God, how depressingly true that is.
We stand there in silence for a few moments more, and then Dr. Iverson puts a hand on my shoulder. “I’m around if you need anything. Please don’t hesitate to ask. Not that you were ever good at asking anyway,” he adds with a smile.
“I still maintain that birthday cake needed a note on it,” I laugh, and for a minute, I can taste the sweet bite of homemade frosting as Elijah and I hunched over it in the Iverson kitchen. Teenage boys like hungry wolves, devouring everything in sight—in this case, Zenny’s birthday cake, which hadn’t yet had her name iced on it.
Dr. Iverson shakes his head. “How you boys assumed my wife went and made a cake and put it in the fridge just for a treat, I have no idea.”
“Zenny was so upset,” I remember, but then saying her name out loud chases the smile from my face. I wish the biggest thing between us were a half-eaten birthday cake. And not the giant storm of hurt I conjured up last night.
“She got over it. She’s a tough girl,” he says, and then he squeezes my shoulder before he goes. “Goodbye, Sean.”
“Goodbye, Dr. Iverson.”
And then it’s time to go back to Mom.
They gave her a whiteboard and a marker while I was at lunch; she’s allowed to take the mask off for very brief intervals, but it seems whenever she does that her oxygen levels careen dangerously down, so they’re restricting mask-off time to the occasional swab of water for her drying mouth. She’s written the words mountain dew on the board no less than five times already; each and every time the nurse explains that the bowel obstruction still hasn’t resolved, that she can only have fluids via IV, that if her mouth is dry they can swab it again with water.
So thirsty, she writes. Please.
They give her a mouth swab, cluck and chuckle at her when she asks for a mouth swab of Mountain Dew instead of water. I don’t think she’s joking, but when I mention it to the nurse, the nurse scolds me.
“It’ll be bad for her. Don’t you want her to get well?”
That shuts me up.
After the hustling of changing sheets and brushing her teeth is over, Mom and I are alone again. When I sit down, she narrows her eyes at me.
Crying? she writes on the board.
Ah fuck. My eyes are still red from crying over Zenny in the cafeteria. “I’m okay, promise.”
A frown. B/c of me?
I rub my hands over my face and give a weak laugh. I’ve been crying so much lately that it all gets kind of mixed together. “Well, yes because you’re in here,” I say, and then I’m not planning on saying anything more, honestly I’m not, but the thing about heartbreak is it becomes the only thing you want to think about and talk about. In a twisted way, the only thing you want to feel. So I blurt, “Actually…well, there was a girl.”
This piques her interest immediately. Girl???? She underlines the word several times in case I don’t appreciate her eagerness.
“Yeah. But I messed it up, Mom. I’m pretty sure she hates my guts now.”
…
She actually writes an ellipsis on the board, gesturing for me to elaborate.
“Are you sure you want to hear this? It’s not a very mom-appropriate story and also I think I might be the bad guy in it.”
She writes, tell me. it’s a tiny house rerun anyway.
And so weirdly, embarrassingly, I do. I tell her how Zenny and I met at the gala, and while she looks surprised that the girl is Zenny, she also looks thoughtful, as if she’s already imagining the two of us together in her head. I try to dance around the fact that we had sex, but she rolls her eyes whenever I get cagey about it.
How do you think you got here? she writes at one point.
“Ew, Mom, ew.”
I tell her how after only one night with Zenny, I knew I was fucked with wanting her, and how the want became love, and at the same time, I found myself being quietly rearranged into a man I barely knew. A man who didn’t care about money. A man who worked in a shelter for the first time and began to see the real, endless need in the world around him. A man who cared about injustice.
A man who was willing to look God in the face, if God would only look back.
I tell her about how I ruined it all last night, and when I get to that part, my words sort of shudder out into silence, like a stalled car, and Mom reaches over to take my hand.
“And the hell of it is,” I mumble, “we started this by me caring for her the way I care for people—with control. And that’s exactly the thing that drove her away in the end.”
Love is hard, Mom writes.
“Yeah.”
Do you love her enough to give up control? To let her go?
“Of course.”
Then maybe there’s a way.
But what that way might be is never revealed because a nurse comes in with a bright smile and announces it’s time for another X-ray and I am summarily shooed from the room.
The day passes slowly. So does the next one. Aiden comes by a few times during the workday to check in and we agree he’ll crash at my loft to be closer. Ryan drives in from Lawrence with a duffel bag and sets up camp in the waiting room, slouching over a textbook and highlighting certain parts, stopping every thirty seconds to check his phone. I walk him through writing emails to his professors about missing class and then end up helping him with his homework because it keeps my mind off Zenny.
I wonder what she’s doing now, where she is. Maybe she’s at the shelter, helping pack up supplies to move to the new location. Or maybe she’s got a rare sliver of free time to squeeze in some extra studying. I close my eyes for a minute, picturing her at her desk with her hands curled around her coffee mug, or maybe she’s on her tummy with her feet kicking idly in the air. I picture her face creased in concentration, her mouth just this side of a pout, her slender fingers fidgeting with a highlighter.
Fuck.
I miss her.
I miss her studying. I miss her dedication. I miss her adorable boredom.
I miss coming up behind her as she works and kissing her neck. I miss stripping her bare and drawing maps and murals all over her back with those highlighters.
I miss fucking her and kissing her and holding her. I miss her like a physical pain. Missing her is a cancer and it’s stealing my cells and breaking my bones.
It’s eating me alive.
It’s hard to describe how time passes like this. The hospital becomes a kind of non-reality, a limbo of time and action where nothing and everything matters. In my haze of heartbreak, it barely makes a difference. But it is jarring to have the outside world intrude. Like when I look up to see Charles Northcutt strolling into the family waiting room.
Even with all the times I’ve fantasized about Zenny visiting, even if it was just to distribute some prayer or a blessing, it’s still strange to see someone from my real life here, among all the beige walls and beeping machines.
But still. Why is it Northcutt here and not her?
Surely her father told her about Mom…so why hasn’t she come?
Does she hate me that much?
“Sean, darling,” Northcutt greets me, flopping down next to me on the vinyl sofa. He takes a look around the room, as if realizing where he is for the first time, and wrinkles his nose. “How can you stand it here?”