Mary
They say I’m not mad, at least not in the worst way one can be mad, but surely they’ve gotten it wrong. Only a fit of madness could explain what I’ve just done. Without a moment’s thought, I have dragged the worst of my sins out into the light, thrown back the curtain on the woman I have struggled long and hard to bury. And for what? For penance? Sweet bleeding Jesus, as if living through it all has not been penance enough.
Confession, they say, is good for the soul, but that’s just a load of manure shoveled by those who want to know your secrets. I should know. I’ve been confessing for years. Not to the priests or the nuns, or even to God. I gave up blathering to them long ago, when I finally realized no one was listening. No, I don’t believe in God. It’s best not to for people like me. It wouldn’t do, you see, to lay what I am at the feet of a benevolent God. Better, I think, to count myself, and those like me, as unfortunate accidents of nature, the splicing of cells gone terribly awry.
Instead, I’ve done my confessing to the White Coats, who all claim they will heal me, if I will only tell them again what happened that terrible night. And so I tell them. And then I tell them again, though all this confessing has done nothing whatever for my soul. It is only the sea that understands, the sea that shares my secret, the sea that truly knows what set all the horrors in motion.
And now someone else knows. Or at least knows part of it.
If only I had stopped with the pills. Plenty of people take pills. Plenty of perfectly sane, perfectly safe people take pills. But then I had to bring the boy into it. Poor, dear thing; there was no missing the revulsion on her pretty face in that instant when I blurted out the truth. Oh, she hid it well enough, because it’s in her to be kind, but there’s no sense in trying to fool myself. I’ve been on the receiving end of that look too many times not to recognize it when it’s staring me in the face—like I’m something to be scraped off a shoe.
She was polite to the end, of course, offering to take me home, but that will be the end of it. The morning tea will stop, and she’ll begin taking the long way round the dunes when she sets out on her morning walks. Who can blame her, really? No one wants to take tea with a crazy woman, and certainly not one with the blood of a young boy on her hands.