Oblivion Read Online Free Page B

childhood Sundays in his second-floor rectory, gazing out the window at the labyrinth below, while he stole my mother away to the room he perversely called the confessional. Some days I’d wander, if they took their time about things. It was a great pleasure to ring the bells in the tower, for their cacophony drowned the sounds of my parents having sex. I’d stand in the belfry, spying on the teenagers in the maze of hedges, watching them lock hands, lips, bodies. Forbidden energy abounded on that hallowed ground, but I didn’t understand the dichotomy of such a thing back then. I simply yanked on the bellpulls so I didn’t have to stand witness to the sounds coming from the confessional.
    I can’t pinpoint, exactly, the day I noticed that theirmeetings in the confessional were less about getting off than control. But one day I noticed my mother’s expression as she closed the door lingered somewhere between dread and hopelessness. It was then I’d realized Palmer had broken her spirit, but I couldn’t understand why she returned to him day to day, week to week, year to year.
    A man of God. A reverend. His congregation adores him still. They don’t know him like I do. They don’t know he abuses his position of power to manipulate, to control. They don’t know, like I do, that he’s capable of taking Hannah—and breaking her the way he broke my mother.
    The day the police found me at the Vagabond, I provided evidence that Palmer Prescott was not what his public assumed. I think Detective Guidry believes me, even if he can’t prove it.
    I didn’t know until Palmer sent my mother away that he was my father. She never told me, she gave me her last name, and he never treated me with any privilege, or unfair expectation, to set me apart from any other children of the congregation. In my mind, I scan the crowd amassed for one of Reverend Palmer’s sermons. I search for faces like mine. I wonder if I have brothers and sisters, I wonder if he treated other women the way he’d treated Mom. And often, I’d wished I weren’t an only child, when Mom would fade away for a few hours, when she’d morph from a vibrant, artistic nurturer to a sobbing mess for seemingly no reason.
    I feel the stones beneath my feet, take in a deep breath of night air. Sometimes it’s surreal to consider that I made it out of the chaos. Sometimes I have to remind myself that life with Palmer is over—at least for me. And sometimes, despite the concrete evidence surrounding me—Lindsey, the house behind me, the Catholic high school uniform hanging in my closet—I still can’t believe it.
    Lindsey unlocks the shed and flings herself into one of the vinyl beanbag chairs resting on the indoor-outdoor carpeting within. “Dude, I talked to Jon tonight.”
    I sink into a chair opposite her, near the leak in the roof, and toss her The Little Mermaid . “Really.”
    “Yeah. Marta and I ran into him at Caribou.”
    “What did he have to say?”
    “Well, I mean, we didn’t exactly have a meaningful conversation. Just bullshit, you know.” She pulls out her bowl, a colorful contraption of iridescent greens and purples, and packs a few pinches of pot into it. “Talked about school and stuff. He says Mr. Willis must’ve been cracked for assigning a twelve-page essay on a novel, even if it did win a Pulitzer. Says we should revolt and crucify him. So glad I have Hayhurst for Lit.”
    Crucify, crucify, crucify .
    “Crucify?” I shift uneasily. “That’s the word he used?”
    “Yeah.” She shrugs, as she tests the flame on her lighter and lowers it. “He was pretty stressed out and worked up about it.”
    “Interesting choice of words.” Considering, of course, that it’s been spinning in my head all day.
    “Guess you were right about the bookish thing.” She brings her lighter to her bowl.
    I pull this week’s well-worn notebook from my backpack.
    “Great idea.” The crackling of leaves under flame meets my ears. She holds in her