The machine finishes up with an obnoxious hiss and then clicks off.
“Are you…” the words are so insane in my mouth that I have a hard time forming them. “Are you asking me to choose between my mother and my job?”
“It sounds so stark when you say it like that. Think of it as adjusted allocation. You’re going to adjust how you allocate your time back to a professional level. And once you show me you can do that, then I’m willing to show you the keys to the kingdom.” His voice is fatherly, warm almost, as if he feels like he’s being magnanimously paternal right now. Meanwhile, my actual father is leaning against a window and staring at a highway, his broad shoulders folded into themselves like wings.
“No,” I say, and it comes out so easily, too easily maybe, given that this is the one thing I used to want above all others.
Valdman’s office, Valdman’s chair. To be king of the garbage people, the biggest eel in the tank.
But I don’t want it anymore, and I’m shocked to realize that it’s not even because of my mom, not even because of Valdman’s cruel ultimatum. It’s because of Zenny and the man I’ve become from knowing her.
“No?” Valdman sounds amused, like he thinks I’m joking. “Sean, be reasonable now—”
“I am being reasonable. My mother is dying. I’m staying with her. Thank you for the phone call.”
And then I hang up. I want it to feel good, but it doesn’t feel like anything.
Dad has to leave around lunchtime to tend to a few things at the warehouse, and I find myself a pale, gelatinous pot pie in the hospital cafeteria and eat without tasting it. Thinking of the pot pie I made for Zenny a lifetime ago. Of making her eat it, watching her soft lips move enticingly over her fork. Of stripping her and tasting her and holding myself still with agonizing strain so she could explore every corner of my body.
And that memory spirals into every other night we shared, every other minute. The laughing, the teasing, the arguing. The discussions about God and poverty. The way I remembered more and more of my forgotten self with her.
How she made me think of the way light falls through stained glass.
That hole in my chest is huge now. Vacant, hungry, chewing through more and more of me, spreading from my heart to my eyes and my stomach and down to my wretched, selfish toes.
You fucked up royally.
The one time something good and pure and true landed in your life, you smothered it with greed, asshole.
Asshole is too good a word for me. I’m subhuman in my selfishness. I’m a rotting pile of shit with nothing to show for my life but an empty heart and a perfect head of hair. It’s dumb that I should have to confront this here, now; it’s weak and stupid that I can’t stave it off any longer, but who am I kidding? How long could I really have pretended to myself that I didn’t care? That I could feel nothing about the one thing in my miserable life that meant everything?
I love Zenny. And I lost her. All because I couldn’t stop being Sean Bell for one minute and look outside myself. All because I couldn’t put her first, not when it meant losing control. She’s gone and it’s my fault.
Okay, and maybe a little bit the Reverend Mother’s. She did say to tell Zenny, after all.
The good thing about hospital cafeterias is that no one looks at you twice when you start crying, which is what I do now, curling over my uneaten pot pie and letting the hole chew through the last remaining shreds of my soul.
Chapter 29
Dr. Iverson is coming out of my mom’s room when I turn the corner, and I freeze. For a very idiotic, teenage second, I assume he’s here to kill me for sleeping with his daughter, and a very brainless, very adolescent panic thunders through me as the father of the woman I love walks my way.
But then reason filters in, and I see him dabbing at his eyes under his glasses with a Kleenex, and I understand. He stopped in to see Mom. To visit her.
“Sean,” he says, extending a hand, and I shake it.
“Dr. Iverson.”
“Can I have a few moments of your time?”
My mind flickers back to Zenny, and I wonder if he’ll kill me slow or quick, but then he simply leans against the wall and takes off his glasses, cleaning them with a cloth he pulls from his coat. I breathe again—he probably wouldn’t excoriate me about having sex with his daughter in front of the nurses’ station, right?
Right?
“Of course,” I finally answer, and I turn to face the window into Mom’s room. From this angle, we can see her bed and a few of her monitors, but she can’t see us. “Was she awake?” I ask, half small talk, half genuinely wanting to know.
“She was. We talked. I regret…” Dr. Iverson lets out a long breath. “I regret not talking with her before this.”
And suddenly it all feels so pointless. So distant, that Sunday afternoon filled with whiskey and pain. Why had we let something so small define something so important? Why had we made our lives emptier at a time when it was already so fucking unbearable in its emptiness? Tyler was right. The Iverson-Bell schism was a mistake.
“I’m sorry,” I say at the same time he says, “I’m sorry—” and then we both cut off with a little chuckle.
“You first, young man,” he says, putting his glasses back on. In the bright sunshine pouring in from the skylight above, I see that his eyes are brown in the middle, glinting into copper at the edges. Just like Zenny’s.
“I wanted to say that I’m sorry for…holding my distance since Lizzy’s funeral. Being angry. What you said to my parents—”
Dr. Iverson looks stricken. “I shouldn’t have said it. Not then, not ever.”
“You had every right to say it. I’m sorry I didn’t understand that before. I’m sorry we let this one thing get so big that it wedged our families apart.”
He sighs. “I’m sorry for that too.”
We stand for a moment, and then he says, “I work with dying people all the time, you’d think I’d know how to talk to my best friend after his daughter’s funeral. But I couldn’t find the right words to say, and if I’m honest, part of me felt…defensive.”
“Defensive?”
“For choosing to stay at the church after it happened,” he explains, looking in at my mother. “It felt like there was no right answer. Did we leave in solidarity? Did we stay and try to hold the new priest accountable? What’s the right thing to do when something like this happens?”
You should come back.
That was the thing Dr. Iverson said to my parents, and now that I’m old and tired, I can see what he meant by it. He meant this community is here for you as I am here for you. He meant please don’t suffer alone. He meant let me help comfort you.
He didn’t know about the anonymous threats we’d already gotten from the parishioners, the menacing notes and ugly phone calls. He didn’t know that the deacons had tried to block Lizzy’s funeral from being at the church or about the brewing backlash in the police investigation. He was only trying to help, and my parents couldn’t hear it inside of their own pain.
“You meant well.”
“If there’s anything you learn as a doctor, it’s that ‘meaning well’ can be a very small thing indeed.”