“Good,” chimes in another girl. “He’s a creep. I hope he dies.”
“You can’t say stuff like that,” Laura chides her.
The girl puffs with laughter. “Yeah, yeah, Laura O’Malley is gonna lecture me?”
Laura sits still. If Tony wakes up, she’s done for. She has to get out of town before then. She has to think of something.
Between classes, she sneaks out of school. She knows no one will notice, or even if they do, they won’t care because no one expects different from her anyway. Who knew that it would become a blessing one day. Normally, Laura loves the quiet and tranquility of these hours when everyone is busy, but today, it feels eerie to her. She passes the field with its bleachers where she’s snuck away to smoke a cigarette in the middle of the day so many times, deserted now as it usually is. She doesn’t even pause. Soon, she’s on the main street, and her feet take her in the direction of the town’s center.
Laura passes the gas station and the convenience store in measured strides, but she can’t shake the feeling that she’s being watched. She chances a sideways glance. At this time of day, the teenager who sells her smokes isn’t there, of course, because he’s at school, like all the good people’s children, and the person behind the counter is his mother. In a terrifying moment, it seems to Laura like the woman is craning her neck to see through the window, frowning in Laura’s direction. It’s enough to make Laura break out in a cold sweat. She struggles to keep herself from running off, and the whole time she’s walking past the gas station her knees feel soft as if about to buckle. Only once the gas station is far behind does she allow herself to breathe.
The church floats into view out of nowhere. Laura hadn’t realized how fast she’d been walking. Across the street from it is a small park with a bench, where she goes to sit down. The late-morning sun beats down on top of her head, and after a few minutes, she can no longer sit still.
To go into the church seems like the last thing she should be doing. Only for a moment, she tells herself. Just to cool off in that refreshing shade. She saunters up the stairs, and the door opens with nary a creak, letting her through.
For the first few moments, her eyes adjust to the lack of sunlight. She blinks through the bright yellow blotches that float in front of her vision. Once the church’s incense-scented air wraps around her like a blanket, she becomes aware of the sour, sweaty smell wafting from her, and it instantly makes her self-conscious. When her eyes finally adjust, she looks around, wondering if the candle she lit for the dog is still there, but she can’t find it among all the others.
“Hi, Laura. Didn’t think I’d see you again.”
She freezes in her tracks. She’d hoped she’d be alone, but of course it was stupid to think so. Not like the priest had anywhere else to be during the day. What on earth was she thinking, coming here?
She briefly considers turning around and taking off in a run but thinks better of it. It would only make her look even more guilty than she does already. “Hello,” she mumbles. The acoustics pick up her voice, amplifying it. It grates on her own eardrums.
She thinks he must be about to ask her why she isn’t at school. That would be the most logical question, one any reasonable adult might lead with, at noon on a Monday.
But the priest eyes her with sympathy and with surprisingly little judgment. “Is everything all right?”
She gives the tiniest little nod. There. She’s lied in church. And nothing happened. Lightning didn’t emerge from the clear sky and strike her down.
“I just had a question,” she says.
“Go ahead.”
“How did Saint David exorcise the demons?”
The priest blinks. Clearly, this isn’t the question he was expecting.
“Well, that depends,” he says at last. “It’s a complicated process. Definitely not something anyone should try on their own.”
She looks him in the face, and the skin around his eyes is crinkled. He’s making fun of her. “I’m serious,” she says. “What if I think someone might be possessed?”
The man sighs. “What makes you think that?”
Laura starts to say something but stops. How can she explain it? No one would believe her even if she tried, even if it wasn’t about Tony Bergmann. The more she thinks, the more she has no clue how to even start.
“Something bad happened,” she says at last.
And then the whole story comes spilling out. Laura isn’t even sure how it’s possible, but before she knows it, she’s confessed the whole thing, about the cabins, the forest, the rock, and the river.
The priest listens, his face serious at last. The saints watch indifferently from the colorful windows, their glass eyes still.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing to do about Tony,” he says at last. “I’ve known for a while that something was wrong. You’re only confirming it.”
“I am?”
He nods. “A long time ago, his father, Pierre, wanted me to perform an exorcism,” he says.
“On Tony?” Laura asks, incredulous.
“No, not on Tony. Tony was a small child back then. On Sophie, his mother.”
Laura stares at him, slack-jawed. “The witch?”
Part of her expected the story to be just that, a story, something her own mother overheard somewhere and then embellished to scare Laura straight.
“I’m not so sure she was a witch,” the man remarks softly. “And after seeing her, that’s what I told Pierre. There was something wrong with her, for sure, but it wasn’t anything I could help with.”
Laura stays silent, thinking this over. “But I heard… she sacrificed animals to the—” She cuts herself off. She is in a church after all.
“—to the Devil,” the priest finishes for her with a small smile. “You can say it. We’re not afraid of him here. So I was told, too. But I wasn’t convinced this was the case. It would be easy to blame everything on the Devil, but we must accept that sometimes evil has its origins in the darkness of the human heart.”
Laura quietly fumes. The darkness of the human heart doesn’t sound like a good enough excuse for everything that happened.
“Tony Bergmann,” the priest says in the meantime, “is a bad apple. He has that darkness too, just like his mother did. You should have stayed away from him.”
“A little too late for that,” Laura says. Her voice cracks with bitterness.
“Listen, Laura.” The priest meets her eye. “I’m not going to repeat a single word of what you told me here to anyone. I don’t have the authority to judge, only to forgive. But hear this. If Tony doesn’t wake up, then your secret will be safe here forever. But if Tony wakes up and tells the truth, so be it. You must accept it, and not run from the consequences of your actions.”
