But after yesterday, he could never forget. He could never forget that safety was a gift to which he would never be entitled, and it made him so angry and scared and also desperate to hold on to his mother and never let go. He rolled to his side, eyes still closed, and tucked her hand against his face, not caring if she felt the tears seeping out of his eyes or not.
She seemed to understand, and her voice took on a more soothing tone, a singsong of storytelling that he remembered from his childhood, while she told the story of Santa Muerte and how he got his name. “The Vatican doesn’t like Santa Muerte and neither does your abuela. ‘Good’ Catholics aren’t supposed to venerate her. But it seems to me that Santa Muerte is speaking to people in the way the Church has sometimes forgotten how, and is that not what God is supposed to do? Speak to his people through his saints and angels? The old Catholics used to worship Sophia as God’s wisdom incarnate—why don’t we do the same with death? Death, which is the heart of life? Death, which God took into himself, which he wedded to his body, for our sakes? The heart of God’s love for us was forged in death. Is that not something we should consider beautiful?
“But back to your name. Santa Muerte is also sometimes called Santa Sebastiana. Do you know why?”
St. Sebastian just shook his head against her hand.
“The real St. Sebastian knew death intimately,” she said. “When the emperor who loved St. Sebastian chose to bind him to a stake and have him shot with arrows, he was thought dead and left there to rot. But he wasn’t dead—Saint Irene found him and nursed him back to health in her home. It was a miracle that he survived, that he lived! Anyone would have understood if he’d tucked that miracle into his palm and lived the rest of his life thanking God. But that’s not what St. Sebastian did, that’s not who he was. He went back. He went back to the emperor he used to love and he spoke his truth to him, even though it meant a certain fate. The emperor had him beaten, beaten until death, and then thrown into the sewers. So St. Sebastian has the honor of suffering the full pain of martyrdom twice. Twice for the glory of God.”
With his brain bruised and aching, with every breath reminding him of Lee’s deadened gaze and clean trainers, St. Sebastian saw very little honor in suffering at the moment. It didn’t feel glorious, it didn’t feel holy. It didn’t feel anything like having Auden bite his lip or tug on his hair.
It felt shitty and terrible and stupid, and it mauled at him like a tiger, like it had a life of its own.
Jennifer seemed to know what he was thinking. “I didn’t name you St. Sebastian because I wanted you to suffer,” she said softly. “I named you St. Sebastian because St. Sebastian, like Santa Muerte, shows us that death is part of life. Death is meant to be lived with, danced with, talked to. Death is meant to be stared at, and then she should be welcomed when it is time for her scythe to harvest our lives and bring us to our loved ones who’ve gone before.” She pushed his hair from his forehead with warm fingertips. “I wanted you to have death’s protection and friendship. I wanted you to live without the fear of it.”
“I can’t help it,” St. Sebastian whispered. His lips were dry, his voice hoarse. “I’m still afraid.”
He could only admit this with the pain like a cloud over him, with his eyes closed, with the room a little cloister for their folk saints and stories of death.
“I know,” his mother said, gently, in Spanish. “I know you’re afraid, because I’m afraid too. I’m so afraid for my son that when I pray, the only word that comes out is please. And I don’t know if I’m praying to God or the Virgin or Santa Muerte or St. Sebastian himself—I only know that I’d pray to them all day and night if it meant I could keep you from harm. But there is something worse than being afraid, and that is letting fear so far into your life that it stops being a life at all. Do you understand this?”
“I guess,” he said in English. He didn’t guess, he knew. He knew what she meant and what she was trying to convey to him—that one act of evil shouldn’t snuff out the lights in his mind, the candles of fantasy and hope and belief that belonged uniquely to him. But he couldn’t have predicted what she’d say next, which was so Jennifer Martinez that it actually made him smile for the first time since yesterday.
“And I won’t let it. I won’t let the fear in,” she said firmly, as if that was that. His mother wouldn’t let this suppurate into his life, she wouldn’t let him be afraid. Fear and hatred and bigotry had nothing in the face of Jennifer’s blazing love.
And though even then he knew it wouldn’t be that easy, even though he could already sense the years ahead looming back at him with their ashy, grayed-out silence, he still loved her for trying. He still loved her for taking his pain as her own, for lifting the burden of what will happen next, for being safety incarnate so that he could just ache in peace.
Yes, love meant hell to pay sometimes. But love also meant hell had the brightest ribbons and seams of heaven woven in, because could it really be hell if someone who loved you refused to let you hurt alone?
“How did you find out about Auden?” St. Sebastian asked after a minute. “Did the police know?”
When his mother didn’t answer right away, he cracked open his eyes and then immediately regretted it, shutting them again. Jennifer kissed his forehead and stood up.
“I’m going to see about more pain medicine,” she said in English.
“You didn’t answer,” he complained.
Another pause. “No,” she said finally. “I didn’t find out from the police.”
And then he heard her leave the room before he could ask any more questions.
Before he was able to leave the hospital the next day, the doctor looked him over a final time, making him go through some vision and balance tests before reconfirming that the injury had indeed been mild, and after a few weeks of rest and care, he’d be well again.
The doctor frowned though, after pocketing his pen. “That little cut under your lip—it’s not on your report,” he said. “I need to amend that—”
“It’s not from the—um—the thing in the graveyard,” St. Sebastian said. He could feel his cheeks heat, could feel his mother’s head swivel to stare at him. “It was from before.”
“Brilliant,” the doctor said with a smile, visibly relieved at not having to do more paperwork. “Shall we get on with your discharge then?”
The whole way home, St. Sebastian played with the cut and bruise on his lower lip, and he knew his mother was pretending not to watch out of the corner of her eye.
“The doctors asked me about all the drawings on your body,” she said. They were bumping down a hedge-lined road to get to Thorncombe. “I said a friend did it, but it was Auden, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Was it Auden who left that mark on your lip?”
St. Sebastian’s cheeks burned again, along with his chest. “No,” he lied. He didn’t know why he was lying, really, just that he felt suddenly betrayed by her nosiness, betrayed by this question that felt like an accusation. How could she have been so tender at his bedside and then suddenly be so…so…invasive?
“I know it was, St. Sebastian,” she said. “I can tell by how upset you are now.”
“It’s private,” he said mulishly. “It’s none of your business.”
She sighed, turning them through the corner that opened into Thorncombe’s sanctuary of trees and stone and wooden pub signs. “Tell me if you fall in love with him. Please.”
“And then you’ll give me all the reasons why I shouldn’t be in love with him?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to tell them to me now?”
They pulled into the driveway. Something dark speckled the render covering the front of their house—algae or mold or something—and the neighbor’s bin had fallen over, spilling rubbish everywhere. Home sweet home.
“If I told you, I think you would stop loving me,” his mother said quietly.
It was such a strange thing to say tha
t St. Sebastian had no real reply. “Mamá.”
“Inside, mijo. You need to rest.” And she used that tone, that voice that meant there’d be no pushing her on this. So he steeled himself for the pain and carefully got out of the car, each movement like an arrow in his side, and went into the house.
It wasn’t until that first day home, when he tried to call Thornchapel from his mother’s phone, that he realized he didn’t know what to say.
His body was Auden’s canvas still, and he resented every shower, every brush of clothing, every hour of his skin dying and renewing itself, which would take these traces of Auden away from him. He was supposed to have belt marks, rope marks, bruises on his arse from Auden’s palm . . .
Billy and Lee had stolen that away from him, and so now he only had this sketch of Thornchapel with its mysterious letter M over his heart. Well that, and the deep bruise on his lip.
But even though his body was marked like a surveyor’s map—Sharpied strokes like property lines, squiggles like rivers and streams, his whole body a landscape for Auden to learn and then conquer for his own—St. Sebastian’s thoughts were blank.
What could he say that could possibly be worth what Auden had done that day? What words could ever weigh against those steps he’d run toward the road? He could call and say I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for hours into the phone and it still wouldn’t make a difference; it would only be a drop in the ocean of what he owed to Auden. It would be an insult to the magnitude of his sin and what he imagined must be the magnitude of Auden’s anger.
The problem was that St. Sebastian was angry too, if he was being honest. He was so angry at Auden for not listening, angry with Billy, angry with Lee, angry with the world for being shaped the way it was.
And he was terrified that if he dialed Auden’s number and Auden picked up, what wouldn’t come out of St. Sebastian’s mouth was hours of apologies, but instead tearful, bitter, aching rage, directed not just at Auden, not just at himself, but at everyone and everything and everywhere. Every single molecule of the universe that had arranged itself so that it was even possible for bones to be broken and brains to be bruised for the crime of wanting another boy.
No, he couldn’t let Auden hear all that. St. Sebastian didn’t even want to hear it and it was coming from inside himself.
So he put down the phone and told himself he’d try again the next day.
But the next day came and St. Sebastian had the same problem. The only words crowding his mouth were angry—violent even—or so guilt-laden that they sank like lead back down into his throat. He was boiling over, he was freezing at the same time, the result was hot shards of himself pointed outwards at everyone, and then he hated himself for that too. He hated that he couldn’t remember what it felt like to lay on a bed of crushed lavender while Auden devoured his mouth. He hated that he couldn’t remember what it felt like to know—with primal, elemental urgency—that he was on the edge of something new and wonderful, that he was plunging into a wild dream. He hated that he couldn’t remember what magic felt like.
The only thing he still loved was Auden. And he couldn’t even figure out what to say to him.
He put the phone down and decided to try again the next day.
By the end of the week, he’d written emails upon emails that went unsent. He tried to write a letter by hand, and then burned it with a lighter while listening to very sad music, and then he wrote another letter—which he then burned listening to angry music instead. He thought about messaging Auden on Twitter or Facebook—but he didn’t have accounts on any of those things and he didn’t know what he thought he’d be able to say in a short DM that he couldn’t even express in a two-thousand-word email.
Finally he gave up, caved to what he’d known he should do all along. He waited until his mother drove into the next town over for groceries and snuck out of the house to walk to Thornchapel.
The walk felt longer than it ever had in his life, each footfall sending a jolt of pain through his ribs and head, each step taunting him with the memories of those six cursed steps he’d taken outside the graveyard.
He welcomed it, welcomed the pain so clean and so honest when right now nothing about him felt clean or honest. The pain made sense; he deserved it; he deserved more.
Love sometimes meant hell to pay and all that.
There was something else dogging his walk though, and he was too miserable not to be honest with himself.
He was afraid.
After sixteen years of carelessly rambling around Thorncombe and the high hills and pitched valleys, he was afraid. His own home frightened him, the very folds and nooks of the valley that he loved had turned sinister, pooled full of shadow and threat. Yes, the village had always been a place where scorn seemed to simmer under the surface, yes, he sometimes hated it here, but the combe itself—the valley and the river and the moors and the forest and the thorn chapel—that had always been his.
No longer.
They could be hiding anywhere, they could be watching and waiting and planning just around the next kink in the road. He’d heard the police had brought Billy and Lee and the others in to question them, but that was all he’d heard, and he was too pessimistically built to hope they’d actually been punished, he was certain they were free once again, and full of amplified malice that he’d survived and blown the whistle on them. Even thinking about it made him cringe, and he had to walk with his hands shoved in his pockets to stop them from shaking and stop himself from wheeling at every innocent summer sound as he walked down the hedge-lined lane.
But they’d chased him away from Auden once and he’d be goddamned if they did it again. He’d walk through the terror, through the pain, to get to his magic boy, no matter what the cost.
When he got to Thornchapel, however, his courage quailed, and he stared up at the forbidding edifice with something beyond trepidation, something more like certainty that if he knocked on the door, he’d be knocking on his own fate, and he didn’t know if he was ready. Was he ready to say sorry? Ready to set aside his anger?
Or could he just drop to his knees and let Auden exorcise it all from him with kisses and pain? Could he just lay it all bare—his love, his guilt, his shame and resentment—and trust that Auden would know what to do with it?
God, he hoped so. He prayed it would be so, that he could use Auden like he used the saints of the Church—for intercession and exoneration, for protection and clarity.
And maybe, just maybe, Auden would use him back. Then all the needy, hungry chambers of St. Sebastian’s heart would be full.
Holding tight to this, St. Sebastian stepped forward to the wooden double doors that marked the entrance to the house. The right door was decorated with a knocker styled into a large face, a grinning man with a thick ring clenched between his teeth—all of it cast in verdigris-covered bronze, which showed its age in every shade of green imaginable, leek and chartreuse and olive. When St. Sebastian reached up to rap the ring against the door, he noticed that the man’s face was made of leaves—layers and layers of them, delicately veined and variegated for all that they were made of thick metal. He must have seen this front door uncountable times that summer as a child, and a fair few times this summer with Auden, but he’d never noticed the leaves before. He’d never recognized the figure they comprised before now.
The Green Man.
It seemed rather improper to have such a cheerful figure on the door of such a stern house, but he didn’t have much time to wonder about it, because only a few seconds passed between him rapping the door and it opening. He didn’t even have time to panic.
Which was good, because the door wasn’t opened by a servant, like he’d planned on, and it wasn’t opened by Auden, which he’d hoped for.
It was opened by Ralph Guest.
St. Sebastian tried to speak, tried to say hello, explain why he was here, but nothing came out.
Ralph frowned down at him. “May I help you?”
Auden. You’re here for A
uden.
You’re not allowed to run away again.
“I wondered if Auden was home,” he forced himself to say.
The frown deepened. “Auden is still in hospital.”
“Oh,” St. Sebastian breathed, feeling this like another kick to the ribs. “Oh.”
“There was some internal bruising to the organs,” Auden’s father explained matter-of-factly. “They want to monitor it a bit longer before they send him home.”
As an adult, St. Sebastian would have known all the right questions to ask. He would have asked which hospital, what room? He would have asked if he could visit, and as an adult, he would have had a car to drive there. But as a newly-turned sixteen-year-old boy, this felt like a stone wall right in his path, too high to climb over, too smooth and formless even to try. It felt like the end of all possibilities. Even more so with the following exchange:
“Will…will he come back here? When he’s well again?”
“I think not.”
Ralph’s voice was clipped. To the point. And with every cold, cultured syllable, St. Sebastian felt smaller and stupider.
“O-okay,” St. Sebastian stammered. “Will you tell him I came by? I’m St. Seb—”
“St. Sebastian Perth Martinez, yes. I know who you are.”
Uneasiness—unrelated to his earlier nervousness—whispered up and down his back, prickling at the skin at the back of his neck. It was unusual to know someone’s middle name, right? He could barely even remember his own mother’s middle name, much less rattle off the middle names of strangers from the village.
Ralph said, abruptly, “You were with my son when he got hurt.”
“Yes,” St. Sebastian managed, his face aflame, his whole body itching to run away. He didn’t know where this was going. Was Ralph angry that his son was spending time with another boy? Did he think that St. Sebastian had—he didn’t even know—corrupted Auden or something?
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