Page 23 of Devil

“Busy—Mary,” I said, changing to her real name so she knew I was being completely honest. “I don’t want that. I’ve never wanted that.”

“You’re lying.” Her voice shook with fury. “It’s the only thing I have left, my only hope for a way out, and you want to take it from me!”

I shouldn’t have been hurt by that, but Iwas. I was hurt and livid that she thought so little of me after all I’d done for her, after all the patience I’d tried to give, and all I could do was let out a dry, bitter laugh. “I don’t give afuckabout this place, Mary Geraldine,” I said. “The only reason I could ever care about the money is that it might give me a break from you asking for it.”

She slapped me so hard that my face whipped to the side.

The burn on my skin was immediate and so was the ringing in my ears, louder even than the rain.

“Fuck you,” she spat. “I knew you were holding it against me. Every single time. Some Christian charity you’re displaying, Mary Merle.”

I slowly turned my head to look at her. Whatever had happened over the last month had cut new hollows under her cheekbones and left her mouth hard. Her eyes were?—

Something wasn’t quite right in them.

I took a breath. Another. My jaw hurt like a bruise would be coming up on it within the hour.

She’s got a bruise shaped like four fingers and a thumb.

But if I stayed here, if I tried to calm her down here at the lake, I’d miss the chance to use Jim Holsinger’s forklift tomorrow, and if I missed the chance to bring home the basswood block that was supposed to be my angel…

No, it had to be tomorrow for the forklift. It was when I could afford to rent it, and it meant Evelyn couldn’t get any ideas about claiming all the partially carved blocks for themselves and thereby wiping out all the progress I’d made on those projects. I’d need every single dollar from those commissions. I couldn’t stay here.

“You’re always welcome at home,” I said tiredly. “I don’t want the money from the cabin, and I never have. I’m sorry I haven’t been gracious when you asked for money before, but I’ll try to be better if you’d please come home. I don’t know what happened in Odessa, and I won’t make you talk about it. I won’t involve the police or make you go to the hospital, but you shouldn’t be alone right now.”

I didn’t take my eyes off her, but I tilted my head at the broken lamp on the other side of the bed.

“Don’t be alone, Mary. Not this time.”

That uncanny light in her eyes burned, but coldly. Like one of those lonely utility pole lights outside.

“Go on,” she dared. “Pretend to be good, pretend to be better than me. Show off for God. He’s always watching, right? Always keeping score? Precious, righteous Birdie, who never sins because she never lives. Well, I know you better than God does, and I know that deep down, you’re a worthless wreck just like me, and you’ll die alone, and I’ll be watching from hell with a smile.”

My car wouldn’t makeit back up the hill.

I got out and stood in the rain and stared at it. I tried pushing it up, but the mud and gravel were too loose, and it slipped under my shoes as I tried to brace against the car and push. I couldn’t afford a tow truck. I couldn’t go back to the trailer with Busy being the way she was, mean and lit from within by that fervid, unearthly earnestness.

The terrible thought flickered for a moment—just a single moment—but the flicker was a lightning strike, illuminating a terrain that was deeply alien and also darkly attractive.

I could just stop.

That was it. That was the entire thought.

I could just stop.I could simply stop trying, stop struggling, stop enduring.

Whatever the Church said now, I’d been brought up to believe that you couldn’t go to Heaven if you killed yourself. But if you died of something like hypothermia…that wasn’t suicide, not really, nor was walking on a wet, precarious road in the dark, knowing a semitruck could sling itself around one of those tight, Ozarkian curves at any moment. Nor was accidentally slipping into the hole on the other side of the road and tumbling past boulders and deadfall. None of that was on purpose. None of that would count.

“Birdie!”

I looked up through sheets of rain to see Mel Charboneau in a camo-print poncho holding a flashlight. And somehow, Mel and her flashlight had conjured up two other neighbors, old-timers that reminded me of Paxico. One of them had a truck with a winch, and the other had a pickup that was encouragingly described to me as astubborn son of a bitch, and then suddenly my car was at the top of the hill, back onto the tree-fringed pavement of F Road. Everyone refused offers of payment and waved off my tremulous thanks and melted back into the rain.

It took me even longer to drive back home than it had to get to the lake.

My hands were shaking from stress and hunger by the time I pulled onto the gravel turnoff, and so it took me a minute to realize that the hill was alive. Undulating, glimmering in the glow of my headlights, and with a new river where the driveway was supposed to be. The undulations were the sheer amounts of water coming down off the hill through the long grass. And barely audible over the rain was something like a roar, which I know now was the creek. It would have been flooded by that point, spilling over its banks and climbing jealously up the hill.

I parked the car and turned it off and tried to remember the kindness of Mel and her neighbors as I sloshed down to the hill house. I tried to remember that I could still make art even if no one else wanted it. I tried to remember that Busy loved me and she’d been trying to hurt me because she was hurt somehow, and she’d never been good about loving anyone when she was hurt. I tried to pray for courage and endurance. I tried to think of anything, pray for anything, that would keep theI could just stopfrom murmuring to me between the gusts of rain.

I opened the front door to the house, and water pouredout.