan.”
The door behind her is slightly ajar. Out of sight on the tiny bathroom counter is a cup holding a toothbrush and a tube of Crest and the broken remnants of a plastic razor. One of the three blades has been pried free with a butter knife.
The blade is in Brooke’s hand beneath the desk. Her nails are chewed to the quick, as well as the skin around the cuticles. One of her sleeves is shoved up to the elbow. She grips the slender metal spine and rolls the razor’s edge across the back of her forearm, notching another neat line.
The pain is distant as an echo but at least she senses the sting. It is enough to remind her she is still alive.
“When he fell off the wagon again…”
Out of view beneath the desk, she presses again, feels surface tension pop, the tiniest bit of her insides dribbling out into this world.
“That’s it. That’s how it goes. Every time I start to get my feet back under me…”
“God tests us,” the older woman on the other end of the call says. “It doesn’t mean we have to like it but we have to bear up with our best selves.”
Chin dipped, Brooke nods rapidly. “Why’s Dad have to be so weak? When it’s me who pays for it?”
“People disappoint us.” The woman’s face holds grief in the wrinkles but she doesn’t look wizened.
Helen. Her name is Helen. There’s a fierce handsomeness to her features, untouched by plastic surgery or cosmetics.
A hard-earned truthfulness. Her light blue eyes blaze undiminished. “But God never does.”
Now the gravelly voice of her husband: “‘In all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.’”
Helen and Derek Riggs are a kindhearted couple in their mid-sixties, suffered through a half dozen miscarriages early in their marriage, lost their only son recently to fentanyl at the age of thirty-nine. These sessions are intimate, honest in every way but one.
“I believed that once,” Brooke says, and Helen makes a soft noise not of disapproval but of bone-deep empathy.
“But I’m losing my … faith.” The last word she can barely utter.
It is as though she no longer deserves to say it out loud.
“I worked so hard to get into seminary. And the out-of-state tuition … What am I even gonna do with a master’s in theology? What do I have to teach anyone?”
Brooke swipes at the fresh cuts with a tissue, rolls her arm across the Band-Aid patch she has ready sticky side up on her thigh, and lowers the sleeve. Not a drop of blood exposed. She has become an expert at concealing this sinful little habit.
With a fresh tissue, she wipes her cheeks.
“Do not hide your light under a bushel,” Derek says. “You have everything to give. We can see it. The goodness inside you.”
A small inset window on Brooke’s laptop screen runs proprietary software, offering a constant scroll of stats, readings, insights.
Brooke clutches her stomach and rocks slightly. “I can’t,” she says. “I can’t keep doing this.”
Helen grips her husband’s hand. Their knuckles are pronounced with age. They are sitting at a wooden farmhouse table in a spacious kitchen, the bay window affording a view of snow-dusted Deer Valley. They exchange a meaningful look filled with love, respect, and immeasurable sorrow.
“How much is tuition?” Helen asks. “And what’s left on those undergraduate loans?”
Afterward Brooke drifts into the bathroom. She runs the shower until steam fills the air and threatens to choke her. She is running out of time. Soon everything will get much, much worse. Sitting on the closed toilet, she hugs her midsection and rocks herself some more.
“It’s okay, little one,” she murmurs to herself. The words her father used to soothe her when she was a girl. When they were close. “Things will get better.” Her eyes clench. “You are loved no matter what happens out here.”
There is so much anguish, so much regret, so much pain. It is walled up inside her behind a dam, threatening to unleash and drown her. But she cannot let it.
The stakes are too high.
Even in the heat and humidity, she is shuddering. She pinches her lids, rubs hard until spots appear in the darkness. The parts of her no longer fit together. It’s as if someone broke her into jigsaw pieces and shook them in a box.
“There’s still hope,” she murmurs. “There’s still hope for you.”
She thinks about the crinkled skin at the edge of Helen’s pale blue eyes. The way her husband’s hand trembled with emotion as he jotted down the routing number. You are a blessing, he’d told her. Together we can turn heartbreak into healing, sorrow into strength, grief into grace.
Brooke strips the patch bandage and stares at the hatchwork of slices riding the back of her arm from wrist to elbow. The ones closest to her hand are healed over, slender purple scars, but they grow riper as they climb the arm.
She digs her thumb into the freshest incision.
And she screams.