THIRTY-FOUR DAYS BEFORE

The woman entered the confessional room that Saturday afternoon without any shame or chagrin, an abnormality for a sinner at reconciliation. She slammed the door behind her, sat in the chair across from Rafael’s, looked him in the eyes, and asked for an exorcism. 

Her decision to sit in the chair instead of kneeling and hiding behind the perforated metal screen was another divergence. Many preferred to be shielded as they confessed their sins, as if tucking trespasses into unlit corners made them less condemnable. Rafael could hardly make out voices through it, but most parishioners knew by now to speak loudly and clearly. When he leaned close, he could usually piece their words together. He managed—he always did.  

Rafael’s breath caught, just for a moment. “An exorcism?” he asked. It was an unusual request, certainly, but it was far from the most shocking thing he’d heard in that room. He was a relatively young priest at thirty-five but had already become somewhat accustomed to the horrific and inventive ways human beings could harm one another, and themselves.  

He felt something stir in his gut. Not complete disbelief, but not quite the opposite, either. 

“Yes, please. It’s urgent.” The woman slouched in the chair. Her hair was short and brown and mostly hidden underneath a Colorado Rockies baseball cap. Rafael focused on her mouth as she talked so he could fill in the gaps of what his ears, and his hearing aids, couldn’t pick up. Her lips were so chapped that spots of peeling skin were flaking off, and in the silence that followed her request, she picked at the loose bits. 

“For whom?”

“Me,” she said, resolutely.

“You’re…possessed?”

“I have an evil entity inside me, yes.” 

Rafael waited for her to say more, but she didn’t, just crossed her arms and stared at him. Her gaze was steady, sincere. He felt the same stirring in his gut, more insistent than before.    

“Well,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Let’s just proceed with confession first. You might find that after receiving the Lord’s forgiveness, you no longer feel the…weight of this, well…what would you call it?” 

She didn’t miss a beat. “Let’s just stick with ‘entity.’”

“Okay, entity. After confession, you may not feel as burdened. You may be delivered,” Rafael said. Then, he added, “without the…well, the hassle of an exorcism.” 

She laughed. The spread of her lips opened tiny wounds, though if she felt any pain, she didn’t make any indication of it. “Hassle? Is that what it is?” 

Her laughter felt jarring in that space, which was so often hushed. The confessional room was plain. There was no ornament, no grandeur, just two chairs, a small table between them, a cross on the wall, and the screen with the worn kneeling cushion behind it in the corner. That was where most people hid from him, the man they had to speak through to reach God. Not her. It was not God she had come for, but him, Rafael. 

Rafael did not enjoy performing reconciliation, not because of the task itself, but because of that room. It was as if the air in it was thicker, perhaps stuffy from the absence of windows, and occasionally, he felt as if the walls were caving in, heavy from decades of absorbed prayers. “Well,” he said, refocusing on the woman, “the number of candles alone…it’s quite the ordeal.” 

The woman’s mouth twitched. Almost a smile. “I don’t really remember how to confess. I haven’t done it since I was a little kid.” 

“That’s okay. I can talk you through it. And we have cards for the Act of Contrition.” He gestured at the pile of prayer cards on the table. She grabbed one. 

“Laminated,” she noted, flicking it with her finger. Her nail made a thwack against the plastic. 

“Yeah. I wasn’t sure the laminator was the best use of parishioner tithes, but the administrator insisted,” Rafael said. “Clearly, it was worth the investment.” 

“Are you trying to be funny?” 

“It’s not a great sign that you have to ask.” 

“No, it was funny,” she said. “I just didn’t think priests could have a sense of humor, I guess. Especially during reconciliation—aren’t you meant to be an instrument of God right now? Like, his Divine Ambassador?” She placed the prayer card neatly back on the pile, without so much as a glance at the words on it. 

“Divine Ambassador,” Rafael said. “Now there’s a great band name.”

“My God, you are funny!”  

He smiled at her, delighted in the feeling of being something unexpected. She appeared to be around a decade younger than him, and making her laugh made him feel not quite younger, but more age-appropriate. Or perhaps he just felt more human, rather than a Holy in-between. 

“Thank you. You did, however, just violate the second commandment,” Rafael noted. “So, you might as well confess your other sins, too. You’re already here.” 

She shook her head. “I just need an exorcism, and I figured confession would be a good way to get face time with a priest. If you won’t do it, could you help me find someone who will? Like, give me a business card, or something?” 

“I don’t have any other priests’ business cards. I don’t even have my own business cards.” 

“That’s a shame,” she said. “You should get on that. You could have them laminated.” 

Rafael smiled at her, then checked his watch. The scheduled hour for reconciliation had ended five minutes ago. 

“I’ll tell you what. Confession is over. Come out with me to the nave. I want to pray anyway, so I’ll pray out loud, and you can just sit next to me. If, a week from now, you still feel you have your entity, you can come back, and we can talk about an exorcism.” 

She sighed. “I don’t really want to wait a week, Father. I can’t.” 

“Okay,” he stood up. His legs ached from sitting still for so long. “There’s another reconciliation Wednesday afternoon. Can you come then?” 

She stood carefully, like an old woman would. “Yeah,” she said. 

She was so unsteady on her feet that Rafael offered her his arm. She waved him away. “Okay,” he said. “Pray with me today, and if on Wednesday you feel you still need an exorcism, come back. And we’ll talk about it.” 

“I can’t waste time talking about it, Father. If I come back, you have to do it. Will you?” 

Rafael paused. He could not, of course, perform an exorcism. He had not been trained in the Rite; he did not have express permission of the bishop. There were rules he must obey.    

“Okay,” he said. A lie. “But let’s try this first? Let us pray.”  

And so, they did, side-by-side. As the priest spoke his prayers into the hush of the empty church, the crucifix hung above them, Christ’s body outstretched in a solemn arc. Afternoon light filtered in through the stained-glass windows, casting ribbons of color across the floor, painting the dust motes that glittered in the shafts. Everything felt still.    

THIRTY DAYS BEFORE 

Again, she waited until the end of Reconciliation hour, and again, she strode into the small room, slammed the door, sank into the chair, and asked for an exorcism. “The entity is still with me,” she said. She wore the same ballcap she had a few days prior. “I need a deliverance.” 

“What’s your name?” He asked her. 

“Jo.” 

“Jo. I’m glad you’re here,” he said, honestly. 

“I need an exorcism, Father.” 

“We can talk about it,” he said. “But we need to discuss what receiving an exorcism actually entails. It’s more of an…administrative process than you might be aware of, and it might take some time—” 

Jo was already shaking her head. “No, Father,” she said, slowly, as if each word was weighted, dragging something behind it. “I don’t have time. I need you to do it soon, okay?” 

He swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t. Not all priests do exorcisms; there’s specialized training that I don’t have, and I need permission from the bishop—” 

“So do the training!” She exclaimed. “Get permission! Do what you have to do! Priests are supposed to help, right? ‘Give to those who ask,’ and all that? That’s in the Bible somewhere.” 

“Matthew,” Rafael said, softly. His eyes stayed fixed on her mouth, which was drier and bloodier than it was before. Priests are supposed to help. Her words felt simultaneously like an accusation and a plea, and he felt them press on him, insistent. 

“I am begging you, Father…”

“Rafael,” he said. 

“What?” 

“My name. It’s Rafael. You can call me Father Rafael, if you’d like. Or just Father. Or just Rafael, if that feels better for you. I don’t mind.” 

“Rafael,” she said. She paused for a moment and then lowered herself, shakily, to the floor, kneeling before him. He wanted to help her up; he did not want her at his feet, but he didn’t dare try to move her. She looked down. “Please. I am begging you—” he heard, but the rest was lost to him.

“I’m sorry, Jo. Can you look at me when you speak?” 

She raised her head to look at him. “Why?”  

“I have a disease,” he said. He saw a flicker of something in her eyes, which were wet with tears—pity? She pulled herself up to sit in the chair, maintaining eye contact, breathless from the effort. Rafael hadn’t noticed it last time, but her eyelashes and eyebrows were so light he couldn’t even see them, a stark contrast to the dark brown beneath her ballcap. 

“A disease?” she asked.

“Meniere’s disease. It’s a disorder in the inner ear. My hearing…it’s very bad. I rely a lot on lip reading, so it’s helpful if you face me when you talk. I’m sorry.” 

She picked at a piece of dry skin on her lips. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “That sounds…that’s awful. Is it both ears?” 

He nodded. “Usually it’s just one, but mine has progressed to both. I got it young. Unlucky, I guess.” 

“I get that,” she said. “Bad luck.” 

“It’s not so bad yet. I have hearing aids, and they help some, although voices are still hard for me. And I find comfort in living a godly life. In Second Corinthians—” 

“Please don’t quote the Bible at me,” she interrupted.

He didn’t press her. “I’m just glad I went to seminary,” he said. “Not just because of my faith. I wanted to be a musician, and I imagine going deaf would be a lot harder if that’s who I’d become.” 

“You’re a singer?” 

He laughed. “I wish! No, I play the organ. Played. I loved it. That’s how I became a priest, actually.” 

“How’s that?”

“I grew up in a city called Amarante, in northern Portugal,” Rafael said, and he saw his childhood home in his head, terracotta rooftops spilling down the hillside toward the river Tâmega, the steps of the São Gonçalo church worn from the passing feet of the faithful, from his own feet. “My uncle was the organ player at the church there. He gave me lessons, and I fell in love. At first I thought I was just in love with the instrument, the music, but no—it was the place too. The church. It was God.” 

“So, what, you just gave up on the organ? To become a priest?” Jo’s desperation from moments ago seemed to have dissolved, though she still seemed weary, depleted by the kind of exhaustion that thrums deep in the body, in the marrow of bones.  

“No, I still played. My seminary had an organ that I played often.”

“This church doesn’t have an organ.”

Rafael had asked about an organ when the bishop appointed him. “There’s a piano,” the bishop had said, as if they were the same. That was nearly a decade ago, and he’d learned to play the piano, which he liked too, even if it was less extravagant, its single row of keys a modest offering compared to the organ’s stacked tiers, which could send sound climbing the walls and settling in the rafters. 

But then, five years ago, as he played Ave Maria on the piano in his rectory, he experienced an awful, nauseating pulsing. His first episode of vertigo. The music, his favorite sound, bent in strange directions, distant and warped. He received his diagnosis shortly after, and he hadn’t played since. 

Rafael looked at Jo. “Your lip is bleeding,” he told her, pushing the box of tissues in her direction. She took one and pressed it to her mouth. 

“No, there is no organ here,” he said as she blotted. “But my rectory has a piano, which I’ve learned to love, too.” 

A few beats of silence passed. Rafael waited for her mouth to move. 

“You aren’t going to do the exorcism,” she said, finally. She crumpled the bloody tissue in her fist. 

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Jo. I can’t. But I’ll help you. I’ve contacted the exorcist for this diocese, and I can help you with the medical examination—” 

“There’s a medical examination?” Her voice sounded terse, anxious instead of angry or exasperated, as it had been before. 

“Yes, just to make sure you’re not mentally ill.” 

“I’m not mentally ill.” 

“The church just needs confirmation of that before—” 

“I don’t get it, Rafael,” she snapped. “You are a priest, aren’t you? Can’t you just say some prayers for me? Sprinkle me with some water?” 

“I can do those things,” he said. “I have been praying for you already, in fact. But if it’s an exorcism you want, it’s just a bit more…involved, we’ll say, than I think you’re imagining.” 

Jo stood quickly and swayed, unsteady. He stood and offered his arm, which she took this time. “Are you okay?” he asked. 

She blinked a few times. Her eyes looked foggy. “I just stood up too quickly,” she said. “It’s nothing.” She released his arm and turned away, stopping for a moment when she grabbed the door handle before turning it and leaving. That night, as Rafael dusted the piano in his rectory, he wondered if she’d said something he couldn’t hear in that pause by the door. 

TWENTY-SIX DAYS BEFORE 

In hindsight, Rafael felt foolish for not catching on sooner. He hadn’t realized what kind of deliverance Jo needed until he saw her after the 8:00 Mass, without the Rockies cap and without the hair she’d had before. I get that, she’d said when she’d learned of his disease, about the tragedy of becoming ill at a young age, bad luck. 

“Hello, Father,” she said. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were not blonde. They were absent.   

“Jo,” he said. “I’m happy you’re here.” 

“Something happened,” she said. 

“Yes?” 

She lowered her head and mumbled something, but then stopped herself and faced him, began again. “I was wearing my wig, which I always wear a hat with because the top of it just looks really…well, wiggish, so I hide it with the hat…but then one of your church people told me I wasn’t allowed to wear caps during Mass. And she was really rude about it, and I…I was having a rough morning. So I just whipped everything off in front of her and said, ‘I have cancer, now how do you feel?’ And then she cried.”

Cancer stuck out, painful, like a splinter in his palm. 

“That was probably Brenda,” he said, after a beat. “She’s…traditional.” 

“Well, can you tell Brenda I’m sorry? But also, maybe to cool it with the dress code?” 

“I’ll talk to her.” 

“Thank you.” 

Jo looked uncomfortable—in her baldness, in the church. She nodded at him, resolutely, and turned to leave. “Do you want a donut?” Rafael asked. “We always have them on Sundays. Donuts. The ones with pink frosting are pretty good.” 

Jo shrugged. “Okay.” 

“Did you enjoy the service?” he asked her after they’d made their way into the assembly area and gotten donuts and coffee. They sat at a table at the edge of the room, far from the other people nibbling and chatting. Brenda stood in one corner and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. 

“Do you want me to be honest?” Jo asked. 

“Catholics are generally against lying.” 

She rolled her eyes at him, then took a sip of coffee out of the Styrofoam cup and grimaced. “You should tell your administrator to allocate more of the budget to the coffee.” 

“Believe me, I have.” 

“No, I didn’t enjoy the service,” Jo said. 

Rafael nodded. “That’s alright.” 

“It’s not your fault, though. I’ve never enjoyed church. I used to go with my parents all the time, and I’ve been thinking about all this a lot recently, you know? Religion. Faith. I didn’t just show up at a random church and ask for an exorcism. I am technically Catholic.”  

“Why don’t you enjoy it?” 

Jo sighed. “The same reasons a lot of people don’t, I guess,” she said. “It’s boring. It doesn’t make any sense. And I’ve been pretty pissed off at God recently.” 

“Why’s that?” Rafael asked, as if he didn’t already know, as if he wasn’t familiar with that kind of anger.

Jo scoffed. “Is that a joke?” 

He hadn’t meant it to be, but perhaps they both could use some levity. “Will you be upset if it is?” 

She shook her head.

“Well then, yes, it’s a joke.” 

She laughed, but the laughter sounded strange, more strained than when he’d made her laugh before. When she stopped, her cracked lips began to quiver. “God gave me cancer,” she said. “Or if he didn’t give me cancer, if he just made the world and humans and did all the stuff in the Bible and then left us alone, then he gave me a body with cells that mutated into cancer. In fact, he gave all of us bodies with cells that can potentially go rogue and destroy us, and I don’t really see why he would do that. And everyone always talks about God being Love and Mercy and all these other wonderful things, but that’s not really what I’m seeing, you know? And I haven’t been perfect. But I don’t really think I deserve this. I’m going to die, Rafael. They can’t do anything else for me, and apparently you can’t either. So, yeah. I’m fucking mad.” 

Rafael didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. She bit into her donut. 

“I don’t think an exorcism would’ve helped.” Rafael said gently. 

“Why not? I have an evil inside me. I want it to be cast out. That seems apropos for an exorcism.” 

“It’s okay to be afraid—” 

“You know how in the Bible, that girl dies, and on his way to seeing her, Jesus heals that sick woman? She touches his clothes, and she’s healed, and Jesus says, ‘Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.’ And then he goes into the house and raises the girl from the dead.” 

“Right. That’s in Mark.” 

“You know what’s always bothered me about that story? We don’t even know their names, the woman and the girl. And we don’t know what happens to them after. The Bible focuses only on Jesus, on the healer, instead of on the healed. I want…” she trailed off. 

Rafael stayed quiet. She was right. Jairus’s daughter was never named, and neither was the healed woman.

“I’m dying, Rafael, and I don’t know what to do.” 

He cleared his throat. His mouth tasted like bad coffee. “In the story of Jairus’s daughter, Jesus says to the woman, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you,’” he said. 

Jo rubbed her eye with the back of her hand, took another bite of donut. “I was afraid you’d say that.” 

“Why?” 

“If faith is what it takes to be healed, then I’m a goner. I can’t just…I can’t. I wish I could.”   

Rafael felt the ache of her hopelessness like a dissonant chord. He remembered the feeling that hung in the air after he struck the jarring notes of augmented triads with his uncle, but those were always temporary, a catalyst for resolution. “Resolve it, Raf,” his uncle used to say, when he lingered too long in the dissonance. 

He could not resolve this, he knew. All he could do was sit with it, with her.  

THIRTEEN DAYS BEFORE 

He’d convinced her, in the time they’d spent together as her condition worsened, to make a final confession. “Even if you don’t believe in it,” Rafael said at one of the many dinners Jo’s parents invited him to, “I think it will make you feel lighter. And it will make me feel better.” 

“And that’s what’s most important,” she’d said, as she rolled her eyes. 

He would not hear her confession; they agreed that it would be inappropriate now that they’d developed their unlikely, unfettered friendship, but he offered to accompany her to a church a bit further away so she could confess to a different priest. 

She was quiet as he drove. “Are you nervous?” he asked, glancing over to her, curled up in the passenger seat. She was bald and skinny and delicate-looking, like a newborn bird, and the sight of her caused a sharp anguish in him.   

He prayed for her, of course, but his prayers felt somehow changed, like they weren’t sacred enough. He spent his time with God making frenzied, frantic pleas instead of hopeful requests for a peaceful transition, like he’d done for other dying people. That is what she was, he knew, no matter how inconceivable it felt. A dying person. He felt entrenched in the inevitability of it.  

“Of course I am,” she said. “I’m about to tell all my sins to some stranger.” 

“You’re not saying them to the stranger, not really,” Rafael said. “You’re talking to God. Through the priest.” 

“That doesn’t make me feel better, believe it or not.” 

She didn’t say anything else during the drive and stayed silent as they waited in line. She’d written her sins on a piece of notebook paper, which she folded and unfolded as the people in front of them shuffled through the confessional room, until the creases were so worn Rafael worried the paper would tear. 

“You don’t have to be ashamed, you know. Of what you’ve written,” he said, glancing down at the paper, shaking in her hands. The writing was smudged, her fingertips gray. 

She didn’t say anything, and then it was her turn to confess. 

When Jo emerged from the room fifteen minutes later, her eyes were red and her skin, on her face and on her scalp, was blotchy. She walked directly to Rafael, the paper with her sins written on them balled in her hand. 

“Are you okay?” Rafael asked. 

She raised her head so he could see her lips. “I’m supposed to do five Our Fathers.” 

“Okay,” Rafael said. 

“Will you do them with me?” she asked, and then her breath caught, jagged, and the tears came. She fell into him and cried, and he held her, bore the lightness of her sick body, trying to still her shaking. He pressed his palm softly against the soft flesh on the back of her head, like he pressed his own palms together in prayer.   

The others waiting to confess looked away politely, and once she seemed able to support herself again, he led her into a pew in an empty corner of the church. It was, he assumed, where the choir stood during Mass—there was a piano there, and music stands, and some steel folding chairs. He kneeled with her and bowed his head, noticing gray smudges and damp spots on his white button-down from her fingers and tears. He prayed out loud, five Our Father’s, words he’d said thousands of times, and she wept. A crucifix loomed above them, its shadow stretching over the pew.  

After he’d finished her penance, they sat in the pew. Minutes passed, then a half-hour. “Will you play something?” she asked, finally, looking at the piano. 

He hadn’t played since the night of his first vertigo. That night, as he heard the music he loved twist into something else entirely, something unfamiliar and awful, he felt his heart break in a specific, unfixable way. He could not resolve it. There was nothing to be done.  

The piano was not the cause, he knew, but he didn’t think he could survive that again, that mutilation of his most beloved sound. So, he had stopped playing. His piano gathered dust, until recently. 

“Oh, Jo. I haven’t played in a long time.” 

“Please, Rafael,” she whispered. “I want to hear you play.”  

She wanted to hear him play. Finally, something he could do. 

As he ran his fingers over the smooth keys, a neglected devotion stirred in him, a rekindling. His hands yearned for the organ keys in that far-away church, his first love. “Any requests?” he asked. 

“Do you know Clair de Lune?” 

He did. The song, gentle and tender, unfurled through the church like incense, swirling through the emptiness and the high, arched ceilings. It did not twist or distort, as it had that night long ago, when his disease had first surfaced. That was, he knew, its own kind of grace. 

NINE DAYS BEFORE 

“I can come back,” Rafael said. “When you feel it’s time. I can do the Anointing of the Sick, if you want…” 

“Raf, please,” she said. 

Everything she did seemed laborious, even just breathing and speaking from her hospital bed. Her IV machine beeped beside them. “You said you wouldn’t try to…you know I don’t want…” 

“I know.”

She raised her lashless eyes to his, and he, in her look, felt what she did: a coming-to-an-end, a goodbye. It was as imminent as the silence that he knew would be complete one day. There was so much he was in the midst of losing. A passio. 

He knew about prolonged suffering. He knew who he was supposed to turn to. 

“I can come,” he cleared his throat. She looked away from him. “I can come just to say goodbye, if that’s something you want. Just as me. As Rafael. I won’t perform any sacraments, or even pray, if you don’t want me to. I just…” 

Her eyes returned to his. She nodded. “Please,” she said. “I want you there.” 

AFTER 

At his request, the church arranged for a substitute for the first two weeks following Jo’s death. “You should go somewhere,” the church administrator suggested, tenderly. “Take a vacation. You deserve it.” 

There was nowhere he wanted to go. Instead, he spent hours playing Clair de Lune on the piano until his fingers ached. He played with none of the steady gentleness the song, and his life, his profession, asked of him. He banged the keys as hard as he could, and still, the music was quiet, although whether the muffled sound was due to his disease or his grief, he did not know.   

On the first Sunday after Jo died, Rafael returned to Mass for the first time in days. He typically celebrated daily, as he was encouraged to do in seminary, but now he was suddenly afraid that he wouldn’t know what to do at the altar, where to place his hands, what words to say.  

He went because the expanse of a Sunday without a Mass seemed too big, and the idea of it gave him the same unease he felt as a child when he sat beside the Tâmega at night, black and enigmatic. Time, drenched in grief, stretched before him like that unknown water. So he went. 

The church microphones weren’t working, and many of the volunteer readers were soft-spoken, so when they stood before the people and read from the Holy Book, he heard almost nothing. He knew they read, because that was what the structure of the Mass asked of them, and because he saw their mouths move, but he was too far away to make sense of the shapes. The church was too big and too empty, and all the space swallowed any sound his failing ears might have received. Rafael closed his eyes and, finally, stopped fighting the silence, allowed it to seep into and through him, bleeding like ink into paper. The quiet felt like peace. 

Until. 

Until the visiting priest, with a resounding voice that Rafael could feel in the rumbling of the pew beneath him, began his homily. “Our readings today act as a lesson in salvation,” he said. His voice echoed amongst the other sounds that Rafael could no longer hear—sounds of people existing among one another; coughs, sniffles, throat-clearing. Rafael was, suddenly, distinctly aware of his aliveness, the way he felt his exhaled breath on the tip of his upper lip, the ache of his back arched with the stiff wood of the pew, the posture it required he maintain. 

“We heard, in Isaiah, ‘Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid; for the Lord God is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation.’ And so, I ask you now: how are we saved?” 

The priest paused and moved his gaze through the crowd. Color poured through the stained-glass windows, splintering and spilling across the hanging crucifix, cloaking Christ’s lashed, stabbed body in shifting hues of crimson, sapphire, and gold. It made His agony into something fiercely, almost unbearably, beautiful. Rafael looked at Jesus’s face. He wondered if he was supposed to assume this Christ to be dead already, or if the artist intended to capture the death-in-process, Jesus’s final moments alive as man. What were those gathered in the church bearing witness to?  What hung above them? The finality, or the prelude to it? Rafael did not know. There was so much he did not know.     

Rafael leaned forward and pressed his hands together in prayer so tightly his arms began to tremble. He closed his eyes so he could no longer see the crucifix, the light, the rainbow. “How are we saved?” the priest repeated from the sanctuary, and Rafael heard these words without straining, he heard them in his bones. 

Rafael, longing for deliverance, waited for the answer.