Page 7 of Devil

Bell turned his gaze to mine, the full force of his smile bent on me, and I was conscious of a grimy kind of smallness, an unbeauty to me and to Busy, not only in our features but in our lives too. Our scrabbling lives, nicotine stained and directionless.

I prayed then, a quick prayer to the Virgin Mary, asking for the courage to be humble, for my ego to be taken away from me. It was only a proud person who cared what other people thought of them, and I didn’t want to be proud.

But oh God, as Busy strolled over to the coffee cup and tipped her cigarette inside, I was ashamed. And then mortified as she said, “All the boys you teach this cute, Birdie?”

“Busy!” I said, shocked. “Mr. Bell is my student!”

“College student,” she said, like I was being an unmitigated prude. “And it’s not like you’re a real professor. Maybe the scenery makes up for the bad pay, hm? You could ask him to model for one of your carvings.”

A flicker of something over Bell’s face—discomfort, I thought at the time—but it was gone the minute it came, and he gave an easy laugh. “Any one of the fine arts students here would pay Birdie to be one of her models, just so we could take a look at the inside of her studio. She doesn’t let anyone inside. Did you know that? Only the people delivering the blocks of wood for carving.”

He tried to make it better, to make what she’d said into conversation and not insinuation, and that seemed to amuse her. She snorted and then held up the pomegranate. “I’m taking this,” she told me. “And I’ll be back after you can swing by the ATM. I’ll meet you in the parking lot later.”

She left, and Bell and I stood there and listened to her booted footsteps fade away.

“I’m so sorry about that,” I mumbled. I was looking at the ground, so unclear as to what the protocol would be here. This well-behaved, incredibly polite student, and Busy had made things feel so…seedy. “What she said…it was wildly inappropriate?—”

A warm hand came to my upper arm, and I jolted like a frightened animal. Bell dropped his hand.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that it’s okay. I know she didn’t speak for you.”

My own hand came up and covered the spot he’d just touched. It was only after he’d pulled his hand back that I’d become aware of how large it was. He could spread his thumb and cover my upper arm from shoulder to elbow.

“Thank you,” I said, still holding my arm. I dared to look up at him. His expression was gentle, friendly. “I am sorry, though, because ultimately, it’s my responsibility. She’s my sister and she said that in my classroom. If you want to tell the department chair or Father Alvarez?—”

“Birdie,” he said kindly, “it’s okay. Truly.”

“Okay.” My voice was so stupidly soft. I suddenly felt like crying.

In a quick, easy gesture, he checked the watch in his pocket and then replaced it. The other students would be arriving any minute now. He stepped past me, went to the desk, and then threw the coffee cup in the trash can.

Through the lingering smell of cigarette smoke, I caught the scent of him, and it was like smoke too but a rich, heady smoke that made me think of incense. Intoxicating and sinuous as it floated through the church rafters up to the ceiling and eventually to the Sunday sun beyond.

4

BIRDIE

Weeks later,the storm puffed itself out of nothing, just vapor and pressure and then suddenly rain. I watched on my laptop as a scythe of flickering green-yellow-orange cut its way toward Kansas City and Evelyn College on its western outskirts. There were more green spots splotching behind the scythe; they were saying the storm would last a few days. Flash flood warnings had already been put into effect, and the grocery stores were ritualistically denuded of bread, milk, and toilet paper. The brothers and sisters who worked at the college, most of them older, all of them with an encyclopedic memory of past weather, recalled tales of previous floods to the students: 1951; 1977; the fatal, murky waters of ’93.

It was the last Thursday of the semester, and instead of having a studio session, the students had come in to collect their work. Tuesday had been an open house of sorts, a deeply uncomfortable event for me but a proud one for the students, and grades had been issued. They were freed from my class, and I was freed from pretending to be a teacher.

I walked to the far end of campus, where my residency studio was located in what used to be a coach house back when Evelyn was a working monastery. I had the day’s pomegranate in my hand—my last pomegranate—and I was thinking about how I never learned who’d been leaving them for me, how the notes had never gone beyond the markeredMs. Cooper.

It was a sullen, chancy kind of wind that gusted in the open spaces of the campus, sometimes quiet, abruptly harsh, and the raindrops were scattered but hard when they hit me, cold enough to be felt right away. I had my head ducked and was walking at a pace that was just under a jog, the wind yanking at my clothes.

I have to tell you this so I can remind myself: there was a good reason I didn’t notice him following me. And as mundane as a storm in May might be, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good reason. It doesn’t mean I did anything wrong.

I didn’t flip any switches when I walked through the door, letting the eerie gray-green light fill the space through the arched windows. It was a huge space, like the barn back home, and it was selfish to have it all to myself, especially when the college was forever short on room. But the residency program was young, and they still hadn’t created another residency position yet. Maybe one day, the old brick coach house would be sprinkled with marble chips or reek of turpentine, but for now, it was just me and my sawdust. It was heaven. Even if it meant I had to build coffee tables and stepstools to supplement the stipend, even if it meant I couldn’t refuse to teach an orphaned studio session without looking churlish. Here in the studio, it was just the basswood and mahogany and the light through the windows. Just me summoning the memory of saints and angels and God himself out of the wood.

I set my satchel down but kept the pomegranate as I walked up to my carvings in their various iterations, saying hello, watching the storm’s shadows move over them, wondering what the wood would show me it needed today. The Madonna and child was almost finished, but there was a new block of basswood in the center of the studio, earmarked for a Joan of Arc for a new church in Michigan, and I was itching to get my hands on it. I’d already had a fixture of our local Renaissance festival pose in her armor for me, and I’d made a scale model out of clay to refine my plans before I actually picked up the chisel. Maybe I could start penciling Joan onto the block today. The chain mail would be a challenge but so worth it.

It had been only a minute or two, but I’d already forgotten about the outside world, and when the studio door swung open, my heart gave a huge thudding lurch in my chest, my lungs grabbing at air like I was preparing to run. It was an unnecessary reaction, an autonomic one that flared before my mind could catch up, and normally, that would have been it; my lungs would have relaxed, my heart would have remembered itself, and then I would have felt silly for being startled by an opened door.

But my autonomic responses never had a chance to settle. My nervous system stayed aroused because the person walking through the door wasn’t an administrator or another teacher. It wasn’t Kaitlyn or even Busy.

It was Bell.

Bell in jeans and a white Henley, sleeves pushed up to his elbows, the clip of his pocket watch hooked on a belt loop and the watch tucked into his pocket. The strap of a leather satchel cut across his wide chest, and his tennis shoes were worn around the soles, like they were old favorites that he couldn’t bear to retire.