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She nods her head contently at my answer, and I can feel myself thawing to her calm.
“Do you think He calls upon people to do His work?” My eyes glance up at the ceiling.
I’m not an idiot, I know my father used God as his reasoning to do bad. But since Rogue, I’ve felt the power inside me grow. I’m starting to doubt my logic.
“You mean people like my husband?” Mrs. Dwight chuckles.
“My husband spends every Sunday here preaching from that book,” her head points over to the stand where his huge Bible lays open in preparation for his next sermon. “I find humor in the fact it was written thousands of years ago and we still use it as our guide. We’ve evolved. Times are different now. The Lord's book needs an update,” she sniggers, who knew the old woman has had a sense of humor for all these years.
“So what brings you back into town?” She places a pad over my cut, then carefully binds my hand with a bandage.
“I don’t know. Anger, resentment. Forgiveness.”
“Oh, so you want His forgiveness too?” she chuckles. “You realize that in order to get that, you have to forgive yourself first. We can’t seek the approval of just one man. We have to find it in ourselves and in the people around us. We have to accept ourselves as the person He created.”
“And what if that person has evil inside them?”
“If you came here a sinner, Richie…” her finger touches the badge that’s sewn onto my cut. “…only you get to decide what man leaves.”
“I want to be the man she deserves. I don’t want to hurt her. I want to heal her,” I confess, and it feels freeing to say the words that have been plaguing me out loud. “I’m scared of what’s inside me. She’s already been broken and she won’t tell me how. Whatever it is that hurt her so badly, I feel the force of it inside me whenever I’m with her. And the pain it causes me makes it impossible for me to imagine what it does to her. How can my damaged soul be any good for hers?”
“People fix each other all the time, they pull strength from each other… that is God’s work.” She looks at me cleverly before snapping the lid shut on the first aid box and smiling at me. She places it back where she got it from and then pauses in front of me.
“He sends things to try us, and when we overcome them, the rewards are great.” I freeze when she places a kiss on the top of my head.
“Be great, Richie.” She smiles at me one more time before she leaves me alone, and her heels clip against the tiny white and red tiles that line the church aisle.
I sit for a while and evaluate what she’s said. I want to believe it’s true, I want to believe in the good. But I haven’t seen much of it in this world.
No one will ever know until their judgment day if all this is real, and pulling my fingers through my hair, I decide that I have to take the risk.
I’ll believe in the higher power until I’m proven otherwise. I’ll have faith that He has work for me to do. My work is to heal Rogue, to guide her forward, and protect her. And when my judgment day comes, I’ll just pray that He forgives me for the things I did in order to make that happen.
I dip my hand into the stoup on the way out of the door, wetting my fingers and feeling the holy water singe my skin as I touch the sign of the cross from my forehead, to each shoulder.
I’ll save Rogue’s soul, even if it means sacrificing mine.
Turns out, my father was right all along.
The power is strong. So strong that it can strike at any time, and this is how I control it.
AGED 18
“Hello, Evangeline.” Frank’s voice makes me shudder. It’s been a long time since one of Dad’s friends turned up here. I knew that Dad was meeting them all tonight at the bar, and this one reeks of alcohol as he sways into my room and sits on the edge of my mattress. Him getting in here proves they still have a key, and I wonder if any of the others have come with him as he starts removing his boots.
I've been doing a lot of reflecting since Chop raped me at the garage last week. I like the person I get to be when I’m there too much to let him take her from me.
Rogue is the girl who doesn’t give a shit, nobody or nothing can hurt her.
Chop looked surprised when I showed up for work the morning after my eighteenth birthday. On the inside, I may have been aching but on the outside, there wasn’t a chink in my armor.
I smiled at him when he turned up for his shift. I made him his coffee, same as I did every other morning, and I carried on as normal. As the day moved on, I started to feel more and more powerful.
Every step I took made me sore, but I never let him see it. I giggled with Skid when he sent Tommy over to the club to ask Prez for a tub of elbow grease, and I sang at the top of my lungs when a song I knew came on the radio. I blanked out all the bad and worked my ass off to show the fucker that he had no effect on me.
It’s been a long time since one of Dad's friends have touched me, I guess I lost my appeal to them when I started to develop, or perhaps they got scared when I dropped out of high school and started working full time at the club. So, as Frank wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and then slides it up my thigh, I wonder what brought him here tonight.
“You wanna play a game?” he whispers, his dirty thumb swiping over my lip. No, I don’t want to play his game. His games always used to hurt.
