TWENTY-ONE
Tressa
I picked my way around the wreckage. Shrapnel in the form of hundreds of tiny objects.
Objects meant to destroy, ravage, maim the flesh of God’s most obedient flock.
Gunpowder and shrapnel had settled on the last rows of pews, only those with heavier trajectories flying farther up the nave.
Ronnie John picked up a wrench and a jagged shard of steel sitting under the final Station of the Cross, Jesus’s death, hanging just outside the sacristy door. The very objects responsible for battering Lucy and Ms. Watson almost fatally.
When I’d found Ronnie John huddled in a bathtub upstairs, his frail teen boy arms shook with fear as he covered his head and cried.
I cried with him when we walked down the stairs and he told me how he’d come in early before Mass to set up the catechism room and help Father Bastien distribute this week’s leaflets to the missiles in each pew. He described feeling the first boom shake the foundations under his feet. By the time he’d exited the tiny catechism room and snuck up the back stairs, a dark figure was pulling another weighted backpack into the main hall of the church. With the bomber’s back turned, Ronnie John had crab-crawled across the front pews and ducked inside the sacristy, his only focus finding Father Bastien to warn him.
What I hadn’t realized, and what Ronnie John had confessed as we walked back to the chaos, was that Bastien had apparently, and very recently, had a security system installed. A discreet button hidden in a corner of the sacristy rang the security company and local emergency services. Ronnie John had helped him install it before Bastien explained to him and the rest of the kids in catechism class how it worked, urging that if they ever felt threatened, they were to use this without hesitation. He’d also explained to them the importance of keeping it a secret, especially from church officials who wouldn’t approve of its installation without their knowledge.
When one of the kids had asked why it was necessary at church, Bastien had only shrugged it off with a simple, “We all should do what we can to save future souls.”
Bastien’s dogged determination to help the helpless had always impressed me, but the idea that he’d installed an alarm without even the cardinal’s knowledge was something else entirely.
I couldn’t help but wonder if something he’d found in the attic upstairs had driven him to seek out enhanced security for St. Mike’s.
My rebel saint, the man with the plan to save us all.
Ronnie John cleared his throat as he swung open the door of the sacristy to reveal a now-bustling crime scene.
Armed officers, detectives, and medics swarmed.
I wrapped my arms around my body, sliding my palms up and down the long sleeves of my shirt before crossing the threshold of the door and letting it close softly behind me.
Ronnie John caught my eye and nodded before heading for a group of detectives, presumably to tell his side of the story.
I wondered if he’d tell the part about me running down the stairs, freshly showered and with Bastien’s marks on my body? What would I say if they asked? What could I say? I didn’t think there was a likely explanation other than the truth. Anything else seemed laughable in comparison.
Anxiety threaded my muscles, making it hard to walk, hard to think, my only focus the fear of what might happen if we were caught.
One night.
One indiscretion.
Two lives changed forever.
I walked the length of the church wall, fingertips drawing on the smooth stone to steady me as I descended each of the Stations of the Cross, a dark representation of Jesus’s last moments before death. The calm look on his hollow face haunted me then, and it did even more so now.
Nearing the light spilling out of the double doors at the entrance of St. Mike’s, I saw Lucy’s softly lit face shining through the pane of a single window, one medic attaching an IV to her arm, the other performing a triage scan of her major moving parts. I’d make sure I was in that ambulance with her by the time it was set to take off for the hospital. No way would I let her navigate that experience alone when she was already suffering from so much.
I pushed through the doors, the smell of gunpowder finally fading, probably with the gusts of wind that carried in and out of the church each time someone new came in and out of the crime scene.
St. Michael’s.
A crime scene.
I was still in shock. It would take me days to unpeel these layers, especially when they were so intimately wrapped around a man who held the most sacred of soft spots in my soul.
I paused at the second set of doors, my view clearer than it’d ever been.
Bastien’s form was hunched over what looked to be an innocent bystander who had been knocked off his feet by one of the blasts.
