Page 128 of Judas
“I’m here to see Sadie Wilson.”
“Oh good, that gentleman with her has been very adamant on your visitation. Go ahead and sign in and I’ll grab you a visitor badge.”
He tilts his head as a way to point at the clipboard on the counter a foot or so away from me. Doing as he instructed, I write down my name, date and time of visit, and my relationship to the patient.
“Here you go. The door to your right over there? I will unlock it for you. When you walk through, take a right and walk down to the end of the hall. Look for her name on the door.”
The badge is passed to me through a small metal pan under the glass partition where I pick it up and clip it to my shirt. Following the directions he laid out for me, he unlocks the door with a hidden button somewhere by his desk. It audibly clicks and I push it open to step through. It only takes me a minute or two before I’m standing before her door. Just as he said, hername is sitting on a little white board with smiley faces drawn around it.
How odd.
Rapping my knuckles on the heavy door, I’m surprised to see Babel when it flies open. He’s still as dark and brooding as he was when I met him but there’s a smile on his face. Short lived, because it faces when he notices it’s me standing here. Like he can’t be caught smiling around anyone else. Taking a step back, he waves me in and I follow.
Sadie is—well she’s not the same person she was at the apartment. This side of her is lighter, more jovial, physically brighter. Arms are bandaged still, but she sits in the middle of her bed with her legs crisscrossed as we talk. I’ve been here for a good thirty minutes or so and experiencing this side of my daughter is refreshing. Between the slight break through with Kace this morning, and witnessing Sadie in this type of mood, it makes me think things could be better. With a bit of elbow grease and the will to fight.
“Why didn’t dad come with you?” Sadie finally asks. I’ve watched her look towards the door several times now, waiting for him to knock or walk through it. Tells me she’s just as desperate for our lives to mesh as I am.
Perched at the foot of her bed, where I have been since I came in, I look over to Babel who’s on one of those long transforming sofas that men sleep on in the labor and delivery wing—stings some but I push it away. He’s been quiet this entire time, allowing us to talk freely without interruption or adding to the conversation he wasn’t invited in on. Mad respect to that.
Coming back to Sadie, her big blue eyes look at me expectantly. The cheerful expression she was wearing moments ago was replaced by something more somber-some.
“He’s back at the apartment tending to Lucien. Getting him ready for transport, I asked him a few questions as to wherehe’s going but he didn’t give me much outside of a more secure facility and he won’t be getting out.”
“That’s sad.” She says, and it stuns me.
“Why would you say that?” I ask, taken back.
“Cause he deserves much more than getting free meals and a bed to sleep in every day. He has taken so much from us—“
“Sunshine…” Babel says but it’s not a warning, it’s more like he’s trying to bring her down. The first thing he’s said since I sat down and that was it.
Sunshine.
“What? He does. You can’t tell me it’s fair he gets to walk around some courtyard like he didn’t almost kill every one of us. He’s killed other people too. He… he!”
Babel is out of his seat in an instant and at her side, reaching out he pulls her into him as she starts to break apart. Standing at first, then he crouches down beside the bed, looking up into her reddened and bloodshot eyes.
“He won’t get to you again. You don’t have to worry about Kate taking over either. The nurses have you on your medicine, you’re safe, and you’re not alone.”
Sadie isn’t hysterical but the tears are flooding over her cheeks like waterfalls and it crushes me.
“Asshole deserves to rot for what he did to me. How he almost killed my mom. If I ever see him I—“
“Stop it. You won’t have to see him once we leave Canada. Okay?” I interject.
She whips around to look at me and I be damned if I don’t see every bit of me in the way she expresses pain and anger.
“You promise? He sets off the demons and I don’t want to be them anymore, mom.”
Moving over, I wrap my arms around her and hug her tight right in front of Babel. He nods at me appreciatively, almost like I’m taking the place where he’s been this whole time. Which,in every painful bit of honesty, is the truth. I’ve been fighting Kace and spent that little bit of time with Lucien since she hurt herself.
In the same way I need her, she needs me too.
“I promise. Once he’s gone, he’s gone forever. There will be nothing that comes between you and I, or your dad. We already have a home waiting for us, where you can heal and we can make sure you feel safe enough to see a new therapist. And I can learn to be a normal citizen again. All happy, all fulfilling.”
“I’d like that.” She says, sniffling then wiping her runny nose with the inside of her gowns collar. I grimace and sharpen my eyes at how unhygienic it was for her to do something like that. Something I’ll address later, right now, this is for us to talk and just be together.
“Me too, baby, me too.”
