Vicious Grace

myself. When I brought the pipe down, it only drove the nail about half an inch in, but the rider roared; David’s pleading voice turned to a stream of impotent rage and despair. I sat on the coffin to keep it from shifting and spoiling my aim. When the nail was in, the shaking was less violent, the shrieking more muffled.

My hand was slick with blood and every swing of the fake, improvised hammer felt like the nail was going into me. Above me, Ex shouted something, and Kim’s voice was a muttering reply. Something crashed, and Ex’s voice sounded more pleased. The wheels of an ancient gurney squeaked in protest and then faded. They were getting Chogyi Jake to help. My friends were leaving me and finding safety. I was alone in the deepest hole of Grace Memorial. Down in the dark, with only the lanterns, the sacrifice, and the beast.

I didn’t know when I’d started weeping. Maybe I had been all along. Driving the last nails became a long, slow torture. The pain in my hand was constant now, the flares that came with the blows hardly noticeable through the constant roar of exposed nerves and torn flesh. I didn’t have the strength, so I soldiered on with determination instead. I couldn’t believe that a few minutes ago I’d done the same job with one bare-handed strike.

The screams and threats floating up from the coffin felt light and powerless as fluff. I went through the punishing steps of my chore almost without noticing them. When the blow sank the last nail, I stopped for a minute. I wanted to collapse, to fall asleep and never wake up. And never dream. I’d been sandblasted, left outside in a desert storm, shocked and abraded until I was clean and pure and skinless. I told myself it would pass. A few days to recover, and I wouldn’t be empty. My brain would start working again. I would be able to feel something that didn’t hurt. I watched myself crying from a distance, as if the sobs weren’t related to me. The coffin still let out muted knocks and thuds, and far, far away, David Souder was screaming. He’d be screaming for the rest of his life. The best I could do now was make sure that wasn’t a very long time.

I stumbled up out of the grave, banging my shin against the crumbling concrete edge. I found a roll of gauze and a bandage pack in a yellowed paper seal, sterilized and marked a year before my mother was born. I opened it, pressing the old cotton against the new wounds on my hand. It sucked up the blood hungrily. The gauze held it in place. It felt almost like I had a lace glove. I didn’t have the strength to laugh at the incongruity. I hauled myself to the wall. The shovel David had used to dig the coffin out lay on the ground beside Declan Souder’s scattered bones.

“Well,” I said to the empty skull, “we did it. Just like the old days, eh? Evil defeated. Hell of a price, but we paid it. Go us.”

The skull didn’t do anything. I hadn’t expected it to. After all, it was just a lump of calcium phosphate. It didn’t have dreams or hopes or regrets. It didn’t have to live with what it had done. Still, I turned its eye sockets toward the wall. I didn’t want it to see me.

I picked up the shovel.

“Hey.”

Ex stood on the stairway. The shadows clung to his eyes, and his cheeks looked sharper than I remembered them. Pale hair had escaped his pony-tail, spilling down his face.

“What?” I said. It was the best I could manage.

“I got them on their way to the ER. Aubrey and Kim are with him. There’s nothing I can do there.”

“Nothing here either,” I said. “One shovel.”

I didn’t want him here. I didn’t want anyone here. I wanted my crimes committed in the dark, without witnesses.

“Never heard of taking turns?” Ex asked, coming down the stairs. “What kind of day care did you go to as a kid?”

“Don’t do this,” I said. “Please. Go. I have to—”

I was crying again. I hated it, but I could no more stop than I could will myself not to breathe.

“You have to what?” Ex said.

“I have to kill him,” I said, then folded. My knees gave way gracefully, and I hunched on the floor, supported only by the shovel. The words kept spilling out of my mouth. “I have to kill him. Oh God, I have to kill him.”

“Give me the shovel,” he said.

“No.”

“I can do this for you,” he said. His voice was so soft. So gentle. He wanted so badly to spare me this. To spare me something. Anything.

“No,” I said. The anger in my voice surprised me, but it also gave me a last sip of strength. “Don’t make this easy. Don’t you dare make this easy.”

Ex smiled. He understood. So maybe his being here wasn’t so bad after all.

“Come on, then,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”

He held out his right hand, and I took it with my left. My legs were rubber and string. We walked together, side by side, to the edge of the grave. The rider was screaming obscenities somewhere. And when it wasn’t, David’s weaker voice wailed piteously. I wasn’t doing him any favors by waiting.

Ex stepped away from me, standing at the coffin’s head. He took something out of his pocket—a bottle of something that looked like olive oil—opened it, and poured it onto the coffin lid. Then he put his hands out, palms down toward the grave. His voice was low and resonant and rich. Almost like he was singing a dirge.

“Per istam sanctan unctionem et suam piissimam miserecoridiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per visum.” With this oil and His own gracious glory, may God forgive you those sins which you have committed by sight.

Last rites. He was giving David last rites. There was no magic in the words, no sense of the human will bending the world to account. But maybe there was something, even if it was only hope and respect. I sank the shovel into the pile of dirt, lifted, and poured it onto the coffin. Then another. David screamed every time more dirt struck the lid. I closed my eyes and kept going.

“Per istam sanctan unctionem et suam piissimam miserecoridiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per audtiotum.”

It took me half an hour, but I filled the grave. I buried an innocent man alive. At some point, the screaming stopped being loud enough to hear and became something I only imagined.

It sounded just the same.

TWENTY-FIVE

When I was still living at home, back even before I’d broken the news to my parents about going to a secular college, I found a picture in the back of an old book. I still remembered it now. Two boys in front of a wide, white fence. The color was off; all red and yellow and hardly any blue. They were both wearing pea coats and haircuts that made me think of the late 1960s. The taller boy grinned at the camera. He might have been seven or eight years old, and the rictus grin of his false smile looked charming. I could see where the cheeks would thicken, the flesh fill out, and a small, well-intentioned mustache grow in. I could see my father in the boy.

The smaller one wasn’t aware of the camera. He was pointing at something off to his right, his eyes wide with wonder and joy. He would grow up to be, in Ex’s words, at minimum a sociopath and a rapist.

There had to be a moment. Somewhere in the path between that little boy discovering the world with an innocent delight so powerful it could impress itself onto a fold of paper and a little light-sensitive chemistry and the man who wrote Fucked her. There had to be something that made it all go wrong. Not just a lost innocence. Something worse than that.

Becoming soulless, maybe.

“THEY TELL me that spleens are, for the most part, optional,” Chogyi Jake said. A television across the hall burst into authoritative news-on-the-hour music.

“I’d heard that,” I said.

As soon after the operation as he’d been stable enough to move, I’d had him transferred out of Grace. Without my being his wife or his kid, it hadn’t been as straightforward as I’d hoped. I wound up playing the employer card and throwing a lot of money at it, and the problem eventually went away.

The first time I’d walked into Northwestern Hospital, coming to see him even if it only meant watching him sleep, I’d had a flash of panic. The complexity of halls and elevators brought up a bone-deep terror that didn’t have