“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, slicedneatly 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.”
