Page 103 of Devil

I think I believe him, that he would have told me, but I guess I have to decide whether that matters. My thoughts keep going in circles, stretched thin, lifeless and gray.

He likes transgressing, and I like being transgressed. That will always be the flame and smoke between us, the dark and impure truth, and I think even the cameras and the recordings—and oh God, the camera at Evelyn—make a profane kind of sense to me. It is debasing and desecrating, but it’s in this language that we both speak, that we speak together, so it could also be nice, knowing that even the lonely moments in the warehouse weren’t as lonely as I thought they were. It could be nice if Bell put a camera in his office at the firm for me so I could see him too. It could be nice watching his favorite videos together.

Could be.Won’t be.

Because I still can’t believe that there’s not an end point for him in all this, that he’s not planning to pay me off with a brokerage account so I’ll go quietly and then he can move on to a properly mayoral spouse or just on to someone who makes more sense. Because we might speak the same language when it comes to sex and obsession, but nothing else belongs together. He’s young and handsome and charismatic, and the interesting things about Birdie Cooper have only ever come with piles of sawdust.

There will be an end point. Even if he doesn’t consciously think there will be. He’s preparing for it, he’s got everything lined up perfectly, and he’s telling himself it’s because it’s all a good idea anyway.

There will be an end point, and I won’t survive it when it comes, and I don’t think I can survive it now, with the little scrap of self I have left. I’ve already given him too much; I’ve uncoiled like a new seedling, all green and tender, given him every secret and shadow and furled open my fragile hopes and contentments.

I used to have myself even when I had nothing and no one else, and no matter what came my way, I knew I could suffer through it. I could endure because I’d always done it before, because I could depend on myself and because I only belonged to me.

But.

I’ve given him too much, and now there are forged signatures and unforged signatures, and this can’t last—it can’t stand. If I stay any longer, there will be noIleft. TheIthat I kept alive on my own since my father and grandparents died will simply stop existing.

Because there will be an end point for Bell, but there won’t be for me. All he’s good for is ruin, and he’s ruined me, and this is it—this is all I can handle. If I stay and fall deeper in love with him, into this depraved love that only we understand, and then he ends things between us…I’ll have nothing left.

Less than nothing. I’ll just be the woman who traded her soul away for rough sex and some chisels.

I stand up, which makes Bell take a step back, surprised.

When I look at him, I see hope and arrogance and longing. I see the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, and now I have to exile myself for the completely understandable sin of loving him too much.

Of being unworthy of even his toxic obsession and, worst of all,knowing it. Knowing it won’t last.

“Ry,” I say, lifting my chin, hoping it’s not too late for whatever’s left of my heart. “I’d like to leave now.”

42

BIRDIE

The farm isnoisy when I get there, the trees around the creek and our hill swaying with the wind, gusts that blow and blow, sending cut green hay from a nearby field skittering around my ankles. Whenever the wind dies down, the trees are disheveled and messy.

A storm is on the way.

That’s what my grandma would have said, squinting out the kitchen window at the pale leaf bellies. My dad would have been out in the fields—he had a cell phone, but he was terrible at remembering to take it with him—and my grandfather would have to drive out to him if he wanted to talk. He’d take one of the pickups that occasionally sprouted in the barnyard like rust-eaten toadstools. Sometimes I’d go with him and then climb into the tractor while Dad and Grandpa kicked at the dirt with the toes of their boots and squinted up at the sky. They’d take off their ball caps and scratch at their heads, and they’d dither about spraying a field before the rain came. They’d chew over whether they should call the neighbor with the baler and tell him they’d lay down the hay next week instead.

I stand outside my truck a moment and close my eyes. If I can’t see anything, if I can’t see the barely standing farmhouse and the overgrown drive down to my empty childhood home, if I can’t see that there’s no light on in the barn and no more toadstool pickup trucks, then I can almost imagine I’m there. I’m just a girl on a farm with sidewalk chalk under her fingernails and a healing poison ivy rash on her legs.

God was everywhere. My mother was happy. Busy still played with me.

And when the storm would finally reach us, our grandparents would come down to the hill house with a basket of flashlights, and Dad would charge Busy and me with watching the barn cats, who’d been carried in with resigned, tame-when-it’s-convenient expressions. The adults would have the news on, and if the power went out, someone would get the radio.

What would all those adults who loved me—who doted on me and rubbed calamine lotion on my poison ivy spots and carried me inside when the twisters came—think of me now if they could see me? If God decided they should have a look at what I’ve become so they could plead and intercede for me?

What would they think if they could see me blown and hail-hammered in a storm of my own making?

I open my eyes, noticing distantly that they’re wet, that my face is wet. I’m crying then—that’s probably good. Seven years ago, it took watching the creek rise up to swallow my home while my cheek burned from Busy’s hand and my soul burned from everything that happened at Evelyn. Like those bodies they find in bogs that have been poisoned, strangled, and drowned, three deaths for one person. That’s what it took to crack open the numbness.

Although I still feel numb—like someone else is crying and I just happen to be nearby.

Bell didn’t cry at all when I told him I wanted to leave, but I think I might have preferred it. He stared at me like I’d buried a dagger in his ribs, his chest moving jerkily, his throat working.

“I’d like—” He took a breath. “I’d like to talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I replied, which was a lie, a cliché I’d heard somewhere on TV or something, because there was so much talk about. I shook my head at my own words—I didn’t want to be a liar, even reflexively. “That’s not true. What I mean is that there’s nothing I’m ready to talk about right now.”