Page 84 of Sinner (Priest 2)
“I like your awareness, but in this case, you’re using it as an excuse.” She nods to herself again, the starched fabric of her wimple brushing roughly along her shoulders. “Are all those muscles just for show or are you actually strong, my son?”
And with that, she unbuckles her seat belt. I scramble to help her out of the car, and we don’t say anything else as I walk her to the door, but the look she gives me before she goes inside is very loud with all the things she doesn’t say.
Tell her, the look says above all else, and my heart gives a hopeful and ugly lurch at the very thought.
Mom has a NG tube coming out of her nose, and she hates it. She can be patient about IVs and ports, but the moment there’s something on her face, she gets irritable—and in this case, the thing is in her face, not just on it.
I do my Sean Bell thing when I get there, the Oldest Child thing, all the rituals and little sacrifices made to the Church of Cancer. I see first to Mom, then to Dad, who is, as always, a fraying shell of himself in these circumstances. After Mom is asleep, exhausted from the pain and the procedures, I manage to find the charge nurse and doctor on rotation, and avail myself of every detail of the day.
All that sorted, I send Dad out to get us some real dinner—not cafeteria dinner—and sit in Mom’s room and try to work from my laptop.
Aiden shows up a few minutes later, his suit and hair rumpled, like he spent the day sleeping (which I know for a fact he didn’t because he emailed me no less than three times this morning about a puppy he wants to adopt). He flings himself on the small, hard couch next to me.
“She doing okay?” he asks, running his hand through his messy hair. He’s breathing hard too.
“Yeah. I mean, for now. We don’t know yet what’s causing the blockage, and I guess the suction got messy and difficult, so that’s not great.”
“Oh,” he says.
“I texted like three hours ago. Where were you?”
“I just got your message,” he says vaguely. “I was almost out to the farmhouse. Had to turn back.”
Hmm.
I give him a more careful once-over. His tie has been hastily re-knotted, the laces on his dress shoes are untied, and there’s something about his face, all flushed and swollen-mouthed.
“You were having sex!” I accuse, sitting up.
“Shh!” he hushes me frantically, glancing over at Mom, who’s still deep in a morphine nap.
“Don’t shh me,” I say irritably. “You think Mom doesn’t know you’re a total fuckboy?”
Aiden looks very annoyed at my lack of quiet. “That’s not true.”
I roll my eyes. If Aiden were a Wakefield Saga character, there would be all kinds of words for him. Rakehell, scoundrel, cyprian, cad, libertine, lothario. He’s barely better than Double Condom Mike, and I know a lot of the trouble he’s gotten in because I was right there next to him. In fact, until he started acting weird last month, I would have put good money on him having more sex and with more women than me.
“I don’t care that you were having sex, dummy,” I say. “Mom wouldn’t either. It’s just a dumb reason not to be here.”
He sighs. “I know. I honestly didn’t look at my phone until after though. I came as soon as I saw your text.”
“Fine. Was she good?”
Aiden looks puzzled for a minute, like he can’t quite track this turn in conversation.
“The fuck, Aiden,” I clarify, exasperated. “Was she good?”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. And before he can ever make the words come out, Dad is walking in with Indian carryout, and we all fall on the plastic bags like a pack of starving wolves.
The next five or six days pass in a blur. Between Zenny’s life and mine, all we get together are nights and mornings. Sometimes a phone call during the day if we’re lucky.
I never do work up the courage to say what the Reverend Mother wants me to say, but also, it’s so hard to do when our quiet moments of snuggle and talk have been robbed from us, and all we have are stolen, sweaty hours in the dark and the ensuing bleary-eyed mornings.
I’ll vow to do it tomorrow, and then tomorrow comes and I vow to do it the next day, and on and on it goes, until I almost feel like telling her is an impossible task, a Holy Grail-style quest that God has set before me and I’ll never be pure and brave enough to complete.
It’s maddening.
Towards the end of the week, Mom starts developing pneumonia. It makes a godawful wheezing when she breathes, and things start to change in the predictable comings and goings of the nurses and doctors. There’s more bustle around the bed, more bags being hung, more tests and X-rays. Conversations start taking a more somber tone. Mom is given a cannula and antibiotics. I finish reading In the Arms of the Disgraced Duke, and we speculate about the next Wakefield novel, which comes out next week. We watch HGTV on the hospital television and make fun of the tiny house people.
