The Confession Booth

The father had been hearing confessions for twenty-two years and had learned to hold them loosely. You took in what people offered, you offered back what you could, and you let the weight of it pass through you rather than settle. It was the only way to stay standing.

He heard twelve confessions in the afternoon before it happened. Petty things, most of them. One woman who’d been mean to her sister-in-law at Christmas and felt guilty about it still. A man who’d been quietly stealing pens from his office for years, which made him work to keep his face composed. A teenager who had said something terrible to a friend and didn't know how to take it back.

The twelfth was a man he had never seen before.

The man was perhaps mid-forties, dressed in work clothes, with a way of sitting very still that he’d associated with people who were used to waiting. He sat on his side of the screen for a moment without speaking.

“Go ahead,” the father said.

“I need you to hear something,” the man said. “I'm not Catholic.”

“That's all right.”

“I don't know if I believe in any of this.” He said it plainly, not as a challenge. “But I don't have anyone else to tell and I can't not tell someone.”

The father had heard this before in various forms. “Tell me,” he said.

The man told him about the woman. She worked the early shift at a nearby diner, and she left work at two in the afternoon and walked home alone because she didn't have a car. The man knew her route. He knew the alley on where the route became briefly private. He knew she would be there tomorrow at 2:17, and he knew what was going to happen to her because he had already decided what was going to happen to her.

The father sat very still on his side of the screen. “Why are you telling me this?” he said.

“Because maybe you can stop it.”

“You can stop it.”

“I'm not sure I can,” the man said, and the way he said it made the father’s throat go dry. Not like someone confessing a temptation. Like someone reading a weather report.

“There are things I can do,” the man continued. “And then there are things that happen. I don't always know which is which until afterward.”

The father said, “Tell me your name.”

“I'd rather not.”

“Then tell me something. Anything that would help me find you.”

“I'm telling you everything that will help you. Find her, tomorrow at 2:17.” A pause. “Here’s a note with the information.”

The father took it.

The man left without absolution because he hadn't asked for it.

The father sat in the confessional for several minutes after the door closed. The church was quiet. Somewhere a radiator knocked. He read what he had written.

The seal of confession was absolute. It was the thing he had never broken, not once, in twenty-two years. It was the thing that made the confessional what it was. He believed in it the way he believed in almost nothing else anymore, which was with the stubborn and battered faith of someone who had stayed past the point where staying made obvious sense.

He sat with the notepad in his lap and the pen in his hand and thought about her, who existed, he had no doubt about that. She was probably at home right now or getting off her shift or making dinner. She didn't know that a man had sat across from him and described what he intended to do to her at 2:17 tomorrow afternoon.

He had eighteen hours.

He folded the piece of paper and put it in his breast pocket. Then he sat for another minute. Then he took the paper out again and unfolded it and looked at it.

He thought about what the man had said. Things I can do, and then things that happen. He'd known parishioners who described their own worst impulses that way, as if they were watching themselves from a distance. He had never found it convincing as an excuse. He didn't find it convincing now.

The man had come to him. That mattered. Whatever the man believed about himself, he had driven himself to a church and sat down in the dark and told someone. That was not nothing.

The father put the paper back in his pocket. He left the confessional and went to his office and stood at the window looking down at the street. He thought about a law he had heard once, something to do with the duty to prevent a crime. He thought about the difference between what he could prove and what he knew. He thought about the woman walking home alone on a y and not knowing anything about any of this.

He picked up his phone. He put it down. He picked it up again. He did not call the police. He called the diner.

The woman who answered was not the woman, but when he asked to speak with her, she came on after a women. Her voice was a little wary, carrying the particular tiredness of someone in hour six of a long shift.

“I don't know you,” he said. “My name is a priest from the church nearby your diner. I'm not going to explain why I'm calling, just to ask you to please change your route home or take the bus or ask a colleague to walk with you.”

A long silence. “Why?” she said.

“I can't tell you why. I'm asking you to trust me without a reason.”

Another silence. “Okay,” she said, then, “Okay, Father.”

She hung up. He put the phone down and stood there. He didn’t know if she would listen. He didn’t know if it would matter. He didn’t know if the man would find another day, another route, another way. The seal was intact. He had told her nothing. He had only asked.

He thought he would not sleep tonight.

He sat down at his desk and folded his hands and looked at the space in front of him for a long time and tried to figure out if he had done the right thing, and found that he genuinely could not tell.