Saint Homicide (Single Shot) Read Free

my grief every Sunday and twisted it into an example of perseverance.
    Everyone was kind. For a while. Everyone mourned the loss of Brother Peter, and they mourned the damage done to his daughter and the suffering inflicted on her young husband. Eventually, though, the flowers and cards stopped. Days turned into weeks, and then into months, until now years had passed and everyone had long since gone back to their families and their careers and their favorite television shows.
    My new life consisted of pain and repetition. I tried to adapt. I had been strong after the accident, had kept taking Jennifer to church, had tried hard to accept the instantaneous change from lover to caretaker. For years, I had not been ashamed of myself.
    Then, late one night I was in the den flipping channels on the television and caught a teenage sex-comedy on cable in which the female cast members kept taking off their clothes. In the darkened house, I sat in the television’s dim light and watched the female bodies as if I were watching a big game cat chase down and tear apart a zebra. The next day I cancelled the cable. A few days after that, however, I went to the video store and rented a soft-core sex movie off of the top shelf along the wall, handing over the cassette sandwiched between The Searchers and Vertigo to the smirking boy behind the counter. Late that night, and for several nights after, when I knew Jennifer was asleep, I sat in the weak light of the movie and masturbated.
    Then one night while I was in front of the television I heard a heavy thud in the hallway. I shut off the television and found Jennifer collapsed on the carpet. She cried as I carried her to her room, and she told me she knew what I had been doing. “I know you lost a lot,” she said. “It’s my fault.”
    I shook my head, my face seared with blood and shame, and told her, “Don’t. Don’t ever feel that way.” I tucked her into her bed.
    “Could…” She squeezed her eyes shut, and her pale face, except for the plastic piece in the center, turned slightly pink. “Could you do that now? With me?”
    I had tried. I took off my pants, laid them over the back of a chair, and sat on the bed with her hand in mine. But I could not achieve an erection. Not when I filled my mind with thoughts of Jennifer when she was healthy and strong, not even when I tried to recall the trashy simulated sex from the film. The figures of the naked women from the film only made me think of meat and bone and dismembered animals. Jennifer’s cold hand trembled in mine, her eyes full of something like worry, the plastic magnetized to her skull clicking with every breath.
    We had both cried and to think of it now made me sick.
    I threw out the television set. I devoted myself fully to the Bible. Out of the death and damage done to our family, I felt the Lord pulling me more and more toward the movement to defend life. I studied. I protested. I prayed. And now I had quit my job for the cause.
    Still the thought tugged at me as I lay in bed that night: Why can’t you be a better husband?
    If I’m honest, I suppose I was scared of Jennifer. I was scared of what had happened to her, and I was scared of what she now knew about me. Had she ever told Lynn about the movie? Her teenaged sister was the only person Jennifer confided in. But the girl had never made any mention of it. She never acted as if her impression of me had undergone any change. I couldn’t really tell about her, though. Lynn was so much like Jennifer had once been: strong almost to a fault, keeping her terrors and insecurities so close to her they barely seemed to exist. It was hard to know if anything ever bothered her.
    As if in reply to that thought, the phone rang. Sitting up in the bed, I read my alarm clock. 10:39. The phone rang again, and I slid out of bed and walked over to the dresser. It rang again as I picked it up.
    A woman was crying on the other end.
    “Hello?” I said.
    “Daniel,” my