Confessions Read Online Free PDF Page A

Into something from nothing. Possibility from random assertions. I should not allow such theorizing in myself. Should not harbor a willingness to entertain the fantastic.
    I should not.
    “When did this happen, Eric?” There are too many things wrong with what I have just done to list. Above and beyond all, though, I have interjected myself into what should be a sacred moment for this man. To any observer it might seem innocuous. A simple query. Posed innocently to aid the dying man in clearing his conscience. It is not that, I know. I ask because an answer to the question exists, and I want to hear it. I want to hear him speak the words that put the remote likelihood of what I am thinking to rest. I want to learn that the timeline of his transgression does not fit. That he was party to murder last week in a desperate bid for cash to feed his obvious drug habit, or a dozen years ago when he was a miscreant fresh out of high school taking his first steps on a path counter to all that is good and right. This is what I want to know so that I can be what I am supposed to be right here, in this place and moment, for this man.
    He seems to puzzle over the question I have posed him, or maybe he is surprised that I have asked it at all. I take this as a sign my foolish wondering is wrong. The deed is too far in his past to clearly recall. This I believe.
    This I want to believe.
    “How long ago, Eric?”
    “Five years,” he says, and a sickly lightness begins to fill me. Like I am falling upward. “Five years ago.”
    “Where did this happen?” I press him gently, leaning closer, the confusion, surprise, whatever it is in his gaze doubling on itself. To the point it is indistinguishable from fear.
    “Here,” he answers.
    “In the city?”
    His head bobs slightly. Weakly. I lean closer still.
    “Where in the city?”
    For an instant his eye drifts off of me. Not looking at anything in the here and now, but to another time, another place. Dredging that place from memory. Recalling it with unwanted clarity. Reliving what happened there.
    What he did there.
    His eye tracks back to me. A tear spills from it. Drags a wet streak down his blood-stained cheek.
    “Tyler Street,” he tells me, and in the instant after he utters those two words, as they connect undeniably with other specifics of what he has confessed, the world as I have known it, all the terrible and the wondrous, changes.
    And I with it.

Chapter Four
    That Night
    I had to tell my parents their daughter was dead.
    I have tried to bury that time. To lay a veneer over memory that, on occasion, has yielded and allowed snippets to invade my consciousness. Now that thin skin of manufactured self deceit has been shredded, and what was , is again.
    Six minutes past midnight, May 10 th , 2005. My second year at St. Mary’s. I was associate pastor then, a year away from ascending to full responsibility for the parish upon the death of Father Oliver Simon. It was with him that night I was engaged in the kind of random discussion common among those who are not friends in the truest sense. The simple back and forth where acquaintances edge toward friendship. He was inquiring as to my recent appointment to the chaplaincy program of the Chicago Police Department as we stood in the kitchen, he filling the coffee maker for its morning duty and I assembling a late night turkey on wheat. I was telling him that my six months working on the periphery of the CPD had given me more insight into the job of a police officer than my thirty years as the son of one had. That was entirely unfathomable to Father Simon, and he probed as to whether there was a distance between my father and me which I had not revealed. I was on the cusp of explaining my father’s way, the Great Wall Of Dad which protected family from job, and job from family, when there was a knock at the door.
    Three knocks. Solid. Official.
    There are no good reasons for the sound at the hour I heard it. I laid my half