Until the Devil Weeps

by W E DeVore

  “You saved me,” she said. A month ago, this statement would have been followed by her telling her friend that everything good she had - her marriage, her career, her family - was all thanks to him. Now the most important component of that equation was gone, and she struggled to find a replacement. “Thank you, Aaron, for staying with me. When do you have to go back to work?”

  “I took a leave of absence. I’ll go back to work when you’re settled at home.” She started to argue and he stopped her. “It’s already done. I’m not leaving you until you can look after yourself. There’s only one case I’d want to work anyway and they’re not going to give it to me.”

  “You think you could find who did this to me?” she asked.

  “I know I want to,” he replied. “I wish you’d talk to me about it.”

  “I told you, I can’t remember anything. I keep trying, but nothing comes. I was half asleep by the time we got home. I just remember Ben’s face. His eyes were so afraid. I’d never seen him so afraid…” Her body began to tremble all over. “Why did he have to die so afraid?”

  “When are you going to cry about this, Clementine?”

  “Never,” she said, clearing her throat and willing her body to calm itself. “It wouldn’t do any good. It won’t bring them back.”

  “You can’t keep it in. Ben’s dead. Jasper’s dead. You need to mourn. You’re acting like a fucking robot,” he told her in a firm voice.

  “No,” she whispered. “As long as I hold it in, they’re still with me."

  "You can keep them with you in other ways," he tried. “I write letters to Avi almost every day and most days, I still feel like I have an older brother to talk to. My mom, too. You can grieve and move on and still keep them here.”

  She finally confessed the truth of it. "If I start to cry I’m never going to be able to stop. I’m going to have a nervous fucking breakdown if I feel anything and I really don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a nuthouse. I have to be numb. You have to let me be numb.”

  The door opened and Ben’s younger sister, Yvie, and her boyfriend, Josh, came into the room before Sanger could reply. He got out of bed, standing up to stretch. Q turned from her two visitors, flinching at how much they both reminded her of her husband. Yvie, because she looked so much like him. Josh, because he acted so much like him, having been his friend and business partner for so many years.

  Yvie took Sanger’s spot on the bed, curling around Q and kissing her cheek. Q finally looked at her sister-in-law. Her eyes were puffy from weeks of tears pouring from them, but she forced a smile and said, “We didn’t know what you’d want to eat for dinner, darlin’, so we brought jambalaya, hamburgers, some étouffée, and a huge piece of chocolate cake.”

  Her voice had a gravelly undertone that wasn’t there before, raw from constant grief, and it made her sound more like her brother. Q’s empty stomach flooded with nausea at the memory of Ben’s voice yelling for her to get down just before he’d been shot.

  “I’m not hungry,” Q said.

  Yvie stood up and began straightening the blankets before adjusting the bed to a more upright position. Q recognized the behavior. When Yvie felt powerless, she took it back in any controllable action within her reach.

  Pushing away a fresh batch of tears with the palm of her hand, Yvie replied, “You have mistaken me for someone who gives a goddamn. You haven’t eaten dinner for three days. You’re eating some food tonight even if I have to force feed it to you.”

  Josh came over and put his arm around his girlfriend, saying gently, “Q, you have to eat. You’re not going to get any better if you don’t eat.”

  “I did eat,” she stated. “I had a cup of yogurt this morning. I’m just not hungry.”

  Sanger folded his arms and gazed at the ceiling, his jaw clench in frustration. “She’ll eat the jambalaya. All of it.”

  Rage overcame her senses and she felt her skin grow hot with it. She wanted to scream. She wanted to destroy everything around her. Taking a deep breath, she tried to contain her fury and failed.

  “I don’t want jambalaya,” she snapped. “I’m not fucking hungry, but I’ll eat a hamburger just to make y’all shut the fuck up. Stop fussing. Goddamnit, I’m fine.”

  The three people in the world who were closest to her husband exchanged worried glances at her outburst. Josh silently pulled out a Styrofoam container from the bag and moved the table over Q’s lap. She opened it and took a large, angry bite; talking around her food while stuffing French fries into her mouth. “There. I’m eating. You fucking happy?”

  Yvie’s eyes went to Sanger for guidance and he shook her off. Q wanted to stab them both with the plastic knife next to her dinner. She struggled to chew her food, not wanting to admit that in her anger, she’d shoved too much into her mouth. Finally managing to swallow some of her bite, she swallowed down some of her wrath as well.

  She didn’t want to tell her friends that food tasted like ash. That she didn’t want to eat jambalaya, because she’d never taste Ben’s version of it again. That nourishing her body felt like a betrayal because she should be in a grave, not her sweet, strong husband. So, she didn’t. She forced herself to eat, listening to her friends try to make small talk as they ate their own food, injecting an artificial normalcy into an abruptly abnormal reality that none of them could have predicted.

  After Yvie and Josh left, Sanger sat down in the chair next to the bed. “What’s on the agenda for this evening’s entertainment? Cards? Movie?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Go home, Aaron. Get some sleep. I’m fine.” She looked away from him and stared out the window at the lights of the parking garage in the distance.

  He turned her head back to face him. “I told you, I’m not leaving you on your own until you’re home.”

  “I have to get used to it sometime, cowboy. Please, just go.”

  “Not today.” He smoothed out her hair.

  Tears started to form in her eyes and an odd ache radiated from the center of her chest. Sanger sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand, continuing to stroke her head. “Let it out, Clementine. Let it out.”

  She shook her head, fighting against it, her body shuddering until she opened her mouth and screamed in rage, howling out her wrath, shrieking as loudly as her body would let her. She sat upright and hit Sanger with her fist, pounding on his arms and chest. Two nurses ran through the door and Sanger shook them off. She punched Sanger’s chest as hard as she could with her good hand and screamed again, kicking at an invisible enemy with her feet, ignoring the wound on her leg as it resisted the violent movement.

  A nurse moved to sedate her. “She’s disturbing the other patients.”

  Sanger held him back and said, “Let her be.”

  “Five minutes. I’ll let this go on for five minutes and then she gets sedated and transferred to Psych.”

  A group of nurses stood in the door watching in concerned silence as Q raged, screaming out her pain until she was empty. She finally lay back on the bed, breathless, her throat burning. The nurses slowly left on by one.

  “Why?” she whimpered. “Why did this happen to me?”

  Sanger wiped away the tears that were running down his cheeks. “I don’t know, Clementine. I wish I did.”

  July: Pain

  Home.

  It had taken Q years to feel like the house she shared with Ben was her home and not just his. While she’d been away on tour with Dark Harm, she’d dreamt of sitting on the porch swing looking out at the quiet, Uptown neighborhood, listening to the traffic roll by on Carrollton a few blocks in the distance. Now it was hers. This house was no longer Ben’s. His will had made it only hers. And she hated it.

  She sat in Sanger’s truck, staring at the back of Ben’s Audi in the driveway. It was covered in pollen and dust, its black finish dull and lifeless. The front gate was leaning against the side of the house, its hinges twisted and mangled.

  “What happened to the gate?” she asked.


  “It was locked. They had to break it down to get to you,” he explained.

  “Who?”

  “The fire department,” he said. “You don’t remember?”

  She shook her head and Sanger got out of the truck. He walked around and opened her door, helping her onto the pavement. Q flinched at the tearing in her abdominal muscles and cursed. He wrapped his arm around her waist and lifted her upright. “I’ve got you, Clementine.”

  As she hobbled towards the porch, Q frowned at the dying ferns that lined it. “Ben’s ferns. Fuck.”

  “I’m sorry. We all forgot about them.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “He can’t see them anyway.”

  They climbed up the porch and she stopped at the topmost step, studying the cement for some sign of what had happened.

  “It’s clean,” she said.

  “I called in a company. They cleaned up… everything. Repainted.”

  “They did a good job.” Q slid down the side of his body to rest on the porch and ponder the familiar street. A memory flashed through her mind and she saw a black Camaro parked on the other side of the gaping maw in the wrought iron fence at the front of the lawn. But she wasn’t sure if it was real or not. She pointed to the empty street. “They were driving a black Camaro.”

  Sanger sat next to her. “Who?”

  Her eyebrows stitched together. “No, that doesn’t make sense. That was earlier, at the restaurant, maybe?”

  He studied her face and spoke slowly, “Yes, there was a black Camaro that drove by us at Manny’s. Did you see it again later?”

  “I don’t remember.” The horrified face of a young man holding a gun pointing directly at her stared back at her from the street. “He said he was sorry. Before he shot me. He said, ‘I’m so sorry.’”

  “Who?”

  “It was a kid, Aaron,” she said as she realized that this was a memory and not a dream. “It was a fucking kid.”

  Sanger pulled out his phone and began to record her. “What did he look like?”

  “Young. Maybe sixteen, seventeen. Braids, pulled back, I think. Medium complexion. Thin. Really thin.”

  “What else?”

  Q pushed him away and pulled herself up to stand. “He was sorry. He didn’t want to do it. It doesn’t matter. It’s done.”

  Sanger was on his feet in an instant. “Clementine, you have to help us. We’ve got nothing without you. No one saw anything, they were gone before anyone realized what had happened. What if it’s your stalker? Did you think about that? It could be Burn Bitch Burn. They could come back to finish the job.”

  She moved away from his urgency as every ugly word her stalker had sent her over the years flashed through her mind. “Stop. You’re going give me a panic attack. It wasn’t my stalker.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just told you. It was a kid, Aaron. Why would a teenage boy obsess about me marrying Derek fucking Sharp.”

  He pursed his lips and put his hands on his hips. “Maybe they sent somebody. Hired a professional.”

  “Maybe you should go back to work. You’re seeing killers where none exist,” she said. “It was a couple of kids. Probably some sort of gang initiation. Isn’t that what the cops on the case think?”

  His momentary resolve sagged. “Yes.”

  “Well, tell them they’re right. I remember now. Leave it be, cowboy.” She looped her arm through his and rested her head on his shoulder. “Please, Aaron. I can’t help you with your cases. Not anymore. And especially not this one.”

  Sanger patted her hand. “Come on, let’s get you settled.”

  Q examined her front door and the immaculate floor of the porch. “I thought there’d be blood.”

  He moved them towards the door and pulled out a set of keys. “I didn’t want you to come home to it.”

  “How did you pay for it?” she asked.

  “Money. The usual way one pays for things.” He unlocked the door and led her inside. She stood near the threshold as he entered the code for the alarm.

  “Tell me how much. I’ll write you a check.”

  Sanger glanced over his shoulder at her before gently taking her hand. “It wasn’t that much. It’s fine.”

  “No, you’ve been generous enough with your time. I’m not going to drain your bank account, too. I’ll write you a check; you’ve done enough.” They walked into the living room and Q’s nose tickled at the strange smell of her home. The usual smell of Ben and chicory had been replaced by absence and a faint tinge of bleach. “I smell bleach.”

  “Ms. Lila and the hens came over this morning and cleaned it for you. Stockpiled your refrigerator, too,” he explained. “They set up the guest room, thought it would be easier for you to be downstairs, with your leg…”

  Q stared up the steps to the second floor and felt a rush of regret, worried what the women in Ben’s family may have done in their eagerness to shield her from her grief. “Did they clean the nursery?”

  “I don’t know,” he stuttered.

  She let go of his hand and heaved herself up the steps. The physical therapy had strengthened her leg the point where she could walk without limping, but her shoulder and stomach muscles still had a thing or two to say about stairs. When she arrived on the second floor, she was greeted by a cascade of light extending from the window at the end of the hallway and she breathed in its warmth.

  Ben.

  The allspice and lavender smell of her husband filled her and drained some of the inner chill that she’d come to expect whenever she thought of him. She opened the door to her right and the small nursery that Ben had only recently finished completing. Smiling at the memory of the shouting match that had been the result of her coming home to find a white crib nestled under the eaves in the room across the hall from their bedroom, Q touched her fingertips to her lips and placed the distant kiss on the door before closing it. She walked to her bedroom and immediately stood in front of Ben’s closet, pulling down the first dress shirt within reach and retreating into their bathroom to put it on.

  When she came back into the room, she found Sanger resting back against the wall next to the bay window beside the high, four-post bed with his arms folded. His head was turned away, watching a cardinal in the live oak outside as it flitted from one branch to another. He glanced at her and she smelled the cool, crisply ironed cuff of the large shirt that draped down to her knees.

  “Gonna have to ration these,” she said.

  Sanger blinked back the tears that were pooling in his eyes. He cleared his throat. “Can I get you anything?”

  She pulled back the covers on Ben’s side of the bed and slid her body up onto it. “No. I’m going to sleep and pretend he’s at work. Jeffries is probably missing you like crazy. You should go take her dinner or something, my treat. I’ll give you my credit card. Take her anywhere you like. When was the last time you saw her?”

  He sat beside her on the edge of the bed. His back hunched in a defeated posture. “We broke up.”

  She tilted her head forward, trying to see his face. “Since when? You were talking about marrying her….”

  He rolled his eyes and smirked at her. “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were. You loved her. You wanted her to move in with you.”

  “And that would have been a mistake. It doesn’t matter, it’s over.”

  She nudged him with her knee. “We have any beer downstairs?”

  “I don’t know, probably.”

  “Go get us a drink and something to eat.”

  Sanger sighed in relief. “You serious? You want to eat?”

  “I could eat. Go on.”

  She rested back into the pillows and looked out the window, tracking the late afternoon sun through the leaves. The brick wall of isolation she’d been slowly building fell apart while Sanger was downstairs and she let her body relax into the comfort that still lingered here, not knowing how much longer the residual traces of her life with Ben would last.


  Closing her eyes, she listened to Sanger move in the kitchen below and wondered at the peace within her.

  I just need to be close to him. I can do this. This is good.

  Footsteps in the hallway pulled her back to waking and she opened her eyes to find Sanger carrying a tray with two bowls and two beers, a dishtowel draped over his arm. The smell of boiled seafood and pepper followed him into the room. “Seafood gumbo. There was a note on it that said, ‘eat this first.’”

  A lump swelled in her chest. “Ben’s favorite.”