Confessions (15 page)

Three shots.

It swims in his eyes for a moment, the whole of those few seconds in the market on Tyler Street. His head shakes a bit. It could be that he is saying without words ‘not me’. Or, more likely, ‘this can’t be happening’. Neither is what I have come for. What I am here to find.

“You killed my sister,” I say, a warmth sparkling behind my eyes. Washing forward over them. Without seeing myself I know that they are glistening with the threat of tears. It is as if the sadness of all the days since Katie was killed, every moment of ignoring the loss of her, has found the way free from the place I have buried it. The fury I have mustered for this confrontation begins to weaken. My arm eases slightly from its hold against his throat, the first outward sign that I am not what I needed to be. Whatever one needs possess to draw truth and admission from the James Estceks of the world, it is not part of my fiber. I should be grateful, were I thinking as the man I was not many days ago, but the only appraisal I can muster of myself at this instant is weak.

That is, until he speaks.

“So the fuck what?”

I do not even feel the rage rise. In fact it seems not to come from anywhere, but simply is everywhere about me all at once. No thought guides what I do then. I am barely aware of it as my forearm drives hard against his neck again and my free hand draws back, a fist flying past my cheek again and again, pummeling James Estcek’s face. I feel a wet spatter across my cheeks as I rain blow upon blow on him. It is his blood, the rational part of self tells me within in some clinical play by play my mind seems to be engaging in. It tells me that I am striking him. That his eye is swelling shut. That a tooth has just been knocked out. That the crunch just felt against my knuckles is his nose breaking.

And then the oddest commentary of all in response to something I have not realized. Some physicality of self I have not noticed. For however long I have been beating the man who killed my sister I have not taken a breath, and my mind calmly tells me to breathe.

When I heed the reminder, whatever has allowed me to do what I just have rushes out of me with the stale air I have held within. I gasp a deep breath and almost jump back from James Estcek, letting his bloodied body crumple to the floor in the corner. I stand still for a moment, drawing fast gulps of air as I watch him twitch and cough. He rights himself to a sitting position, his head lolling backward so that what is left of his face is angled toward me, one open eye wide with terror and fixed upon me like he is trying to awaken from some nightmare.

At that moment, we are as close to knowing one another as will ever be possible.

I turn. Slowly. As if I am moving through some impenetrable darkness and know not which way to go. I am looking at the door, the way out, and still my hand gropes for the knob, my mind still seeming disconnected within and surprised at the fumbling it is witness to. Finally I grip the knob, and turn it, and without another look at James Estcek I open the door and step out, closing it slowly behind.

*  *  *

“Mike?”

It has stopped raining. The sun has set. I am parked in the driveway of the rectory, the engine running.

“Mike, you okay?”

It is Tim. The glass of the driver’s window muffling his voice, his words to me seeming to drift from some great distance, not the few feet that separates us. My gaze, still, has not angled to find him. It is fixed ahead out the dry windshield, wipers scraping uselessly across it. I wonder how long I have been sitting here. The car is in drive, my right foot pressed hard down on the brake.

And there are my hands. Both clenched around the steering wheel, white knuckles scraped red, whatever blood had stained them washed away by the rain as I walked from James Estcek’s building and crossed the street to my car. Did I sit behind the wheel there for some time as I have here? I try to remember, but can’t, and try no more to do so as a quick rap sounds on the driver’s window. I finally look and see Tim bent forward, eyeing me through the half-fogged glass, a nascent concern plain about him. He has never expressed worry toward me, has never needed to beyond that which came natural in the time surrounding Katie’s death, and so the peculiarity of the moment here between us very clearly troubles him in ways he is not prepared for.

“What’s wrong?”

I relax my grip on the steering wheel and put the car in park. My right foot eases up from the brake and I turn the ignition off. The wipers screech to a stop mid-windshield. For a moment it is quiet. No engine noise. No rain thrumming on the roof or road whining rhythmically beneath the tires. I think at that instant that this must be the sound of one entombed. Walled in and shut off from the world that is. Or was.

I end my isolation with a pull on the door handle, and step out. Tim straightens as I close the driver’s door behind. His brow is creased, eyes appraising me almost clinically, like some practitioner trying to diagnose a malady buried deep by seeking signs upon the surface. What he sees, though, are only symptoms. Distance in my gaze. A wan detachment plastered upon my face.

“Mike, what is it?”

There is more than one answer to that. There is the ‘what’ of what I have just done to James Estcek. And a similar series of actions on my part leading to that. But there is also the larger answer under which all these acts do exist in concert. I have turned away from inviolable tenets of my calling. Turned full away and begun to put distance between myself and the things I had so very recently held as vital to my place in this world. Possibly that is an explanation. Even one with substance and warranting some forgiveness should I share it with Tim. But I know I will not do that. One sometimes admits guilt. And I can see myself doing so. When I am done.

“It’s alright,” I tell Tim, summoning what must be a convincing show of assurance. He relaxes almost instantly, a bemused smile flashing briefly.

“I was thinking the worst,” he says. “Your mom or something, I didn’t know.”

I shake my head. “No it’s just…” I search for the right thing to say. For all I have done to lay stain upon my vocation and the vows central to it, I find that crafting some lie to feed my friend is beyond me at this moment. The silliness of that sudden rise of morality makes me almost laugh, but I do not. Instead I look hard at Tim with a sincerity that is the truest, purest thing about me since taking my first steps on the dubious path I have chosen to follow. “It’s something I’d rather not talk about right now.”

He absorbs that and nods. “If you need to, anytime…”

“I know,” I say, accepting his offer even as I wonder if I
will
accept it. Will Tim be the one with whom I will share the full measure of my transgressions? Still, that question lives only briefly in my thoughts, as I realize I can not quantify what that measure may be in its finality. It may be, I have to admit, that baring my freshly tarnished soul to my friend is an act I will find too difficult to begin, much less complete.

“I’m gonna head in,” Tim says, maybe sensing that I still need a moment to myself.

I nod and he turns, a few steps carrying him back into the rectory, side door slapping hard shut. He is right. I do need a moment, because the question of what comes after has not risen to such prominence in my thoughts before. Knowing who killed my sister, and coming to some understanding as to why she was killed, may be an endpoint for what I began when Eric Ray Redmond begged absolution with his dying breath. But will such knowing and understanding be mine and only mine? It is logical to think that my father should be privy to any revelation that I come by. I suspect it would offer him answers without comfort or closure, possibly adding to the grief that has silently gripped him since Katie’s murder. There is no argument that he has a right to know, and if my mother were at a place where the world to her was not an ever-shifting Rorschach of time and place and memory, some final answer as to the taking of her daughter’s life would rightly belong to her as well. Yet I struggle now with the thought that whatever I come to know may be dragged from its place of shadow to satisfy my want of answers, and mine alone. That is a burden I have not considered, and though it is in no way an obstacle to keep me from reaching into the shadow to extract whatever truth lies cloaked there, it does leave me with the thought that I may be racing toward some solitary satisfaction indistinguishable from emptiness.

It is a weighty rumination that grips me as I stand alone, but only until I realize that I am not alone. The soft clanking of glass draws me from my thoughts and my gaze angles down the driveway where Father Taylor appears, stepping from the darkness of the sidewalk into the sodium glare of the rectory’s driveway light. There is the paper sack in his hand. Cradled in one arm, to be exact. The two bottles of cheap wine unseen within held as if precious beyond measure. He smiles a bit upon seeing me and approaches in steps that are not quite shuffling, but not far from it, the cane in his free hand scuffing the driveway in a weak rhythm. Like a heartbeat winding down.

“Michael,” he says, stopping close, lapels of his overcoat turned up and cinched tight, mostly hiding the clerical collar worn beneath, possibly in some simple belief that he is keeping from the night clerk at Lawson’s Liquor his station in life. Maintaining some illusion of purity or piety. Or, maybe, he is just cold. A victim of the night and the season no different than I.

“Father,” I greet him. He smiles, shifting the heft of his vice where it lies in the crook of his elbow.

“Just out for my walk,” he says, calling it what he must. Or what he can manage. Some priests run marathons. Some gamble their meager pay at tracks or Indian casinos, or steal moments away from their flock to smoke. Father Augustine Taylor nightly plies himself with middling wine as he drifts off to sleep, maybe muting the screams as he dreams of Rwanda. Of vices that one might embrace, on his I offer no judgment. I am not worthy.

“It’s cold,” I say, concerned for him. His face is pale, the slightest tinge of blue about his thin lips.

“I prefer the cold,” he tells me. “Your friend, though, the chill looked to be wearing on him.”

“My friend?” For an instant I wonder if Chris had come by and crossed paths with him while I was…gone. But Father Taylor referenced a ‘him’.

“Yes, up the street,” Father Taylor explains, gesturing back down the driveway with a sideways tip of his head. “He asked me from his car if you were home. I told him I didn’t believe so, but that he was welcome to wait inside for you.”

“What was his name?” I ask, unconsciously making a mental list of who might stop by unannounced. And from that list I narrow to any who, for whatever reason, might be reluctant to simply knock at the door instead of corralling an aged priest on the street to seek my whereabouts. A sum total of no one is what I come up with.

“He didn’t say.” This no one, now, piques not only my curiosity, but injects a morsel of worry. Perhaps it is only because of what has happened these past few hours. Correction—what I have
done
these past few hours. No happenstance put my fist across James Estcek’s face. “You can go ask him.”

“He’s there? Still?”

Father Taylor nods and bids me a good night, which I accept absently, possibly offering him the same as he shuffles toward the side door. I do not truly know if I say anything. My focus is down the driveway, toward the street, and in seconds I am at the sidewalk looking up the block. It takes no time or effort to find what Father Taylor has described—a car nestled close to the opposite curb between the rectory and the corner, light from a distance street lamp silhouetting a figure behind the wheel. The engine is idling, foggy exhaust billowing from the tailpipe. Perhaps the person within grew weary of the chill and started the engine to warm themselves with a blast from the heater.

Perhaps. But there is another possibility that becomes apparent as I approach the car, heading up the sidewalk a bit before starting to cross to the opposite side of the street. No sooner does my foot touch asphalt than the brake lights of the car bloom for an instant, hot and red. Its wheels spin on the slick pavement and it swims away from the curb, rear end fishtailing until the tires bite. I stand in the middle of the street watching it grow smaller, blowing stop signs in the distance, finally disappearing with a screech around a corner.

This is not my life. What has happened, what I have done today, it is not made of the moments which construct the existence I know. And this last thing, some stranger come to seek me out only to flee when I present myself…

Something is wrong. Any day of the past few I could have stated the same, but right now, in front of me as I stare at the empty road ahead, I feel it. I know it.

Chapter Eighteen

Cold

Father Generette catches me as I enter the living room, some reality show featuring singing acrobats low on the television as he munches on the largest Snickers bar I have ever seen.

“Good offering today,” Jimmy G says, looking back at me from the hollow he has slouched into the sofa.

“Really?” I ask absently, pausing for a moment to soak in the distraction on the TV.

He studies me for a moment, clearly sensing that I am out of sorts, but Jimmy has never been a forward friend. One willing to step up and question a mood, a look, an out of place demeanor. Unlike Tim, Jimmy, at least between the two of us, practices ‘let sleeping dogs lie’, and so the curious gaze he lays briefly upon me ends as quickly as it began. He turns back to the show. “Very good.”

I nod, oddly thankful right now for the distance he maintains between us. I can deal with Tim’s overt concern, and am even comforted by it, but more would seem suffocating. Particularly now.

“You hitting the sack?” Jimmy G asks through a mouthful of chocolate.

“Yeah.” I almost exhale the answer. It is not late, but I am tired. Beyond that, really. It feels as though I have spent some measure of my life energy today. Spent it wantonly. Never to be realized again. And so I want sleep. The detached nothingness that comes with closed eyes and distant dreams. I head for the stairs, and am almost there when Jimmy G twists his body to eye me once again. Something on his mind.