Confessions Read Online Free PDF

constructed sandwich on the counter and went to the front door. I opened it to find two faces. One familiar, Reverend Harrold Garner, the department’s senior chaplain, and one not. An officer in uniform. A captain. They wore grave expressions with an open resignation. As if there were no other manner possible about them right then. Something terrible had painted that look upon them, and it could not be wiped away or willingly made to be something less foreboding. I puzzled for a moment at them, wondering in that instant before knowing what could have brought them at that hour with dread in their eyes.
    Then they told me.
    It is odd to recall it now, all things up to that moment crystal clear in my mind, but the hours and days after learning that my sister had been killed a warren of places and conversations and plans all lost in a foggy state of consciousness. I wonder if it was so for those who experienced the events I mentioned earlier. Did people wander in a daze following Pearl Harbor? Did the basics of life continue—eating, sleeping, breathing—without the texture and feelings which defined one day as different from the last, or one moment?
    A few minutes after being given the news of Katie’s death I was in the back of an unmarked CPD car, Reverend Garner next to me and the captain at the wheel. I did not know his name, and to this day I still have no idea who the man was who drove me from St. Mary’s to my parents’ house in the dark.
    Officers arriving at the market where she was shot found her identification, a driver’s license clutched in her dead hand with a fifty dollar bill, and one had recognized her last name. Had wondered if this could be any relation to Gus Jerome. A cursory exploration of that possibility had confirmed that she was. Some harried discussion had followed as to how to notify their brother officer of his daughter’s death when someone interjected my newish involvement with the department.
    I was to be told first.
    It was assumed, I imagine, that I would simply accompany Reverend Garner and the captain to my parents’ house to be present as they were notified. As they were officially told of Katie’s murder during an attempted robbery of a market none of us had ever heard of. That was what I was told on the doorstep of the rectory. That was the plan as we drove the few miles to share the awful news. That was the intention as the captain pulled to the curb in front of the house where Katie and I had grown up.
    But as we walked up the path to the front door that sequence of events yet to play out seemed impossibly detached. I could not stand by as witness to what was about to transpire. I could not simply observe. She was not a stranger whose untimely passing I was only connected to by my position and my calling. She was my sister. My flesh and blood. I could not be the face my parents looked to after learning of their daughter’s death—I had to be the face they were looking at as they learned it.
    And so I told them. The reverend and the captain did not challenge me in that decision as I stopped them on the way to the door and announced my intention. They did not intervene when the door opened and my father and mother appeared together. They stood by in support only as we entered the house and gathered in the cramped foyer. They listened as my mother gave a soft, detached whimper upon hearing the news, retreating almost immediately to the living room a few feet distant where she settled into her rocker by the fireplace, letting the motion of the chair lull her to a place more distant than was now usual for her.
    My father made no sound, standing rigid, nothing seeming to move about him. Nothing seeming to change. But I saw it in his eyes. An avalanche of boundless grief. As if a piece of his soul had just washed away, no different than footprints gone from a sandy beach as the tide rolled in. There one instant, but not the next. You glance away and they are no more.
    And from there