DAMN OH DAMN YOU CLUMSY SHIT LOOK WHAT YOU DID NOW YOU’LL GET IT, OPEN AND SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO

He slapped himself, trying to calm down; frantically sorted through his papers until he found a scrap of newsprint that felt like velvet, so worn was it from handling. His most precious possession, even more precious than his manuscript: a newspaper photograph of a five-year-old girl, blond, her face bleached out so that only her eyes and mouth could be clearly seen. Elsie Paroubek. She looked otherworldly, elfin, her expression one of slight alarm.

She was no longer alive. His eyes welled; the image blurred as he brought it to his face and pressed it against his mouth.

“Dearest one,” he whispered.

He shut his eyes and saw her floating before him, her tiny mouth and dark eyes. He bent over the picture, hands in his lap, and waited for the happy spell to come. Afterward he rocked back and forth, weeping as he prayed for forgiveness. When his grief subsided, he replaced the newspaper picture in the folder and gathered up the pages of his manuscript. He tied them back together with the piece of string, his clumsy, damaged fingers fumbling with the knot, opened the drawer, and put everything back inside.

Last of all, he blew out the candle, set it with his other things, and closed the drawer. He stood and undressed, folding his clothes before pulling on his nightshirt. He knelt beside his bed and said his prayers, fingering the scapular. When he finished, he made the Sign of the Cross and crawled under the covers. Within a few minutes he was sleeping soundly.

Chapter 24

Chapter 24

THERE HAD BEEN a girl—Maura, a friend of his sister Ellen’s, dark haired and buxom, with freckled cheeks and breasts. A laughing girl. They’d been courting for almost a year when it happened: not the usual fumbling in the dark with a whore, but a stolen afternoon in a hotel room. Lying beside her afterward had been even sweeter than what had gone before.

“Will you marry me?” Francis had whispered.

“Of course,” she’d whispered back, her face still wet from crying. Happiness, he’d thought at the time. Two weeks later she was dead, bled out on an abortionist’s table. Not his child, of course. Ever since he’d tried to balance it in his head: Would it have mattered? If he’d known the choice was another man’s child or her lying in bed beside him now, warm and laughing? Most days he believed he might have lived with it. Other days, he did not. And some days, thinking of her freckled limbs tangled with those of another man, he almost wished he’d killed her himself.

Chapter 25

Chapter 25