Until the Devil Weeps

by W E DeVore

  Lila broke down in a fresh storm of tears and Big Ben moved to hold her.

  “Promise me, Daddy,” Q said, keeping her voice even so he’d understand how important it was to her. “I don’t care what you have to do, you have to make that happen for me. Jasper’s so small. I don’t want him to be all alone. Please promise me.”

  “I promise. He’ll rest with his daddy. I promise.”

  Q turned her face from them to regard the ugly wallpaper that decorated her room. Something about the pattern reminded her of the painting that hung over the fireplace in her home. It had been the source of more than one domestic squabble. Ben loved it. Q thought it looked like a trapped scream. Now she was transforming into that trapped, silent scream. There was no end to this grief. There was no end to the frozen creature she was becoming. She only knew that as long as she held onto the scream entombed within her throat, her husband and her child would hold her up. Two arctic blades inserted through her heart to keep her upright and moving forward.

  Agony was the new normal.

  Kvura: The Burial

  Within a few days, Q had been moved from the ICU and into yet another room to continue her recovery. She thought it was a strange thing for the medical personnel to say, as if they already knew there would be no end to it. This wasn’t something from which one recovered.

  She watched the clouds float against the sunny sky outside her newest window. In a few hours, her husband would be entombed. In a few hours, it would be over. The end of him. The end of their life together. The end of every promise he’d ever made. She’d told him once that she would personally rip him back from the afterlife if he ever died on her. Now that he was gone, Q realized what an empty threat it had been. There is no way to fight death. Death always wins.

  An orderly walked into her hospital room carrying a huge floral arrangement of white roses and pale blue orchids. He set them on the table next to the bed and she reached for the card with her good arm.

  Angel, Whatever you need. I’m here. – D.S.

  She fingered the card, turning it over and over in her hand. Things must be worse than she could have possibly imagined if Derek Sharp was sending her flowers and acting like a human being with empathy. She thought about the last time she’d spoken to him - sitting next to Ben on that streetcar - and she realized she would never be that happy again.

  Sanger walked in and whistled. “Holy flowers, Batman. Who sent those?” She handed him the card and he read it. Setting the card back on the table, he said, “Guess he might be human underneath all that rock star shit after all.”

  “Why aren’t you at the funeral?” she asked. “It should be starting now.”

  “It is. I didn’t want you to be alone.” He held up the shopping bag in his hand. “Thought we’d have a memorial of our own. I swung by your house and grabbed a photo album I thought you’d like.” He gave her a sad smile. “Constance wanted to come, so did your dad. I can still call them…”

  “No, I don’t want them here. I can’t stand the two of them fussing over me. It’s so unnatural.” She shifted over on the bed, patting the emptied space for him to sit. Sanger opened the album as he rested beside her and they flipped through several pages before Q stopped to run her fingers over a photograph of her and Ben. She was smiling at the camera. He was kissing the top of her head; his eyes were closed. Neon lights glowed in the background.

  “Where’s that?” Sanger asked.

  “Your hometown, cowboy.” She smiled at the memory. “We rode the train up to Memphis for the weekend. Ben wanted me to have a good day. A perfect day.”

  “Was it?”

  “It was. We went to Graceland, ate barbecue, found this hole in the wall blues joint in a shady neighborhood and danced all night.”

  They looked through a few more pages and Sanger finally said, “Why don’t you tell me how you met.”

  “You know that story. Ben’s loves to tell that story… Loved to tell it,” she corrected herself.

  She reached for her water cup and took a sip to swallow down the sorrow that was demanding to be released.

  He lifted the cup from her hand and set it back on the table. “Brought you something better than that.”

  Reaching down into the bag beside the bed, he pulled out two glasses and a bottle of scotch.

  Q took the bottle from his hand. “Sanger, this is like a $500 bottle of scotch. You can’t afford that.”

  He looked down his nose at her. “How do you know what I can afford, Clementine?”

  “Well, I know what cops make and they don’t make enough for one of these.”

  He took back the scotch and opened it, pouring out a little of the amber liquid into each glass before handing one to her. “It’s my best friend’s funeral. If you can’t drink a $500 bottle of scotch at your best friend’s funeral, when can you?”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to bring alcohol into the hospital, Aaron.”

  “What are they going to do?” he asked. “Kick you out?”

  “No, but they might kick you out and then where would I be.”

  “I’m a cop. I can go anywhere.” He gently jostled her with his hip and she tried not to flinch as her entire body balked at the movement. “Come on, you said Ben would want everyone to tell stories and that was one of his favorites. I’ve heard his version half a dozen times, and frankly, I only believed about half of it, so I want to hear your version of the truth. Humor me.”

  She settled next to him and took a sip of scotch. “Fine. I was playing a friend’s birthday party. She wanted live music, but couldn’t afford it, so I brought my keyboard and a small P.A. and I played her party as a birthday present. I was singing an old standard and Ben walks in, so tall, so handsome. He was wearing this black suit and a bright white shirt, cufflinks, you know, looking all like a damned Fifth Avenue Norse god.”

  “What song were you singing?”

  “Night and day…you are the one,” she sang by way of answering. “He caught me staring at him and stared right back, until Strickland walked up - that was his girlfriend, at the time. I knew her, a bit, and she was like five-foot-ten, ballerina body, gorgeous, as you can imagine. And it was obvious that they were together, but he kept looking at me over his shoulder, smiling at me, winking at me, making me blush every time he caught me looking back at him. So, at the end of my set, he comes over and says, ‘I hear your name is Q Toledano.’ And I say, ‘you heard correct.’ He hands me his card all suave-like and says, ‘my name is Ben Bordelon and I own Lafitte’s Cove. I’d love for you to play for me sometime.’”

  Sanger sipped his drink. “God damn, this is good. Totally worth the cash.” He clinked his glass against hers. “By the way, none of this is in Ben’s version.”

  “I know. He always made it sound completely innocent. It definitely wasn’t.” She thought for a minute. “Anyway, The Beasts and me had been dying to play the Cove at the time and needed to get an in over there, but I had to give him a hard time, because I knew he was hitting on me and had zero interest in actually booking my band, so I hand him my business card and say, ‘yeah, I bet you would. I’m not a solo act. If you want me and the Beasts to play, call me, otherwise have a nice night.’”

  “What did he do?”

  “Doubled down. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t know his girlfriend was standing right behind him and he says, ‘how about a private show instead, just you and me?’ and I turn to Strickland and say, ‘is he seriously trying to pick me up when he’s here with you?’”

  Sanger started to laugh. “No wonder you thought he was a womanizer.”

  “I know, right? He got all flustered and embarrassed, because I don’t think he’d ever done anything like that before, and I stand up and pat him on his chest and say something like, ‘QT and The Beasts don’t play for free, Bordelon. Call me if you want to book a real gig at the Cove.’ Then he did. He called and apologized, said he’d had too much to drink.”

  “Did he?”

  �
��Fuck no, he was sober as a judge,” she replied. “Anyway, we started playing at the Cove pretty regularly after that and he was always watching me and I was always watching him. He brought Gracie to one of my shows and they were dancing and he kept staring at me the whole time. Of course, I didn’t know that she was his little sister. And then the Beasts and me played this Valentine’s weekend gig at the Cove and had been instructed by the management to sex it way up. I think that was his last play. Get us to stare each other down while I was singing songs about all the things he wanted us to be doing to each other instead. And it worked. It was a good play. So, he’s watching me all night and I’m singing just to him. And we close out the gig with the dirtiest blues song I think we’ve ever played…”

  “What song?” he asked.

  She hummed a grinding roadhouse blues riff and sang in a long, drawn-out, downward bend, “You shook me, baby. You shook me all night long. You shook me, baby, you made me scream and moan.”

  “It got way worse from there,” she admitted. “We played it for like ten minutes, making up dirtier and dirtier lyrics, everybody was dancing all slow. Charlie kept whispering new verses for me to sing. ‘Rock me, harder, I’m gonna ride your bone.’ Shit like that. I think at one point I actually said ‘I want to taste your cum.’”

  Sanger blushed. “I get the idea.”

  She closed her eyes and saw Ben through the haze of the writhing dance floor. “But I was just singing for Ben. We’d been dancing around each other for almost a year and I wanted him and I knew he wanted me. He was standing there, in the back of the room, arms folded, looking at me like there was no one else in the world but us. Afterwards, I went to his office to go get paid and he said it was going to be a while. Told me to have a drink on him and he’d be happy to give me a ride home. Then my phone dings with a calendar update from Tom and Pete that says something like ‘Go on and fuck him. Half the women in New Orleans have.’”

  “I know,” Sanger said. “You made me read it out loud in front of my lieutenant when we were tracking down Ethan Nichols, remember?”

  She laughed at the memory and took a drink. Before they were married, Ben had been framed for murder by one of his closest friends. At the time, it was the worst thing Q could imagine happening to them. Resting against Sanger’s sturdy warmth, she had the sudden realization that if Ethan hadn’t tried to hurt her and Ben, Sanger wouldn’t be here with her now.

  “That’s right,” she replied. “I forgot about that. You turned bright red when you read that.” He gave her a shy grin. “Anyway, I stayed after everyone was gone and it was just the two of us, alone at the bar. We talked. I was staring at his mouth, wanting him to kiss me so bad, not listening to a word he was saying.”

  “Did he kiss you?”

  “Nope. We get in his car and he starts it and he tells how nice it was to finally be alone with me. That he’d been wanting to be alone with me for months. He’s getting all shy, trying to work up to ask me to dinner, at least that’s what he told me later. And I kissed him. We made out for like an hour in his car, probably burned through half a tank of gas…” She started to shake, tracing her lips with her fingertips. “Oh god. I’m never going to kiss him again, am I?”

  “No, you’re not.” He put his arm around her. “Let it out. I’ve got you. You can do whatever you need to do. Cry. You need to let it out. You don’t have to be strong right now. I’ve got you.”

  She took a large drink of scotch. “No, I don’t want to cry. I can’t. I’ll lose my mind if I do. Tell me a story, your turn.”

  He leaned his head back and gazed up at the ceiling for a minute before he said, “I remember the first time I saw the two of you together. Ernst and I had busted up into his house. Your old bass player had taken off after y’all found that girl dead at the Cove. Ernst was convinced you knew exactly where Pete was….” He stared off into the room and said, “Watching you curled next to Ben on that couch, wearing his shirt, I thought ‘that’s what love looks like.’ You remember that first Passover at Constance’s?”

  She nodded.

  “Constance hands him a kippah and says, ‘you wear it on your head’ and he looks down at you like ‘does she seriously think I’m that stupid,’ but he puts it on and says, ‘Thank you, Ms. Constance, I don’t know if I could have figured that out for myself.’”

  She started to laugh. “He was so nervous. He wanted to make such a good impression and she was so mean to him. But he was so fucking charming. By the end of the night, she wanted me to marry him.” She paused and sipped her scotch, looking at the diamond on her left hand sparkle against the black cloth of her sling. “I never really wanted to get married, until him. He made me want to spend forever loving somebody. Turns out forever wasn’t very long, but I loved being married to him.”

  He clinked his glass against hers. “To Ben. The best friend a man could ever have and the best husband a woman could ever hope for.”

  “To Ben.” She drained her scotch and held it up, Sanger refilled both glasses. “Scotch and narcotics are doing wonders for my outlook right now, cowboy. But your story was too short, I demand another.”

  He kissed the top of her head and pulled her closer. “Alright, at the risk of being super Jewish, there was a bedtime story my dad used to tell me that Ben always reminded me of.”

  “Alright, Super Jew, I’ll bite.”

  “It’s the story of creation. Do you know it?” He looked down at her face.

  “Genesis? Yes, rabbi, I am familiar.” She grinned.

  “No, before that. It’s a midrash.”

  “Did you seriously just say ‘midrash’ in casual conversation?” she asked. “I’ll give you bonus points if you can work in Mishnah. Two, if you can work in Gemara.”

  “You want to hear the story or not?” he asked.

  “Super Jew!” she sang as her body abruptly relaxed into the chemical cocktail that was intoxicating her brain and soothing her grief.

  “Stop it,” he scolded.

  “Super Jew, to the rescue!” she sang again.

  “Keep it up and I’ll cut you off, Clementine.” He reached for her glass and she pulled it away.

  “Sorry, please continue.”

  “Thank you.” Sanger took a sip of scotch and cleared his throat. “Before creation, there was only God and His light filled everything so completely, there wasn’t room to create anything else. So, He decided to bottle up His light inside of jars, so He could create our universe.”

  “Wait,” she said, confused. “If God’s light filled everything, where did the jars come from?”

  “They were heavenly jars…vessels…whatever.”

  “Heavenly jars?” she asked, skeptical of the veracity of his story.

  “It’s religion, Clementine, don’t try to insert logic into it.”

  She took another drink. “Fair point, continue.”

  “So, HaShem bottled up all His light and created our universe, and the stars, and the planets, and one particularly beautiful planet where He created us. But while He was admiring His creations, He didn’t notice that the jars were cracking. You see, His light couldn’t be contained, and it shattered the jars; and the shards rained down to earth and they became sorrow and suffering. Our job is to pick up all those shards and put them back together. Then there will be no more sorrow.”

  “Easier said than done,” she said, allowing the haze of a scotch and Vicodin buzz to wash over her. “So, what happened to the light?”

  “It shattered, too.”

  “Light can’t shatter, cowboy, it’s energy.”

  “Just listen, will you?” Sanger scolded. “When the light shattered and it fell down to Earth, it became the human soul. So, everyone has a little bit of God’s light inside of them. That’s how we see each other. We see God in one another. I always figured, though, that the shards weren’t all the same size. When something shatters, some pieces are big, others are so small you can barely see them. Some people, like some of the assholes I arres
t, they only have a tiny piece of that light. But Ben, he had a huge piece and it filled him. You could see God clearly, being around him. He was so at peace with himself. Avi was like that, too.” His face fell, thinking of his murdered brother.

  “You’re like that, Aaron. Must run in your family,” she said, growing drowsy as the first alcohol she’d had in months syphoned into her bloodstream. She finished her drink and handed the empty glass to Sanger, resting her head on his shoulder. “Oh god, what the fuck am I going to do?”

  “Your body’s going to heal. You’ll go home. You’ll grieve. You’ll cry. You’ll be sad for a long while. And then you’ll start over. And you’ll stop being sad all the time until you’re sad less and less. Maybe you’ll meet somebody, somebody that makes you smile like Ben made you smile. And maybe you’ll even fall in love again.”