Page 5 of The Beast
"Not long," I said. "Came to see my mother." The lie sat easy. I had no intention of driving to Marfa to watch a woman who'd read to half this county look at me like a stranger who'd wandered into her good light. "And to pick up a couple things."
Closer to true, that part. There was nothing at the ranch I wanted. No box of letters, no rifle, no childhood keepsake I'd driven through the night to collect.
But there was this. The three stones. The reminder I still couldn't name. The thing I came out and filled up on like a man at a dry-country well, because it was the only fuel I'd ever found that burned long enough to carry me through what came next.
I didn't tell him that. I'd never tell anyone that. Some things you carry alone or you don't carry them at all.
Sherwood studied me a moment longer. Whatever he saw, he had the grace not to name it.
"Well." He touched his hat brim. "Have a good visit, Brock."
Then, he turned and walked back the way he'd come, slow and square, the hitch in his step the only toll the years had managed to take. I watched the climbing sun swallow him up the rise toward his truck, and I thought about going after him. Closing the distance. Saying what I couldn't say at the graves.Sorry. About my mother. About all of it. About being the kind of man you have to drive to a beggar's plot to find.
I didn't.
I turned back to the stones and let the morning have me. Let the memories come up out of the ground the way the light had—slow, certain, finding the low places. I didn't fight them. I never did. I stood and remembered, and the remembering did what it always did: burned quiet and steady and filled the empty places back in.
I was going to need it.
The phone in my coat had gone off sometime before dawn, while I was still on the highway with the windows down and the radio off. I'd felt it buzz and let it ride. I knew the rhythm of a call by now, and that one was Tommy—my brother had tried me twice and quit, the way he always had to, because I don't answer calls. Not from family. Not from anybody but the men who holdmy leash, and when those calls come in they mean the same thing every time: bad business, headed for bad people, and me the one they send to deliver it.
I pulled the phone out. The text still sat there under the cracked glass.
Tommy.Need you in Charleston. All of us do. It's bad. Pick up the goddamn phone.
I read it twice. Then I put it away and looked back down at the dirt.
I didn't know what was waiting in Charleston. All I had was the ring of it. Tommy didn't spook. None of us did. And a man like my brother didn't putit's badin writing unless it was already worse than the words.
So, I'd go. Point myself east, find out what had come for my family this time, and do to it what I'd been doing since I was a teenager in a town nobody remembered the name of.
I'd deal with it.
That was the one thing I'd ever been good at. The one thing that ever quieted the noise. I stood over three unmarked graves in the new gold light and let the old fuel run me full to the brim, because I had the feeling I'd burn every last drop of it before Charleston was done with me.
The dove called again, somewhere out in the brush.
I left the dead where they lay and walked back into the living to do what it had only ever needed me for.
3
MARY CATHERINE
Two hundred and twelve people were looking at me.
I knew this the way you knew things that couldn't be unknown. Their collective attention had a weight to it, a pressure that landed somewhere between my shoulder blades and spread outward. I stood at the back of Saint Sebastian's nave and felt it settle over me like a second dress.
My father's arm was still beneath my hand. He hadn't moved. He was waiting, the way good men waited, with patience and perfect certainty, because Martin Donovan had never once considered that this moment might be anything other than what it appeared to be.
I had given him no reason to think otherwise.
That was the thing I kept coming back to, in the strange, slow suspension of that moment—how completely I had constructed this. Every element. The flowers, the venue, the dress, the photographer positioned at the far end of the aisle with his long lens trained on the door, waiting for the money shot. I had chosen it all with the same careful competence I brought to everything. I had done it so well that standing inside it now feltlike standing inside a room I'd built myself and somehow locked from the outside.
The organ was very loud.
I had always loved this music. The processional had moved me at every wedding I'd attended, that swell of it, the way it announced something irrevocable with such beautiful confidence. I had cried at my cousin Brigid's wedding, and at the weddings of three separate Providence Academy colleagues over the past four years. I had stood in pews and felt something open in my chest at the sound of it, some respondent ache, and told myself that was what wanting felt like.
I understood now that what I'd felt was grief. A very small, very patient grief, folded up and set aside so many times I'd mistaken it for nothing.
