The Confession

Chapter 8 — Doubt

Michael did not sleep that night. He lay in the rectory bedroom with his hands folded over his chest like a corpse in a coffin and listened to the wind work the loose shutter, and when he finally did drift, he dreamed of blue cloth tearing — that soft, papery rip — and woke with his own shout dying in his mouth and the sheets damp with sweat.

Prayer had always been the floor under him. Now it felt like talking into an empty room.

He tried anyway. He knelt in the dark church at three in the morning, the votive candles burned down to stubs, the air cool against his face, and he whispered the words he’d been whispering since he was seven years old, and they came back to him hollow, the way your voice comes back to you in an empty swimming pool. *Lord, in your mercy. Christ, in your mercy.* The silence pressed on his ears until his ears rang.

“Show me what to do,” he said aloud, and his voice startled him in the emptiness, too loud, too human. The crucifix above the altar did not move. He had not expected it to, and the not-expecting felt like its own kind of grief — the grief of a man discovering that the room he’s been talking to for forty years might have been empty all along.

So he did the only thing he could do without breaking the seal: he began to look.

The county library kept its microfilm in a back room that smelled of mildew and old coffee, lit by a buzzing fluorescent tube that made everything look slightly underwater. Michael went on Tuesday morning, collar hidden under a windbreaker, feeling like a teenager sneaking into a bar. He fed quarters into the machine and scrolled through the autumn of 2004, week by week, and the past unspooled in front of him in reversed white-on-black: high school football scores, a city council fight about water rights, a church bake sale, a missing-person notice.

*REYES, DAVID. Age 31. Last seen September 2004. Drives blue pickup.*

Michael stared at it until the screen blurred and the fluorescent tube buzzed on.

The police reports were harder. He called in a favor from an old seminary classmate who’d left the priesthood for the county sheriff’s office — a lunch at a diner off the highway, a careful conversation, no mention of the confessional, no mention of anything that mattered. The file, what was left of it, was thin enough to slide across the table in a single folder. David Reyes, reported missing by his mother on October 3, 2004. Vehicle missing, presumed driven away. No sign of foul play. No witnesses. Case gone cold by spring, the way cases went cold out here, the way everything went cold eventually.

“Ran off,” the classmate said, chewing his burger, wiping his mouth. “Classic. Happens out here more than you’d think. The desert’s full of men who walked away from their lives. Usually the truck turns up in Mexico. Usually.”

Michael nodded, and felt like a liar, and didn’t know what he was lying about.

He drove back to San Miguel with the windows down, the desert air hot against his face, and he thought about the thinness of the file — how little was left of a man’s whole life after twenty years. A date. A truck. A mother’s signature on a report form. He thought about the way Rosa had never once, in all those years, suggested they hire someone to look for David, and the thought sat in him like a splinter he couldn’t reach.

He went to the church office after lunch and pulled the parish burial records for 2004 anyway, though he knew David had never been buried anywhere, though he knew exactly what he would find, which was nothing. He told himself it was thoroughness. He told himself a lot of things that week. He told himself the stranger was a crank, a con artist, a man with a sickness in his head who had picked the wrong priest. He told himself the details — the shirt, the buckle, the creosote — were the kind of details any man could invent, the kind of details that felt true because they were built out of true things.

He told himself all of this, and he did not sleep, and the dreams kept coming: blue cloth, a silver flash, the smell of rain on hot dust, and underneath it all a sound he couldn’t place, like something heavy settling into sand.

Saturday came. He sat in the confessional with his breviary open and unread on his knees, and he watched the light move across the floor, and at 4:12 the door slid open and the voice said, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” and Michael’s stomach turned over like a car going off a cliff.

“Not this week,” the stranger said softly. “Just one thing. Then I’ll go.”

Michael’s mouth was dry. “I’m listening.”

“I’ve been thinking about what I told you. The shirt. The buckle.” A breath, shaky this time, the composure cracking at the edges. “There’s something else. Something I haven’t said. Something I haven’t said to anyone.”

Michael waited. The booth was very dark. He could smell the aftershave, the lemon oil, his own sweat.

“You were there that night, Father.”

The words hung in the air between them like smoke.

“Weren’t you?”

Michael’s hands began to shake on the prie-dieu, and he could not make them stop, and in the dark behind his eyes something moved — something blue, something silver, something smelling of rain — and then it was gone, and he was alone in the booth with the sound of his own breathing, and the stranger was gone too, the door already sliding shut, and Michael sat there shaking until the light failed at the little window and Mrs. Ortiz came to lock up and found him there, and asked if he was all right, and he said yes, and he was lying, and he didn’t know what he was lying about.