Page 100 of Sinner (Priest 2)
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.
Why hasn’t Zenny visited?
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?”
And then he takes a good look at me, with scruff that’s definitely graduated to a full-on beard and my wrinkled clothes.
“Never mind. I guess you fit.”
I don’t answer him. There’s no point.
“Anyway, you’re fired.” He cheerfully hands me a folder that I don’t bother to open. I know what it will be. The usual HR bullshit. A description of stock options and retirement funds held within the company and how to transfer the accounts.
I stare at him. “Is that all?”
“Well, and Valdman has tapped me to take over the firm when he retires.” Northcutt looks ready to gloat in full, but he pauses and tilts his head at me. “Doesn’t that piss you off?”
I stand up. I’m in a rumpled T-shirt and jeans and he’s in a five-thousand-dollar suit and I don’t even care. “Come here, Northcutt. Let me show you something.” And he follows because he’s a curious douchebag and still wants his chance to lord this new turn over me.
We get to my mom’s room and stop outside the glass, and I don’t say anything at first, I just let him take it in. The seven different monitors, the uncountable tubes and IVs, the mask. The small, sunken body.
“I don’t give a shit about you,” I say very clearly. “Or about Valdman. Or about that job. I worked my ass off to have all that money, and all that money couldn’t do shit when it mattered.”
Uncharacteristically, Northcutt doesn’t answer. He’s looking at my mother with real discomfort.
“Well, they’ll fix her up and everything,” Northcutt says eventually. He seems to be saying it for himself and once he says it, he gives a little relieved breath, like he believes it. “Yes, she’ll be just fine. But you won’t.”
I could tell him he’s an idiot if he thinks my mom is going to be patched up and sent home, good as new. I could tell him every single ugly truth about watching a body fail—watching a body fail as it still holds a person you love beyond measure.
But why? I don’t care enough. I don’t even care enough to hate Northcutt any longer. Let him have his empty life and his empty money, let him sit in Valdman’s chair. It won’t change the fact that one day he’ll be in an ICU bed of his own and there won’t be anyone there to sit next to his bed. There won’t be anyone to swab his mouth when the nurses are too busy or change the channel when it’s an episode of Fixer Upper he’s already seen.
No one will be there to keep watch with him through the night. Which begs the uncomfortable, lonely question: will anyone
be there to keep watch with me? When it’s my time?
“Thank you for delivering the news,” I tell Northcutt, taking his shoulders and turning him toward the exit. “You can go back to the office and tell everyone I’ve become a bearded slob.”
Northcutt allows me to move him, push him, and it’s shocking to me that after several years of wanting to beat the shit out of him, my movements aren’t rougher than they are. He moves like butter anyway, like a soft man does, and I do tuck away a bit of smugness at that. If someone tried to literally push me out the door, I’d go Kansas City Irish on him in a heartbeat, I wouldn’t even need the whiskey to get started. But he’s nothing but a smirking pushover and utterly undeserving of all the time I’ve spent hating him.
