Confession, forgiveness, and absolution

Confession, forgiveness, and absolution are bound together in Maren’s search for a way to live with what she has done, but the novel keeps their promises in tension. A radio preacher offers forgiveness through faith and self-forgiveness; Lee challenges the comfort of that certainty; and Maren’s later attempt to confess to the police ends with her destroying the evidence she prepared. The sequence makes confession more than the naming of a wrong: it is a test of whether truth can bring release, or only make a person answer for the past.

The Promise of Forgiveness

After dinner, Maren and Lee lie in the flatbed listening to Lee’s transistor radio. Among ball games and political talk, Maren finds a live religious program. The preacher addresses ordinary strangers as brothers and sisters, extending kinship even to a colleague who is cruel or a thief who has emptied someone’s jewelry box. His appeal is not simply to forgive other people: he insists that people cannot forgive one another until they have forgiven themselves. Forgiveness is presented as both communal and inward, a responsibility toward others that depends on facing one’s own guilt.

Maren gives the broadcast an imaginative force beyond Lee’s casual listening. She pictures the preacher as a tall, thin man in a gray suit and crimson bow tie, with thick black glasses and a small scar on his brow. The audience’s distant calls of praise establish that this is a live gathering, not a private sermon devised for her. Yet the radio makes its welcome feel personal: Maren imagines herself at the front of the crowd, where the preacher asks why she has come. A tinny voice answers for her that she is there to forgive and be forgiven. Her imagined response gives shape to a desire she has not yet been able to state directly.

Lee’s reaction sets a skeptical counterpoint. He dismisses the broadcast as the sort of religious programming that can be heard anywhere in the country, and Maren bats his hand away when he reaches for the dial. When he calls her Sister Maren, the language of fellowship becomes teasing rather than consoling. The preacher’s message therefore reaches Maren in the presence of someone who does not share her absorption in it. The scene holds open the difference between hearing a promise of absolution and trusting that it applies to a person whose guilt has not been disclosed.

The Cost of Disclosure

The radio preacher describes people who admit that it is difficult to be good and urges them to let the Lord help them. Lee can agree with the difficulty, but not with the religious answer. He challenges Maren to enter the hall the following night and tell Reverend Figtree exactly who she is and what she has done; he says he will accompany her if she does. His condition makes disclosure the test of the sermon’s promise. It is not enough for Maren to imagine herself among people seeking forgiveness: she would have to bring her actual actions into that public space.

Maren curls into Lee’s sleeping bag and does not answer. She thinks it foolish to imagine that anyone could grant absolution without knowing what she had done. The hesitation exposes a contradiction at the heart of her hope. She longs for forgiveness, but cannot regard a general promise as meaningful if it has not encountered the particulars of her guilt. Lee, meanwhile, warns that she may be seeking not truth but the preacher’s bubble of sunshine and certainty. His challenge does not settle whether religious forgiveness is possible; it forces a distinction between comfort that leaves the secret untouched and confession that risks making it known.

A Confession Prepared for the Police

Later, Maren turns from imagined religious testimony to a written statement addressed to the authorities. She tells Lee that the document begins by identifying her as sixteen and anticipates that its account may sound like a sick joke. It directs readers to compare the names and dates with missing-person reports. While waiting for Lee, she has looked up police-station addresses in the towns where she committed the crimes, written the confession in her notebook, and made nine photocopies. The pages translate private guilt into a proposed record that could be checked against public evidence.

The list names ten people and places the deaths across fifteen years, from Penny Wilson in or near Edgartown in 1983 to Andy, a Walmart employee near Pittston, Iowa, in June 1998. It includes Luke Vanderwall, Jamie Gash, and six other named victims between those entries. The accumulation gives the confession a starkly administrative form: names, ages, locations, and dates rather than a plea for sympathy. Maren is not merely considering whether to tell someone; she has prepared copies for police in several towns and is still deciding where she should wait for them.

When Lee says nobody will believe her, Maren answers that perhaps they will. She invokes the belief that truth will set her free, but her plan remains practical as well as moral: the missing-person reports are meant to verify her account. The statement’s opening anticipates disbelief, while its reference to corroborating names and dates tries to answer that disbelief in advance. Confession here is not presented as guaranteed absolution. It is an act of exposure whose consequences Maren cannot control, and whose credibility she can only try to establish.

The Destruction of the Statement

After Sully leaves the cabin, Maren waits an hour and sees that he does not return. She takes the photocopies from her rucksack, crumples them, and feeds them into the fire one by one. The repeated physical act reverses the work of writing and copying: the document that was meant to carry her account outward is reduced to something she can destroy alone. Her choice comes after the departure, but it does not bring relief or resolve the guilt that prompted the confession.

Maren concludes that the truth will not set her free and fears she will only end up like her father. That thought recasts the hoped-for promise as a threat of repetition: disclosure appears to lead not to release but toward an ending she associates with him. The novel does not make the destruction proof that she no longer wants forgiveness. Instead, it leaves her caught between the need to acknowledge what she has done and the fear that acknowledgment will not save her. Across the radio sermon, Lee’s challenge, the carefully copied pages, and their slow destruction, confession remains both a possible beginning and an unbearable risk.