Page 82 of Devil

And I didn’t forget.

It was like creation itself had been dammed up in my fingers, a surging and rolling fire of will, and now that it’s been unpent, I’m helpless in its tide. I haven’t even needed models for the criminals because their faces were as clear in my mind as if they were in front of me, their contorted bodies already speaking to me from the grain of the wood.

Godis speaking to me from the grain of the wood.

Was he waiting there all along, I wonder? And all I had to do was have enough faith to pick up a chisel again?

I tell all this to Bell as I walk around the first statue—he hasn’t seen it yet with the oiled finish—and then the new block of basswood. I show him the clay model I made before I penciled the final to-scale sketch. Bell is curious about everything, every choice, every line and curve. His curiosity is electrifying, as is all his attention, but especially so when it’s about something that might as well be the unlocked gate to my soul. Especially so because I never talk to anyone about my art, ever, not in the visceral way I experience it. When Catholic magazines and newsletters asked questions, when local papers profiled me, what they really wanted was something that justified their own existence. Catholic publications wanted me to speak about art in a way that locked in neatly with post-Tridentine doctrine; local papers wanted me to talk aboutjust how localI was—my high school, my own local heroes, why I loved making things here and not some other, better-known place.

Bell wants to know the guts of it. Nothing already decided, no agenda beyond his obsession with knowing my mind. And inside his appetite to know my art, I find new revelations even for myself. New questions to ask. Things I’ve done instinctively that I wonder if I can do on purpose.

Like right now, he asks, “Why don’t you use a chainsaw for the initial paring down of the piece? It takes so much effort to get things trimmed with just a hatchet and a hacksaw, but you never take the easy way out. Why is that?”

My eyes move away from the screen to the finished criminal as I consider this. “It’s the way I’ve always done things,” I say.

I know Bell will want more than that, but he doesn’t rush me; he lets me think.He lets me think.It seems so small, but it’s so rare, both his patience and his respect. He doesn’t treat my sketching, chiseling mind as something that can be changed, chivied into quickness. He waits, his attention never abating but never growing heavy either.

“It’s a form of devotion for me,” I explain, finally ready to shape this into words, no matter how little they might make sense to someone like Ryan Bell. “All of it is the work of my hands. Each chip, every flake, they come off in the order they’re meant to, they come off with a music that echoes the music of cathedrals being built, altars being carved, even the work of Christ’s own hands when he was alive. It’s meditative, a kind of prayer, and inside that prayer, I can touch my purpose, at large and also in the moment, with that particular piece of wood. And every cut, every splinter, every time I wake up with sore arms or shoulders, I’m reminded of what my devotion is for. I thank God for giving it to me.”

Bell, who’s long since reached his hotel room and sat on his bed against the headboard, looks at me with an expression I can’t place. “I don’t think God deserves you, Birdie Cooper,” he tells me. “Any more than I do.”

My own reply is quiet. “Then I’m glad that neither relationship is up to me. I think maybe I’d rather be kept than deserved.”

A muscle twitches in his jaw and he looks away. And I am as consumed as he is because I want to know everything he’s thinking right now, everything he’s feeling. Is he feeling grateful that our deal is so carefully bounded? Relieved that he doesn’t have to deserve me past the money he’s promised for Busy? Angry maybe that I’d compared him to his divine enemy, God?

“Ry,” I prompt softly, and he looks back at me. And like I’ve seen so many times before, that mystifying expression shimmers into something good-natured and flirtatious. The Bell the rest of the world sees.

“What did you have for breakfast?” he asks, smiling and settling farther back against the headboard. “Something more interesting than a banana, I hope.”

I want to press. I want to ask what he was thinking and why he doesn’t want me to know, why sometimes he looks at me like I haven’t relinquished something that I was supposed to when I’ve already relinquished everything he’s ever asked for.

But I don’t press. I’m a coward…and honestly, who am I to press anyway? I can understand that he craves more than sex from me, so I know I’m notonlya whore, but I’m not much more either. A paid companion, a mistress.A girlfriend experience, as Busy once put it when describing some time she’d spent in Nashville. Not someone who has the right to demand emotional transparency.

So I answer his question instead, sitting at the workbench and dangling a strip of tracing paper for the kitten to bat at. “Toaster waffles,” I tell him. “With peanut butter and honey. Although there was no one here to cut them with a pizza cutter for me.”

A slow, knowing grin spreads across his face.

“I told you I miss you,” I say, knowing my cheeks are bright red. It’s schoolgirlish, to eat something the object of your infatuation eats. It’s not something a thirty-six-year-old woman has any right doing. But he looks so delighted with himself, so preening, that it’s almost worth the vulnerability of admitting it.

“Oh, Birdie. If I were there, I’d make you all the waffles you wanted. What were you thinking when you were eating them? What were you doing?”

The thing about Bell is that he truly means every question he asks, no matter how obvious the answer seems, no matter how inconsequential. And he asks questions all the time. He asks if I’ve enjoyed walking to the river with him, if I like fireworks better at night, what flowering weed I think is pressing through the concrete outside the front door. When he found out that I haven’t seen any of the famous TV shows of the last ten years, he decided we should get me caught up, and as we watch, he wants to know everything I think, every pet theory, every favorite character, everything that makes me wince or chuckle.

When I told him I didn’t like the house I grew up in, he wanted to know exactly what the unhappiness felt like, if it changed from room to room. When he learned that my grandparents had built it and loved each other and been happy there—that my own parents had been happy there until my dad died—he’d decided the fault was with the structure itself and made me draw out the floor plans, the angles of the hill. He wanted to know exactly what I saw from my bedroom window or where in the living room I’d curled up to watch TV. He wanted to know if I ever felt like the house could have been welcoming, what I would have changed.

Everything, I told him.It was built wrong from the beginning. A cistern that collected all the smallness and shabbiness from the world around it and went rancid.

So that’s Bell. His curiosity is insatiable, his attention absolute. He glows when I confide the smallest thing, and glows even more when I confide it unprompted.

I know it’s invasive—I know it might be sick, it might be sinister, for someone to want so much of the inside of you. I know that your inner life is supposed to be yours alone. But my inner life has been such a lightless place for so long, since my dad and grandparents died, and it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to crawl inside me as much as it feels like he’s letting me crawl inside him.

Yes, it’s greedy, but it’s greed forme, and yes, it’s hungry, but it’s hunger forme. No one has wanted me, no one has bothered themselves about me in so, so long, and slowly I stopped bothering myself about me too. It was so much easier to let the cold creep in, the unfeeling, to deaden everything that wasn’t the ability to plod ahead like an animal.

And then Bell came back into my life, and he wants me so much that he shakes with it—he shadows me around the house, cajoles me into coming along for the most mundane errands, barely endures the moments when we’re not touching. How can that feel invasive when there was nothing but emptiness to invade? How can it feel like darkness when I know what real darkness is and it is the void of touch, of language, of art?

How can it feel wrong when it feels better than anything has felt in my entire life?

I love it. It might destroy me in the end, but I love it.