Sacred

“Oh, yeah. Cool.”

He dropped Angie and she said, “Maybe you need some time away.”

“I do.” Bubba sighed. “It’s hard being the guy who does all the thinking for everybody.”

I followed his gaze, watched as Nelson dove on top of the Twoomey brothers and they all slid down the side of the frozen snow pile, punching each other, giggling.

I looked at Bubba. “We all have our crosses to bear,” I told him.

Nelson tossed Iggy Twoomey off the snow pile into a parked car and set off the alarm. It screamed into the night air and Nelson said, “Uh-oh,” and then he and the brothers burst out in fresh peals of laughter.

“See what I mean?” Bubba said.

I wouldn’t find out what had happened with my credit card until the next morning. The automated operator I contacted when we got back to the apartment would only tell me that my credit had been placed on hiatus. When I asked her to explain “hiatus,” she ignored me and told me in her computer drone that I could press “one” for more options.

“I don’t see that I have many options in hiatus,” I told her. Then I reminded myself that “she” was a computer. Then I remembered that I was drunk.

When I got back to the living room, Angie was already asleep. She was on her back. A copy of The Handmaid’s Tale had slipped down her rib cage and rested in the crook of her arm. I bent over her and removed it and she groaned and turned onto her side, clutched a pillow, and tucked her chin into it.

That’s the position I usually found her in when I came out into the living room every morning. She didn’t drift to sleep so much as burrow into it, her body curling up so tight and fetal that it barely took up a fourth of the bed. I reached down again and removed a strand of hair from underneath her nose, and she smiled for a moment before burrowing further into the pillow.

When we were sixteen, we made love. Once. The first time for the both of us. At the time, neither of us probably suspected that in the sixteen years that would follow we’d never make love again, but we didn’t. She went her way, as they say, and I went mine.

Her way was twelve years of a doomed and abusive marriage to Phil Dimassi. Mine was a five-minute marriage of my own to her sister, Renee, and a succession of one-nighters and quick affairs and a pathology so predictable and male that I would have laughed at it if I hadn’t been so busy practicing it.

Four months ago, we’d begun to come back together in her bedroom on Howes Street, and it had been beautiful, achingly so, as if the sole purpose of my life had been to reach that bed, that woman, that moment in time. And then Evandro Arujo and Gerry Glynn had slaughtered a twenty-four-year-old cop on their way through Angie’s front door and put a bullet in her abdomen.

She got Evandro back, though, fired three big fuck-yous into his body, left him kneeling on her kitchen floor, trying to touch a piece of his head that wasn’t there any longer.

And Phil and I and a cop named Oscar took down Gerry Glynn as Angie lay in ICU. Oscar and I walked away. But not Phil. Not Gerry Glynn, either, but I’m not sure that was much of a consolation prize for Angie.

Human psyches, I knew as I watched her brow furrow and her lips part slightly against the pillow, are so much harder to bandage than human flesh. And thousands of years of study and experience have made it easier to heal the body, but no one has gotten much past square one on the human mind.

When Phil died, his dying swam deep into Angie’s mind, happened over and over and over again without stop. Loss and grief and everything that tortured Desiree Stone tortured Angie, too.

And just as Trevor had discovered with his daughter, I looked at Angie and knew there was very little I could do about it until the cycle of pain ran itself down, and melted like the snow.

9

Richie Colgan claims his ancestors are from Nigeria, but I’m not sure I believe him. Given his sense of revenge, I’d be willing to swear he’s half Sicilian.

He woke me at seven in the morning by throwing snowballs at my window until the sound reached my dreams and I was yanked from a walk in the French countryside with Emmanuelle Beart and thrown into a muddy foxhole where the enemy was inexplicably catapulting grapefruits into our midst.

I sat up in bed and watched a hunk of wet snow splat into my windowpane. At first, I was happy it wasn’t a grapefruit; then my head cleared and I walked over and saw Richie standing below.

The miserable bastard waved to me.

“Grief Release, Incorporated,” Richie said as he sat at my kitchen table, “is one interesting organization.”

“How interesting?”

“Enough that when I woke my editor up two hours ago, he agreed to give me two weeks off from my column to research them and a five-day, front-page, lower-right-corner feature series if I come up with what I think I will.”

“And what do you think you’ll come up with?” Angie said. She glared at him over her cup of coffee, her face puffy and hair hanging in her eyes, not at all happy to greet the day.

“Well…” He flipped his steno notebook open on the table. “I’ve only perused the diskettes you gave me, but, Christ, these people are dirty. Their ‘therapy’ and its ‘levels,’ from what I can see, involves a systematic breakdown of the psyche followed by a fast buildup. It’s very similar to the American military’s concept of break-’em-down-so-you-can-build-’em-back-up approach to soldiers. But the military, to give them their due, is up front about their technique.” He rapped his notebook on the table. “These mutants, however, are another story.”

“Example,” Angie said.

“Well, do you know about the levels—Level One, Two, et cetera?”

I nodded.

“Well, within each of these levels is a set of steps. The names of these steps vary depending on what level you’re at, but they’re all essentially the same. The object of these steps is ‘watershed.’”

“Watershed is Level Six.”

“Right,” he said. “Watershed is the alleged goal of everything. So, to reach Total Watershed, you have to have a bunch of little watersheds first. Such as, if you’re a Level Two—a Desolate, say—you go through a series of therapeutic developments, or ‘steps,’ by which you reach ‘watershed’ and are no longer Desolate. Those steps are: Honesty, Nudity—”

“Nudity?” Angie said.

“Yes. Emotional, not physical, though that’s accepted. Honesty, Nudity, Exhibition, and Revelation.”