“Ha. Well, it’s actually a place that provides prenatal and postpartum care to women and babies. We went there for a mission trip—it was my first mission trip ever—and I just fell in love.”
“With the babies?”
She spreads her fingers in my hand, gesturing. “With all of it. Every part of it. Mom and Dad had pushed me toward medicine or law, and growing up, I thought that’s what I wanted too. But there was something about medicine that always felt—I don’t know—sterile, I guess. Impersonal. But when I went to work with the nurses and midwives down there, a part of me came alive. It was so necessary, so intimate, so…human. To be with these women while they carried their babies and labored them into the world. And to know what huge differences small interventions could make—it felt magical. There’s no glory in it, there’s no money, but the magic is better than both those things.”
“And that’s when you started thinking about becoming a nurse-midwife?”
She nods. “Dad was so upset. Of course, he’d rather I’d chosen something like surgery or oncology, but at the very least couldn’t I compromise and study obstetrics? But I guess I know too many doctors, and I felt that choosing obstetrics over midwifery would limit me. I didn’t want to be a doctor at all, I didn’t want to be wearing a white coat and playing God.” She sighs, and the sound is mostly lost in the whirr of our wheels over the wood floor. “It was a hard fight. But there was no changing my mind.”
“So what happens after you graduate? Will you ever get to practice midwifery if you’ve taken vows?”
Her face lights up, as if I’ve asked exactly the right question. “I’ll still have two years of midwifery school after I graduate with my RN next spring. But the Reverend Mother and I have plans. See, so many of the people who come into our shelter are in some stage of needing maternal care—either they’re pregnant or they’re about to deliver or maybe they have a young infant and they’re struggling to breastfeed—and most of them don’t have access to healthcare. Some of them are afraid to go to a hospital, even when they’re in labor, because they’re undocumented and they’re frightened of being arrested or deported. Some people simply can’t afford it. So what if we opened up our own birthing center? Here in Kansas City? There’s a huge need for it, and by the time I finish my midwifery degree, we’ll hopefully have enough money and all the right permissions to launch it. We could help so many people, Sean, from all walks of life. We can really make a difference.”
I’m captivated by the passion in her voice. I can’t remember feeling this passionate about anything, about any cause, any vocation, ever in my life, and the gap between us in this is both humbling and absorbing. I feel like I could spend the next year thinking about it and only just begin to unravel the rift between the kind of woman Zenny is and the kind of man I am.
Zenny saw suffering and it made her want to engage and change things and invest her life in helping. The literal only time in my life that I’ve seen and felt real suffering—Lizzy’s suicide—my response was to reject everything. To disengage. To scorn.
For the first time, I begin to understand why Tyler went back to the Church. Why he became a priest.
And suddenly I feel strange about my own choices, about my own convictions. They feel flat and callow next to Zenny’s lively, energetic zeal. I’m not used to feeling that way about myself, and it’s rather uncomfortable.
“If I hadn’t brokered the Keegan deal, how were you planning on fitting a birthing center into the shelter? You’re already crammed into that space just doing normal shelter stuff.”
She gives a shrug. “We would have asked the owner for more space in the building, since it was empty anyway. Or found an off-site location. We have faith that something will open up.”
I’m about to say that she doesn’t need faith, that she has me and I’ll make sure she gets the best fucking space available in this city, but my conversation with my mom is still rattling around my head, a loose ball bearing denting up my thoughts. It’s like no one cares about what I can do when they have faith, and I find that’s making me rather surly.
Instead, I check my watch and see that it’s time for my sixty dollars to find their new home.
“Be right back,” I say, giving Zenny a quick kiss and then dashing off toward the front desk of the rink, dodging teenagers as I go.
And when I come back, she’s leaning against the railing on the outside of the rink, watching the clumps of youths skate around.
“Everything okay?” I ask, because she looks very pensive right now, and not a little sad.
“Oh, yes,” she assures me. “I’m just thinking about things.”
I lean next to her, bumping her hip gently with my own. “What kinds of things? More about the birthing center?”
“I wish. It’s more like thinking about the birthing center made me think about that first mission trip, and that made me think about being a teenager again…like, I just—” She stops, and I get the feeling she doesn’t want to tell me. Or that she does, but doesn’t think she should. Finally she just lets it tumble out. “I’m not much older than the people in the rink, but I already feel like I missed out on so much. I didn’t have Saturday nights to goof around—if I wasn’t doing homework or volunteering or at a debate tournament, it was a dinner party with my parents’ friends or some society event we needed to be seen at. My teenage years were spent trying to make myself into the perfect Iverson daughter, and after I rejected all that, I felt like I had to work even harder. I had to be the best nursing student, the best postulant, to make throwing all that away worth it, and—”
I let her find her thoughts, her center. She’s twisting her fingers together as she talks, and twisting them hard enough to make her knuckles go tight. I don’t like that she’s hurting herself in her agitation, so I slide behind her and cup her hands with my own, forcing them to relax.
She sighs and melts back into me, her hair tickling irresistibly at my neck.
“I guess I just worry that I’ve thrown away the last three years too, trying to prove that I can succeed like this. Like, maybe this whole time I wasn’t working hard for just myself; even if it felt like I was doing it to spite my parents, in a way, it was still for my parents.”
“Are you saying you’re having doubts?” I ask, unable to quell the happy little spit of excitement kindling in my chest. “You can stop trying to prove your parents wrong and stop this nun thing and just marry me instead?”
She shakes with laughter in my arms. She thinks I’m joking.
Wait, I am joking right?
I’m definitely joking. Totally. I’m just joking that I want to see Zenny at the other end of a church aisle in a gorgeous white wedding gown, her nose ring glinting mischievously from under her veil. Or that I want to spend every night for the rest of my life kissing that delicious mouth and watching her sweet belly slowly grow with our children and cradling those tiny babies in my arms as I watched them coo and chirp and blink themselves to sleep.
Of course I’m only joking that I want to spend the rest of my life with the most beautiful, fascinating, sexy woman I’ve ever met. It’s all a joke. Ha ha ha. Hilarious.