Page 64 of Sinner (Priest 2)
“Oh yeah,” I say. And she’s right. In fact, Elijah and I both quit roller hockey the year Zenny was born—me because it was not one of those sports that netted lots of attention from girls, like basketball or football, and Elijah because he was so busy with his ten trillion other extracurriculars that he had to start dropping things to make time for the activities he really wanted to do.
A quick bite of shame follows the realization. Because what am I doing with this girl, really? Who do I think I am? There’s got to be a special hell for men who fuck their best friend’s sister, especially when their best friend’s little sister is much, much too young for the kind of fucking I like to do.
I execute a few figure eights around Zenny, trying to push these thoughts away, and my antics earn me more clapping, which only makes me peacock more. I know I’m thirty-six, but it feels really good to show off sometimes, okay? Even on rollerblades.
It only takes Zenny a few laps for her legs to remember how to move on skates, and then we settle into a nice pace, holding hands and talking to each other over the music. I feel like a kid, like a teenager, electric that she’s holding my hand, stealing glances at her tight ass moving under her jeans. The breeze created by our movement plasters her T-shirt against her body, and under the thin, worn-through cotton, I can see the divot of her navel, the smooth cups of her bra. I can see the place where her hips flare out from her narrow waist, the outline of the button of her jeans. A button that I plan to have unbuttoned very soon.
I adjust myself subtly as we skate, and sneak a look at my watch. Twenty more minutes and I’ll be able to put my sixty dollars to work.
“See something you like?” Zenny asks dryly, noticing my gaze and my not-as-subtle-as-I-thought handling of my cock.
“Just reading your T-shirt,” I pretend to lie, knowing she’
ll see right through it and not caring. I want her to know how much I look at her, how much I want her. I want her to have me at full force, full desire, not only because it’s what she wanted out of this arrangement, but because I don’t know if I can actually hold myself back. It might kill me to pretend to want her less.
“Uh-huh,” Zenny says, in a voice that conveys that she’s clearly on to my lecherous ways, but she glances down at her shirt anyway. It’s a mission trip T-shirt from several years ago, with the words Maison de Naissance printed underneath the picture of a cross superimposed on the outline of Haiti.
It rings a bell, and I manage to fish out a fuzzy memory of Tyler’s wife talking about Maison de Naissance.
“That’s a birthing center, isn’t it?” I ask, nodding at her shirt.
“It is,” she affirms, looking a bit impressed that I know that. “Do you speak French?”
“Only enough to order good food.”
“Ha. Well, it’s actually a place that provides prenatal and postpartum care to women and babies. We went there for a mission trip—it was my first mission trip ever—and I just fell in love.”
“With the babies?”
She spreads her fingers in my hand, gesturing. “With all of it. Every part of it. Mom and Dad had pushed me toward medicine or law, and growing up, I thought that’s what I wanted too. But there was something about medicine that always felt—I don’t know—sterile, I guess. Impersonal. But when I went to work with the nurses and midwives down there, a part of me came alive. It was so necessary, so intimate, so…human. To be with these women while they carried their babies and labored them into the world. And to know what huge differences small interventions could make—it felt magical. There’s no glory in it, there’s no money, but the magic is better than both those things.”
“And that’s when you started thinking about becoming a nurse-midwife?”
She nods. “Dad was so upset. Of course, he’d rather I’d chosen something like surgery or oncology, but at the very least couldn’t I compromise and study obstetrics? But I guess I know too many doctors, and I felt that choosing obstetrics over midwifery would limit me. I didn’t want to be a doctor at all, I didn’t want to be wearing a white coat and playing God.” She sighs, and the sound is mostly lost in the whirr of our wheels over the wood floor. “It was a hard fight. But there was no changing my mind.”
“So what happens after you graduate? Will you ever get to practice midwifery if you’ve taken vows?”
Her face lights up, as if I’ve asked exactly the right question. “I’ll still have two years of midwifery school after I graduate with my RN next spring. But the Reverend Mother and I have plans. See, so many of the people who come into our shelter are in some stage of needing maternal care—either they’re pregnant or they’re about to deliver or maybe they have a young infant and they’re struggling to breastfeed—and most of them don’t have access to healthcare. Some of them are afraid to go to a hospital, even when they’re in labor, because they’re undocumented and they’re frightened of being arrested or deported. Some people simply can’t afford it. So what if we opened up our own birthing center? Here in Kansas City? There’s a huge need for it, and by the time I finish my midwifery degree, we’ll hopefully have enough money and all the right permissions to launch it. We could help so many people, Sean, from all walks of life. We can really make a difference.”
I’m captivated by the passion in her voice. I can’t remember feeling this passionate about anything, about any cause, any vocation, ever in my life, and the gap between us in this is both humbling and absorbing. I feel like I could spend the next year thinking about it and only just begin to unravel the rift between the kind of woman Zenny is and the kind of man I am.
Zenny saw suffering and it made her want to engage and change things and invest her life in helping. The literal only time in my life that I’ve seen and felt real suffering—Lizzy’s suicide—my response was to reject everything. To disengage. To scorn.
For the first time, I begin to understand why Tyler went back to the Church. Why he became a priest.
And suddenly I feel strange about my own choices, about my own convictions. They feel flat and callow next to Zenny’s lively, energetic zeal. I’m not used to feeling that way about myself, and it’s rather uncomfortable.
“If I hadn’t brokered the Keegan deal, how were you planning on fitting a birthing center into the shelter? You’re already crammed into that space just doing normal shelter stuff.”
She gives a shrug. “We would have asked the owner for more space in the building, since it was empty anyway. Or found an off-site location. We have faith that something will open up.”
I’m about to say that she doesn’t need faith, that she has me and I’ll make sure she gets the best fucking space available in this city, but my conversation with my mom is still rattling around my head, a loose ball bearing denting up my thoughts. It’s like no one cares about what I can do when they have faith, and I find that’s making me rather surly.
Instead, I check my watch and see that it’s time for my sixty dollars to find their new home.
“Be right back,” I say, giving Zenny a quick kiss and then dashing off toward the front desk of the rink, dodging teenagers as I go.
And when I come back, she’s leaning against the railing on the outside of the rink, watching the clumps of youths skate around.
