What do you need from me? What can I do to help?
She slid down into the covers so that we were facing each other eye to eye underneath the candlelight. Pray with me, mijo, she said. Pray for our souls, and for the souls of all your brothers and sisters. Including the ones you haven’t met.
I shook my head. I don’t know them, I said. They might not even be Catholic.
It doesn’t matter. Their mothers are all like me tonight, depressed and weeping over their glasses of wine. I’m sure of it. So will you pray for us? Can you do that, please?
Yes. I can do that.
We bent our heads over the wine-stained sheets and began to whisper silently in the dark. I don’t know when the last of the candle burnt out, but by the time we opened our eyes again, it was like passing from one darkness into another, from the uncertainty within to the one without, with only her reassuring voice to make me believe it could all somehow be overcome.
I walk through a field of earth, unsure of my own footing. Slogging through layers of compost sown into the dry topsoil. Summer sun on my forehead, horse-flies on the wing. They go for the ears, nostrils, mouth, dark places always, loving the darkness, like the sun’s own excrement, clinging to the crevices where intruders are most unwelcome. The priest said we are all excrement but for divine grace, the body a temple of mud and dung, the soul encased inside like a saintly relic, too fragile to be touched. What carpenter or mason could build such a flawed structure and call it his own? I am alive in the heat, unstoppable. Forgive me for being invigorated by unclean things. Forgive the rifle strap, forgive the kill. No hunting to be done, only killing, performed with the sort of pathetic ecstasy I should have outgrown long ago. Ground squirrels dashing from burrow to burrow, massacred in a puff of dust. Sparrows exploding in brown fragments across a bone-blue sky. A Sunday afternoon. God forgive me. Empty five rounds and masturbate in the brush behind an irrigation pump. Jizz and excrement, two parts of a depraved whole. Only sweat for lubricant. Do not look at me.
Ellie’s bruises were no joke. Four finger-sized marks all around the sides of her neck. It was two days before the swelling went down and she could talk like a normal person again. While she was recuperating, I liked to sit down with her at the kitchen table and watch her eat the chicken tortilla soup Katie had made special for her. She would scoop a bit of sour cream onto the end of the spoon and stir it slowly into the hot orange broth. Then she would raise the spoon to her lips and blow on it and slurp the broth into her mouth without giving any thought to proper table manners. No one was going to scold her for that now. By the third day she was feeling well enough to try out a peanut butter sandwich. She tore it into small pieces and consumed it bit by bit like a European on TV snacking on bread and olive oil. Grape jelly clung to her fingers, lending them a purple hue like the ones imprinted on her throat.
You don’t have to talk if you’re not up to it, I said. But you know I’ve been waiting all week to talk about it, and sooner or later we’re going to have to talk about it.
You don’t have to tell me, she said. Her voice was so hoarse it made my heart ache, remembering what happened to her on the porch steps. I’ve been wracking my brains in silence, she said, trying to figure out what I would say when the time came to decide on a plan.
I was wondering what sort of plan you would come up with.
I didn’t. That’s the problem. I’ve worked it over in my head a thousand times, and any way you look at it, we’re screwed. We’re holding a mad dog by the scruff of the neck, and the only thing dumber than holding on to it might be letting it go.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it looks like my mom and the others are sitting this one out. After what happened with Jennifer, it seems they’re putting all their faith in us now. We’re the ones who will have to decide what to do next.
You think I don’t know it? Jesus, Dawn still hasn’t recovered from walking in on Mama in the bathroom, and Katie’s been so depressed I wonder if I shouldn’t be keeping an eye on her as well. Even Will and Logan are more anxious than usual. None of them know what to do.
I don’t see how they can leave such a huge responsibility to us alone.
Whether we knew it or not, we were taking on that responsibility the minute we decided to confront him ourselves. We’re in the mess we’re in now because we failed to meet the challenge head-on. That can never happen again. We can’t let it.
I think we handled ourselves pretty well all things considered.
No. We let him get into our heads and provoke us. We both did. And now we’re paying for it. Big time.
He’s the one who should be paying for it. For what he did to you. For what he was trying to do to the family.
I know where you’re going with this, and I’m only going to tell you once—put it out of your mind completely. Your moment to play the white knight was over after you knocked him off of me. Anything more and you’d just be jerking off your own ego. And it’s already pretty well jerked.
Ellie smiled and looked down at the remains of her sandwich. She had stripped away all the bread contained within the crust, and now she decided to break the crust up into square sections and arrange the sections around the edge of the plate like some sort of fancy finger food and then take them up one by one and finish off each one with a few quick bites. The way she teased and talked down to me, it was a wonder I ever missed talking to her at all. For a while there, when I was still getting used to having her around, I thought there must be something wrong with her, that she was disturbed like her mother, or maybe even a little autistic, to where she couldn’t control the things she said. It took me a while to realize, though, that she was fully aware of how she came across, and that she could even see herself as others saw her, and that she just didn’t care. Bossy and obnoxious, sarcastic and blunt. Adjectives didn’t mean anything to her, or at least not enough to make her hide her light. She was so bright she could shine right through you and reveal the words written in lemon juice across your paper soul. And while most people, in their selfishness, would have tried to exploit the gift for their own benefit, she was always comforting and listening to other people, and even looked down on those like me whose noble gestures were sometimes guided by a desire to prove our own worth. I often wondered what plan God had in store for her, and why he would bestow so much insight on a non-believer.
Is this what having responsibility means? That I’m powerless to do anything?
She smiled again. Not exactly, she said. There’s still one thing you can do.
What’s that?
Sandwich.
What about it?
Make one. With lots of peanut butter.
You’re feeling better now. Make your own.
Not for me. For him.
Him? Make a sandwich for him?
Sure. When was the last time he ate?
Last night. Mom gave me some of the leftover chili to feed him.
He has to eat again eventually.
Is that what we are now? His room service?
No. We’re his captors, and even prisoners are entitled to three square meals a day. Especially when they’re being held illegally. We need to keep him comfortable until we figure out what to do with him in the long run.
He’s a drunk. He doesn’t give a crap about food.
Then we need to show him that we care about his health even if he doesn’t.
I don’t care about his health. He could curl up and die as far as I’m concerned.
Don’t think about him, then. Think about the family and what it means for us to defuse this situation.