“Well?” he prompts as he re-levels his head.
Now he’s focusing on the pines and the maples across the way, the former which are dark green and fluffy-boughed, the latter that flame red and orange.
“I love the fall,” I say.
“Jesus Christ, you’re a pissah, you know that.”
“I didn’t say anything—”
“I worry about Mharta. All the time. She runs with a fast crowd, downtown, in the middle of the fucking war, and I can’t talk to Marissa about it, because I do not want that on her radar—and why didn’t I bring the bottle with me.”
As he glares back at the door to the Pit, I can feel the frustration coming off him in waves, the charge in the air sizzling through me.
“She’s too much like her pops, that girl.” He puts the glass up to his lips and takes a draw of what surely must be a mere wash of alcohol. “Marissa…should have had a kid with a better class of male.”
I stare at him now, at the cut of his jaw, and that busted nose and the hint of the front tooth that he had to get reconstructed. He’s right. His daughter is a lot like him. She does run with a fast crowd. She is not going to listen to anybody about anything.
Unlike him, I know what’s coming.
And my heart breaks. But it’s like when I knew that Wellsie was going to die from the very first book. I had to watch all those scenes with her and Tohr, throughDark LoverandLover Eternal…knowing what was on the way, lurking in a future story.
“She’s beautiful like her mother.” He exhales in a kind of defeat. “Would that she had me on the outside and Marissa on the inside.”
Mharta does have long, blond hair, just like hermahmen, and also the kind of stunning face that comes with bone structure people pay good money to plastic surgeons to get. But he’s right. There’s a piece missing on the inside, and what’s filled it is a desperate restlessness that she hides under bravado and is going to get her in trouble.
Her destiny is coming like a freight train.
Butch’s voice is all gravel now: “You’re supposed to tell me it’s going to be all right.”
“It’s going to be all right,” I blurt.
He just shakes his head and starts walking again. He’s not stupid. He knows the rules, and so do I, and I just feel like crying. I do that a lot with these books. The crying thing, when I’m alone in my room with the dogs, and I’m typing words out onto a computer screen—except they’re not words, not really. My fingers are moving over the keyboard, and letters are marching across the page on my monitor in a quick rush, and there is a coherency to it all when I reread. But none of that is what I’m seeing as draft.
I’m in the movie in my head, watching the people live their lives, hearing their voices, seeing what they see, experiencingwhat they do, living around them and through them. And yes, I know that they don’t exist. Not in the flesh-and-blood, touch-them kind of way. But if we assume the human brain is just a filter for what the five senses feed us from our environment, if all it is, is a processing unit for sensory perception…then my mind doesn’t know that any of these pictures in it aren’t real. When these people who exist in my mind hurt, I feel it, too.
And so do you. Or you wouldn’t read, right?
This is our version of virtual reality, with the words being the headset we use to go to different worlds and different places. And it’s magical.
Also a kind of hell.
Butch and I are by the Mercedes and going up the steps, now, and he’s opening the massive front door for me. I enter the vestibule first, but he’s the one who puts his face in the security camera thingy. There’s a moment before the unlocking and I slip his jacket from me and hand it back to him.
“You’ll feel better when you get there,” I say. “You always do.”
“Where-my goin’?”
There’s no reason to answer that. He’s heading directly to midnight mass now. Even though he’ll be two hours early, even with the travel time. When he gets to the cathedral, he’s going to sit in the fourth row from the back, with his hands clasped loosely in his lap, and he’s going to stare up at the altar and the figure of Jesus Christ on the cross that hangs high above the place where the priests conduct the services.
And he will wonder why. And he will beg for mercy. And he will ask for forgiveness.
Because he’s wrong about himself. He is a very, very good man, through and through, and he is worthy of Marissa.
He hands me the glass. “Take this in for me.”
“Absolutely.”
It’s the least I can do.
