Page 107 of Devil

Up on the hill, we’ve always been able to see a little more, a little farther to the west, so now I can see the rumpled end of the storm, the silvering sky with little keyholes of blue. I see the train of the dress, dragging Miss Havisham-like. It’s so close to me, so low, that I feel like I could reach up and press my palm flat against it.

The emptiness in me feels less empty in the ionized air, in the stillness as I watch the train of the dress come closer. And then, like lace off a tattered hem, a tangle of cloud drops below the rest and dangles and drags and spins, spinning itself smooth and long, clothing itself from the spray of dirt and crops at its base.

And it’s no longer quiet. The wind is back. My hair is dancing in it, it’s plucking at my T-shirt, and it’s fully a tornado now. And it looks like it’s spinning in place, whirling in display, and it curves and curtsies, and then it stands still.

Even my dad would go inside now, even my grandpa, because the reason you don’t stand still when a tornado stands still is because it’s not standing still at all, it’s coming straight toward you.

But I don’t go inside. I don’t even move.

What’s waiting for me inside? Stepping out after the storm to damages I can’t pay for because I don’t have homeowner’s insurance? Going back to shifts at Buddy’s, huddling alone under bleary lights for all the days of my life? My chisels gathering dust in the barn because I can’t hear God when I carve, and my sister not needing me anymore, and one side of my bed neatly made and unslept in?

Busy doesn’t need me. Bell won’t want me.

I’ve offered up a lifetime’s worth of suffering, and it hasn’t been enough, and I don’t think I can offer up any more. I can’t go back. I can’t feel that way again. I’ve reached the end; I can drink no more vinegar?—

At some point, I have to be allowed to hang my head and rest. And then the old thought comes begging, supplicating.

I could just stop.

I could just stop right here. And there would be no more loneliness, no more exhaustion. No more pain because the former things have passed away.

I will stand here before the tearing howl of the end, and I will think,At last.

43

BELL

I did throwa little tantrum after she left, but in my defense, I didn’t do it in front of her, and Ididlet her go without falling to the floor and wrapping my arms around her knees—or throwing her over my shoulder and hauling her upstairs.

I think my self-control is to be commended.

“Fuck!” I shouted as I threw my office chair against the floor. And as I ripped binders off the shelves and flung them against the glass. “Fuck!”

But I didn’t break anything, I restrained myself to two shelves of binders, and I didn’t find Kaitlyn Masterson and outline in excruciating detail exactly how I would like to ruin her life.

See? Commendable.

I ended up in the studio somehow, my back against the wall with Birdie’s woodenI love youin my hand, Lilith perched on the bottom rung of Birdie’s stepstool and eyeing me warily. I stared at the criminals on their crosses, bitterly wishing I could climb on a cross for real so I could somehow make Birdie understand that I loved her exactly like I told her I did.

Doubt seemed to be the actual reason she’d been startled into flapping away. Not the illegally made trust, not the cameras, but those half-signed NDAs. That goddamned cover letter from Esau. The idea that I would declare us finished, that I would walk away and leave her alone to carry the burden of what we’d conjured here—tender perversities and bespoke darknesses.

She’d forgive me for any transgression except for withdrawing my transgressions.

I didn’t sleep, obviously, unable to handle the smell of her on my sheets, unable to deal with the lovely, inflaming memories made on the couch, so I lay on the guest bed with the woodenI love youbetween my chest and my flattened palm, trying to figure out if there was any other way I could have handled things.

I should have told her about the trust and the cameras earlier, but I still would have committed both those crimes. I wouldn’t have signed those NDAs, however—and if I were able to do things over, I would have fed them through the shredder the moment I saw what they were.

I had to let her go, though. I promised I would at the beginning and all throughout the summer. It was one of the few rules I made myself follow when it came to her—if she wanted to leave, I had to let her. I couldn’t be shitty about it. There was no rebuttal period, no appeal; she got to go when she wanted.

But after I managed a few fitful hours of sleep in the stormy gloom, I woke up thinking of something she’d said before she’d left.

You’ll get sick of me, and a part of you already knows it, that this was never meant to last.

Never meant to last? The studio I’d built for her years ago, the closet I’d been slowly stocking, the money I’d been saving from the commercial property renovations I’d been doing on my own. The years spent looking for her, the semester I spent watching her eat the pomegranates I’d left on her desk, the fact that I transferred to Evelyn at all…

Never meant to last.

She is the only thing that lasts. She is eternity and my hereafter. I have built my entire life for her, around her. I learned the difference between sawdust collection systems for her, and she thinks I never meant for this to last?