Page 61 of Sinner (Priest 2)
“What are you trying to tell me?” I ask.
“Just that you can do both, Sean. You can do both.”
There is some fuss regarding my bossiness about bedtime—Zenny wants to play our new bedroom games and pouts so magnificently after I order her to ready herself for sleep that I almost reconsider—but I only have to look at the exhaustion around her eyes to remember to hold my ground. I ask her, as always, if now is the time she’d like to declare me an asshole and have me back off, but she shakes her head with a huff and stomps off to the bathroom to brush her teeth. But I know I’ve done the right thing when she’s swaying on her feet while she waits for me to get ready.
“Get in bed,” I say after I rinse my mouth. “I’ll be right after you.”
She zombie-shuffles into the bedroom and then I hear a sleepy, happy squeal from her.
“Satin sheets?”
“And satin pillowcases,” I say, changing into a pair of drawstring pants that hang off my hips. She’s not so tired that her eyes don’t gobble up the sight of my bared torso and hips—and again, I almost reconsider Plan Tucking Zenny Into Bed. But her health is more important than fun, and I climb into bed myself to set a good example. She looks disappointed, but the moment I flip off the lights and gather her into my chest, she turns into a sprawl of tired, heavy limbs.
“I can’t believe you got new sheets for me,” she says.
“I’d get new anything for you, Zenny-bug. New everything.”
“Sometimes you are just too smooth,” she says and I know there’s got to be a smile on her face from the tone of her voice. “But it works somehow.”
“All part of the Sean Bell charm, I assure you.”
Her hair tickles against me as she nods, and I stroke her arm until I feel her breathing relax and drop into a steady rhythm.
“Theodicy,” she murmurs dozily.
“Um. What?”
“It’s called theodicy. When people try to explain how God can still be good when bad things happen.”
“Oh. Okay?”
Her lips press against my chest in the sleepiest kiss ever and then she rolls over onto her pillow, wriggling backward into the cradle of my body. Despite the serious God talk, my cock surges happily against her.
“Some people think it’s a bad idea, trying to justify God’s goodness, because it distracts us from what’s important. It tangles us up in intellectual knots, when intellection isn’t the point. We have philosophy for that. Religion is for ritual, for practice. For moral action.”
“So it’s more important to pray than to figure out God? That seems backward to me. How can you pray to something you don’t understand? To something that might not be good?”
“Credo ut intelligam,” Zenny says. “It means: I believe so that I may understand. But believe is a tricky word in English, and so the meaning of the phrase has gotten slanted over time. The Latin credo came from cor dare—to give one’s heart. What St. Anselm was saying was not ‘assent blindly and uncritically to these intellectual positions about a deity,’ but rather that the intellectual positions were less important than the practice of living a moral life or a spiritual life. He was saying, ‘I commit so that I may understand.’ Or ‘I engage with this because it is the kind of thing that can only be understood by engaging with it.’”
I turn this over in my mind.
“Your mother is like St. Anselm,” Zenny goes on after a short, cute yawn. “She’s willing to engage in a spiritual practice while coexisting with a host of complicated ethical and metaphysical questions. A comfort with doubt concurrent with a commitment to living a spiritual life—that’s amazing.”
It occurs to me that it’s Zenny’s goal to live like that. That somehow in the midst of tragedy and impending death, my mom has found a relationship with faith that could make even a nun envious.
It’s a curious thought.
“Tyler’s middle name is Anselm,” I say, apropos of basically nothing, but I don’t have any response to her insights. She’s too smart and I’m still too close to the howling boy kicking his car open in a fit of drunken pain.
“See then?” Zenny murmurs, and I know she’s very close to sleep now. “I bet she already knows all this.”
I snug my little nun in close and stare at the lights outside as she sleeps in a temptingly sweet burrow against me. I think about God on trial and my mother’s rosary until my thoughts blend into unhappy dreams, dreams I can’t remember when I wake the next morning.
It’s a Saturday, and Zenny has a clinical rotation today—her first—and she has to stop by the shelter afterwards to help with dinner. I practically gnash my teeth in frustration, because after being so twisted up over God and Mom last night and after my (very noble and very stupid) insistence on sleep instead of play last night, my cock is approximately the hardness of a carbon dwarf star, and the gravity of its need is insane. My thoughts, my hand, everything feels like it’s pulling toward my aching organ, and I just want to fuck it all away, I want to ride Zenny until my chest stops hurting and my thoughts are clear again.
But I won’t, not even when I get her back tonight, because of the plan. The stupid fucking plan that I can’t let go of. Although as much as I’d like to fuck her, I am pretty excited about tonight.
We’re going on a date.
