by Tonya Hurley
She brushed the strings of her guitar gently with the milagro and fingered the fret board tenderly. Determined to play the show of her life. She restarted the concert, her career, and her mission with a single, simple announcement to the expectant audience that burst through the speakers with commanding power.
“Intermission,” she shouted, “is over.”
Lucy and Agnes stood at the back door of the club, not anxious to face the pack of photographers and bloggers waiting for them on the other side. News of the melee was already spreading through the blogosphere.
“Do you want one of us to walk you out?” a bouncer asked.
“No, we’re fine,” Agnes answered.
“Who the hell was that lighting guy?” Lucy asked.
“He’s not on staff. Just some dude we hired from the halfway house down the street for the night. Trying to be supportive. You know. Now he’ll probably sue our asses.”
Lucy and Agnes shrugged, keeping their suspicions about the guy’s deadly intentions to themselves as he trudged off.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said.
“Don’t be,” Agnes comforted, taking her hand.
“I see things that are going to happen. I can’t help it.”
“Good thing for Cecilia, right?”
“Doesn’t that freak you out?”
“Sebastian said we would discover things like that when we needed them, remember?” Agnes said calmly, finding the silver lining in Lucy’s predicament.
Agnes was being more than understanding. She was commiserating.
“You too?” Lucy asked.
“Yeah,” Agnes said. “Sometimes I feel like there’s two of me. Literally in two places at once. Or none of me. Like I’m fading away or splitting apart. I can’t control it.”
“Yet,” Lucy said. “Get on it. That talent might come in handy.”
“That was the first attack on any of us,” Agnes observed. “Why do you think it would be in such a public place?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “It was pretty ballsy trying to attack her in a crowded room like that. Makes me wonder if killing her was the point.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sebastian said we’d be hunted, right?”
“I’m not getting you.”
“I mean that if Frey really wanted us dead, he’d be making more of an effort,” Lucy said.
“You think that stage diver was all about stopping the show?”
“Maybe,” Lucy said. “Frey’s as afraid of the message as he is of us.”
“So why would he want to keep us alive?”
“The heart,” Lucy declared.
Agnes nodded in agreement.
The sounds from the stage began to overwhelm their conversation.
“Ready?” Agnes asked.
“Ready.”
Agnes pulled her hood over her head and Lucy shielded her eyes with a new pair of oversize shades. They walked quickly through the rear exit and into the whirlwind of media types shooting pictures and video and shouting questions. The doorman had cleared a path to Lucy’s waiting car and driver.
“Jump in, I’ll take you home.”
“No, thanks. I want to walk.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Lucy said. “Get in.”
“I’ll be fine,” Agnes said. “Really.”
“Careful, okay?”
Agnes waved good-bye and slipped away. Her mind was spinning every which way. She needed some alone time, some peace.
She tried desperately to make sense of what Lucy had told them and what had happened at the show—Cecilia’s life at stake. Holding on to her sacred heart chaplet and her black and gold mourning ring. Trying to figure it all out. Her life. His heart.
“I can’t do this,” she said, her eyes tearing up.
A light rain began to fall as she turned the corner on Union Street toward Park Slope. The rain felt good on Agnes’s face. It wasn’t epic, like the weather or its aftermath the previous November, but it reminded her of Sebastian nonetheless. Considering what she just learned and what had just happened, that was a mixed blessing.
Agnes headed straight to Precious Blood, or what remained of it, for the first time since it all went down. She hoped she would see him there, feel him. She needed him now more than ever. Once she arrived, she saw that the scaffolding and police barricades were long gone, leaving the entire edifice in a sort of spotlighted limbo, its only purpose now as a stop for morbidly curious tourists or a field trip destination for parochial schools. She half expected to find a gift shop erected near the staircase.
Agnes stood across the street staring at the charred walls and shattered windows, away from the prying eyes of the few religious fanatics and die-hard atheists, who regularly congregated and chose sides, pontificating or speculating about what had actually happened there. For some it was shrine. For others, a monstrosity. For her, it was both a crime scene and the place where she fell in love.
Nevertheless, she had to come, especially now. She went because the only people she could trust she had met there. It was where their memories stained her forever, where they lived—Cecilia, Lucy, and Sebastian. Trust wasn’t something she could do easily anymore. Not in the world she lived in now. It was getting smaller. Closing in on her, and she found it hard to breathe. The end, her end, could come at any time.
She heard someone approaching from behind, a man, she figured, from the heaviness of his step. He was close enough for Agnes to hear the rain bouncing off him to the sidewalk. She steeled herself, clenching her house keys between her fingers like spikes, just in case, and continued to stare ahead at the church.
“Excuse me, miss. Aren’t you, aren’t you . . . one of them?”
Agnes’s first reaction was to deny it. To walk away from it. All of it. Go back to her life the way it was. With the exception of school and her neighborhood, she was the least high profile of the three girls and was more than happy to leave the notoriety to Lucy and Cecilia. It had been a manageable level of attention and harassment, a neighborhood and school thing, just enough to get her trolled in the high school hallways and online or to get her mother a free cup of coffee or loaf of bread at the local bodega in exchange for a kind word. Just in case it was all true. Ass coverers or believers, the coffee tasted the same.
“No,” she whispered firmly. “I’m not.”
“But I’ve seen you with the others.”
“It wasn’t me,” she said again, less convincingly.
“C’mon, it is.”
Agnes was more irritated than threatened, hoping to have some time for reflection. To be with Sebastian again, if only in her mind. She relaxed her hand and put her keys in her pocket.
“I’m sorry, I just want to be alone.”
“I didn’t mean to bother you. I must have been mistaken.”
The disappointment in his tone struck her. She felt the distance between them grow as he turned to leave.
Agnes wanted to deny it a final time as he left, scream it out to him, but her instincts took over. She could not deny it. Not here. She removed the cowl from her head, and as she did, layers and layers of gorgeous auburn ringlets cascaded down around her pale face, falling to her waist.
“Please. Don’t go,” she insisted. “I’m Agnes.”
He turned back to her and approached slowly.
“All those beautiful things destroyed,” Agnes mused, as if she were talking to herself, “never to be replaced.”
“There is no need to replace them. They are here now, in you,” the stranger answered, laying a hand on Agnes’s shoulder. “Alive.”
“Thanks, but I’m afraid that brings little comfort to me.” Agnes sighed. “The world is so cruel. I hate it. And I don’t know where to look or what to do.”
She wiped at tears beginning to mix with the raindrops. She was becoming emotional, but instead of her heart beating wildly, it was slowed by the stranger’s touch. Calmed.
“Agnes, why are you cryin
g?”
She felt herself begin to open up to the stranger in a way she wouldn’t have imagined a few minutes before. As if she were not actually speaking to another person, but thinking out loud, confessing thoughts so personal that she was glad not to be facing the stranger.
“So many reasons.”
“Tell me.”
“For a dying old woman I visited today. For a boy I loved and lost there,” Agnes cried, pointing weakly at Precious Blood. “For myself, I’m ashamed to say.”
“There is no shame in compassion, in sympathy, in love,” came the reply. “To the woman you gave comfort. The kind of comfort one receives only from true faith. To the boy you gave love. The kind of love that comes only from a pure heart. ”
“And what about me? What did I give to myself?”
“Why did you come here?”
“I wanted to be near him.”
The stranger whispered.
“He isn’t there.”
The stranger moved in closer behind her, almost touching. Agnes didn’t move. He brought his hand to her scarred wrists and turned them gently upward into the falling rain. His touch was reassuring. Gentle. Nearly tranquilizing. She suddenly felt displaced. There, but not. Both unable and unwilling to resist. The kind of feeling she’d told Lucy about. A feeling she’d only experienced in her most private moments. She felt the touch, the presence, warm and alive, but saw no breath blowing past her in the cold night.
“Who are you?”
“Did you know that the boy, Jude, is named for the patron saint of desperate causes?”
“How do you know him?”
He spoke in a soft but commanding voice, one suddenly familiar.
“Quid quæritis viventem cum mortuis?”
“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Agnes translated out loud. She gasped, raised her head and turned. Her heart filled. She turned to face him, reach for him, but he was gone. Agnes fell to her knees, weeping.
“Sebastian.”
13 “Need an escort?” a burly voice asked through the thick of the darkness.
“Chaperone-free zone,” Cecilia said, waving the security guard off. “I can take care of myself.”
“Yeah, I just saw that,” he replied. “At the show.”
“Keep the faith,” she said, walking away.
“Watch your brave ass, okay?” he called back.
“You can watch it for me,” she yelled back, wiggling as she split.
He kept an eye on her until she’d left the alley and turned onto heavily warehoused and dilapidated Van Brunt Street. It wasn’t a good idea for her or anyone to walk alone at night in the midst of this desolation, but she was preoccupied. Lucy’s news weighed heavily on her, and the fact that someone had already tried to kill her once that night seemed to give her a little breathing room in terms of mortality.
Everything loomed over her like the massive cranes towering over the terminals in the distance. There they were, scraping the sky, loading and unloading container after container, even in the dead of night. No respite from the heavy lifting, or the constant threat of a crushing blow. Cecilia could relate.
She’d hadn’t noticed it until just that second, but her hands were hurting. From the gig, she figured, but she remained on guard nonetheless.
“CeCe,” a weary voice called out.
She kept walking. Whether it was an apostle or an assassin, she was prepared.
“CeCe,” he called again, this time more forcefully.
She stopped and turned in recognition and amazement. “Bill?”
The weary voice was familiar, but not the man. “You were great.”
“What?” she asked, thoroughly confused and more than a little freaked out.
“Your show. You were great.”
“You were there? You?”
He approached slowly, eyes cast downward. “I wouldn’t have missed it.”
Cecilia was almost speechless.
“I almost died,” she said. “Your corset, the wrought-iron relic you gave me. It saved me. You saved me.”
“I can’t save anyone, CeCe, not even myself. I’m a junkie. A liar.”
As he approached, the light from the streetlamp above revealed Bill—an older guy, sixty-ish, close-cropped gray hair, wrinkled hands but manicured nails, his two-piece suit pressed neatly, creases in the slacks, and a noticeable glint beaming from a pair recently polished lace-up shoes. A sharp-dressed man; an executive out for a nightcap, a Park Avenue lawyer or a Wall Street broker, anyone might have thought.
Cecilia brought her bloody hand to her lips to stifle a gentle laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you upright before.”
He raised his head and smiled. Their eyes met. His were clear. Hers were turning red with emotion, as if she’d just emptied a bottle.
“You’re so dressed up,” she said.
“It’s my girl’s big night,” he said. “You bet your ass I’m dressed up.”
Cecilia took in the pride radiating from his eyes.
“I’m totally dry now. Two months,” he said. “Thanks to you.”
Cecilia let the tear in her eye go. Black mascara streaked her porcelain cheek like a dusty raindrop down a windshield.
“That’s not exactly a deathbed conversion, Bill,” Cecilia observed. “I haven’t seen you in three months.”
“Well, it wasn’t my deathbed that did the trick, it was yours.”
“But it still took you a month.”
“I never said it was easy. None of it,” he said.
She closed the distance between them. They hugged, holding each other tightly. He was still thin, still frail. She could feel his bones through the designer threads that hung on him, the slow beat of his heart and the wet, rumbling breaths of a lifelong smoker. All was well on the surface, she thought, but there was no hiding the damage that had been done inside. She stepped back after a long while, still holding his hands. He squeezed hers gently, with what she figured was all the strength in his body.
“Where are you living? What are you doing?”
“Well, I gave up my penthouse,” Bill joked. “Traded it in for a cot in the shelter.”
“Still writing?”
“Not so much,” he replied. “Doing a lot more talking these days. To kids mainly. Runaways. Addicts. Hopeless cases. Aspiring writers. Thinkers. You know, like me. Small bites. One day at a time. One person at a time.”
“One at time,” CeCe repeated thoughtfully.
“I feel like I’m finally earning my keep. Making up for wasted time.”
“They’d be wise to listen. About how to be real. To be true. Like I did.”
The compliment brought a humble smile to Bill’s face.
“On the contrary, Lady.”
Cecilia didn’t know what to say. It was all too much. Being on stage, seeing Bill again. Like old times, only it wasn’t. Not in the least. Those days of looking up at the stars and wondering what they’d turn out to be were over. The innocent fantasies, dreaming, delusions of grandeur. Over.
The man took a long, deep, crackling breath.
“I’m so sorry, CeCe,” he confessed, shaking. “It was the addiction. I had no idea Ricky meant to hurt—”
She cut him off, reaching for his hand. “All’s well that end’s well, right?”
As she took her hand from his, she noticed the blood from her palm had been transferred to his. She reached back to wipe it.
“Oh, Bill, I don’t want to stain your suit.”
“Not stained,” he said, wiping his hand across his breast pocket. “Cleansed.”
Cecilia held both her palms up to him, displaying the seeping wounds.
“It’s so scary,” she admitted, breaking down. “I’m just oozing out drop by drop.”
He held her under the smog and stars on the abandoned Brooklyn Street.
“You mean something,” he said. “That’s what’s scary.”
Cecilia held him back. Tight.
> “Whatever is happening to you means something,” he said. “It’s what we all want. Need.”
His words connected with her. Right down to her soul.
“It definitely means something to me,” she said.
“Can you ever forgive me?” he asked.
“Ego te absolvo,” Cecilia said, raising her hand up over her head in a gesture of mock absolution, “you genius son of a bitch.”
“I believe in you, Lady of Sorrow,” he whispered in her ear. “Sing your song for the lonely girls, so everyone can hear it. Until you can’t sing no more. And then, keep singing.”
Cecilia felt a sharp pain in her hands, followed by a sharp pain in her head. She fell backward, almost losing consciousness. Cold-cocked. As she looked up, dizzy and finding it hard to focus, she saw Bill struggling to catch his breath. A black-sleeved arm tightening a chokehold around his slender throat. The assailant was big, ski-masked. Typical mugger dirt bag on the prowl for a well-to-do older gentleman and his young girlfriend, she figured. Give him what he wants and he’ll go away.
“Where is it?” the attacker asked, addressing not Bill, but her.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she responded groggily, struggling to get to her feet.
“Tell me now, or he’s a dead man.”
Bill’s eyes were bulging and his face turning as white as his hair, but he hadn’t lost his fight.
“Fuck you,” Bill growled, biting at the forearm that immobilized him, to little effect. “Don’t tell him shit, CeCe.”
Cecilia watched him struggle, unable to help him, the street lamp above throwing a fuzzy halo over his head.
“Last chance. Where is it?”
“Where is what?” she screamed.
The assassin frowned sympathetically, as if she’d taken too much time to guess the final Jeopardy question.
“Aaaaaaaaaa,” he wailed, crudely imitating a buzzer. “Time’s up.”
“Bill! No!” As her anguished screech faded off into the dark night, a single thrust of a sharp blade through flesh and bone broke the silence. Bill crumpled and fell toward her, blood pouring out of his mouth and down the front of his starched white shirt. Her instinct was to chase the murderous bastard, but she knew she needed to stay. In the moment it took to get to Bill’s side, the vicious beast who’d done it was already gone.