Retribution

"I know what you did."

On the other side of the slatted confessional wall, Father David drew back reflexively, head swiveling in surprise toward the voice of the hidden penitent, whose confession was to be the last of the day. The voice was feminine, young, carried a hint of formative years spent below the Mason-Dixon line.

"Excuse me?" he said. "Do you wish to confess?"

Performing the Sacrament of Reconciliation was relatively new to the novice priest, and he still felt a certain unease about the process, a feeling of voyeurism and judgment that he was not entirely comfortable with. He depended on the rote, the practiced words, to mask his inexperience and discomfort, had expected the familiar, "Bless me Father for I have sinned", and was thrown by its absence.

"Father David," the voice continued. "It's a funny thing about words, isn't it, how they can have more than one meaning?"

Father David had once dropped his prayer book on the floor of the confessional and, when he bent to pick it up, discovered, quite by accident, that he could view the confessional's other inhabitant by peering upward through the dividing louvers. He adopted a similar posture now, head nearly in his lap, looking up through the mahogany slats, straining for a glimpse, needing, suddenly, to put a face to the enigma. He was met by the visage of a young girl, fifteen, sixteen maybe, although it was hard to tell. She looked street-tough, bold, hardened, with spiked black hair, piercings in her eyebrow, nostril, lip. For a moment, it seemed the eyes, a deep shade of emerald, were staring directly into his own, but, he thought, surely that can't be true. Nonetheless, he sat up quickly, feeling like a peeping Tom, caught out. Before he could say anything, she continued.

"My mom used to have a memory box stashed in the back of her closet. I found it when I was about 10. I don't think she ever knew. I liked to take it out and look at the things she had in there. Some of them went back to when she was a girl. I thought it helped me understand her better, you know? Touching those things let me imagine who she had been, what had been important to her, what dreams she had lost."

Father David listened in silence, reverent in the hearing, fearful of the outcome, hands beginning a slight tremble in his lap. Because those eyes were familiar.

"Way at the bottom," the girl went on, "hidden away under all her other memories, there was a folded newspaper clipping. Spencer County Gazette, April 1979. It was a story about a dead baby that had been found in a dumpster in the city park."

The girl paused, inhaled deeply, exhaled loudly, plunged on.

"My mom died six months ago," she said. "She left me this letter. It was her confession, I guess. It said she had met a boy, Davy, way back when, fell in love, got pregnant. They couldn't tell anyone. Her parents were strong Catholics, she said, said they would never have understood, that they would have shipped her off to a girls' home and forced her to give the baby away. So she hid her belly with baggy clothes, and no one ever knew. But something went wrong. The baby came too early, and Davy helped to deliver it in the back seat of his car. There was blood everywhere, she said, both of them were hysterical, had no idea what they were doing. After her last push, she thought she heard the baby cry out, but the boy, Davy, took it away. When he came back, he told her that the baby had been born dead, that he had taken care of it and no one would know. But she heard that cry in her dreams. All her life, she said."

The confessional seemed to be getting smaller. Father David buried his face in his hands. Sweat formed beneath his collar and he had to swallow hard to stem the bile rising in the back of his throat. His persecutor went on, relentless.

"There was a picture of you in that box. David Clementi. She had it written on the back. It didn't take much to find you, just a few Internet searches and there you were. A priest. Who would have thought?"

Father David let his hands fall to his lap and took a deep breath. He cleared his throat, then said quietly, "I am so very sorry about your mother. Was her name Kate?"

"Kate? What? No!" came the indignant reply. "Her name was Anna, ass wipe. Anna Murdoch. You get her pregnant, kill her kid and you can't remember her name? Jackass!" Her fist smashed into the partition directly in front of Father David's face, punctuating her words and causing him to recoil in surprise.

Father David recovered quickly, then said gently, "But that isn't true, child. I did live in Spencer County in 1979. That would have been my junior year of high school. And I remember Anna, now that you say her name. She was a classmate of mine but we were never close. But Kate, Kate had my heart from the moment we met at freshman orientation. I'm terribly sorry, but you are mistaken. I am not the Davy of your mother's letter."

A derisive snort came from the other side of the partition. "How does God feel about liars, Father David?"

"I am not lying, my child. I took an oath, one I take quite seriously, I can assure you. I speak the truth before the Lord our God."

"They kept DNA samples from the baby," she hissed. "I talked to the detective who was in charge of the case. Just so you know. I'll be back, Father," she said, and the door closed behind her.

Father David sank back into his chair. He sat there as the light faded past stained glass saints, as dark crept into the Cathedral, coldness on its heels. Finally, he stood up, reached with shaking hands to remove his clerical collar, placed it reverently on the chair. Then he walked out into the night, to face his own dreams, which would be haunted by the soft cry of a baby with emerald-green eyes and the feel of that child's last breath beneath his palm.