I never thought I’d see the day Kane went to church.
It’s eleven o’clock on Tuesday. We should be in school, but most of the roads are closed, choked by snow. We haven’t gotten the two feet the weather report called for, but we got enough to cancel school and my regular morning appointment with Juliet. She called, wondering if I wanted to Skype, but I told her there was really nothing new to talk about, and I could wait another week. She agreed. She probably thought she was in the clear, since she’d gotten me through February 14 in one piece.
After Kane and I finished shoveling out the cul-de-sac, I threw my Jeep into four-wheel drive and we hit the road.
We’re chugging along, slowly making our way through the snow, when he gets the call. It’s his dad. He talks to him for a few minutes, saying uh-huh a thousand times, in monotone, and then hangs up.
“It’s a boy,” he says, his tone flat. “They named him Cooper.”
“Congrats,” I say, though I can tell he isn’t in a celebratory mood.
“Cooper the Pooper.”
“Nice. You’ll be a great big brother.”
I intend to be sarcastic, but actually, Kane might be. He doesn’t like much, but the few things he decides to love? He throws his whole self into them, and his loyalty is boundless. I could see him taking the kid under his wing.
He doesn’t say anything in return. It isn’t until we’re almost at the church that he finally speaks.
“I don’t know what you’re expecting to find here,” he says to me as I pull into the parking lot. Predictably, it’s empty, although a plow’s come through.
I park in the first open space after the handicap spaces and shrug. “Maybe Father Brady will tell me more than you’re telling me.”
He looks up at the white building, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Kane look quite so out of sorts. “What do you want me to tell you?”
Oh, now that we’re in front of a church, he’s going to come clean? “Bzzz. Too late.” I put my hand on the door handle. “I’ve asked you a dozen times to help me figure out what happened before his death, and you haven’t.”
He leans back in the passenger seat. “Okay, I’ll tell you. I mean, it was nothing earth-shattering. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I—”
“I thought you’d said we…” Had sex. Why can’t I bring myself to say it? “You know. That wasn’t earth-shattering?”
He sighs. “Do you remember Christmas that year?”
I nod. Our last Christmas, our only Christmas as boyfriend and girlfriend, and I couldn’t even celebrate it with Declan. Mr. Weeks had taken the family on some skiing trip, and Declan had texted me about a million times, completely miserable, since he didn’t do snow. But before he left, he’d given me a necklace with a tiny diamond in the center of a heart. “Diamonds are forever, and so are we,” he’d said solemnly. Then he’d laughed as he put it around my neck. “I read that in a jewelry ad.”
The memory pulls tears from my eyes. How did I repay him for that kindness? By cheating on him? It all seemed so cruel of me. I squeeze back the tears. “I do. I even remember the New Year’s party. At least the first part of it. We were at your house, right?”
“Yeah. And we all got a little smashed that night, so I can’t help you with that,” he says. “But after Christmas break, we—”
“Wait. Wait. Wait.” I reach into my bag and pull out a little notebook. In it, I’d made a calendar. I’d been filling it in with events as they happened. Memories. “Okay. After break. Go on.”
“We got back in January. So, January 2?” He leans back and put his snow boots up on the dashboard. They’re covered in salt and sand, but my Jeep is beyond help, so I don’t worry. I write: Jan 2. “You remember that? We all came back to school, and you were worried that Declan was acting weird.”
“I was?”
He nods. “You wouldn’t tell me what the deal was.”
I rack my brain. Had Declan ever acted weird? Well, he normally acted weird, but in a delightful way. Nothing that ever worried me. I shake my head helplessly.
“That week you suggested we go to the movies. So we did. All six of us. Remember that?”
None of this rings a bell. “What did we see?”
“That stupid horror movie. The one about the teens who get stranded in the house on the mountain, and then all of them start to die?” He takes in my blank expression and says, “It’s no wonder you don’t remember. It was pretty forgettable.”
Yeah, but not only do I not remember the movie, I don’t remember the entire outing. I scratch my head. On the calendar, it looks like that day would have been January sixth. Five weeks before Declan died. This is good. I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere. I write Movies with the 6 in the box for that date.
“And everything was good that night?”
He nods. “Wait…no. I think you and Luisa got into it that night?” A cold gust rattles my Jeep, and icy air infiltrates the tattered soft top. He pulls his fleece jacket closed and blows into his hands. “It was more than a year ago. I can’t remember everything.”
I make a note of that. We fought. Luisa was all sweet sunshine, but when she got pissed, it could get ugly. “I wonder what we fought about.”
He looks at me like it’s obvious. “Me.”
“What?”
“Well, Declan didn’t know about you and me. But Luisa always suspected something.”
I stare at him, openmouthed. Then I reach forward and smack him upside the head. It doesn’t faze him. “If Luisa suspected something, what was to stop her from telling Declan?”
He thinks for a moment. “She wouldn’t.”
“And why not?”
“Because I’d get pissed at her. And you know she loves the shit out of me.”
“Oh my God.” That’s his reasoning? I stare at him as if he’s an alien being. If Luisa told Declan about us… I shiver. I can’t even think about it. “You are so fricking full of yourself, it’s ridiculous. Come on. You need this place.”
I pocket my notebook and push open my door. St. Andrew’s is on a hill, so the wind always whips right across the parking lot, freezing poor worshippers before they can make it through the doors. “What?” He lingers in the Jeep, but finally gives up and follows me.
“You need church, if only to remind yourself that you’re not the bright center of the universe,” I mutter.
He follows after me like a recalcitrant child, arms crossed over his ski jacket. We go inside, and when we’re in the atrium and I’m uncoiling my scarf from my neck, it hits me. I’ve been going to this church sporadically since I was a baby, but I’ve never actually carried on a conversation with Father Brady. Or, really, any religious type. Declan went on and on about him so much, making him seem like a regular guy, but he’s not. He’s a priest.
He might be able to see through me.
Still, I need to do this.
Pulling my coat around myself as if that will better insulate me from his divine power of sight, I walk down the empty hall toward the church office. There’s a light on, and I can hear typing. Real, honest-to-goodness typewriter typing, complete with the bell and zing of the carriage return, slow though it might be. Kane lags behind me, looking up at the pictures on the wall: our bishop, our cardinal, the pope. Kane looks like he’s never seen any of them before. I’ve never actually seen him out of place somewhere, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.
He pauses before we reach the door. “You know,” he says, pointing away from the office. “I’ll wait out here.”
I start to argue, but decide I don’t need him. “Fine.”
I creep to the door, and the second I peek in, someone shouts, “Shit!”
Father Brady rips a page from the typewriter, crumples it into a ball, and tosses it. It bounces off my head and lands at my feet.
He sees me and covers his face with his hands. “Oh dear.”
There’s a trash can behind me. I bend over, grab the discarded paper, and drop it in. “Um, Father Brady?”
He nods. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone was here. My secretary called in sick. Flu. So I’m trying to type out these marriage certificates.”
“Oh.”
“Do you know how to use one of these?” he asks, feeding a paper into the typewriter. He slumps down in the chair. “Of course you don’t. You probably don’t even know what a fax machine is.”
I shake my head.
Father Brady would’ve been attractive in his youth. He’s probably about forty, with a stomach pooch and a bit of a bald spot. He motions me to sit in the old upholstered chair across from him and stares determinedly at the typewriter. When I perch on the edge of the seat, he says, “And what can I help you with, Miss…”
“Ward,” I say. “Hailey Ward.”
His eyes snap up, and he regards me again through his bifocals, fingers hovering over the keyboard. “Declan’s Hailey?”
I nod, pulling the jacket tighter across my body.
He takes his hands off the keyboard. Removes his glasses and a handkerchief from his pocket, and starts to polish the lenses. Without them, he looks oddly young, like a different person. “I was wondering when you were going to come see me. How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “I mean, it’s been a year. So I don’t need your help. I mean, spiritually. I’m good.”
Oh gosh. I’m babbling.
He seems surprised. “I think we could all use God’s help, whether or not we think we do.”
I nod along. Probably. “What I mean is, there are some things that still puzzle me about his death, and I was wondering if he’d said anything to you that could help shed some light on it. Since you two spoke often.”
He nods and pushes his glasses onto his nose. “I have to admit, when I heard the news, I thought it was a mistake. Did you think the same?”
I nod. “Yes. That’s why I thought that maybe you had some idea what was troubling him.”
He shakes his head. “Not a clue. Nothing that seemed to be troubling him enough to do what he did. He had guilt over his father, of course.”
“Over his father?”
“Yes. He felt responsible for his death.”
I rack my brain, trying to remember if he ever told me that. No. He’d said he talked to his father. But he’d never said he felt guilty about his death. His father had died in a car accident, on the way home from work. How could he have felt responsible? “He did?”
“Oh yes. That was a major theme of our talks. He was big on guilt. Beat himself up over fear of doing the wrong thing.”
Looking back, Declan never seemed to do the wrong thing. I thought he’d always done right effortlessly.
Father Brady lets out a heavy sigh. “Other than that, he had the same troubles as any boy his age. School. Future. Girls.”
Girls. Me? He had trouble with me? Oh. The whole sex-before-marriage thing. I’m not going to touch that topic with a ten-foot pole with Father Brady. I stand. “All right. Well, thank you.”
“Of course,” he says as I put the scarf around my neck. “Declan didn’t come to see me at all in the time before he died.”
I stop winding my scarf on my neck and stare at him. “What do you mean?”
“He used to come and see me every Tuesday evening, like clockwork,” he says, making me think of my own Tuesday appointments with Juliet. “He knew I had a penchant for Big Macs, so he’d always bring me one, and we’d sit and have dinner together and talk about life, maybe play a little chess.”
Okay, so that was nothing like my appointments with Juliet. I didn’t even know Declan knew how to play chess. “And you say he stopped coming?”
He nods. “The last time I saw him was before Christmas. He didn’t show up after that. He even stopped showing up at Sunday masses, though his mother did. When I asked, his mother said that he was fine, that he’d bitten off more than he could chew and was busy with school. The year before college is a busy year, so I didn’t think anything of it.”
I stare at him, mouth agog. Declan had stopped going to church? I didn’t think anything short of a natural disaster or death would keep him from church. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Father Brady pushes his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, refocusing his eyes on the paper in front of him as I head for the door. Before I can escape, he says, “Your family doesn’t come to church anymore. But you used to go with Declan. Did you lose your faith when he died?”
Talk about guilt. I feel it seeping in. “No,” I say. I could say more, but I don’t.
Instead I leave. Because he wouldn’t like the rest: I never really had any faith. I wanted it. I thought Declan could give it to me. I’d wanted to be more like him. And yet…that never happened.
He stopped going to church.
He lost his faith.
Something made him lose his faith.
Something, or someone.
I hold my chest as I walk through the empty hallway, the figures in the stations of the cross staring down at me. I feel like my heart might beat out of my chest.
I find Kane inside the sanctuary, sitting in a pew in the back, looking up at the altar. I nudge him over and sit beside him. “Did you learn anything?”
“Father Brady says he hadn’t seen him since Christmas,” I whisper, as if the statues surrounding us are listening. “He didn’t go to church before his death. For, like, six weeks.”
Kane looks down at his lap, and it almost looks like he’s praying. “Strange.”
“I don’t think he’d ever be so busy as to miss church. But I found out why he felt guilty,” I say. “His dad. He felt responsible for his death.”
Kane nods, unsurprised.
“You knew that?”
“Yeah. His dad was coming home from work, but Declan called to tell him he needed to get picked up from his friend’s. His dad reached for the phone while he was driving and lost control of the car.”
He never told me that. As close as we were, Declan never told me that. And it wasn’t anything he couldn’t tell me. I thought I was the closest person to him. It was hard to imagine any two people being closer than him and me.
Until now.
“Oh. He never told me.”
“Well, it’s not something you bring up in casual conversation.”
Casual conversation. Our conversations had long since stopped being casual. In fact, all we did was have deep, meaningful heart-to-hearts. We’d spent so many quiet nights together, telling each other our stories, that when the week before Christmas came around and we went out to Friday’s for dinner, we’d sat together staring at our phones, barely talking. I’d been quiet because I couldn’t think of anything to say, since there was nothing about me he didn’t know. I’d already poured my soul out to him, so there wasn’t a single side of me that he hadn’t seen. But Declan?
He’d had things to tell me. He just chose not to.
The thought makes my heart ache. I stand, without a word, and go outside. Kane follows a few minutes later, after I’ve already twisted the key in the ignition. “See,” he says, opening the door to the passenger side. “Told you that you’d take this too hard.”
“I’m not taking anything hard,” I snarl, reaching into my bag and pulling out the notebook. I scan the calendar and say, “What happened on January 7?”
He lets out a laugh. “Well, that was the day I was wearing the red Aeropostale shirt.” When I scowl at him, he throws up his hands. “How should I know, Hail? It was a long time ago!”
“It was the day after the movies,” I prompt. “Sunday.”
He thinks, then hitches a shoulder. “I don’t know. Let me think on it. I’ll file a full report in the morning, officer.”
I ignore the attempt at humor. “When did we have sex? That day?”
He shakes his head. “No. That was later. I don’t know the date.”
I throw the notebook into the center console and shift out of Park. “Well, think. Please.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m serious.” The sun is so bright against the snow that I wish I had my sunglasses. I look over at him and see starbursts. I’m getting a headache. “You will, right?”
He mumbles, “Yeah. Sure.”
I don’t know if he really means it. I can tell he’s getting annoyed with me, but I don’t care. I pull out onto the main road and gun it through the slush. My Jeep starts to rattle and whoosh with the wind so I have to yell, “What are you moping about now?”
“I’m pissed that you have absolutely no recollection of our mind-blowing time together, so yeah, I’m moping,” he yells back.
I give him an annoyed look. “You know what I’ve been thinking?”
“About how much you want a repeat performance?”
I cringe. “Can you stop being a total horndog and focus? I was thinking about the shed.”
He lets out a sigh. “Right. Of course. Why think of your living boyfriend when you can think of your dead one?”
“Stop. I’m not your girlfriend. What—”
“Because you don’t want to be.”
I huff. “Let’s not talk about that now. Listen. Do you think we can go by the police station? I want to talk to Nina’s dad.”
Without waiting for an answer, I start heading there. It’s around the corner from the church, so it would be a wasted opportunity not to.
“What do you expect he’ll tell you?”
“Declan hated going into that shed when he had to mow the lawn. He used to tell me that the chemicals made his eyes water. He avoided it at all costs.”
“Yeah, well, apparently he didn’t avoid it that day,” Kane says, looking out the window. He starts to play with the frayed edge of the soft top.
I’m so deep in thought that I don’t come out of it until I find myself sliding on a patch of ice from driving too fast. Overcorrecting, I look at Kane, and he’s bracing himself, holding the door handle. “Chill. I’ve got it.”
He loosens his grip. “You know what? Drive us off the road. Kill us. Since you only seem to think about the dead.”
“Sorry.” I slow down, though I’m dying to get to the police station. I lower my voice from a yell. “And the gun? What about that? Your dad kept his guns under lock and key, didn’t he?”
He nods. “Uh-huh. Key was in my father’s bedroom, in the top drawer of his dresser.”
“Declan didn’t care about guns. Did he even know that?”
Kane shrugs. “Guess so.”
I don’t buy it. Declan was anti-gun, I’m sure. We pull into the parking lot of the police station, between two police cruisers, and the whole time, I’m seeing more cracks pop up in this story by the second. Why had I never questioned this? When I cut the engine, Kane’s looking at me helplessly, his hands in his lap. “What?” I ask.
“I don’t know what you’re hoping to find. What can Officer Paradis actually tell us that we don’t already know?”
“We’re missing something. He might have some information from the scene.”
Kane closes his eyes and inhales, long and purposefully. “Really? You’re forgetting, Hail. I saw the scene,” he says, his voice hollow. He had, for a second, until his father had pulled him back, but I’m sure that second is permanently ingrained in his head, as much as he won’t speak of it. “You ever think how I might feel? Maybe I don’t want to relive it.”
With the car’s heat off, the cold quickly seeps in. I dig my hands into the pockets of my coat, sinking into my seat. “Well, whose idea was it to torch the shed afterward? Isn’t that odd? Do you—”
“My dad did that. It was easier that way. Easier than…going in there, I guess. He just wanted to wipe the place off the earth. And I agreed with him. We all did.”
“But he did it so soon. Maybe he was hiding something that—”
“Wait, hold up.” He turns to me in the passenger seat. I can feel his stare on me. “Do you realize what you’re saying? You’re implying that my dad had something to do with the death of his stepson. My. Dad. That’s bullshit, Hailey. He loved Declan like a son.”
“I know, I know.” It’s stupid. But my mind keeps spiraling, coming up with the weirdest ideas. Everything is on the table, and no one is safe from suspicion.
Not even Kane. Not even me.