“Tell me anyway,” said Thomas.
“Tomorrow.” Reed scrubbed a hand over his head. “He’s got everything he needs to set up a portable operating room; all he needed was the drugs. She’s scheduled to go under at eight a.m.”
Thomas’s thoughts slipped on their axis, the last pieces of the puzzle slotting into place far too late to do anything about them. “Who’s the surgeon?” he asked, though he already knew. “What’s his name? You never said.”
“It’s Jesse,” said Reed. “Jesse Grayson.”
The door to the confessional booth was pinpricked in silver shoots of light. It turned the air inside a dusky shade of blue, bottomless and chilly. Vivienne sat shivering in a paper-thin hospital gown, her knees crammed into her chest, her head haunted by the dregs of yet another dream—by what she’d torn out of it. She held her eyes tightly shut and tried not to think at all. Instead, she wept. It was a horrible, half-decayed sort of sound, more suited to a ghoul than to a girl.
She supposed that’s what she was.
When she was four years old, Philip had carted her and her mother along on a surprise trip to Las Vegas. She didn’t remember much of it, only colorful snatches: the golden lion, his mouth gaped open in a karat-fanged roar. The soaring fountains, wide jets of water lit blue, then red, then pink. The sting of cigar smoke. The frenzied ringing of slot machines. The bloodied face of a man on the gambling floor, his jacket rumpled and his hands raised in supplication as he pleaded with her stepfather.
On the third morning, Philip had woken her well before the sun. It was late March, their yard back home still iced over with slush, but out in the Nevada desert the temperature had already climbed to an insufferable heat. Sweating in her pajamas, she’d followed him outside to find that he’d rented a sleek red convertible for the day. Upstairs in the hotel room, her mother slept the morning away, little glass bottles scattered across her end table like confetti.
Vivienne hadn’t wanted to go anywhere without her mother—not so far from home, where everything felt as grainy as film and the air tasted like soot—but even in her very small age she already knew better than to question Philip. He’d buckled her into her booster seat and driven the two of them away from the glittering strip and out, out, out into the flat red desert.
She didn’t remember much of the drive. Only red, red, red, until finally he’d pulled over on the side of a flat, serpentine road. The desert had stretched on for miles and miles, red and rocky and endless, the bluffs stuffed with bladed grass.
Can you whistle?he’d asked.Like a bird?
A little, she’d said. Her nanny had showed her how.Miss Marley taught me.
We’re going to play a game, Philip said.I’m going to go off in the bluffs a bit. You watch the road. If you see anyone coming, you whistle. Just like Miss Marley taught you.
It hadn’t sounded like much of a game at all, but she’d known better than to say so.
Waiting for Philip to return to the convertible had turned out to be dull as dirt. No cars came or went. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Even the sky was still, the cloudless sear of blue baking the convertible’s leather interior.
Eventually, she’d caught sight of a desert cottontail. She hadn’t planned to follow it so far from the car, but the little white flag of the cottontail beckoned her farther and farther, until finally—with a hop—it was gone. She’d become steadily, horribly aware of endless sand, endless sky, and endless heat. The convertible was nowhere to be seen. Lost and frantic, she’d broken into a run. Her slippered feet caught on the lip of a rock and she’d fallen, toppling deep.
This part, she remembered clearly. The rush of air. The spine-juddering impact and the hard snap of bone. She’d landed in a hole, dark and cool, her skin scraped raw, the pale white sliver of her femur poking through. When she shrieked, the walls shrieked back. When she wept, the walls wailed with her.
And when night fell, the lights went out. Stars brighter than she’d ever seen winked dazzlingly to life in a narrow cleft far overhead, as though she’d been watching through a telescope. If her stepfather whistled for her, she’d been too far to hear it. She’d screamed and screamed. And then, in the breaths between sobs, she’d heard it: the insidious rattle of something coiled in the dark.
A voice, low and cold and slithering.Stop that crying, it said.Or I’ll stop it for you.
•••
She didn’t like to think of that moment, or what followed—how the voice in the dark had sung her a lullaby, soft and sneering. How she drew comfort from it in those first fatal hours as she lay dying at the bottom of a gorge.
She didn’t like to remember how, when morning came, it crawled inside her and made itself a home along her bones. All these years later, she could still recall the feel of it twining down her throat, could still hear its hiss in the quiet.
I will mend you, little one, but there is a price.
The door to the reconciliation room clicked open and she sat up fast, panic clanging in the hollow of her chest. She was certain it must be Jesse—or else one of his peers—coming to retrieve her for surgery. Instead, through the dense netting she could just make out the lines of a broad, indiscernible figure taking a seat in the adjacent booth. The door snicked shut. A heavy silence settled over the room.
Andthen.
“It’s been eleven years since my last confession,” said Thomas Walsh.
She tensed against the bench—too afraid to move, to breathe, to blink. She heard the rustle of fabric as he sighed, settling back against the wall.
“This is the part where I list my transgressions,” he went on. “Do you want to hear all the ways I’ve sinned in the past eleven years?”
She shut her eyes. She wished she could see his face. She wished she could say something—anything—in response. He was alive. He washere. He’d come for her. After everything, he’d come after her. She thought she’d broken him. Thought she’d maimed him. Thought she’d torn his mind in two and left him there to die.
But he was here, and he was whole, and her elation was as incandescent as a sunrise.
