Karin Slaughter - Faithless

She parked at the front of the church, leaving the doors unlocked as she walked toward the front gates of the memorial garden. The area was well lit, overhead lights illuminating the grounds. She knew she had driven here for a reason. She knew what she needed to do.

Someone had planted a handful of pansies by the entrance to the cemetery, and they swayed in the breeze as Lena walked by. Sibyl’s grave was to the side of the grounds that bordered the church, and Lena took her time walking through the grassy lawn, enjoying the solitude. She had spent almost twelve hours straight on her feet today, but something about being here, being close to Sibyl, made the walk less daunting. Sibyl would have approved of being buried here, Lena always thought. She had loved the outdoors.

The cement block Lena had upended and used for a bench was still on the ground beside Sibyl’s marker, and Lena sat down, wrapping her arms around her knees. In the daytime, a huge pecan tree gave shade to the spot, tendrils of sunlight slipping through the leaves. The marble slab marking Sibyl’s final resting place had been cleaned to a shine, and a quick look around at the other gravesites proved that this had been done by a visitor rather than the staff.

There weren’t any flowers. Nan was allergic.

Like a faucet being turned on, Lena felt tears pool in her eyes. She was such a horrible person. As bad as Dale was to Terri, Lena had been worse. She was a cop: she had a duty to protect people, not scare the shit out of them, not grab their wrist so hard that she left a bruise. She was certainly in no position to call Terri Stanley a coward. If anything, Lena was the coward. She was the one who had scurried off to Atlanta under the cover of lies, paying some stranger to slice out her mistakes, hiding from the repercussions like a frightened child.

The altercation with Terri had brought back all the memories Lena had tried to suppress, and she found herself back in Atlanta, reliving the whole ordeal again. She was in the car with Hank, his silence cutting like a knife. She was in the clinic, sitting across from Terri, avoiding her eyes, praying it would be over. She was taken back to the freezing operating room, her feet resting in the icy cold stirrups, her legs splayed for the doctor who spoke so calmly, so quietly, that Lena had felt herself being lulled into a sort of hypnotic state. Everything was going to be fine. Everything will be okay. Just relax. Just breathe. Take it slow. Relax. It’s all over. Sit up. Here are your clothes. Call us if there are complications. You all right, darlin’? Do you have someone waiting for you? Just sit in the chair. We’ll take you outside. Murderer. Baby killer. Butcher. Monster.

The protesters had been waiting outside the clinic, sitting in their lawn chairs, sipping from their thermoses of hot coffee, for all intents and purposes looking like tailgaters waiting for the big game. Lena ’s appearance had caused them all to stand in unison, to scream at her, waving signs with all sorts of graphic, bloody pictures. Obscenely, one even held up a jar, the implied contents obvious to anyone standing within ten feet of it. Still, it didn’t look real, and she wondered at the man- of course it was a man- sitting at home, maybe at his kitchen table where his kids sat and had breakfast every morning, preparing the mixture in the jar just to torment frightened women who were making what Lena knew was the most difficult decision of their lives.

Now, sitting in the cemetery, staring at her sister’s grave, Lena let herself wonder for the first time what the clinic did with the flesh and bone they had removed from her own body. Was it lying somewhere in an incinerator, waiting to ignite? Was it buried in the earth, an unmarked grave she would never see? She felt a clenching deep down in her gut, in her womb, as she thought of what she had done- what she had lost.

In her mind, she told Sibyl what had happened; the choices she had made that brought her here. She talked about Ethan, how something inside of her had died when she started seeing him, how she had let everything good about herself ebb away like sand being taken with the tide. She told her about Terri, the fear in her eyes. If only she could take it all back. If only she had never met Ethan, never seen Terri at the clinic. Everything was going from bad to worse. She was telling lies to cover lies, burying herself in deceit. She couldn’t see a way out of it.

What Lena wanted most of all was to have her sister there, if only for a moment, to tell her that everything was going to be okay. That had been the nature of their relationship from the beginning of time: Lena fucked up and Sibyl smoothed things over, talking it through with her, making her see the other side. Without her guiding wisdom, it all seemed like such a lost cause. Lena was falling apart. There was no way she could have given birth to Ethan’s child. She could barely take care of herself.

“Lee?”

She turned around, nearly falling off the narrow block. “Greg?”

He emerged from the darkness, the moon glowing behind him. He was limping toward her, his cane in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other.

She stood quickly, wiping her eyes, trying to hide her shock. “What are you doing here?” she asked, rubbing grit off the back of her pants.

He dropped the bouquet to his side. “I can come back when you’re finished.”

“No,” she told him, hoping the darkness hid the fact that she had been crying. “I just… it’s fine.” She glanced back at the grave so that she wouldn’t have to look at him. She had a flash of Abigail Bennett, buried alive, and Lena felt an unreasonable panic fill her. For just a split second she thought of her sister alive, begging for help, trying to claw her way out of the casket.

She wiped her eyes before looking back at him, thinking she must be losing her mind. She wanted to tell him everything that had happened- not just in Atlanta, but before then, back to that day she had returned to the police station after running some samples to Macon, only to have Jeffrey tell her that Sibyl was gone. She wanted to put her head on his shoulder and feel his comfort. More than anything, she wanted his absolution.

“Lee?” Greg asked.

She searched for a response. “I was just wondering why you’re here.”

“I had to get Mama to bring me,” he explained. “She’s back in the car.”

Lena looked over his shoulder as if she could see the parking lot in front of the church. “It’s kind of late.”

“She tricked me,” he said. “Made me go to her knitting circle with her.”

Her tongue felt thick in her mouth, but she wanted nothing more than to keep hearing him talk. She had forgotten how soothing his voice could be, how gentle the sound. “Did she make you hold the yarn?”

He laughed. “Yeah. You’d think I’d quit falling for that.”

Lena felt herself smile, knowing he hadn’t been tricked. Greg would deny it at gunpoint, but he had always been a mama’s boy.

“I brought these for Sibby,” he said, holding up the flowers again. “I came yesterday and there weren’t any, so I figured…” He smiled. In the moonlight, she saw he still hadn’t managed to fix the tooth she had accidentally chipped during a game of Frisbee.

He said, “She loved daisies,” handing Lena the flowers. For just a second, their hands brushed, and she felt as if she had touched a live wire.

For his part, Greg seemed unfazed. He started to leave, but Lena said, “Wait.”

Slowly, he turned back around.

“Sit down,” she told him, indicating the block.

“I don’t want to take your seat.”

“It’s okay.” She stepped back to place the flowers in front of Sibyl’s marker. When she looked back up, Greg was leaning on his cane, watching her.