Killing Rites

might have been there, curled up against him for a couple of minutes. It might have been half an hour. I couldn’t have told the difference.

When I pulled myself back together, he stood up, fished around in his pocket, and pulled out a linen handkerchief. I wiped my eyes, blew my nose. When I spoke, my voice was thick and wet.

“I need my body back,” I said. “I can’t have this thing living inside me.”

“Okay, then,” he said, walking the three steps to the back of the RV. “You’ve got a plan for that. What else?”

“I want to never hurt anybody again ever.”

“Tall order, but worth aiming for,” he said, grunting. I glanced over. He was pulling on a fresh shirt. I’d left a wide damp spot on the old one.

“I need to figure out who I really am,” I said. There was a weird sense of déjà vu in saying the words.

“Yeah, well. That’s never wrong. So here’s what I’m hearing you tell me, okay? No matter what comes next, the first step, you’re finishing up with the papists. After you’re calling the shots on your body, you’re spending some time actually getting your shit together. Which means not running around the world like a decapitated chicken all the time. Slow down. Figure out what your next step is. And—this is me talking now—no more stroking your inner victim. Bad for your skin.”

“Yes, Oprah,” I said, but I smiled when I said it.

“Hey. Fuck you too,” he said, grinning. He teeth were black where they weren’t yellow.

My phone rang at the same moment that something scratched on the thin metal and plastic of the doorway. I turned toward the sound of claws, ready for a threat, but Midian waved me back. I pulled my phone out of the leather backpack I used as a purse. It was Ex. Midian opened the RV door and the ancient Laborador from the parking lot hefted hersef up the stairs on arthritic hips. I answered the call.

“Is everything okay?” Ex said instead of hello. His voice was tight as a wire.

“Sure,” I said, trying to keep the aftermath of tears out of my voice. “Everything’s copacetic. Why?”

“You’ve been gone a long time. We were starting to worry.”

“No, I’m at O’Keefe’s,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe—“

Midian coughed. He stood in the galley, scratching the dog between its ears and looking at me. His yellow eyes were empty, and I understood. If I told Ex he was here, he would tell Father Chapin. If Ex told Father Chapin, the exorcists would come after Midian. If not now, then later. Maybe I should have felt some conflict about lying to Ex, but I didn’t. It was Midian.

“You wouldn’t believe how good the food is,” I said gamely. “I’m just luxuriating over a little coffee.”

“Did anything happen?” he asked. The tension in his voice sounded like a small accusation.

“I haven’t been taken over by the rider and hijacked to Juárez,” I said a little sharply. “I’m fine. I’ll be back in a little bit.”

“All right,” Ex said, backing down. “We’ve got a game plan and a schedule. When we’ve gone over it, we can all call it a night.”

Meaning that until I showed up, Father Chapin wasn’t going to let himself rest. It was like looking forward in time to who Ex was going to be at sixty. His cranky, paternalistic streak shifted into a different frame. It wasn’t that he wanted to control how long I took eating dinner. He just wanted to take care of his uncompromising old teacher, and this was the closest he could come to saying that out loud.

“I’ll come home soon,” I said. “Promise.”

“Thank you,” Ex said.

We paused for a moment, neither of us with anything to say and neither one hanging up first. I could hear him breathe like he was sitting beside me.

“Thank you,” he said again, and dropped the connection. I put the phone back in my pack a little more gently than I’d taken it out. Midian stopped scratching the dog’s ears, and it turned to me, pushing its nose under my hand and wagging. It had gray on its muzzle and around its black, watery eyes.

“Vatican’s junior hit squad wants you back, eh?” Midian said.

“Guess so,” I said, petting the dog’s head, then scratching its breast. The dog smiled and turned to look over its shoulder at Midian. See, this is how you’re supposed to do it. “This one’s yours? I never saw you as a pet kind of guy.”

“Ozzie’s not mine. She came with the job. I don’t know how she got here originally. Being loyal to disloyal people’s my bet. Lived by catching rabbits and birds. When she got old and weak, she started hanging out at the back door, stealing scraps.”

“And now she’s part of the place.”

The dog chuffed happily.

“Sort of,” Midian said. “The guy that owns the place still wants to shoot her, but I let her come in when it’s cold out. I’ve got a soft spot for down-on-their-luck predators. Don’t know where it comes from.”

“Can’t imagine.”

“So we’re good?” he asked.

“Of course we’re good,” I said, but when I stood up to go, I found I didn’t want to. I wanted to sit back down and pet the dog and drink the coffee and talk all night. I had a powerful flash of resentment toward Ex and Father Chapin and all the rest. Men who were risking their lives to help me. I looked down.

“You want to talk about Eric, don’t you?” Midian asked.

“Yeah. And about a million other things.”

He lifted his beef-jerky arms to the RV like he was displaying a treasure.

“You know where to find me,” he said.

“All right, then.”

“Yeah,” he said. “All right. ’S good seeing you, kid.”

The wind outside was biting cold and it smelled like snow. Low gray clouds had rolled in while I wasn’t watching, smothering stars and moon. I wrapped my coat around me and ran around the side of the restaurant. The parking lot was nearly full now, and it took some maneuvering to get the car to the ragged blacktop. The heater roared discreetly, and I turned up the music to carry over it. China Forbes sang “Let’s Never Stop Falling in Love” and I sailed through the darkness, feeling something like peace for the first time in weeks.

I cried after Chicago without knowing particularly what I was crying about, but I had been alone and there hadn’t been any catharsis in it. Tears wouldn’t clean me. I’d thought at the time it was only because I was so thoroughly blackened. Now I wondered if it was just that I’d done it alone. If Chogyi Jake had been there instead of recuperating in Chicago, if I hadn’t broken the thing off with Aubrey, and there had been someone to talk to. Someone to confess to. Would it have been different?

I tried to imagine what it would have been like if I’d gone to Ex. On the one hand, it was kind of unthinkable. From the moment I told him I had a rider, he’d been focused on fixing the problem. If I’d talked to him about guilt, he’d have handed me over to God, and it was a long time since I’d taken comfort there.

But on the other hand, what if he’d listened? What if he’d put his arm around me and let me cry his shirt wet. Would it have stopped there? Would I have wanted it to? Maybe the kind of intimacy where I could tell him about what I was afraid of and guilty over would have led to the other kind. And maybe that was where we were going anyway.

The road went under the highway, and I reached the ramp up, signaling my lane change even though there was no one in sight. I swung the nose of the car to the left, crossed the oncoming lanes, and flew up toward the interstate like a crow taking wingirst fat flakes of snow spattered against the windshield, and the car knew to start the wipers without my touching anything. The GPS glowed, guiding me. There was more traffic, and I checked my blind spot as I merged.

“Please don’t do this to me,” something said with my mouth.

My heart started spinning like a bike wheel. My hands dug hard into the wheel, white-knuckled. I drove eighty miles an hour down a dark, mostly unfamiliar road, waiting for my body to speak to me again.

Chapter Nine