She drops her backpack with a thump on the floorboard and twists to buckle her seatbelt. “I see you’re not wasting any time in challenging me.” Her voice is mild, a little wry maybe, but when I look over at her, I immediately feel like shit. She looks fucking exhausted, and she smells like cheap tomato sauce and infant formula. The lumpy backpack between her feet is clearly stuffed with textbooks and there are dark smudges under her eyes that speak to how late I kept her up last night.
My dick fusses at me, but I decide the minute we get home that I’m tucking her into bed.
“That was thoughtless of me,” I admit, starting the car and heading the handful of skyscraper-filled blocks home. “I had a weird conversation with my mom tonight, and it’s fucking with my head. But that’s not an excuse.”
“The conversation was about God?”
“Yes. I found a rosary on her table, and I just…” A tight anger fuses in the knob of my throat. I feel like a parent discovering a bag of meth in a teenager’s room. “How could she?” I burst out. “After what happened to us? After what happened to her only daughter?”
Zenny’s quiet for a moment, leaving us with the echoes of my outburst. I try to swallow it down, I try to reel everything back in, but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
“How do you think she could?” she finally asks.
“I—wait, what?”
“You asked a rhetorical question, and I’m asking the same question, only not rhetorical. Place yourself in her shoes, with her memories and her life, and then ask yourself how she could pray the rosary again.”
“The thing is that I don’t know,” I say, frustrated. “How can she forgive God for letting that happen? Lizzy loved God so fucking much before she—” I stop, full of the same wounded anger I felt the day after her funeral, when Tyler and I got into my car and her stupid Britney Spears CD had started playing. Neither of us had realized she’d been the last one to drive it, and we’d crawled in—me drunk as fuck and Tyler hung over—and then we’d heard it. The music that Lizzy had loved, had sung badly in the shower, had saved up babysitting money so she could go hear live in concert—it came spilling out of the radio at full volume, and I’d lost it. Just lost it, like a fucking maniac, kicking the shit out of my dash until I’d finally smashed something crucial and made the music stop.
I still can’t listen to Britney Spears. Not without that memory howling up inside me. Not without feeling like I want to tear apart the world with my bare hands.
My baby sister. My annoying, funny, nosy, and earnest baby sister. Gone.
All these years later and it still won’t stop fucking hurting. And it’s God’s fault.
“There’s a story Elie Wiesel tells,” Zenny says, and her voice anchors me back, away from the screaming drunk boy and to the man I am today, and I feel my chest loosen the tiniest bit, my hands relax on the steering wheel. I can breathe again.
“It’s about the Holocaust,” she continues. “Wiesel says in Auschwitz a group of rabbis decided to put God on trial. They charged God with crimes against His creation, and it became a real court, a real case. They found witnesses. They presented evidence.”
In the distance, lightning stitches across the sky and wind buffets the car. There’s going to be a storm. And still I find myself settling, easing to the sound of Zenny’s rich alto, to her story.
“The trial lasts several nights,” she says, “and at the end of it, they find God guilty.”
“Good,” I mutter, as the first drops of rain splatter the windshield.
God is guilty. God deserved this trial.
“And then do you know what the rabbis do next?” Zenny asks, gathering her backpack into her lap as I pull into my parking garage.
“What do they do?”
“They pray.”
I park, turn the car off. And then I turn to look at her.
“They find God guilty and then they pray,” she says again, her eyes and her voice and her everything soft and full of something I don’t understand. But it reminds me of the way I used to feel as a child, falling asleep as a music box chimed the notes of “Jesus Loves Me.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” I ask.
“Just that you can do both, Sean. You can do both.”
There is some fuss regarding my bossiness about bedtime—Zenny wants to play our new bedroom games and pouts so magnificently after I order her to ready herself for sleep that I almost reconsider—but I only have to look at the exhaustion around her eyes to remember to hold my ground. I ask her, as always, if now is the time she’d like to declare me an asshole and have me back off, but she shakes her head with a huff and stomps off to the bathroom to brush her teeth. But I know I’ve done the right thing when she’s swaying on her feet while she waits for me to get ready.
“Get in bed,” I say after I rinse my mouth. “I’ll be right after you.”
She zombie-shuffles into the bedroom and then I hear a sleepy, happy squeal from her.
“Satin sheets?”
“And satin pillowcases,” I say, changing into a pair of drawstring pants that hang off my hips. She’s not so tired that her eyes don’t gobble up the sight of my bared torso and hips—and again, I almost reconsider Plan Tucking Zenny Into Bed. But her health is more important than fun, and I climb into bed myself to set a good example. She looks disappointed, but the moment I flip off the lights and gather her into my chest, she turns into a sprawl of tired, heavy limbs.
“I can’t believe you got new sheets for me,” she says.
“I’d get new anything for you, Zenny-bug. New everything.”
“Sometimes you are just too smooth,” she says and I know there’s got to be a smile on her face from the tone of her voice. “But it works somehow.”
“All part of the Sean Bell charm, I assure you.”
Her hair tickles against me as she nods, and I stroke her arm until I feel her breathing relax and drop into a steady rhythm.
“Theodicy,” she murmurs dozily.
“Um. What?”
“It’s called theodicy. When people try to explain how God can still be good when bad things happen.”
“Oh. Okay?”
Her lips press against my chest in the sleepiest kiss ever and then she rolls over onto her pillow, wriggling backward into the cradle of my body. Despite the serious God talk, my cock surges happily against her.
“Some people think it’s a bad idea, trying to justify God’s goodness, because it distracts us from what’s important. It tangles us up in intellectual knots, when intellection isn’t the point. We have philosophy for that. Religion is for ritual, for practice. For moral action.”
“So it’s more important to pray than to figure out God? That seems backward to me. How can you pray to something you don’t understand? To something that might not be good?”
“Credo ut intelligam,” Zenny says. “It means: I believe so that I may understand. But believe is a tricky word in English, and so the meaning of the phrase has gotten slanted over time. The Latin credo came from cor dare—to give one’s heart. What St. Anselm was saying was not ‘assent blindly and uncritically to these intellectual positions about a deity,’ but rather that the intellectual positions were less important than the practice of living a moral life or a spiritual life. He was saying, ‘I commit so that I may understand.’ Or ‘I engage with this because it is the kind of thing that can only be understood by engaging with it.’”