The wound felt deep and fatal. “I didn’t—”
“Think?” he demanded. “You didn’t get it through your twisted fucking head after it happened to Callie, after you intentionally and willfully murdered a man, that maybe it’s a bad idea to connect another teenage girl with a goddam rapist?”
All of the breath left her body.
She felt her feet start to float away from the floor. Her hands fluttered into the air as if her blood had been replaced with helium. She recognized the sensation from the days before, the lightness that came when her soul couldn’t take what was happening, so it abandoned her body to deal with the consequences. She realized now that the first time she had felt it happen was inside Buddy’s yellow Corvette. The Deguils’ house was outside the window. Hall & Oates was playing softly on the radio. Leigh had floated against the ceiling, her eyes closed but somehow still seeing Buddy’s monstrous hand wrenching apart her legs.
Jesus your skin is so soft I can feel the peach fuzz you’re almost like a baby.
Now, Leigh watched her own shaking hand reach for the small, silver handle on the door. Then she was stepping down the metal stairs. Then she was walking down the driveway. Then she was getting into her car. Then the engine was rumbling and the gear was shifting and the steering wheel was turning and Leigh drove along the empty road away from her husband and child, alone in the darkness.
Thursday
13
At what felt like the crack of dawn, Callie got off the MARTA bus at Jesus Junction, an intersection at three roads in Buckhead where three different churches competed for clientele. The Catholic cathedral was the most impressive, but Callie had a soft spot for the Baptist steeple, which looked like something out of Andy Griffith, if Mayberry had been filled with ultra-wealthy conservatives who thought everybody else was going to hell. They also had better cookies, but she had to admit that the Episcopalians knew how to rock a pot of coffee.
The Cathedral of St. Phillip was at the crest of a hill that Callie had been able to easily climb before Covid. Now, she followed the sidewalk around to the side, taking a slower incline to reach the meeting space. And still, her mask was too much for the journey. She had to let it hang from her ear so she could catch her breath as she walked toward the driveway.
BMWs and Mercedes peppered the parking lot. Smokers in business attire were already congregating around the closed door. There were more women than men, which was not unusual in Callie’s experience. The preponderance of DUI arrests fell on men, but women were more likely to get court-ordered AA than their male counterparts, especially in Buckhead where high-dollar lawyers like Leigh helped them walk away from responsibility.
Callie was twenty feet from the entrance when she felt eyes on her, but not in the usual, wary way that people looked at junkies. Probably because she wasn’t dressed like a junkie. Gone were the cartoony pastels she normally chose from the kids’ rack at Goodwill. A deep raid of her bedroom closet had delivered a long-sleeved black spandex top with a scooped neck and form-fitting jeans that made Callie feel like a slinky panther when she’d modeled them for Binx. She’d tied it all together with a pair of scuffed Doc Martens she’d found thrown under Phil’s bed. And then she’d risked pink-eye using her mother’s make-up to follow a ten-year-old doing a YouTube smoky eye tutorial.
At the time of her self-Pygmalion, Callie’s only concern had been to pass as a non-junkie, but now that she was out in the open, she felt conspicuously female. Men were appraising her. Women were judging her. Gazes lingered around her hips, her breasts, her face. On the streets, her low weight was a sign that something was wrong. In this crowd, her thinness was an attribute, something to be appreciated or coveted.
She was grateful to be able to pull up her mask. A man in a dark suit nodded at her as he held open the door. Callie resisted the urge to shudder at the attention. She had wanted her costume to buy her entry into normal society, but she hadn’t realized what that society was like.
The door closed behind her. Callie leaned against the wall. She pulled down her mask. From down the hall, she heard beeping and snorting and giggles from the pre-school of boisterous children gearing up for the day. Callie took another few moments to collect herself. She pulled her mask back on. She went the opposite direction from the toddlers, coming face to face with a giant banner that said GOD IS FRIENDSHIP.
Callie doubted God would approve of the kind of friendship that she had in mind this morning. She walked under the banner toward the meeting rooms, passing photographs of the reverends and the very reverends and the reverend canons from years past. A paper sign taped to the wall pointed toward an open door.