by Keri Lake
The woman at the front desk recognizes me and ushers me along without signing in. The halls are quiet, and my whole body is shaking uncontrollably, noticeable when Damon takes my hand. We reach the far corridor, but Anita has tears in her eyes, shaking her head as she approaches.
“I’m sorry, baby. She’s gone.”
Body shuddering with a sob, I let her pull me in for a hug. “I need to see her. I need to.”
With a sniffle, she nods and releases me from her embrace.
“I’ll wait out here, Ivy.” Damon squeezes my hand and takes a seat on one of the chairs set in the hallway.
The room is quiet when I enter, my stomach twisting with anxiety, as she remains concealed behind the drawn curtain. I round the footboard and find her lying peacefully in bed, eyes closed as if asleep. Heart racing, I focus on her chest. Did it move? Did her hand twitch?
But I know my mind is so desperate at the moment, it has me seeing things that aren’t real. Things that’ll never be real again.
She’s gone. And I’m alone. And all I want right now is to hear her laughter again. I want to shake her awake and beg her to tell me the stories of skipping school to go to the movies. To tell me not to hate my mother for being so selfish and immature, as she always did. To beg me to forgive my father, because carrying the burden of grudges is too heavy for a woman wearing three-inch heels, as she always said.
I kneel down beside the bed and take her cold, wrinkled hand, wishing I had one more second, to tell her how sorry I am for being the pesky, petulant child she was forced to raise on her own.
But I already know what she’d say. The same thing she always said to me when I was growing up. She’d tell me the most wonderful things in life are blessings we don’t see coming.
I glance to the side, where her radio sits silent, and I flip it on to Les Feuilles Mortes by Juliette Gréco. With my head resting against her hand, the tears that slip down my temple dissolve into her skin below me.
“Are you okay?” Damon’s deep voice draws me out of my thoughts, to where he stands on the opposite side of her bed.
That’s when I notice the pictures plastered all over the wall, telling the story of her life, the many women she took in, the children she practically helped raise alongside her own. Her friends. And pictures of her, of course, back when she was a teenager, just having crossed the ocean to make a life here. Alone. No mother, father, grandmother. Nothing but self-determination and strong wit.
I am her granddaughter. Born of the same determination. And if she can survive alone, then so can I.
Offering a nod, I lean forward to kiss her hand, and more tears blur my view. “She never gave her last confession. I never gave her the chance.”
“Perfect contrition is a love of God above all other things, and as such will save her from damnation, Ivy. He knows her heart. Don’t worry.”
“That’s all she asked of me, and I failed her. I failed her because I was selfish. Because I—”
“You wanted to keep her a little longer. You loved her. There’s no need to be sorry for loving her that much.”
Sniffling, I wipe the tears from my eyes, unable to look at him. “For the funeral … will you … I mean … is it possible that you can …”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
I nod and lay my head against her shoulder, just as I did when I was a child and she would comfort me. Across from me, Damon kneels at the side of her bed and takes my hand.
“Saints of God, come to her aid.
Come to meet her, angels of the Lord.
Receive her soul, and present her to God the Most High.”
As he recites a prayer, I watch and listen, thinking how beautiful it is in this moment, how fortunate I am to have had him here tonight. It’s as if God sent him to me as a gift, to keep me from going to Calvin’s, who surely would make tonight a nightmare.
“In Your mercy and love, forgive whatever sins she may have committed through human weakness. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
“Amen,” I echo and turn my attention back to Mamie. “Je t’aime.”
“Ivy?” Anita peeks around the curtain and stuffs her hand into the pocket of her scrubs. “Few years back, your grandma asked me to write some things down for you. She made me keep it, in the event she passed away.”
“Oh, God, I can’t.” The urge to sob tugs at my chest again, as she hands me the paper.
“I’m not gonna lie. She made me cry just writing it. So, maybe read it on your own time.”
“Thank you, ‘Nita.”
“She asked me to give this to the priest, as well.” Anita pulls out another note, handing it off to Damon. “I don’t know how that works with confessions, and all that, but I ain’t planning to tell nobody what she made me write down.”
Accepting the paper, Damon tucks it into his shirt pocket, while I watch with pointed interest. Only one thing I know for certain had always tormented her conscience, and if it’s written there, then Anita knows as much as Father Damon is about to find out.
Anita flashes me a smile, not bothering to meet my eyes, as she exits the room, and the worry blossoms inside my gut once more.
“Excuse me, Father.” I push to my feet and chase after her. Once outside the door, I grab her arm. “Anita, wait.”
“Look, I promised her I won’t say anything. And I plan to keep that promise. You should, too, Ivy. Past is past.”
“How can …. How can you know what she told you and say that?” I keep my voice low, eyes scanning down the hall and back to her. “How can you know what I did and …”
“Forgive you?”
Casting my gaze away from hers fails to shrink the shame bubbling in my gut at what surely must be written on that paper for Father Damon.
“Because that’s what we do as human beings. We forgive.”
Tears stinging my eyes, I lift my gaze to hers and shake my head. “I don’t deserve it.”
Returning to Mamie’s room, I take a seat and lift her hand, feeling something crumpled in her palm. Paper. Black and white, it’s stained her skin, and I flatten it to reveal the story she clipped years ago, kept tucked inside a scrapbook of things in her nightstand. A woman and child murdered in their home.
Rubbing my brow, I swallow back the urge to throw up right there on the floor.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Damon slips the paper from my hand, and I let him. There’s no sense keeping secrets, when every detail is undoubtedly written on the page tucked inside his pocket.
His eyes shoot toward Mamie and back to the paper, then to me, and there’s far more in them than mere curiosity. “Why did she have this?”
Ignoring his question, I dare myself to hold his stare. “There’s something I have to confess, Damon.”
“What is it?”
I reach out for the paper, flicking my fingers to make him give it back. “I’ll tell you everything in the car. Please, can I have it back?”
“I’d like to keep it, if you don’t mind.”
“Why?”
“There’s something I should confess, as well, Ivy.” His brows come together as he stares down at the clipping in his hands. “Valerie and Isabella Savio were my wife and child.”
16
DAMON
The drive back to Ivy’s is somber and quiet, her gaze cast toward the passenger window beside her. The note in my pocket practically burns a hole through my chest, as her grandmother’s final words sit tucked against my heart.
“Tell me, Damon. If you know someone committed murder, and you don’t bother to tell anyone, is that a mortal sin?”
“If this is about what you saw me do, I can arrange to have Father Ruiz take your confession.”
“This isn’t about that.” Her neck bobs with a swallow, giving me a sense her preoccupation has nothing to do with me, or the death of her grandmother.
“What is it?”
Hands fidgeting in her lap, she keeps her gaze directed away from mine. “A few years b
ack, Calvin showed up to my work, asking me for the medical record of a man who ended up on the news three days later.” She clears her throat, and I catch the slight tremble of her entwined fingers. “Murdered.”
“And you feel responsible.”
“He was from New York, staying at a hotel downtown,” she continues, ignoring my comment. “Had some shortness of breath, so he came to the ER. His record detailed where he was staying.” Her brow flickers, and she clamps her eyes shut, chest rising with a deep breath. “I provided that information to a man I firmly believe showed up at that hotel and killed him.”
I slow the car to a stop across from her apartment building and kill the engine. Whether the girl is a masochist, or just naturally dominated by her conscience, she can’t seem to stop punishing herself.
Running a hand down my face, I huff. “Ivy, your grandmother just passed away. Just … focus on yourself right now. Don’t trouble your mind with things you can’t change.”
Her head snaps in my direction, brows knitted with a caustic expression. “Trouble my mind? This has been eating at me for years now. Years, Damon. And there’s more.” Chin jutted, she directs her attention toward my chest. “Open my grandmother’s letter. Read it.”
“I plan to read it later.”
Eyes brimming with protest, she stares back at me. “No. Now. Read it right now.”
“Ivy, c’mon—”
“Now! Read it right now!”
Gaze locked on hers, I sneak my hand inside my pocket and pull the note from inside, opening it up to a handwritten letter, addressed to: Dear Father.
In the event I’m not able to confess my sins before death, I feel compelled to cleanse my soul by divulging something that was told to me many years ago. Due to my slowly declining health, I find it necessary to capture my thoughts while I still have my wits about me, and am of sound mind to relay them to my most trusted caretaker, Anita. I’ve kept this to myself for a long time, for fear of what might happen to my only love in the world, my only granddaughter, Ivy Mercier. But I refuse to let this secret follow me to the grave, and so you may take this as my last confession.
First, you must understand, my granddaughter has always been a very happy child, so even through my own malady, I could see something was troubling her. Through tears, she described a man who had come to her work, demanding that she hand over the medical record for a man named Richard Rosenberg. I will never forget his name because what transpired next was a series of very unfortunate events. Not three days after her releasing the man’s record, Mr. Rosenberg showed up dead. Tortured to death and discarded in a dumpster outside of his hotel. Ivy expressed sincere regret and remorse, feeling responsible for the man’s death, and she’s been punishing herself for years since. Though I urged her to go to the police with the information at the time, she told me this Calvin, who demanded the record from her, threatened to kill both of us, if she said a word to anyone. I later learned from a friend of mine, who works at that hotel and had overheard the investigators talking, that this Richard Rosenberg was here on behalf of his client, to secure a witness who might testify against a known criminal. A man by the name of Anthony Savio.
In a brief pause, I stare down at my father’s name written across the page, and suddenly the letter takes on new meaning. This isn’t just a confession at this point, or the mention of a lawyer whose contact information was stored in my dead wife’s phone, but the pieces to a puzzle that have eluded me for the last eight years. It begs me to keep reading.
A few days after Richard Rosenberg’s body was recovered, the daughter-in-law and granddaughter of Anthony Savio were found dead in their home. It is my belief that Calvin was responsible for the lawyer’s murder, and possibly that of the woman and child. He is an evil man who has taken it upon himself to make my granddaughter’s life miserable. I want to make it known to God that my granddaughter, Ivy, is innocent and deserves absolution for the sins she has committed.
God Bless,
Adele Mercier
Cold branches of rage snake through my veins as I stare down at the letter in my hands.
“I didn’t know it was your family until tonight.” Ivy’s voice is a dissonant chime beneath the swish of blood pounding through my ears. A disconnected sound that fails to draw me out of the images passing through my mind, too fast for my brain to keep up.
Visuals of the card I pulled out of Val’s phone case with the lawyer’s number. A hotel room written on the back. The few times before her death when I tried to reach her, and she didn’t answer my call. Her preoccupation that I must’ve mistaken for worry over the cost of Isabella’s treatments. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“Is your father Anthony Savio?”
“Yes.”
“From what I’ve gathered, Richard Rosenberg was the lawyer who came to secure a witness against him. They found a broken digital recorder and an empty briefcase in the lawyer’s hotel room. I’m guessing whatever they had on him was destroyed. And I’m pretty sure Calvin, or someone working with him, killed him.”
A sniffle draws my attention toward Ivy, who wipes tears from her cheek.
“There’s something else. On one of the nights I stayed with Calvin, I was nosing through his things while he was passed out, just looking for any information I could find. Not that it mattered, but I needed to know. I needed to know if he killed that lawyer. I found a picture of your wife and daughter with an address clipped to it. I recognized them from the news report after the murder.”
“No. The police … they told me it was a break in.” Even as the words tumble from my lips, I knew back then it was a lie. One I’ve never believed, yet right now, I find myself clinging to it, if only for the sake of my sanity, because the picture Ivy’s painting is too hard to look at. “Val wouldn’t have testified against my father.”
“Are you sure?”
Am I sure? Had she ever once felt anything but contempt toward my father? Was it possible she might’ve seized the opportunity to lock him away for the things she became privy to throughout our marriage, and while working as his bookkeeper? And what wouldn’t she have done to pay for Isabella’s mounting hospital bills, because surely, anyone willing to go after my father would’ve offered a nice sum of cash. “That would mean that … Calvin was hired by my ...” Shaking my head can’t erase the possibility in all of this, the thin shred that makes all of this plausible.
“I told you. Calvin is a bad man who has done bad things.”
Hands balling into fists at my side, I fight the urge to latch onto the brewing anger toward Ivy, the only link I have at the moment. The only thing attaching me to this chaotic mess hammering against my conscience. A living, breathing catalyst to my pain. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I didn’t know it was your family. The husband was Anthony Savio Jr. There’s nothing on him.”
“I changed my name after the murders. I joined the priesthood to start over. To get away from the rage and this … life.”
“I’m sorry Damon. If I hadn’t given him that file, he wouldn’t have found your family. It’s my fault.”
Another spike of anger rushes through my blood, and I tamp it down for the pieces of this story that don’t match up correctly. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would Calvin go to the hospital to find out where the guy was staying? How the hell would he even know he was there?”
“One of the security guards saw him enter on camera. I told you, he’s got ties to police and security. Eyes all over the city. He doesn’t deserve to live for what he’s done. Who he’s hurt.”
Which is probably why the police lied to me. Why they played it off as a simple break in, and closed the case as if it no longer warranted further investigation. As if my wife and daughter had died for something insignificant and meaningless. “And you didn’t know it was me? Right. You planned this all along, Ivy. You strung me along, so I’d do your dirty work.” I can’t even bring myself to look at her, for fear I’ll do something un
godly, something I’ll regret when the shock of all this settles in my head. “And now you’re making up some fabricated story, so I’ll kill him for you. You’re manipulative and a liar. So full of shit, it’s leaking out your eyeballs.”
In my periphery, she leans toward me, and at the brush of her hand, I wrench my arm away, not wanting her to touch me.
“I swear to you on my grandmother’s grave, I didn’t make this up. Not this, Damon.”
“Get out.”
“Damon.” The quaver of tears carries on her voice, but doesn’t draw a single ounce of empathy from me. “Please. Don’t do this. I’m sorry. Please don’t shut me out.”
“Get out!”
The moment she exits my car, I hit the gas and take off down the street. Buildings pass in a blur. The sudden need for whiskey tugs at my chest, and it isn’t coincidence when I pull the car into the liquor store parking lot. I buy a fifth and leave the twenty bucks in change on the counter, letting the wrath whisper its dark and chilling assurances in my ear. Whispers that promise pain and revenge—all the things to which I vowed never to fall victim again.
Isabella.
Her name echoes inside my head as, once outside, I tip the bottle back, letting the warm liquor burn my chest and straighten the thoughts beating against my skull in punishing cadence. In the center of the storm is a woman with bright green, hypnotic eyes, the kind designed to draw a man in and make him forget everything. A potent dose of lust that overwhelms the senses and weakens the mind. Even with all this anger, all this reason to hate her, I still want the woman behind those eyes.
The sinner. The manipulator. The unforgiveable starlet in every fantasy I’ve had over the last few weeks. She lied to me, and I was right about one thing all along.
Ivy really is poison in my blood.
17
IVY
Parked on the floor of my apartment with a bottle of wine and a cigarette, I open the letter from Mamie. Probably a bad idea to read it now, of all times, but I need her words more than ever. What I wouldn’t give to have her sitting beside me, stroking my hand with her warm, wrinkled skin, telling me everything will be okay.
