Page 88 of Saint
He finds the rigid, aching need under my scapular, and with the taste of his lips on mine and the shush of the waves in the distance, we show each other our own kind of devotion until the bells toll down the hill.
* * *
I right myselfand say terce with my breviary while Elijah claims to write in his notebook but instead mostly just stares at me with his arm wedged behind his head and his mouth curved in a fond smile.
It should be distracting, and maybe it is, but it’s wonderful too, like praying next to brightly colored stained glass or in a twisting curl of incense smoke. It makes the prayers deeper and sweeter and even older somehow, like I’m praying something beyond the words of the psalms, like I’m praying what it means to be human in the first place.
And when I finish, the moment is so perfect, like something out of a dream, with soft grass and soft sunlight and Elijah’s eyes, that I know I have to tell him about that night. I don’t think I’ll be able to bear the perfection of this memory otherwise, knowing there was this final, unspoken truth between us.
I set my breviary in the grass and turn so that I’m facing the same direction as Elijah—toward the gateless gate and the stream beyond it. On the other side of the stream is a hill covered in green grass and yellow gorse and gray rocks, and it couldn’t be more different from my Mount Sergius hill, but it still calls to me.
Maybe I’ll find God in every hill I see for the rest of my life.
“That night,” I say after a moment, wondering where I can even begin. “That night was more than I’ve made it sound. With the fight and the text and everything.”
I look over at Elijah, and a new tension has seeped into him. He comes to a sitting position, his legs folded and his back against a thick root of the yew tree.
I take that as my signal to continue, to tell the entire story, and so I do.
I take a deep breath and I start from the beginning.
47
It.
The first timeI met it, I wasn’t in a graveyard or at a funeral. I wasn’t watching a movie or a stupid early internet video or listening to my classmates make awful jokes.
I wasn’t even alone.
I was in my kitchen, rummaging through the fridge for the millionth time that day, looking for something to eat, and having discovered some lasagna leftovers from last night, I took the whole pan for myself. I didn’t even bother scooping the leftovers out; I just got a fork and stood at the counter staring out the window into the backyard, eating cold lasagna as mindlessly as a dog gnaws on a bone.
Which is when I heard the voices from the living room.
It had been a year after Lizzy’s death, and we’d gone to the graveyard earlier that day with my uncle Colin and my aunt Trish and laid flowers at Lizzy’s grave, and the adults and Tyler had cried. Sean had scowled at the cross on the headstone like he could beam a middle finger right to Jesus if he tried hard enough, and Ryan was sad too, but also he was only nine or ten at the time, and so five minutes of graveside sadness was about all he could tolerate before the fidgeting set in.
I’d wanted to scowl and be cool like Sean, but Uncle Colin had snuck me several sips of Southern Comfort from his flask before we came, and mostly I just felt floaty and apart from everything around me, like I was an audience member dragged onto a stage while the real actors acted the play around me. It felt like a good thing at the time.
Anyway, the SoCo had worn off by the time I was eating the lasagna, and so I was sober as I heard Aunt Trish say from the living room, “Of course, it’s so common when people get in that mindset that they think the world will be better off without them.”
I remember freezing with a lasagna-laden fork halfway to my mouth, the words etching themselves onto my mind, scratching themselves deep.
Before that moment, I’d thought all suicides were like Lizzy’s, and I thought Lizzy’s must have been as simple as it seemed to me, a teenage boy who’d mostly fought with her over the remote and the remaining Toaster Strudels in the freezer and who had never been privy to her inner life in any form. Lizzy was sad, and therefore she killed herself, and that was all there was to it.
And so when the beleaguered high school counselor sat me down in his cramped office and asked if I felt sad, if I knew that I could tell other people about being sad, and gave me a brochure about the warning signs of teen suicide that was definitely made for parents and not teenagers, I didn’t have much to say. Yes, I felt sad that Lizzy was dead, but mostly I felt angry about the priest and what he’d done to her. No, I didn’t have any of the warning signs. Yes, I knew I could talk to my parents and the counselor if the sadness ever happened to me.
But the day I heard Aunt Trish’s voice from the living room, I understood something I hadn’t before, and it was that the wordsadwas a word people sometimes used for something else. Something I’d felt my own thoughts brush against in the dark, which was not a darkness like how adults were afraid of teenagers finding darkness...but a darkness like the darkness beyond the event horizon of a black hole. A darkness that was anun-light, an emptiness, but an emptiness with hunger, an emptiness with a voice.
Better off.
I looked down at the lasagna I was scraping straight from the pan, and I thought of the shitty joke about my own mom that I’d made the night before in order to make a group of friends laugh. I thought of the rumors I’d spread about a track teammate, I thought of the last two papers for American Lit which I hadn’t actually written but paid a kid in study hall to write for me. I thought of all the service hours I had fudged on my high school service hours log, all the lies I’d told, all the fights I’d started and then finished.
I thought of that feeling I had sometimes, of being full of worms, of being full of slithers and dirt. I thought of the other feeling I had sometimes, the un-feeling, which only went away when I drank or fought or fooled around.
Better off.
I set the fork down as something got up and stretched in my mind. It paced for a minute, and then sat.
It was like the smoke off an oil fire—silky and poisonous and thick; it wore my face; it spoke with my voice.
