Page 103 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
“It was behind the altar,” Saint says quietly. “My shovel caught the tip of it, and then I had to.”
“Had to what?” I whisper, turning back toward the mud.
“I had to keep digging,” he says. Sadly. “To see if there was more.”
I take a step and then another step, but I’m not even really sure where I’m going or why I’m going—except I do know, that’s the terrible truth, I do know where I’m going.
I do know why.
Saint didn’t have to dig deep. Less than foot down and a foot into what used to be the hummock of the altar, I see the pearled scatter of finger bones. Higher up, the deceptively graceful curve of an orbital bone and the unmistakable beginning of the dome of a skull.
A human skull.
Human finger bones.
My mother’s driver’s license trembles in my hand.
“No,” I say.
“The license was where maybe a coat pocket would have been,” he says softly. “Poe, I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry.”
“No,” I say again, louder this time. My voice doesn’t sound like my own—it’s garbled and broken and so high-pitched it sounds like a child’s. “No.”
“Poe . . .”
“They searched here,” I tell him, my voice still wavering and thin. “They searched here. They didn’t find her. She wasn’t here, this isn’t her—”
“Poe.”
“It can’t be her,” I say, I plead, and then I’m crying, so fast and so hard that my entire body is shaking with it. “It can’t be, I know it can’t. She can’t really be—”
I’m on my knees now, but I don’t remember falling there. I’m on my knees and Saint’s on his too, and he’s holding me, crooning something low in my ear, soothing me like you’d soothe a wild animal. He’s stroking my hair and rocking me back and forth and nothing is real, nothing can be real right now or ever, ever again.
“Shh,” Saint comforts me. “Shh.” And then he starts murmuring something I don’t recognize at first, until suddenly I do. It’s the Salve Regina—the closing prayer of the Rosary. One of those prayers Catholic children grow up with stitched into the background noise of life, one of those prayers so ever-present that I can’t even remember when I first learned it.
“Hail, holy Queen, mother of mercy,” he says, “Hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope.”
I know he’s searching for something, anything, to help me right now, even a prayer he doesn’t believe in. But it works. The familiar cadence of the words cuts through my hysteria the tiniest bit—I’m able to fill my lungs, able to feel the cold mud on my knees.
“To thee do we cry, poor, banished children of Eve,” he continues, and I’m able to breathe again and again and again. I know this prayer, I’ve heard my parents pray it. I grew up praying it. I’ve heard Becket pray it.
I murmur the next part along with St. Sebastian, clutching my mother’s driver’s license tightly in my hand as we do. “To thee do we send up our sighs,” I say. I dare a look at the bones again, at where they peek out from the wet, rich earth. “Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.”
Next to, and slightly above, the bones, I finally see the altar stone itself. Thick and gray.
I stop praying.
“Poe?” Saint asks, feeling me stiffen all over again. I don’t answer, because I can’t, because everything is suddenly gone from me—even the prayer, even the tears.
On the edge of the altar stone, on the side that would have faced the priest, is carved a single word in a very ancient hand. The carved letters are deep enough that most of them are still filled with mud, although Saint’s scraped the stone clean enough that the word is clear and legible, a word I’d be able to read even if I’d never seen it before.
But I have seen it before.
The word is in Latin.
All along, the answers to all my questions were right here at the thorn chapel’s altar. Buried and just waiting
to be found. I turn my face into Saint’s chest so I don’t have to see that word anymore, so I don’t have to see my mother’s picture or my mother’s orbital bone or the grass that once covered my mother’s grave.
