“It did look kind of …
“Yeah, that’s exactly it,” I said. “So why’d you do it?”
“Leave them, you mean?”
“That too, I guess. But I meant why did you go in the first place? When I was nineteen, I was about trying to get out from under the church. Anything secular was cool. Why take vows?”
Ex breathed in deeply, held the air inside himself, and then let it seep back out, but it wasn’t exactly a sigh. It seemed more like he was steeling himself for something more painful than the wounds on his back.
“I was wondering when you were going to ask me that,” Ex said. “God called me.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
I tried not to smile or roll my eyes.
“He stopped by the bedroom one night after prayers? I mean, how does that happen?”
Ex shrugged.
“It’s different for everyone. When I was ten years old, I wanted to be a soccer star. Didn’t have the build for football. That was my brother’s thing, anyway. He was on the varsity team at the high school, and he’d have ground me into the turf if I’d tried to horn in on his territory. I went to youth soccer, I watched all the games I could find. I had an old poster of Pelé in my room. And then one morning I got up, and I knew I was supposed to be a priest. I took down the poster, and that was that.”
“You just
“I did. I didn’t tell my father about it for a few years, but by the time I did, he’d already figured out what I was up to. He didn’t like it. Always suspected I was playing some kind of angle. The idea that I’d actually been called just didn’t seem plausible to him. But I finished high school a little early, I had good grades, and I’d gotten to know all the priests at church. When I applied to become a novice, it was easy. I taught catechism. I worked with the poor and the homeless. I studied. It was more like being home than being home ever was. When the time came for vows, I didn’t hesitate. I was … certain. God called me. I answered. Everything was just the way it was supposed to be. I felt blessed.”
“Never looked back, then?”
“Not then. During first studies, I found myself drawn to the rites of exorcism. I read about possession, the way the soul can be corrupted. There’s a special program for people with a talent for that kind of ministry, and I fought to get into it. I was good. Had a talent for it like no one had seen in a generation. When Father Chapin agreed to take me on, I knew that this had been the plan all along. God had made me to fight the devil and save the innocent, and He’d put me in place so that I could do it.
“I was a weapon in His hand. Tamblen and Miguel and Carsey. Father Chapin. I was going to spend my life with them. They were more than family. They were the other guys in my foxhole. And we saved people. We really did.”
Ex shifted his weight and winced. A dark spot was blooming on the towel draping his shoulder where he was bleeding through the bandage. The blanket pooled in his lap, and one bare leg shifted out toward the fire. His pale skin, the angle of his thigh, the distant expression, all conspired to make him seem like a sculpture worked out of marble. Something hard and beautiful and cold.
“And then?” I said.
“And then,” he echoed, like he was agreeing with me. “And then we lost one. Badly.”
“Isabel?”
His eyes went a little wider, but he nodded.
“The first guy … Um. Miguel? He mentioned the name when we got here,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Yes, Isabel.”
“You want to tell me aut it, or would that be too weird.”
“She came to us for help, and I betrayed her trust. I broke my vow to God.”
The fireplace hissed.
“You slept with her,” I said.
“I did. And because I lost perspective, we lost her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and he shook his head, refusing even that weak comfort.
“It’s different this time,” he said. “This time, we’ll win.”
Chapter Six
When a little before midnight I got to bed, I was asleep almost before my eyes closed. My consciousness fell away like shrugging off a jacket, and I slept through to morning without a single nightmare. I woke up with sunlight struggling in past wooden shutters and only a vague sense of where I was. With all the travel I’d done in the past year and a half, I’d built up a strategy of sorts for waking up in unfamiliar beds. First thing was not to get uptight, this happened all the time. Memory always wandered back eventually. The second was to find coffee.
The upstairs floor was scarred hardwood, and cold against my feet. I dug my bathrobe out of my suitcase, huddled into it, and went down the stairs. Arriving in the dark, I hadn’t understood the way the snow amplified light. The sun was hardly visible over the steep, pine-crowded mountains, but it was already bright as noon. I cranked up the thermostat, looked unsuccessfully through the cupboards and refrigerator for anything resembling food, and went back upstairs to raid the emergency supply of coffee from my leather backpack.
The door to the second bedroom stood open a few inches. Ex’s snores stumbled out on the air, as disoriented and tentative as I was. I paused in the hallway. His bed sat across the room, against the outside wall. Ex was curled around a pillow, his back to me. I watched for a few seconds as his rib cage rose and fell. The wound on his shoulder had bled a little more in the night, a smudge like a shadow across his skin. Somewhere in the crappy filing cabinet of my memory, a woman said something about falling into bed with a man just because they were alone in a cabin together, that it was the sort of thing men and women do. I wondered if that was true.
I’d lived with my family until I’d left home, and then on campus, and then on the road with Ex and Chogyi Jake. And Aubrey. I wasn’t a virgin, and even before I’d passed that supremely anticlimactic milestone, I’d had a pretty graphic understanding of how tab A fit into slot B.
It didn’t mean I knew what men and women do together. Not really.
Anyone who’d grown up with any actual experience—even just someone to talk to about it—would have known better than I did. Maybe after you spend a few weeks alone with a man, after you’ve washed the blood off his back, after he’s sat up until dawn with you waiting for the nightmares to fade, something just happens. No one’s responsible, and no one’s surprised. Was that how it was supposed to be? If I went to him now, slid into bed beside him, would he roll over and smile at me? It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered what his lips would taste like. Or what it would be like toslake the longing I’d already felt burning in his mind.
Was I falling for him? Maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to be held, and he was there. I was pretty sure if I pushed open the door and went to him, he wouldn’t turn me away. Just knowing that made it more tempting.
Ex shifted, and the movement sent a shock of panic through me. I walked down the rest of the hall as fast as I could on cat toes, my heart racing. I dug the little foil bag of ground coffee out of my bag and went back downstairs. I didn’t glance at Ex’s door as I passed, but I felt a little twinge of shame at wanting to.
An old plastic drip coffeemaker lurked in one of the lower cupboards, but without a filter. I banged around for a couple of minutes before I uncovered a French press still in the washing machine and a saucepan to heat up some water. When I pushed my hair back from my face, it occurred to me that I hadn’t made it all the way into the shower in a couple of days. I’d need to before we went back down the mountain.
On the countertop, my cell phone chirped its little you-missed-something notice. The number was Chogyi’s, of course. I’d forgotten to call him back or even listen to his messages. The water started to bubble, rocking the pan on its burner. I picked up the phone, thumbed the call return, and started pouring dry coffee into the French press. It was ground too fine. The coffee was going to be muddy, but it was better than none at all. The phone connection clicked.
“Hey,” I said, apology in my voice, “sorry that I—”
“Jayné,” Aubrey said. He leaned into the syllables, rushing to say my name so that he wouldn’t hear
