The Darker Side

  I have many sins, so many, Father, sins of pride, sins of envy, sins of lust. I have murdered men. In self-defense, it’s true, but some part of me enjoyed killing them. I love that I got to kill the man who took my Matt and my Alexa from me. It pleases me forever.

  Sins?

  I have sinned against my family, my friends, those who loved and trusted me. I have lied—a lot. I drink in the night. I have only lain with two men in my life, but I have done it with abandon. Sometimes for love, sure, but sometimes just for the pleasure they could give me. Is it a sin to have taken joy at the feel of cock in my mouth, to have whispered into Matt’s or Tommy’s ears “fuck me fuck me fuck me, dear sweet God, fuck me”? Does God appreciate my bringing Him there, making Him a part of that sweaty moment?

  I have gazed on the suffering of others, on their victimization, on their murdered and mutilated corpses, and I have taught myself how to turn away. How to shut off the images and the emotions, to go home and eat spaghetti and watch TV as though their pain never existed or didn’t matter. I have made a job out of hunting evil men. I get paid a salary because people die.

  Are these sins?

  I shift on the kneeler. All those things that had run through my head may or may not be sins. None of them are the thing that wakes up the monster in my mind.

  See me, it says, but the voice is gentle this time, and the voice, of course, is me.

  I feel tears running down my face. I’m going to tell him, I realize. I was always going to tell him, I knew it the moment I walked in here. That’s why the sweat and nausea went away.

  “I did a terrible thing, Father,” I whisper. “I think because I did this thing I’ll never let myself feel real joy. I’ll never let myself really love someone again. Because I don’t deserve it.”

  Saying it aloud brings out the anguish in earnest. The grief-monster tries to crawl up and out of my throat as a wail. I fight him down, let him detonate inside me. It’s too quiet here; Alan would hear me. I clench my hands together in a single fist and I push it against my mouth. I bite down till I break the skin. I taste a little of my own blood and shiver with my own pain.

  Father Yates has been quiet, waiting. He speaks again. His voice is gentle. Safe. He reminds me, for a moment, of my real father, not God, but my dad, who always kept the creatures under my bed at bay.

  “Put it into words, Smoky. Just let it go. I’ll listen, I won’t judge. What you say here will never be repeated by me to another. Whatever burden you’re carrying, it’s time to put it down.”

  I nod, tears still running down my face. I know he can’t see me nod, but my throat has closed up, and I can’t speak. He seems to sense this.

  “Take your time.”

  I sniffle and he waits. As the moments pass, the hand clenching my throat loosens. I’m able to speak again.

  “After the attack, I was in the hospital for a while. Sands had cut my face down to the bone in most places. He’d sliced me on other parts of my body and had burned me with a cigar. None of it was life threatening, but I was in a lot of pain and they were concerned about infection because some of the wounds were so deep.

  “I was set on dying, Father. I had absolutely, positively, one hundred percent decided that I was going to be blowing my own brains out. I was going to get out of that hospital and I was going to go home, get my affairs in order, and kill myself.”

  “Go on.”

  “This is all stuff everyone knows. I had to see a shrink—and you know how that turned out. The point is, people know I wrestled with the whole suicide thing. They know about the rape, and they can sure see the scars. That’s all safe stuff. Stuff they can understand and excuse. ‘Of course she was suicidal, look at what she went through, poor thing!’ You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And some part of me, Father, some part of me ate it up. All that sympathy. Poor, poor Smoky. Isn’t she strong? Isn’t it admirable how she overcame and went on?”

  The bitterness is rising in me like black coffee, or sour milk. I can almost taste it in my mouth. It’s the flavor of self-loathing. No, that’s not strong enough. Self-hate.

  “So tell me that thing they didn’t know, Smoky. The thing that wasn’t admirable.”

  The rush of hostility makes me a little dizzy with its ferocity. Heat blooms in my cheeks and forehead. Pure anger, the do-or-die of an animal with its back against the wall. This secret is going to go down fighting. It can see the light, and the light makes it rage and scream.

  “Fuck God,” I breathe, and love the taste of the words, the thrill of them.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Fuck God and His forgiveness. Why should I ask that asshole to forgive me for anything? What did my mother need to be forgiven for? Did you know that in the last days she begged us to kill her? She was in so much pain, she begged us to do it, to take her life. And she was the most devout Catholic I knew!”

  “And did you?” he asks, his voice calm.

  “What? Fuck you. No.” The rage is a tidal wave, it has swept me up and I am helpless against it.

  “Then tell me what you did do, Smoky. You don’t have to ask God for forgiveness, if you don’t want to. But you do have to ask yourself.”

  I grind my teeth and grip my hands together until they’re numb.

  “Forgive myself?” I snarl in a whisper. “What, just because I say it out loud here, it’s suddenly going to all be okay?”

  “No. But it’ll be a start. I can’t tell you why it makes a difference to tell someone else what we’ve done, Smoky, but it does. It’s only words, but yes, you will feel better. You need to tell me what you did and then realize that the world didn’t end because you told me.”

  That calm is unstoppable. It’s a little juggernaut of faith, patient and inexorable. If he had to empty a swimming pool with a spoon, he’d do so without complaint, however long it took. It makes me feel safe and hostile in tandem. I want to hug him and slap him all at once.

  “I was pregnant,” I blurt out.

  Silence.

  I think, for a moment, that he’s judging me already, but I realize he’s just waiting.

  “Go on,” he says.

  “Just a few months. It was a big surprise. I used a diaphragm. Matt and I weren’t old, but we weren’t exactly spring chickens either. It just…happened.”

  “Did your husband know?”

  You’re too smart for me, Father.

  “No. I wasn’t sure I was going to tell him either. I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep the baby.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Selfishness, I guess. I was in my late thirties, career on the rise, all the usual excuses. Don’t misunderstand, I hadn’t decided to get rid of it, not for sure. But I was thinking about it, and I was hiding it from Matt.”

  “Did you have a lot of secrets in your marriage?”

  “No. That’s the thing. Well, part of the thing. Matt and I, we were lucky. I know all about the ways a marriage can go off the rails. Men cheat, women cheat, men lie, women lie. Mistresses kill the wives, wives kill the husbands, or maybe they’re fine, but cancer kills them both anyway. Sometimes it’s a long, slow death. Years of little secrets turn into big distrusts, and the marriage is less about love than endurance.

  “Matt and I? We never had that. We had fights. We could spend days not talking to each other. But we always came back together in the end, and we loved each other. I never cheated on him, and I’m sure he never cheated on me.”

  “This moment then—hiding this from him—this was unusual.”

  “Very. You hide little things. It’s part of living with someone. You have to keep some things for yourself. But you don’t hide big things. You don’t hide a pregnancy, and you sure as hell don’t hide an abortion. That’s not who we were.”

  “Did he know before his death?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think you would have told him?”

  “I like to think so. But I’m not sure.”

&nb
sp; “What happened to the baby, Smoky?”

  It’s THE question, of course. See me, the voice said. I do, I do, in bright neon, under the light of 10,000 times 10,000-watt lamps.

  “It’s not so much that I aborted the baby,” I say, “but why.” My voice sounds empty. I am exhausted. I think I’d rather be anywhere than here, right now. “See, I wanted to kill myself, but I knew I could never do that with a baby inside me. So I asked the doctor to take care of it.” Tired, tired, so tired. “It was the last little bit of Matt, right there inside me, ready to grow and be born and live. He didn’t have to end there, we didn’t have to end there, do you understand? Sands didn’t take that from me. He didn’t kill my baby. I did that. Me.”

  I start to weep.

  “Is there more?” Father Yates asks.

  “More? Of course there’s more. I’m here, don’t you see? I got rid of that baby so I could kill myself, but in the end I didn’t even do it! The baby died for nothing! For no reason at all! I—I—” I don’t want to say the words, but I need to. “I murdered that baby, Father. M-m-murdered.”

  I can’t talk anymore. All I can do is cry. I don’t cry for myself. I cry because one of the last actions in my marriage was to lie. I cry for the idea of Alexa having a baby brother or sister. Most of all, I cry for that child. She, or he, had been a chance to put something back of the things Sands had stolen. I threw that chance away in a moment of agony. It’s not about the right and wrong of abortion. It’s about the reasons for the decision, the pain, the selfishness, the maybes, might-haves, could-have-beens. It’s about the misery of realizing you’ve done something terrible you can never take back, can never make up for.

  I cry and Father Yates lets me. He doesn’t speak, but I can feel his presence, and it comforts me.

  I don’t know how long it goes on. The grief blows itself out, not gone, just quieter.

  “Smoky, I’m not going to throw a lot of scripture at you, here. I know that your faith isn’t up to that. I’ll simply say, yes, what you did, why you did it, was wrong. You know this. But what is the real sin? What is it that makes what you did so terrible? It is the fact that you threw away the gift of life. I don’t care where you think that gift came from—God, primordial soup, a little bit of both—but life is a gift, and I think you know that. I think you know it more than most people, because of what you do.”

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  “Then, don’t you see? Continuing to deny yourself forgiveness, continuing to deny yourself love, is to continue the same sin—because all of it means to deny yourself life.”

  “But, Father—how can I let myself be happy, really happy? I can’t change what I did.”

  “You atone. You don’t forget. You don’t justify. You change. You’re raising the daughter of your friend. Raise her well. Be a good mother to her. Teach her to love life. You have a man in your life? Love him. If you marry him, don’t keep secrets from him. You have a job that lets you imprison those who would take life from others. Do that job well, and you’ll save countless lives. It’s right that you’ve suffered for this sin, but you’re not evil, Smoky, and it’s time, if you won’t forgive yourself, to let someone else forgive you. I’ve given you your penance. Maybe it will take you a lifetime to do it. Now, I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

  They’re just words. I’m not right with God, and I’m not sure I ever will be. I may never see the inside of a confessional booth again, and I secretly think Jesus might just have been a carpenter. But Father Yates had been right: saying it to someone else, out loud, and seeing that the world didn’t end as a result, gives me a relief I had never expected. I feel…clean. The sorrow is still there and that’s okay. Only the men I hunt don’t regret.

  “Thanks, Father.”

  I don’t know what else to say.

  “It’s my pleasure.” I can almost feel him smiling. “You see? There’s plenty of adventure to be had, doing what I do.”

  “No kidding,” I agree.

  Some people explore the outer world. They climb mountains, sail the oceans, hunt with the natives, so to speak. Some find their adventure in excess, as Hemingway did, running with the bulls, downing the booze, living larger than life. Then there are the Father Yates and me types, we spend our days spelunking through the inner world, where something new and maybe terrible always lies beyond the bend. “Here there be tigers” the old explorers used to put on the maps. That warning applies most to the territory between the ears and inside the heart.

  To think that you could come inside this wooden box and talk to another human being about the things you could never tell anyone else…

  “Holy shit,” I whisper.

  “Smoky…”

  “Oh my God.”

  Immerse yourself in the environment. I sure as shit had done that. And the answer had been staring me in the face. It was simple, it was direct, it was right.

  “Smoky, are you all right?”

  I stand up. Where did he get access to their secrets? Where else?

  “Father, I think I have some bad news. I think someone else has been inside your confessional, and I’m not talking about God.”

  29

  “IT IS KIND OF A PERFECT ENVIRONMENT FOR PLANTING A bug,” Alan observes. “It’s dark inside, and people have their attention fixed on themselves, not on what’s around them.”

  We’re standing just outside the confessional. I’d rushed out with my tears still drying on my face.

  It makes sense. We’d looked at the idea of support groups, AA meetings, things like that, but why cast such a wide and imperfect net, if secrets were what you were after? The Preacher was all about religion. If you’re a religious person, who do you tell your deepest, darkest secrets to, the kinds of secrets we’ve been seeing on those video clips?

  Your priest.

  You close that confessional door and let it all hang out. I had, and I was the ultimate lapsed Catholic. The obvious worry in terms of confidentiality would be the priest, that’s where the penitents’ concerns would lie, not on the esoteric possibility of someone bugging the confessional.

  Father Yates paces back and forth. He is troubled, angry, perhaps a little sick. I understand. I think about what we just did in there, and I shiver a little thinking about someone else listening in. It must be ten times worse for him, because he’ll feel responsible.

  “If this is true, it’s terrible, just terrible,” he mutters. “Parishioners won’t feel safe coming to confession. The ones that have are going to feel betrayed. There will be crises of faith.”

  The poor man looks more agitated and upset than anytime since I met him. It’s disturbing; I’ve become used to the comfort of his un-flappability.

  “Father, I need to ask you something.”

  He stops pacing. He runs a hand through his hair.

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “I need confirmation. You said you hadn’t watched any of the video clips of his victims. What about the one of Rosemary? He included that in his initial ‘thesis.’”

  “Absolutely not. I skipped through it. I couldn’t watch that.”

  “I need to ask you about the secret she revealed in that clip. It was something pretty bad, and it was something he already knew. I’m going to tell you what it was, and I need to know if she revealed it to you in confession.”

  “I can’t break the seal of confession,” he protests. “Her death doesn’t absolve me of that.”

  “Come on, Father! Even if it helps to catch her murderer? He’s told us he’s going to kill a child soon if we don’t catch him!” I stab a finger at him. “You don’t get off the hook that easy. This is a difficult issue for you, I understand, maybe some advanced canonical interpretation is required, but you need to take a hard look at the right and wrong here. Her big secret is already sitting out there on the Internet for everyone to see. How can you make that worse? Seems to me you can only make it better.”

  ?
??Really?” His voice is harsh. “Let me ask you something, Smoky. If you died tomorrow, would you want me to reveal what we just talked about inside the confessional?”

  The question takes me aback. My immediate, visceral response: Fuck no.

  Touché, Father.

  “Under normal circumstances, of course not. But if I’d been murdered like Rosemary? Forced to tell it all again, and then had it exposed to the world?” I move in close to him, make him look down to meet my eyes. “I’d want you to do whatever it took to bring that fucker to justice.”

  I can see the struggle going on inside him, can understand it. Father Yates is a man of conviction, a true believer who practices what he preaches. He lives his life by certain inviolate concepts. The stability of those concepts, the black and white of them, are what keeps him anchored to his faith while he toils away in the gray areas. The Rosemarys of the world are complicated. Dealing with them must be difficult. I can understand his need for certainties.

  “Fine, tell me,” he says. “If I think your theory has merit, I’ll give you a sign. I won’t speak directly to the content of Rosemary’s confession, but I will give you a sign.”

  I can see that even this compromise has cost him.

  “Thank you, Father.”

  I tell him about Rosemary having sex with her brother, and about how Dylan then took his own life. Father Yates’s face is a mask throughout. When I finish, he looks right into my eyes and makes the sign of the cross.

  “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” he murmurs. “Amen.”

  Excitement thrills through me, overtaking everything else.

  “I need access to the confessional tomorrow, Father. First thing in the morning. I’m going to get someone over here to sweep the confessional booth and the rest of your church for bugs.”

  He sighs. “Of course.”

  “Alan, can you give us a moment?”

  My friend nods. “I’ll meet you out by the car.”

  When we’re alone, I gesture to the front pew. “Take a seat, Father.”

  He does. I sit down beside him.

  “I know this is bad for you.”