Page 19 of Devil

No, I didn’t have any questions. I already knew where the answers would take us—right back to my guilt. There was no point in fighting what they believed to be true, because even if they didn’t believe their own words, it wouldn’t change anything. In this case, moral clarity and the appearance of moral clarity amounted to the same thing. Any hint of impropriety had to be weeded out for God andTheKansas City Starboth.

I couldn’t argue with that, and I wouldn’t.Iwanted the Church to be a better, safer place;Iwanted more transparency in how it handled reports of harm. It was right and correct that a teacher having sex with a student was being investigated and dealt with, and the right thing superseded any individual situation. That was why it existed. That was its purpose—to be a standard applied to every single instance of misconduct.

I only wished I could understand why I’d done the misconduct at all. Why I hadn’t fought Bell off like Kaitlyn thought I should have.

They left in a creak of chairs and carpeted footsteps. Kaitlyn was the last to go, shutting her laptop and standing up.

“I’ll give you until Sunday to be out of my house,” she said, no inflection to her voice at all. The words could have been spoken by a robot.

“Kaitlyn,” I said, but nothing else. What could I say? We’d been friends for almost three decades, and yet that one hour with Bell could nullify every year of it? Every shared stick of lip balm, every hug, every fond text sent to help the other get through the day?

“Your lease says I can evict you at any point,” she said, and she was right. She’d drawn up the lease herself, and it had been baldly favorable to her, but I hadn’t thought anything of it when I signed it. She was my best friend, I’d thought. What could go wrong? She paused with her hand on the closed laptop, looking away. Her mouth was tight. “I’m interviewing for a job with the diocese next week. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to get my own hopes up, but if this interview goes well, I’ll be put through their full vetting process. You can’t have someone with skeletons in their closet bury your diocesan bodies. I can’t have a roommate with the wordsstudent sex scandalattached to her name.”

I wasn’t defiant; I didn’t fight. I wouldn’t make it hard for her, because I knew it was already hard for her, and I didn’t want to be unkind. I still loved her and wanted what was best for her, wanted her to have the job she was so eager for.

“I’ll do my best to have everything out by Sunday,” I replied.

She gave me a sharp nod and slid the laptop off the table to tuck into her elbow. “He’s still with a counselor and another associate lawyer,” she said. “If you want to leave before he gets done.”

And then she was gone.

It was the last kindness she’d pay me, and I didn’t waste it, even though a part of me knew I could have sat in that cheap and sterile room and stared at the wall for hours. Instead, I made myself stand. I made myself go back to the studio, and avoiding the chalkboard in the corner of my vision, I made myself pack up my things.

I didn’t clean up the pomegranate.

And it wasn’t until I was in my car, driving to Kaitlyn’s house to scrape together as many of my clothes as possible, that I realized I hadn’t prayed once through the entire ordeal.

8

BIRDIE

The rain poured.

My car bravely fought back as I drove from Kaitlyn’s with almost everything I’d had at her house, apart from the furniture, to the place where I grew up.

I parked in front of the hill house, the dark, low-slung nightmare that I’d avoided for months. The farmhouse up the hill wasn’t watertight or vermin free, and the water and electricity were turned off for it anyway, so I had no choice. It had to be here.

I turned off the car, grabbed a T-shirt to sleep in and my rosary, and trudged to the front door. The same cheap oak cabinets and laminate countertops from my childhood greeted me, the same beige carpet and thrice-passed-down couch. I didn’t bother going back to the bedrooms. I flipped the light switch for the hallway, changed into the T-shirt right there in the middle of the living room, and lay down on the couch. I covered myself with a dusty throw and rolled onto my side so I could use my arm as a pillow. My rosary was in my free hand. The hill house was a simple rectangle—an open kitchen and living room at one end, bedrooms and bathrooms off a long hallway at the other. From the couch on one end, I could see down the hallway, through the open door of my parents’ bedroom to the far wall of the house, buried in the earth as it was. No matter how many lamps my mother had bought at Goodwill, no matter how bright the bulbs my dad brought back from the hardware store, the house never felt like anything other than a cave, and it was the shadows in her old room I stared at as I lay motionless and wet-haired on the couch. The bleary lights of the hallway only made the shadows darker somehow.

I tried not to believe in ghosts. Talk of ghosts had been relegated to the same place in my family as talk of Ouija boards, tarot cards, and crystals: witchcraft. When I got to college, I began to see a certain arbitrariness to this: cleansing a house with sage was pagan, but cleansing a church with incense was licit; burying a crystal in your backyard was New Agey and dangerous, but burying a Saint Christopher’s medal was condoned or encouraged; trying to speak to the dead was obviously a heretical activity…unless the Church called them a saint, and sometimes they didn’t even have to call them that. My grandmother had a picture of Padre Pio in her house with fresh flowers underneath it long before he was canonized. My own job was giving belief a face, bringing the dead to life in a sense, and the way I felt God, his grace, the spirit of the Holy Mother and the saints as I worked…well, it made it hard to write off everything else, I supposed.

But I still tried not to believe in ghosts.

It wasn’t because I was trying to be a good Catholic; it wasn’t because I wanted to think of myself as rational. It was because if I believed in them, then I would know for sure that this house had one, and it was easier to pretend I was alone.

It took me a long time to fall asleep, to stop staring through the harsh yellow lights of the hallway to the darkness beyond while my lips silently, endlessly, worked through the prayers of the rosary.

I wokeup disoriented and clammy. It was midmorning, with almost no light coming in from the living room windows because of the ongoing rain, and it was the kind of humid that made it hard to tell if I was hot or cold. I’d slept so badly that it felt like I hadn’t slept at all, jolting awake to watch the hall, slipping uneasily into dreams of Bell and pomegranate seeds and wreaths of vapor from Kaitlyn’s vape pen circling me until I was surrounded by a choking fog.

I spent the hour after I woke up ferrying things in from my car, taking a shower, and refusing to think about…about…

About pomegranate seeds brought to my lips. About his mouth on my neck. His fingers between my legs. The heart-pounding tide of the orgasm and the drowned feeling I had afterward.

It was impossible to separate the pleasure from the strange, exhilarating fear I’d felt with him, and now it was impossible to separate both from the suffering. The crushing loneliness on the horizon like a wall cloud in a green sky.

I’d lost my position at Evelyn—that was a foregone conclusion. I’d lost the friendly faces in the Fine Arts Department. I’d lost my best friend. Whether I’d lost my vocation altogether, I didn’t know. Evelyn would be required to make a report; that report would be furnished to an ombudsman and the Central and Southern Province of the Jesuits. I was reasonably certain it would be given to the diocese as well. Whether it would travel further was anyone’s guess. No crime had been committed, and as much as it mattered at Evelyn, it was a fairly low-impact scandal. But if it did travel further, if it made its way into the parishes, into diocesan gossip…

You didn’t buy sacred art from sinners. If the artist was tainted, how could the art be pure? How could it inspire devotion when it was made with unclean hands?