Thirteen Confessions

by David Corbett

That went on until Rhonda’s grand jury appearance, after which she told Mike she’d dime him out herself if he didn’t stop, she didn’t care who got hurt. And Mike obliged her—until Christmas Eve.

  He missed it, that nervy heat when he slipped in, pointing the gun. The fear. The begging.

  As soon as he left the house for Paradise Valley, Rhonda picked up the phone, dialed Cavanaugh, told him she was leaving for good, she’d had it. He told her to wait, he’d be right over. They meant to be gone by the time Mike got back but—here again I’m not sure what to believe—he surprised them, slipping into the house unnoticed. It was self-defense, if you looked at it right, though Cavanaugh knew better than to take that to trial.

  But all of that was yet in the telling as I stood there in the bedroom doorway. The dog ignored me for once, still whimpering, its ears pricked up. It was Rhonda who stared right at me.

  “You’re the one whose wife walked out,” she said finally. She left the rest hanging, but her voice was accusing. She wouldn’t be gloated over, not by the likes of me.

  I don’t know how to explain it. Despite her contempt, despite everything, I felt for her. And I could afford to be gracious, not because I was different or better or even because it was Christmas. I remembered my daughter’s words, whispered in my ear: Don’t be sad, okay? I had a piece of something back I’d thought was lost for good.

  “My wife had good reason to leave,” I said, thinking: Why lie?

  But Rhonda just turned away. With a soft, miserable laugh, she said, “Like that’s all it takes.”

  Babylon Sister

  Swaying a bit atop her stool as she nursed a fourth whiskey, Sister Rita Donovan gazed across the packed hotel bar, admiring furtively (so she hoped) the British thriller novelist Jon Carleton: raffish, handsome, bespectacled, tall. He stood in a crush of fans beyond the leather banquettes and dark oak tables, framed deftly between two vintage Tiffany lamps, pumping hands in grip-and-grins amid camera flash—ever the professional, she thought, marveling at his shrewd and tireless charm.

  They’d spoken earlier, idle hallway chatter. She’d felt a bit like a schoolgirl, fixed in his gaze. Now, from some warm but shadowy place within her, a wistful sigh gathered, a little heated ball of air pushing upward like a mood balloon.

  Oh, what a wickedly delicious confession I’d gladly make, an irksome but familiar voice within her said. If, if, if …

  Shush, she thought, fearing for a moment she’d said it out loud.

  It was Mayhem by the Bay, a San Francisco conclave of mystery enthusiasts—writers, publishers, booksellers, fans—and six o’clock, the hour when everyone thronged the bar.

  People had come from as far away as Copenhagen and Perth to attend, and many were whip smart, with an almost encyclopedic capacity for rattling off titles and authors, even quoting whole passages from their absolute-favorite-you-must-read-this book.

  Rita had found the conversation daunting at times; it seemed she’d spent much of the day with the same gnomish smile plastered across her face, nodding along.

  There were a number of bookish stay-at-homes in attendance as well, of course, out for their one lark of the year—painfully shy, physically unmemorable, hovering in the background until a sudden boldness surged within, at which point they’d emerge from their anonymity, corner someone not too intimidating—Rita, for example—and latch on like barnacles.

  Speaking of which, the voice said, let’s not neglect our two blatteroons.

  Rita returned her misty gaze to the near-at-hand. A pair of Franciscan sisters were talking to her—about her, at her—mystery buffs, both of waddling girth and jackhammer mind, one sipping ginger ale, the other knocking back a lager.

  Leave it to you, Rita thought, to get trapped by a pair you could just as easily have met on retreat. Though well-meaning, they prattled on with such breakneck oblivion she wished they would just buzz off.

  “But then again, some do say your book is derivative of the Father Brown stories.” This from the graying one with her ginger ale—corkscrew curls, tiny eyes in an ample face. “And Father Dowling.”

  “Oh crap,” the other barked. She was a stout Celtic broad—backbone of the faith—cropped red hair, blotchy freckles. “Father Dowling, Father Brown, they’re apples and orangutans.” She threw back some beer, a belch slipped out. “Ralph McInerny, bless his soul, was a saint. Chesterton? A smug, sanctimonious anti-Semite. With a spanking fetish.”

  “That’s been blown out of all proportion,” the first one said.

  “Oh, yes, those touchy conniving Jews.”

  “I meant …” a sigh, deep from the belly, “the other thing. And that was C.S. Lewis, not Chesterton.”

  “Right. Spanker of Narnia.”

  “Getting back to Rita.” The first one pointed, using her glass, as though there might be some question as to who “Rita” was. “I meant merely that, here and there, of whatever consequence, certain people at the conference have suggested that Sister Killian—you know, Rita’s heroine—reminds them somewhat of Father Dowling’s Sister Steve.”

  The redhead cocked an eyebrow. “You’re talking the TV series, not the books. McInerny had zip to do with her.”

  “I realize—”

  “And the TV series was crap.”

  “Sister, that word—”

  “Crap in a basket.”

  “I was simply trying to say that there are those who think Rita here—”

  “For God’s sake, stop picking on her.” Another belch, this one a ripper. “She won.”

  Ah yes, Rita reminded herself: I won. Her Mistress of Mayhem award for Best First Novel rested atop the bar for all to see. All of whom, she thought tartly, casting a glance about. No one but the two Franciscans paid her any mind. Meanwhile, the statuette sat there like a totem of bad taste.

  Ghastly little eyesore. Looks like the shrunken head of a Cubist.

  “I’m not trying to quarrel, sister, I’m merely—”

  “Give the little thing some credit.”

  Rita eyed them through the sensual gloom of her buzz, the gray blinky one clutching her ginger ale, the other gathering a fistful of pretzels from a dish on the bar.

  Sister Rotunda. Sister Mary Porcine.

  Don’t be uncharitable, she thought, addressing the voice, or rather the darkness from which it emerged.

  It had first come to her at age eighteen, just once, a dramatic moment in her life. She found herself in a room at the Homewood Motel with three snoring boys she did not remember meeting. The room stank of liquor, and she was naked.

  On that occasion, the voice said simply, Get dressed and go home.

  The next day, it wasn’t just guilt that paralyzed her, but fear. How could she ask forgiveness or do penance for a sin she couldn’t remember? What would it mean to live a whole life like that?

  After a long and unflinching examination of conscience (since her memory was unavailing) she went to her mother two days later and announced her belief that she had a vocation, and wanted to enter an order known as the Handmaidens of the Word Incarnate.

  Anne Marie Donovan responded by clasping her youngest daughter’s hands and saying through tears that she’d just been made the happiest mother alive.

  The woman was the family rock, a widow at thirty-three when her husband caught a patch of black ice on the Illinois side of the Julien Dubuque Bridge. She raised her three girls, Rita and her two older sisters, alone thereafter, the one constant mainstay, her faith—morning Mass, nightly prayer, Friday novenas, altar society, rosary society, baking pies for bingo.

  Whenever a movie she considered suitably Catholic came on TV, she’d shepherd everyone into the den, plying all three sisters with popcorn and Seven-Up floats, the four of them cocooned together beneath blankets on the sofa, dappled by the flickering light from the screen: Brother Orchid, The Sound of Music, Going My Way, Qu
o Vadis, even Hitchcock’s I Confess.

  Sometimes, Rita blamed her annoyingly persistent sexual longings on her girlhood fascination with Heaven Knows, Mister Allison—if she were half as fetching a nun as Deborah Kerr, she thought, would it justify her lifelong crush on Robert Mitchum?

  Her mother attended every ceremony as Rita climbed the spiritual ladder from postulate to novice to perpetual vows, always beaming with gratitude and hope.

  Then, after all that devotion and faithful sacrifice, she fell sick at age fifty-two to advanced anaplastic thyroid cancer. By the time she was diagnosed, tumors had already spread to her throat and lungs. First order of business, a tracheostomy. For the few months remaining to her, she would breathe through a plastic tube.

  As often as she could, Rita traveled back to Dubuque to help her sisters care for the woman who defined their notion of sainthood, each visit more heartbreaking than the last. Near the end, a ghost of her former self, she turned demented from the chemo and morphine—paranoid, wandering the hospital corridors in terror of every nightfall, confusing daughters and nurses, days and years—what next? Death. A relief. For everyone.

  Well, not quite everyone. A woman from the parish, Mrs. Mastronardi, pronounced during one of her cloying vigils how glorious it was that God would crown their mother’s life with suffering, just as he did with his own son and his most cherished saints—Francis of Assisi and Catherine de Ricci with the stigmata, for example.

  It took every ounce of strength Rita possessed not to slap the old bat right there in the oncology ward.

  That was when the voice returned. It said: Take comfort in a dying woman’s misery, will you? Here, let me take some comfort in yours.

  The voice began speaking to her regularly after that. It sounded different than it had that first time, almost twenty years before. It bore no resemblance to her dead mother’s voice, either, so she didn’t feel particularly haunted. Badgered, more like it.

  Guardian angel? Hardly. Conscience? Please. To her ear it sometimes sounded like Tracey Ullman impersonating Maggie Smith stoked on gin.

  Meanwhile, bit by bit, a light went out in her soul. She’d tried everything to rekindle it—vigorous prayer, intensified devotions, renewed obedience to her superiors. Someday, she hoped, substance would follow form. But the hope was dwindling.

  And now?

  She slid off the cushion of the towering stool and gathered her balance, tottering momentarily in her sensible shoes.

  “Excuse me, sisters,” she murmured, only the hint of a slur, despite the tricky sibilants. “It’s been a very, very long afternoon.”

  The two plump nuns shot acid glances back and forth. Rita collected her statuette, lifting it from the bar with difficulty, its ugliness equaled by its heft. In her small hands, the thing brought to mind a murder weapon.

  Tragedy struck this weekend when two garrulous Franciscan fatsos …

  Rita offered a smiling farewell nod, then shambled tipsily through the bustling lounge, feeling the damning stares of her fellow sisters scalding her back like wagging tongues of fire.

  As she neared the group surrounding Jon Carleton, she caught her distant reflection in a lobby mirror: charcoal calf-length skirt, simple white blouse with Peter Pan collar, blue cardigan sweater. Only the cross around her neck, hanging by its thin gold chain, marked her as a nun. Sandy shoulder-length hair, bangs across the brow. Sad eyes in a longish face with a longish nose, paprika freckles, thin lips.

  Pretty in a drab way, she thought, or drab in a pretty way—that’s me.

  You want to flirt with him you filthy little minx.

  As though he’d somehow managed to overhear her thoughts, the British author glanced up suddenly and offered a welcoming smile. Following the direction of his gaze, his circle of fans turned in sympathetic unison.

  Suddenly, all eyes were on Rita. She felt naked, gripping her homely little bronze, and wobbling just a tad.

  Christ in socks, you’re lit to the gills.

  “Congratulations!” Jon Carleton reached out a hand past several people, offering it to her. She shifted her trophy to her left arm, clutching it to her body, in order to extend her right. His grip, engulfing and warm, melted her.

  He said, “You must be terribly chuffed.”

  She smiled, hoping the word meant proud, not blotto.

  Instantly, the crowd around him echoed his graciousness, showering Rita with praise of such cheerful and generous exuberance she felt ashamed at having thought unkindly of the stammering bookish ones earlier. Why do I judge people so harshly, she wondered, shaking their smooth soft hands. What makes me so petty and ungracious?

  You’re unhappy. And, where it matters most, insincere.

  No, she thought, standing up for herself. Well, unhappy, granted, but this has nothing to do with questioning my vocation, loss of faith, any of that. I’ve got every reason to be disappointed today.

  Earlier that afternoon, while Rita was still flush from the thrill of having won her award, her editor, Jean Virdell—a canny New Yorker of brisk disposition, bright red lipstick, and the attention span of a cat—had invited her to the bar for the first of the day’s cocktails.

  A celebration, Rita supposed, not knowing then where the discussion would lead. She ordered champagne, thinking it wise to pace herself, only switching to whiskey later.

  “Sales weren’t as brisk as we would have liked,” the editor remarked, addressing a spot two inches to the left of Rita’s head. “And, unfortunately, in today’s market, a slow start never turns into a gradual build. You end up where you begin and, regrettably, our beginning was … uneventful.”

  “But the prize.” Rita was stunned. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  The woman smiled as though that were the most pitiable thing she’d heard in years. A heartfelt sigh, deftly executed. “I’m sure you’re very proud.”

  “There must be some way you could publicize—”

  “We gave you everything in the way of publicity we give any start-up author.” Her tone turned scolding. She gestured for the check. “Don’t take it personally, sister.”

  But it’s not just about me, Rita thought. There are so many other people affected by this, relying on me. I need these silly little books to sell for the sake of my convent, the older sisters who need medical care, the work we do.

  “But the second novel’s just about to come out. Are you saying—”

  “We’ve trimmed the marketing budget a bit.” She handed the waitress a pair of bills, shooed her away, then clicked her small purse shut. “You’ll still tour locally, here in the Bay Area. And anything you can pay for yourself, of course, you’re free to do.”

  Pay for myself, she thought. I’m a nun. Perpetual chastity, perfect obedience. Voluntary poverty. “I don’t know what to say … “

  The editor’s attention, however, had already focused elsewhere. She fluttered her hand to a distant someone. Her eyes shone. “Some things can’t be helped,” she said, getting up to leave.

  The surge of congratulation from Jon Carleton’s fans finally ebbed and Rita thanked everyone again, acknowledging the handsome Brit’s courtliness with particular warmth.

  Taking her leave, she drifted across the lobby until she reached the elevators, where she waited alone as a Haydn horn concerto burbled from an overhead speaker.

  The heavy brass doors slid open and she entered, pushing the button for her floor. A wave of leaden fatigue swept through her, tinged with dejection.

  The shiny doors were nearly closed when a male hand reached through, jamming itself into the breach. The doors trembled, a rattling metal thud.

  “Mind terribly if I share your lift?”

  No sooner did the doors close than he turned to her with that knee-wobbling je ne sais quoi.

  “An impressive debut,” he said, nodding toward the homely statuette. “And
now you have the hardware to prove it.”

  Rita could feel the blood warming her cheeks. It was just the two of them. There. Together. She wondered if he could smell the alcohol on her breath, oozing out her pores.

  Get a grip. He’s a Brit, not a beagle.

  The overhead panel chimed, the doors slid open. They’d reached her floor.

  Stepping aside to hold the door, he said, “By the way, my dinner plans appear to have gone tits up, if you’ll excuse the vernacular.” A puckish smile. “Figure I’ll just bang up to the old home-away-from-home, switch on the telly, ring down for room service. Simple enough to order for two, if you’d care to join me.” His eyes met hers. “I’d be so terribly honored if you would.”

  Six hours later, not long before midnight, they spoke from opposite sides of the locked bathroom door. Rita stood within, the tile floor cold against her stocking feet. She took heart from the fact that otherwise she’d managed to remain fully clothed.

  Jon Carleton uttered a lowing sigh. “I really do wish you’d come out. I feel badly as it is, and this is hardly improving my spirits.”

  “I’m sorry.” Rita meant the phrase in every conceivable way. Pressing her cheek against the smooth white door, she added, “It isn’t you, it’s me.”

  “There is such a thing, you know, as innocent human touch.”

  Not with me, Rita thought. Not with you, I mean. And me. “I realize—”

  “Seriously, I’m feeling a right cad at the moment. Couldn’t we manage this face to face?”

  Face to face is exactly how you couldn’t manage it.

  “Oh leave me alone.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Not you. I mean, give me a moment. Please.”

  The evening had proceeded swimmingly up until eleven or so. When he first let her in, she discovered to her profound relief that he had a suite, the bedroom discreetly invisible beyond a closed door.

  Quite an improvement over the Homewood, eh?

  The sitting room, furnished with staid elegance, looked out upon Union Square, lit up for the early evening crowds. It being early January, post-Christmas sales still drew the bargain hunters. A cold drizzle soaked the storefront lights. Trolleys clamored damply up and down Powell.