“Should I start with the little sins?” he asked. “I could tell you about all the times I lied to my mom about doing community service, so she wouldn’t find out I was actually in detention. Or about that time in middle school when I was suspended for breaking Jayson Becker’s nose in the lunchroom. I could tell you I wasn’t sorry, even though they made me tell him I was. I thought he deserved it. I still do.”
She stayed quiet, quiet, quiet. It was all she knew how to do.
“I don’t know.” He shifted his weight, pretending to mull it over. “Maybe the little things don’t matter. Everyone lies. Everyone gets angry. Maybe I should start with something bigger.”
She listened, rapt. His name sat clenched between her teeth like a bullet. She wondered what would happen if she said it out loud. Just once, to let him know she was there.
He shifted again, seeming uneasy. “What if I told you I killed my father?”
His question seized hold of her like a fist. She rose onto her knees on the narrow bench and turned to face him in full. All she saw were those ugly wooden slats—hazy pinpricks of light haloing the broad shadow that was Thomas Walsh. She pressed a hand to the wall between them. The silence felt infinite.
“My parents never got along,” Thomas finally said. “That’s not my sin, but it’s an important part of the story. I used to lie awake at night and listen to them fight. He couldn’t handle the pressure, I don’t think. Mom has an autoimmune disease. It’s manageable, but incurable. I don’t know, I guess maybe he felt like he was being asked to do too much.”
The quiet swelled and then ebbed.
“I was eight years old when he left.” His voice had gone so quiet that she had to press her ear to the wooden laths to hear him. “I came home from school and saw his suitcase by the door and I got so fucking angry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I wanted to teach him a lesson. I wanted him to know he couldn’t get away with it; he couldn’t walk away from us and never look back. So, when he wasn’t looking, I went outside and I climbed into the trunk.
“I figured he’d go to a hotel or something. He’d unload his car and find me and—I don’t know—realize he’d made a horrible mistake. Instead, he went to a bar. He sat there for hours, running up a tab. By the time the paramedics pulled me out of the car, I was half dead. They say it’s nothing short of a miracle that I survived.”
They’d said the same thing about Vivienne, as she sat in her cold hospital gown beneath the cold hospital lights, her vitals being taken by a team of doctors. A miracle—small and scared and soundless, her voice chewed to pieces by whatever sinister something had kept her company in the bloodred rock.
“He came back home,” Thomas said. “After that day, I mean. I guess, in a way, my plan worked. He unpacked his suitcase and went right back to going through the motions. He put on his tie. He went to work. He paid the bills. When the day was done, he went to the bar and ran up another tab.”
Thomas sucked in an unsteady swallow of air. “It was the guilt that killed him, in the end. Not because he’d tried to leave. Not because he didn’t want to be there. Because he’d almost killed his only son, and he still didn’t want to stay.”
Silence, again.
Finally, Thomas said, “You could have told me, Vivienne. I could have helped you.”
The sound of her name startled her into motion. She pried open the door to the booth and slid out into the chilly stone of the reconciliation room, with its exposed copper piping and church-fair furniture. The only light poured in sideways through a narrow tracery window.
With trembling hands, she wrenched open the adjacent door. Thomas sat wedged in the narrow compartment, his fingers laced between his knees, his knuckles dark with abrasions. The rest of him looked no better. One eye was swollen shut. A shallow gash at his temple had begun to bruise.
He stared up at her, and she stared back.
I dreamed about you last night, she signed.
He didn’t smile. “Yeah?”
It was horrible.
“Good.”
His voice was steady. Too steady. It was at odds with the tense way he held himself, a quiet fury crackling around him like electricity.
“You could have told me,” he said again. “Don’t you trust me?”
I don’t trust anyone.
His smile was cold. “Are you sure about that? Because from where I’m standing, it seems like you’re putting a whole lot of trust in your shady ex-boyfriend.”
Wariness zipped up her spine.Is that why you’re so upset?
“Do I seem upset to you?”
Yes.
His laugh came out caustic. “I don’t know, Vivienne. Maybe it’s because you’re about to let an asshole with half a medical degree stick a scalpel in you.”
