Page 98 of Sinner (Priest 2)
But then reason filters in, and I see him dabbing at his eyes under his glasses with a Kleenex, and I understand. He stopped in to see Mom. To visit her.
“Sean,” he says, extending a hand, and I shake it.
“Dr. Iverson.”
“Can I have a few moments of your time?”
My mind flickers back to Zenny, and I wonder if he’ll kill me slow or quick, but then he simply leans against the wall and takes off his glasses, cleaning them with a cloth he pulls from his coat. I breathe again—he probably wouldn’t excoriate me about having sex with his daughter in front of the nurses’ station, right?
Right?
“Of course,” I finally answer, and I turn to face the window into Mom’s room. From this angle, we can see her bed and a few of her monitors, but she can’t see us. “Was she awake?” I ask, half small talk, half genuinely wanting to know.
“She was. We talked. I regret…” Dr. Iverson lets out a long breath. “I regret not talking with her before this.”
And suddenly it all feels so pointless. So distant, that Sunday afternoon filled with whiskey and pain. Why had we let something so small define something so important? Why had we made our lives emptier at a time when it was already so fucking unbearable in its emptiness? Tyler was right. The Iverson-Bell schism was a mistake.
“I’m sorry,” I say at the same time he says, “I’m sorry—” and then we both cut off with a little chuckle.
“You first, young man,” he says, putting his glasses back on. In the bright sunshine pouring in from the skylight above, I see that his eyes are brown in the middle, glinting into copper at the edges. Just like Zenny’s.
“I wanted to say that I’m sorry for…holding my distance since Lizzy’s funeral. Being angry. What you said to my parents—”
Dr. Iverson looks stricken. “I shouldn’t have said it. Not then, not ever.”
“You had every right to say it. I’m sorry I didn’t understand that before. I’m sorry we let this one thing get so big that it wedged our families apart.”
He sighs. “I’m sorry for that too.”
We stand for a moment, and then he says, “I work with dying people all the time, you’d think I’d know how to talk to my best friend after his daughter’s funeral. But I couldn’t find the right words to say, and if I’m honest, part of me felt…defensive.”
“Defensive?”
“For choosing to stay at the church after it happened,” he explains, looking in at my mother. “It felt like there was no right answer. Did we leave in solidarity? Did we stay and try to hold the new priest accountable? What’s the right thing to do when something like this happens?”
You should come back.
That was the thing Dr. Iverson said to my parents, and now that I’m old and tired, I can see what he meant by it. He meant this community is here for you as I am here for you. He meant please don’t suffer alone. He meant let me help comfort you.
He didn’t know about the anonymous threats we’d already gotten from the parishioners, the menacing notes and ugly phone calls. He didn’t know that the deacons had tried to block Lizzy’s funeral from being at the church or about the brewing backlash in the police investigation. He was only trying to help, and my parents couldn’t hear it inside of their own pain.
“You meant well.”
“If there’s anything you learn as a doctor, it’s that ‘meaning well’ can be a very small thing indeed.”
God, how depressingly true that is.
We stand there in silence for a few moments more, and then Dr. Iverson puts a hand on my shoulder. “I’m around if you need anything. Please don’t hesitate to ask. Not that you were ever good at asking anyway,” he adds with a smile.
“I still maintain that birthday cake needed a note on it,” I laugh, and for a minute, I can taste the sweet bite of homemade frosting as Elijah and I hunched over it in the Iverson kitchen. Teenage boys like hungry wolves, devouring everything in sight—in this case, Zenny’s birthday cake, which hadn’t yet had her name iced on it.
Dr. Iverson shakes his head. “How you boys assumed my wife went and made a cake and put it in the fridge just for a treat, I have no idea.”
“Zenny was so upset,” I remember, but then saying her name out loud chases the smile from my face. I wish the biggest thing between us were a half-eaten birthday cake. And not the giant storm of hurt I conjured up last night.
“She got over it. She’s a tough girl,” he says, and then he squeezes my shoulder before he goes. “Goodbye, Sean.”
“Goodbye, Dr. Iverson.”
