I look to Dave Benz once more, with every intention of assuring him of my continued support in the coming hours and days and weeks, but I do not get the chance to do so. I find not his solemn face as I turn, but his broad, boiling profile. Angled toward the door and through its glass window at a rush of activity in the trauma ward beyond. My first reaction is fear. An awful gnawing that Luke’s condition has taken a sudden turn for the worse. But that half glimpse of his father’s face, temple veins bulging, erases that sudden worry and replaces it with another. Fury rages in him. And as I track his gaze I understand why.
A phalanx of doctors and nurses and uniformed officers surround a gurney just rushed into the treatment room directly opposite the door, two away from the nearly identical space where Luke is being tended. But here there is urgency and contrast. A harried precision among the medical staff closest to the unseen patient, and an adrenalin-fueled bravado seeming to leap from officer to officer, a pair of them exchanging a smile as they high-five each other. Between them I glimpse a sliver of the person on the gurney. Just a hand. Splotch of dirty red on it near the silvery handcuff that circles their wrist, the other end locked to the rolling bed’s shiny rail.
And then the view is blocked as the officers and caregivers shift position. I feel more than see Dave Benz draw a huge breath next to me. The kind not meant to calm, but rather to stoke some internal fire. He is a coiled animal just an instant from launching himself at the door when Captain Kerrigan comes around the corner, moving fast. Eyes locked on Dave as he opens the door, stands just inside, the rushed sounds of the commotion behind drifting past him.
“We got him,” he says to Dave, then leans a bit to connect with Celia. “We got the guy.”
She makes some gesture. A nod. A shudder. I am not sure. My attention shifts fast back to Dave as he steps toward Kerrigan. The Captain puts a hand flat upon his chest. A gentle signal to move no further. To put every primal instinct he has in check. For now.
“They’re moving Luke upstairs now,” Kerrigan says. “You need to take Celia and the boys up and be with him. Okay?”
Dave does not answer. His gaze is fixed past Kerrigan on the scrum surrounding the unseen assailant. To him something all too human, all too evil. An entity of flesh and malice that, this day, tried to take his youngest son away.
“Dave.” Kerrigan gently thumps his former colleague’s shoulder. “You hear me?”
Dave stays fixed on the unseen assailant. Responds with the barest nod. Maybe he has checked his fury. Let it slither into some dark place carved out deep within where it can brood. Where it can dream of what cold satisfaction might have come with release.
“Celia,” he says, and looks to her, his gaze sweeping past me without connection. Without recognition. As if I was already gone.
Behind me Luke’s wife rises, lifting Thomas with her, his sleeping head lolling until she pulls him close. Cradles him tightly. Dylan stands next to her and looks to his grandfather. Dave reaches down and opens a hand, the offering needing no words. No beckoning. His grandson simply slips his hand into the wide, weathered palm and the thick fingers wrap tenderly around it.
“Let’s go,” Dave says, and moves past Kerrigan, Dylan in tow, Celia a slow step behind with her youngest blissfully dead to all the dark reality that surrounds him. I watch the procession of family as Dave makes the turn just short of the treatment area, his gaze never seeming to angle its way, an imposed ignorance he has summoned from somewhere. He has chosen the needs of his family over his own want of vengeance. For now at least.
Kerrigan, too, watches the departure. His eyes locked on Dave until he is out of sight. Then he turns to me, an odd duality in his gaze. Duty and disgust. The same mix of contrasts clear in his words as he speaks.
“He isn’t going to make it.”
I absorb that, and understand what he is saying, and why it is hard for him to do this. My eyes drift off of him and to the treatment area. Five officers stand watch, their amped demeanor dialed down. The adrenalin draining away. Past them the urgency seems to have waned, just a single doctor and nurse now tending their restrained patient.
“It’s in the head,” Kerrigan explains. “They have a neuro on the way in, but…” For a moment he is silent. It might be that he hates having to say what he next must. Or it might be that he hates having to ask it of me knowing that I cannot, that I will not, refuse him. “He’s asking for a priest.”
I look back to Kerrigan and nod. He steps aside and I move past him. It is ten steps exactly to the treatment room. For some reason I count them, as if each carries me closer to some moment of great import. But this that I am about to do I have done many times before. The act itself is known in my faith as the ‘anointing of the sick’. Among those who hold to older ways it is possible to find some who still refer to it as ‘extreme unction’.
To the world at large, and to many of my own faith, it is known by a more common name.
Chapter Three
Last Rites
“Excuse me,” I say as I slip past the officers outside the treatment room. Their eyes fix on me, a hint of disdain in each stare. They know why I am here. What I am about to do. To whom I am about to give comfort. It might appear to them that I am siding with one who just hours before tried to take one of their brethren away. I understand their reaction as I move by and approach the gurney. I do not discount what they must feel seeing one who is supposed to serve and support those behind the badge seeming to shift allegiance.
But I cannot think of their distress at this moment. My calling brings me to another. I pause just short of the doctor and nurse between myself and the gurney and glance back past the officers to Kerrigan. I needn’t say anything to voice what I wish of him. He steps close to the four officers and puts a hand to one of their backs.
“Let’s give some space,” Kerrigan says. For a moment they stay fixed on me. They want me to know their disapproval. To feel it. I do, but I do not let it register. I turn away from them as they retreat a few yards. Just out of sight. Barely out of earshot.
“Doc,” I say, and a young woman turns toward me. The overnight shift is not what one of any seniority would choose, and her weary gaze echoes that reality with dark circles and slack jaw which add twenty years to her. “Any problem with me having a moment alone with him?”
She puzzles at me for a moment. Whatever hierarchy exists in this hospital, this ward, she is so low as to not only be slaving past the witching hour, she has also been relegated to tend to the least desirable patient to pass through its doors in recent times. Perhaps borne of these factors a rush of authority rises in her, and she seems more than ready to brush me off. Or possibly loose a choice invective my way. My collar is not here to identify me. To shield me. I could turn half way around and flash her the back side of my windbreaker so that she knows my presence here is warranted, even wanted, but in the end I do not need to. A weak voice from just beyond her paints the picture she is too worn to see on her own.
“Father…”
In an instant the doctor’s sudden severity drains away. Embarrassment flashes fast in her gaze, which shifts from me to the nurse working with her. “Step out for a minute.”
The nurse, an older woman too bright for the hour, gives me a cursory glance and moves past. The doctor follows, pausing at the open wall where treatment room ends and hallway begins. She grips a curtain drawn to the far side and slowly pulls it across, sequestering the space in flimsy privacy.
I turn toward the gurney and, for the first time, see in full the one who has summoned me. Each of his hands is cuffed to the bed rail, intravenous line snaking over a history of scabbed needle tracks on its way to a bag of saline hanging above. Shirt and pants have been cut away and lie in a heap on the floor in the corner. But for a pair of dirty briefs the man is naked, blood splatters on his bare chest approximating red islands scattered about a pale ocean.
Then I look to his head. A mound of bandages is wrapped over the left side, covering that eye and half of the forehead above. Dark stains seep through the gauzy material. What lies beneath I can imagine, though I try not to.
I make my way around the gurney, to the right side. He looks up at me with one wide, cyclopic eye as I near. His chest is rising and falling quickly with rapid breaths. Each seeming more shallow than the one before. His life ticking away like a clock winding down.
When I reach a spot nearest him his right hand struggles up, tugging weakly at the cuff restraining him, fingers splayed open, reaching. Toward me. I ease my hand into his and it closes limply around mine.
“Father…”
“I’m Father Jerome. What’s your name?”
That one eye flares a bit and swirls in its orbit. As if the world about him is spinning away. His hand grips mine, just a bit tighter, but to him I imagine the connection is a lifeline. No less vital than the hold of a stranger keeping him from tumbling into some bottomless well. After a moment his gaze settles back upon me. A perfect terror in that one eye. It is the mark of knowing that whatever this life is to him, it is about to be no more.
“Eric,” he says, his voice hushed. Mostly breath. I lean close to listen. “My mother made me go to church—” He pauses, a rush of quickened breaths filling his lungs enough to continue. “—when I was a kid. It’s been a long time.”
“Are you coming to God now, Eric?” I ask, and he nods.
“I did a bad thing,” Eric tells me. “Terrible thing.”
“The officer is going to be all right,” I assure him, expecting this will give him comfort. Some relief in these final moments. But in his singular stare I see that he puzzles at my words.
“Absolution,” he says. “For what we did.”
It is I who am confused now, though I remind myself that the man lying before me is speaking from a place of fear. From the edge of an abyss. It is my calling, my purpose, to ease him toward the inevitable knowing that acceptance awaits him. “Are you sorry for what you did, Eric?”
“I never should have gone with him,” Eric tells me, some great realization crystallizing in his gaze right then. The mistake of a lifetime laid bare to himself. “Never should have helped him.”
Kerrigan mentioned nothing of an accomplice. He had, in fact, said directly to Celia that they got ‘the guy’. I wonder if I am being told here that another was involved in the events of this night. Though if I am there is nothing to be done with such knowledge. What is being revealed to me is being done so under the seal of confession. My vows forbid me to share any of what transpires in an exchange such as this, whether it is offered by a pious parishioner in the hours before Sunday mass, or, as now, by a fallen member of the faith about to meet his maker. My actions can not exceed the assurance of forgiveness for one’s sins. The solemn secrecy of what transpires here is inviolate.
“I need absolution,” he pleads softly, his repetition of that word a hint at the formality of religion in his early life. He is reaching back, maybe regressing, to a time when all about him was innocence. I suspect that, back then, what he is craving now was little more than a concept. An abstract. But in this moment, I am certain, it is painfully real. “We shouldn’t have done it, Father.”
I stay close to listen, hunched over, his desperate gaze locked with mine. “If you are truly sorry for—”
“Never should have gone in that store,” he interrupts, adding detail to whatever admission he is trying to voice. “Never should have shot that lady.”
I do not realize it, but at that instant my hold on his hand eases. Not a full release, just a hesitation in my link with him as the words that flavor his statement connect in an impossible way.
Store. Shot. Lady.
He is not talking of his crime this night. His assault on Luke Benz. He is begging forgiveness for another act entirely. An act that cannot be what my mind conjures it might. I flush the thought from my consciousness and give full measure of myself to the dying man again. My hand grips his fully.
“Are you sorry for your sins?” I ask Eric. That word seems to penetrate the haze which is steadily enveloping him.
Sins
. Acts contrary to the laws of a higher power. The highest power. He has concerned himself only with the laws of man to this point in his life. The consequences of transgressions against those are no mystery. But faced now with the reality of penance or punishment beyond this life, whatever walls he’d constructed to hide his actions, his lies, his sins, are crumbling. He seeks salvation in accounting for his deeds.
Or deed, as it is to him right now.
“Did it for the money,” he says, adding to the details of whatever terrible act he was party to. “Shouldn’t have shot her. Didn’t deserve it. So young.”
Young
. That pang of connection sparks again. I ignore it.
“We got away with it,” he says, almost surprised, that one eye burning hard at me. “Is it too late to make my peace? Too late to be sorry?”
I stare at him for a moment before answering. The thin particulars of what he has confessed thus far trying to coalesce still. Into something from nothing. Possibility from random assertions. I should not allow such theorizing in myself. Should not harbor a willingness to entertain the fantastic.
I should not.
“When did this happen, Eric?” There are too many things wrong with what I have just done to list. Above and beyond all, though, I have interjected myself into what should be a sacred moment for this man. To any observer it might seem innocuous. A simple query. Posed innocently to aid the dying man in clearing his conscience. It is not that, I know. I ask because an answer to the question exists, and I want to hear it. I want to hear him speak the words that put the remote likelihood of what I am thinking to rest. I want to learn that the timeline of his transgression does not fit. That he was party to murder last week in a desperate bid for cash to feed his obvious drug habit, or a dozen years ago when he was a miscreant fresh out of high school taking his first steps on a path counter to all that is good and right. This is what I want to know so that I can be what I am supposed to be right here, in this place and moment, for this man.