Page 92 of Devil

“Oh, Ry,” Birdie says, and suddenly I’m wrapped in a hug, hair tickling my jaw, the scent of apples everywhere.

I’m surprised by it, but I don’t waste the chance to hold her. I wrap my arms around her and snug her tight against my chest, breathing her in.

“So this is why you and God aren’t friendly?” The words are a little muffled by my tuxedo jacket. “Why you don’t trust him?”

“He gives us a world of papier-mâché and expects us to be grateful for it. He gives us a church that hurts its own people and wants us to worship him in it. When you’re handed blessings, you owe him hours of obsequious praise for his generosity, and yet he can rob you of everything you love and claim it’s not his fault. We’re supposed to believe that the story of the fall is about temptation when really it’s a story about people being able to see things how they are for the first time. No wonder God didn’t want them near the fruit.”

She holds me tighter, and I can feel the slight shudder of her ribs under my hands. She’s still crying.

“Pretty bird,” I murmur, “it’s really okay. I can’t say I’ve made peace with God, but he’s probably made a kind of peace with me. He’s decided to leave me alone while I prove that I can do a better job than he can.”

I feel her snort, an adorable seizing of her body, and then she shakes her head against my chest. “So humble.”

“No one’s more humble than me.”

“And I understand.”

Thatis surprising. Despite my corrupting presence in her life, Birdie is truly and sweetly devout. I expected her sympathy perhaps, but not her empathy.

I adjust her against my chest so she can look up at me. “You understand?”

The lights are purple right now, turning her blue eyes into amethysts. Royal and glittering and sad. “I was an orphan by the time I was eighteen, Ry. For half my life, I’ve had to face the world alone while people told me to trust in God. Yes, I can understand how you feel.”

“It didn’t make you like me, though.”

A sociopath. A demon. A man who traps an artist in his bed for a year.

Her lashes drop as she looks away. “It did other things to me, I think.”

“Like?”

A long pause. A short exhale. And finally: “Do you know how my parents died?”

I consider my response to this. “What answer would you like to hear?”

“So you do.”

I lift a shoulder; I’m a capable stalker when I’m not being foiled by misleading first initials. “Your father died in a highway accident when you were sixteen, and your mother drowned two years later.”

She shifts back against me, her ear to my chest. She’s got her arms around my waist still, so she doesn’t seem bothered by my knowing things from her past. “My grandpa bought an old pickup from a friend about forty miles away. He and my grandma were going to go get it together, but my dad didn’t want my grandma driving back with her new hip not being healed up. He insisted on coming—Grandma insisted they didn’t need the help, of course—but all three of them ended up going anyway. It was a semi that got them…the driver swerved to avoid a deer, is what the report said. Swerved at eighty miles an hour. The trooper told me it was probably instantaneous. It wouldn’t have hurt.”

I smooth my hand up and down Birdie’s spine with a steady pressure. She hugs me a little tighter.

“I didn’t understand until they died how much I needed them. My grandparents were always there, always happy to have us up in the farmhouse and to feed us and let us tag along during their chores when Dad was busy or Mom was having a bad day. And Dad…he was everything to Busy and me, you know? And everything to Mom. He made sure there were hardly any bad days at all when he was alive. I still don’t know how he did it.”

“There were more bad days after he died?” I posit, but more as a way to keep her talking because I think I already know the answer.

“They were all bad days by the end.”

Birdie speaks with such a bleak and toneless voice that I want to cut myself open and let her crawl inside me. I want to travel back in time and rescue her. I want to marry the Birdie in my arms right this minute so she knows she’ll never have to go through a bad day alone again.

“There was so much I didn’t understand about doctors and insurance, and we could barely afford her meds as it was, and it seemed like losing Dad was the kind of thing Mom couldn’t ever stop wobbling from. And the wobbles got bigger and bigger, and it was no longer just mania and depression but delusions too, paranoia constantly, voices sometimes. And then Busy ran away, and it was just me trying to take care of her and what was left of the farm while I finished high school, and it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. By the end, I couldn’t…” Birdie takes a very deep breath in my arms, like she’s trying to pull clean air into the very seat of her soul. “I couldn’t bring her back from the places she went in her mind. I couldn’t convince her not to listen to the voices she heard in the house. She stopped remembering that my grandparents had loved her, that she’d been happy on the farm once. And then the summer after my high school graduation, I came home from a job detasseling corn, and she wasn’t home. She hadn’t left the house in months at that point, plus I had the only working car…but she wasn’t home.”

Birdie stops.

Like she can’t make herself speak the next part of the story aloud.

I can spare her this at least, even if I couldn’t protect her from it when it mattered most. “I read the article from the local paper. The pond was on the farm. They ruled it an accidental drowning.”