without turning her into the sort of mess that enraged their mother. The game was supposed to end there, but it never did.
He was not lithe like Cade. He maneuvered on his elbows to turn toward the exit, cumbersome, working against his belly. And she pounced, springing from her corner to land on his back, asnatched the cuffs from his belt. He cried awwww in defeat, and she slapped them on his wrists pulled behind his back as he writhed against the earth. Above him her body rocked as if on a boat. Sometimes she grabbed him by the front of his hair, what she could grasp of it, and pulled his head back to see him wince. Sometimes she scrambled away and left him to flick his thumbs against the levers in hope they would release.
It wasn’t this that started it. It was already there: the particular, pinpoint thrill, one that came with the amorphous sense that she should not talk about it. That the pleasure of overpowering him was far disproportionate to what it ought to be.
She thought about it often. On the stereo in their station wagon there was a knob for the volume and a sliding control that deepened the bass. If she slid it lower, even the lightest song on the inspirational-rock station developed a palpable throb. Made it vibrate in her bones. Her predilection was the same way. No matter how sweet the song inside her, if they drove past a traffic stop and saw a man being taken into custody, or if in the church coatroom a man struggled to get out of the sleeves of his coat, the bass lever in her throttled downward. By thirteen she knew it was shameful. Anything that made your thoughts go that way was a shame on you, by its very nature. Get thee back, Satan. It was almost certainly what the apostle Paul had meant when he wrote about the thorn in his side. The church, her pastor said, was a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints. And so there she was, more and more often, and that was not shameful.
Then she was fourteen, and there came the day of the Easter passion play. She wore a smock made of sackcloth and a thin crown of flowers. She was part of the Hallelujah chorus. The man playing Jesus, naked but for a rag wrapped around his hips, hauled his cross through the street that led to the church’s front yard. The Romans hoisted him onto the cross and, because the Jesus of their play was a real man and not a martyr, bound him to it with lengths of rope. His head lolled back, the tendons in his neck thrust and trembled against the thin skin, his hands contorted. She felt dizzy with the thrill and the horror. She was certainly damned.
When Dodge started coming around, drinking beer with her dad in the living room and inviting her to talk to him about school, she welcomed his attention with an almost frantic enthusiasm. When he asked if she would ride with him over to the sport shop to pick up a new vest for hunting season, her father gave his permission. They fucked in the front seat of his truck, and she was grateful. She was damned now for a specific, common thing. She would be in hell for a crime she could name. To see Dodge helpless with desire for her was empowering. And to take pleasure from him—for he offered it effusively—was surely nowhere near as evil as taking it alone, with thoughts as aberrant as hers.
She was a good woman now, and she lived a good life. She knew she was forgiven of her sins, although she could never quite believe that a payment would not be extracted from her sometime in the future. A reckoning, not for her sins, which were forgiven, but for her nature, which she carried inside her through her Christian life like a swallowed balloon full of heroin.
She told herself she needed to put her faith in God and know her fears were unfounded.
And then Elias shot himself in the head.
Chapter 24
Jill
In the days between Elias’s death and his funeral, Leela cooked. She abandoned her workroom and spent what seemed like all day in the kitchen, making casseroles and long pans full of green beans seasoned with bacon, scooping precise balls of cookie dough onto baking sheets. Whatever wouldn’t fit into her own refrigerator she