Page 73 of A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel 1)
“Abuse has nothing to do with kink,” Dad says sharply. He sounds very sober right now. “And it especially has nothing to do with what kind of power dynamic gets you off. I’ve known Dominants gentler than Mother Teresa, and submissives more vicious and ambitious than you could ever imagine. Ralph was a tainted man who just happened to get off on pain. It didn’t stop him from trying to control everyone and everything around him. It didn’t save him from himself.”
I think about this a moment. “Did Mom ever want to marry him? Like before she knew how awful he was?”
“Of course not.” My father’s voice is still sharp. “I told you that we loved each other deeply—we still chose each other, we still chose our commitment to each other and to you, and she didn’t entertain his ideas for a single second. It infuriated him. Enraged him beyond all measure, but the angrier he got, the more she’d punish him, and the more she punished him, the more he wanted to marry her. It was a vicious loop, and it finally twisted hard enough that I thought it would strangle us all. Everyone had to leave before our work was finished, and it was the end of whatever we had. I haven’t spoken to any of the others since.”
I try to remember the day we left, if the adults had seemed angry or strained or sad. But I can’t picture any of their faces, hear any of their words. I’d been too busy saying goodbye to the other children, memorizing the color of Auden’s eyes and the shape of St. Sebastian’s hands, and there’d been no room for me to notice how the adults felt when I felt so cheated and wronged to be taken away from my friends and the magic house of Thornchapel.
“Why did we come to Thornchapel at all?” I finally ask. “How did you meet everyone? What were you working on?”
He answers after a long pause. “It’s a conversation we should have in person. It’s a very long, very weird story.”
“Weirder than telling me that you and Mom slept with other people, and oh, sometimes she beat them too?”
He lets out a tired laugh. “If you can believe it, yes. It’s even weirder than that.”
“I’m holding you to your word,” I say. “I need to know.”
“You could come home now and I could tell it to you?” he offers hopefully.
“Dad.”
“Just promise me you won’t go out to the chapel ruins,” he says. “Don’t go into the woods. Especially not today. Please.”
What can I say to him?
Sorry, Dad, I can’t promise that because a bunch of us are going out to the ruins to have a sex party in the dark?
“Okay, Dad,” I lie. “I won’t go out there tonight.”
“Good.”
The rain’s swallowed the house now, we’re in a world of rain, and the narcolepsy creeps back for me, clutching at me with fingers made of yawns and nods. I manage to say goodbye to my father—after getting his repeated assurance that he will finally tell me the story of the adults that summer—and then I lie back down and disappear into dreams of mud and sex.
Dreams of tonight.
Chapter 22
To Thee Do We Cry, Poor Banished Children of Eve
The sawn boards give off a pleasant fresh-wood smell as St. Sebastian carries them into the clearing. He skipped the maze and went to the ruins using one of his poacher’s paths through the trees, wood lengths balanced easily on one broad shoulder. It takes four trips to get all the wood into the clearing, a final trip to bring out the tools he borrowed from Augie, and then he gets to work assembling the low platform in front of the altar.
He loses himself in the tactile, methodical comfort of building, in the music of the drill and the clink of screws in his palm. The world outside the clearing slinks away from here, and by the time St. Sebastian finishes, there’s mud on his knees
and his hands, and one thick daub across his cheek, as if he’s been marked with the only world that matters. The only earth, which is the earth of Thornchapel.
His mind is clean and clear. He likes this work. He likes this place.
He stretches his back and examines the fruits of his labor.
The platform is much smaller than a stage, but it’s big enough that six adults could lie comfortably on it. There’s enough room between it and the altar that all six of them could easily congregate in front of the grassy mound, and there’s enough room between the platform and the front of the chapel that they can still safely build a fire inside.
It will be warmer than laying in the mud.
It occurs to him, as he walks around the platform examining it for flaws, that this is the first project he’s ever finished. The first idea sparked in his mind that he didn’t eventually snuff out with his inevitable indifference or doubt. He had the idea for the platform last night as he lay awake in bed, thinking of Proserpina’s kiss, of her hand on his erection, of the curve of her breast in his hand before he ruined everything. He wanted to say sorry and he wanted to atone and he also wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she admitted that he was right and she was better off without him.
He wanted to explain somehow that his entire life was defined by one moment, by one cowardly moment, and he’d never forgive himself for it and no one else should either. He wanted to explain that he’d once done the worst thing one person can do to another, and in the process, had scorched the inside of his soul beyond all redemption.
He wanted to explain to Proserpina that she scorched him all over again, but in the best way. In a way that made him feel like he wasn’t such a fuck-up, that he could be good, that maybe being scorched clean actually meant that everything unnecessary had been burned away to make room for something better.
