Sin of the Saint

CHAPTER TWO: A FINAL LETTER

Liv sat herself down between her parents after coming back from the bathroom. She tugged the cardigan even tighter around herself, nervously hiding her newfound secret: a pair of angel wing tattoos that she knew for a fact, she had never gotten—and yet there they were, plain as day, on the backs of her shoulders.

That couldn't have been in her head, either, because that girl Felicity had seen them, too. She was the one that noticed them to begin with. But how...how had she gotten them?

It had to be a joke her younger brother played on her...painting wings on her back one of the few times this last week she'd taken a sleep tab and clocked out. She resolved to address him when she got home and then scrub the stupid things off.

The rest of the funeral service had passed like Liv had been trapped in a snow globe—caged in with all her guilt for Charity's death as well as her million questions about her new "tattoo" or its legitimacy. Charity's three brothers and her father—her pall bearers—had taken her coffin out to the cemetery, where the rest of the funeral party followed, each taking a yellow or white rose from a vase by the door.

Liv pressed a thorn from the rose into her palm, trying to feel something, trying to wake herself from her own stupor. She bled from multiple places on each hand with no result. Her ears didn't hear the prayer the priest had said, nor the final goodbyes her family members uttered to Charity before they began to lower her coffin into the grave.

She couldn't speak or even cry—her shock had been too great to will her body to feel any kind of emotion at all. Since Charity's death, Liv had felt like she was drowning at sea...coming back up for air some of the time, but most of the time...she felt like this. Alone, dying in the silence of her own mind.

Then, one tone—one voice...then many...sounded. The voices filled the infinite space of the outdoors, resonating off of the millions of gravestones. These sounds finally forced a crack into Liv's mental shell.

She raised her head to see a handful of male high school students, her age, though none of them familiar, standing in a line along the length of Charity's grave. They sang a song Liv knew to be Charity's favorite hymn from her church. On the end, a stringy, auburn-haired boy stood with an acoustic guitar on a strap, strumming the chords and plucking notes underneath the beautiful four-part harmony the other boys sang.

Liv watched him intently. The guitarist never opened his eyes, yet his emotion reached all who watched, the way his hands moved across the frets, strumming across the strings, stopping every so often to gently slap the strings or the polished wood to create a beat. His head leaned this way and that, leaning into each note, each chord...his face contorting and relaxing, releasing on each resolution...communicating his own unspoken grief. And for just a moment, while focusing on this boy and the music, Liv felt awake...alive...having forgot all about her tattoo problem, and even just for a breath, she forgot about Charity.

He opened his crystal blue eyes then, meeting Liv's stare, and it seemed she could finally hear the lyrics the other boys sang. She could finally hear. Everything from the sorrowful whimpers of Charity's family members and friends to every lyric of the transposed hymn...she could now comprehend. The message of the song finally became clear to her: Charity was now in God's loving arms...welcomed back home.

Instantly, her eyes shifted from the guitarist to the sinking coffin, and a knot formed in her throat. The music had evoked something within her—summoning her grief all at once to the surface. The strength left her knees and she fell forward onto her knees, clutching her stomach and sobbing. Her tears fell freely from her eyes and dripped onto the grass. As the song continued, it seemed to massage the emotional pain from her body, forcing it out through her tears, though the process wracked her body with a whole new kind of pain—a physical pain—and she couldn't take a full breath of air, as if a giant fist wrapped itself tightly around her torso, squeezing the air from her lungs.