Dirty Prayers

Confession

"Then here is my truth, Father," I let my voice go soft as a confession should be, hushed, intimate, meant only for the darkness between us.

A long, taut silence.

"... Yes," he said finally. Quiet. Careful.

"Every time I walk into this church, I feel more sinful than when I arrived, not less," I paused.

"I don't think that's how it's supposed to work."

"And yet," I saw his silhouette through the lattice. Watched the stillness of him, the terrible, beautiful stillness of a man exerting enormous effort.

"Here I am. Coming back. Every time."

The candle outside flickered. The shadows in the booth moved.

"Why?" he asked. The word came out differently than the others, stripped of its careful coating and just slightly raw underneath.

"Why return if it troubles you?"

"Because," I said simply, "the most sacred thing I always do."

The silence after that was the loudest silence I had ever sat inside.

I could hear him breathing. Slow and measured and deliberate was the breathing of a man counting, steadying, and reciting something internal that had nothing to do with scripture and everything to do with survival.

I could see the outline of his hand through the lattice, resting on his knee, and I watched his fingers press down...just slightly...into his cassock.

"You should go," he said at last. Low and rough and not quite steady.

"Should I?" I didn't move.

"You haven't given me my penance yet."

A sharp exhale. " Ivy—"

"That's how it works, isn't it?" My voice was innocent and gentle, a perfect performance.

"You hear the confession. You assign the penance. I can't leave without it. It wouldn't be right." I paused just long enough.

"And I want to do what's right, Father."

The sound that came from him then was so quiet it was almost nothing. Almost.

When he spoke, his voice was so controlled it must have cost him something.

"Three Hail Marys," he said. "And a reflection on the virtue of restraint."

I sat back on my heels. Smiled at the lattice, at his silhouette, and at the rigid, magnificent effort of him.

"Restraint," I repeated softly. "I'll think about that."

"See that you do."

I pulled back the curtain and stepped out of the confessional into the cool air of the church.

The candles burned steadily along the walls, indifferent and golden.

The stone floor was cold through the thin soles of my shoes.

Everything looked exactly as it had when I came in, unchanged, holy, quiet.

I felt like I had set something on fire.

I walked to the altar and kneeled in the front pew...his pew, the one closest to where he stood every morning...and folded my hands and bent my head.

From inside the confessional, I knew he would be able to hear the faint click of my rosary beads if I had brought them.

I hadn't brought them.

Instead, I closed my eyes and pressed my clasped hands to my lips and thought, with great deliberateness, about absolutely nothing holy.

"Hail Mary, full of grace," I thought.

And then I thought about the way his voice dropped an entire register when he said my name.

The Lord is with thee.

And the way his fingers had pressed into his knee.

Blessed art thou among women.

And that almost-sound. That barely sounds. That thing he had swallowed before it could become real.

I opened my eyes and looked up at the crucifix above the altar.

The figure there, arms outstretched, head bowed, caught in the permanent moment of sacrifice.

"Sorry," I said quietly to the church, to the candles, to whatever might have been listening.

I wasn't sorry at all.

Behind me, the confessional curtain moved.

I didn't turn around. But I felt him, the shift in the air, the weight of his attention.

I bowed my head again. Folded my hands.

The picture of devotion.

Three Hail Marys, he had said.

I would say thirty if it meant kneeling here long enough for him to keep looking.

The next day, started with rain.

Not the soft, polite kind that freckles your shoulders and smells like wet stone. This was the other kind, the kind that arrives without warning in the middle of a September afternoon and turns the cobblestone streets into rivers in under ten minutes. The kind that seals you inside wherever you happen to be standing when it begins.

I happened to be standing inside Saint Jude's.

Of course, I was.

I had come in on the pretense of lighting a candle for my grandmother, which was, for once, almost entirely true. Almost.

The fact that I had worn the black dress, the one that sat off my shoulders and nipped my waist so precisely it might as well have been a confession in itself, was entirely unrelated.

I lit the candle. I stood before it for a respectful moment, thinking of my grandmother, who had been a wicked woman in the best possible way and would have found this entire situation enormously entertaining.

Then I heard the rain hit the roof like a wall collapsing.

I turned toward the door. Lightning split the sky somewhere close, close enough that the stained-glass shivered in its lead frames, the purples and rubies trembling like something alive.

The lights flickered. Went out. Came back dimmer and uncertain.

And from somewhere behind the altar, I heard the measured sound of footsteps stop.

He came out of the sacristy carrying a candleholder, the flame cupped in his palm against the draft.

His collar was loosened by a single button... just one, barely anything... but on Johan it registered like a crack in a dam.

His eyes found me immediately, that precise, unwilling attention he could never quite help.

He stopped.

We looked at each other across the length of the church.

Outside, the rain intensified, hammering the roof with a sound like applause.

"The storm came in from the valley," he said. "It won't pass quickly."

"How long?" I asked.

He looked at the windows. "An hour. Perhaps more."

I looked around the empty church, the trembling candles, and the shadows pressing in. Then back at him.

"Just us, then," I said.

He set the candleholder down with a careful, deliberate click. "I have work to attend to."

"In the dark?" I asked again.

He didn't answer. He turned and went back through the sacristy door, and I heard nothing for several minutes except rain and distant thunder.

I sat in the front pew and waited. And smiled at the crucifix.

He lasted eleven minutes. I counted.

When he came back, he opened a book on the lectern, thick, worn, not the prayer book he carried like a shield, and stood with his back partially to me and began to read.

Or to perform the act of reading. The page didn't turn for a very long time.

"What are you reading?" I asked.

A pause. "Augustine."

"Confessions?"

The page turned. Deliberately. "Yes."

"I read it once," I said. "In university, 'Make me chaste, Lord...but not yet.'"

He went very still.

I kept my voice light. "I always thought that was the most honest prayer ever written. The only one that admitted what people actually feel."

"Augustine wrote that as a condemnation of his former weakness," Johan said carefully.

"Did he?" I tilted my head. "Or did he just write what was true and let other people decide what to do with it?"

He closed the book. Slowly. Turned to face me.

In the candlelight, he was devastated. The warm gold light found the places where the priest ended, and the man began.

Storm-blue eyes. That jaw. The straight, suffering line of his shoulders.

"You come here," he said slowly, "as if it were a game."

"Is that what you think?"