Page 44 of Priest (Priest 1)
We were in my bed after cleaning up the sanctuary and sneaking over to the rectory. I was fingering her hair with a fascination that bordered on reverence, worshiping those long, dark tresses with curls of my finger and brushes of my lips. We’d been talking lazy pillow talk, drifting from The Walking Dead speculations and favorite Latin texts to hushed recountings of all the ways we’d suffered in wanting each other this last month.
I had been about to kiss her again when she’d said that, so I settled for sliding a hand under the sheets and finding her breasts instead.
“I like things to be clean.”
“I think that’s admirable. You just don’t see it very often in men like you.”
“Men like me? Priests?”
“No,” she shifted toward me, smiling. “Young. Charming. Good-looking. You would have been a fantastic businessman, you know.”
“My brothers are businessmen,” I said. “But I was never interested in that stuff; I never wanted money or success or power. I loved old things—old languages and old rituals. Old gods.”
“I think I can picture you as a teenager,” she mused. “I bet you drove the girls crazy—hot, athletic, and bookish. And also really clean.”
“No, I wasn’t always clean.” I debated for a moment about explaining, but we had just shared something so intimate, why would I hold this back from her? Just because it was depressing? Suddenly, I wanted to share. I wanted her to know every dark thing that I’d dragged around by myself, I wanted to show her all of my burdens and have her lift them from me with her clever mind and her elegant compassion.
I moved my hand from her breast and glided my fingers under her ribs, tucking her close against me.
“The day I found my sister,” I said, “was a Saturday in May. There was a strong thunderstorm going on, and even though it was daylight, it was dim all around, like nighttime. Lizzy had taken Sean’s car home from college—they were both at KU then—and so she was home for the weekend.
“My parents had taken Aiden and Ryan out for lunch, and I thought they’d taken Lizzy too. I’d slept in late, and I woke up to an empty house.”
Poppy didn’t say anything, but she nestled in closer, giving me courage.
“There was a bright flash of light and a huge noise, like a transformer had blown, and the power cut out. I went for the flashlight, but the stupid batteries were dead, so I had to go out into the garage to get more. We lived in Brookside, in an older house, so the garage was detached. I had to walk through the rain, and then when I got in there, it was so dark at first, I didn’t see her…”
She found my hand and squeezed.
“I got the batteries, and it was only luck that the lightning flashed right as I was turning away, or I wouldn’t have seen her. She was suspended there, like she was frozen in time. In the movies, they’re always swaying, and there’s a creaking noise, but it was so still. Just. Still.
“I remember running to her and tripping over a milk crate stuffed with cords, and then a tower of paint cans went rolling everywhere, and I picked myself up off the ground. There was a stepladder that she’d used—” I couldn’t say the words, couldn’t say the stepladder that she’d used to hang herself.
I swallowed and went on.
“I set it back upright and climbed it. It wasn’t until I’d gotten her down and had her in my arms that I realized my hands were dirty from when I’d tripped. Wet from the rain, and then they’d rubbed against the dirt and oil and grime, and I’d left smudges all over her face—”
I took a deep breath, reliving the panic, the rushed 911 call, the choked conversation with my parents. They’d rushed home, and my parents and Aiden had run into the garage only steps ahead of the police, and no one had thought to keep Ryan out. He’d only been eight or nine when he saw his sister dead on the garage floor. And then the red and blue lights, and the paramedics, and the confirmation of what the cold skin and vacant eyes had already told us.
Lizzy Bell—animal shelter volunteer, lover of Britney Spears, and all of the other thousands of things that made up a nineteen-year-old girl—was dead.
For several moments, it was just the sound of us breathing, the slight rustle of the sheets as Poppy rubbed her foot against mine, and then the memories slowly bled back into the ground of my mind.
“My mom kept trying to wipe the smudges away,” I said finally. “While we waited for the coroner’s men to come get the body. The whole time. But you can’t wipe off oil that easily, and so Lizzy had that smudge right up until we had to say goodbye. I hated that. I hated that so much. I made it my mission to scrub that fucking garage from top to bottom, and I did. And ever since then, I’ve kept everything in my life clean.”
“Why?” Poppy asked, moving so she could prop herself on one elbow. “Does it make you feel better? Are you worried about something like that happening again?”
“No, it’s not that. I don’t know why I still do it. It’s a compulsion, I guess.”
“It sounds like penance.”
I didn’t respond to this, turning it over in my head. When she phrased it like that, it made it seem like I hadn’t really let Lizzy go, that I was still grappling with her death, grappling with the guilt of sleeping in that day and not being awake to stop her. But it had been ten years and I wasn’t holding on to it that much, was I?
“What was she like?” Poppy asked. “When she was alive?”
I thought for a minute. “She was my older sister. So, sometimes she was mothering, sometimes she was mean. But when I was scared of the dark as a kid, she always let me sleep in her room, and she always covered for me when I broke curfew when I was older.”
I traced the backlit lines of the blinds on the comforter with my gaze. “She really, really loved terrible pop music. She used to leave her music in Sean’s CD player when she borrowed his car, and he’d get so irritated when his friends would hop in the car and then some boy band or Britney Spears would start playing when he turned it on.”
