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.”
And then it’s time to go back to Mom.
They gave her a whiteboard and a marker while I was at lunch; she’s allowed to take the mask off for very brief intervals, but it seems whenever she does that her oxygen levels careen dangerously down, so they’re restricting mask-off time to the occasional swab of water for her drying mouth. She’s written the words mountain dew on the board no less than five times already; each and every time the nurse explains that the bowel obstruction still hasn’t resolved, that she can only have fluids via IV, that if her mouth is dry they can swab it again with water.
So thirsty, she writes. Please.
They give her a mouth swab, cluck and chuckle at her when she asks for a mouth swab of Mountain Dew instead of water. I don’t think she’s joking, but when I mention it to the nurse, the nurse scolds me.
“It’ll be bad for her. Don’t you want her to get well?”
That shuts me up.
After the hustling of changing sheets and brushing her teeth is over, Mom and I are alone again. When I sit down, she narrows her eyes at me.
Crying? she writes on the board.
Ah fuck. My eyes are still red from crying over Zenny in the cafeteria. “I’m okay, promise.”
A frown. B/c of me?
I rub my hands over my face and give a weak laugh. I’ve been crying so much lately that it all gets kind of mixed together. “Well, yes because you’re in here,” I say, and then I’m not planning on saying anything more, honestly I’m not, but the thing about heartbreak is it becomes the only thing you want to think about and talk about. In a twisted way, the only thing you want to feel. So I blurt, “Actually…well, there was a girl.”
This piques her interest immediately. Girl???? She underlines the word several times in case I don’t appreciate her eagerness.
“Yeah. But I messed it up, Mom. I’m pretty sure she hates my guts now.”
…
She actually writes an ellipsis on the board, gesturing for me to elaborate.
“Are you sure you want to hear this? It’s not a very mom-appropriate story and also I think I might be the bad guy in it.”
She writes, tell me. it’s a tiny house rerun anyway.
And so weirdly, embarrassingly, I do. I tell her how Zenny and I met at the gala, and while she looks surprised that the girl is Zenny, she also looks thoughtful, as if she’s already imagining the two of us together in her head. I try to dance around the fact that we had sex, but she rolls her eyes whenever I get cagey about it.
How do you think you got here? she writes at one point.
“Ew, Mom, ew.”
I tell her how after only one night with Zenny, I knew I was fucked with wanting her, and how the want became love, and at the same time, I found myself being quietly rearranged into a man I barely knew. A man who didn’t care about money. A man who worked in a shelter for the first time and began to see the real, endless need in the world around him. A man who cared about injustice.
A man who was willing to look God in the face, if God would only look back.
I tell her about how I ruined it all last night, and when I get to that part, my words sort of shudder out into silence, like a stalled car, and Mom reaches over to take my hand.
“And the hell of it is,” I mumble, “we started this by me caring for her the way I care for people—with control. And that’s exactly the thing that drove her away in the end.”
Love is hard, Mom writes.
“Yeah.”
Do you love her enough to give up control? To let her go?
“Of course.”
Then maybe there’s a way.
But what that way might be is never revealed because a nurse comes in with a bright smile and announces it’s time for another X-ray and I am summarily shooed from the room.
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.
But still. Why is it Northcutt here and not her?
Surely her father told her about Mom…so why hasn’t she come?
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.
“You know, this wasn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be,” he says as I finally let him go.
“Funny,” I say. “Feels plenty satisfying to me.”
I’m lying of course. There’s a quiet, clinical part of my mind that feels relieved: no more dealing with Valdman, no more dealing with that world at all. But I’m still that walking, breathing, bleeding hole—I’m just also a hole that’s unemployed now.
Sisterless, jobless, Zenniless and about to be motherless. Satisfaction is as far away from me as the North Star.
The clouds are back. The clouds are worse.
We stand in the room with the X-rays on an old-fashioned lightbox mounted on a wall. Mom is awake behind us, which I’m painfully aware of as the ICU doctor walks us through the progression of her pneumonia over the last few days. It’s like time-lapsed snowfall, like the spread of fog. But fog and snow are quiet and peaceful…beautiful. This white sprawl on my mother’s lungs is exudative effusion at work—or put simply, Mom’s lungs filling with fluid. It started at the bottom cove of one lung and now both lungs are covered with a smoky and thick white—nearly opaque with fluid and inflammation—with only the top part of one lung still black and clear.
“Her vitals are worrying,” Dr. McNamara says. She shows us charts on her iPad. “You can see here—starting two days ago—oximetry, blood pressure, and body temperature are down. The blood counts and gases show the infection overwhelming her systems. Her hypoxemia—dipping below 90% oxygen saturation—is bad enough now that it’s clear the BiPAP can’t keep up.”
“What does that mean, can’t keep up?” Aiden asks. He has his arm slung around Ryan’s shoulders, who is also being held by my dad. Both Business Brothers and the Baby Bell—I feel Tyler’s absence like a sudden kick to the stomach.
“Well,” the doctor says gently. “It means in normal circumstances, this is the time to move to intubation and a ventilator.”
She doesn’t finish her sentence. Because this is not normal circumstances.
You know how every time you check into a hospital, whether for a broken toe or a heart attack, they ask, “Do you have a living will or advanced directive?” And you think to yourself, I should really make one of those sometime? Well, when you have cancer, they stop asking and flat-out tell you to make one. Mom made hers eight months ago, and I know for a fact it’s on file here at this hospital. I know it’s on Dr. McNamara’s iPad. I know it by heart. It requests for her not to be resuscitated, and it also requests for her not to be intubated. A DNR and a DNI.
Dad and I are the first to meet eyes, and then we look away. Aiden takes a moment, then says, “Wait, that directive thing? No, this is different—that was for cancer, and she has pneumonia.” He looks at us like we’re kindergarten students, like we’re too simple to grasp this. “She didn’t mean for that to count now.”
“If she were ventilated,” I ask the doctor, giving Aiden a look that means we’ll talk in a minute, after we get all the information, “what would happen?”
“You mean, do I think she’d recover?”
“Yes.”
Dr. McNamara looks back at the X-rays, but I know she doesn’t need to look at them again. She’s simply staring at something while she gets her thoughts together. “There’s no way to tell for sure, ever. But I can tell you that her CT scan yesterday showed new tumors around her liver and in her intestines, and only a month ago, there weren’t any there. The odds of her surviving this pneumonia on a ventilator are low…but real. But if she survives, I’m not sure she won’t be needing that NG tube indefinitely, and I’m not sure that she won’t be back in the ICU within a matter of days. Her cancer is moving too fast for the treatments to keep up.”
I squeeze my eyes closed, open them again. None of the Bell men are saying anything, which means it’s up to me, I suppose. “And there’s nothing more we can throw at the pneumonia?”
“We’re throwing everything we can at it,” the doctor says, giving me a weak smile. “It’s overwhelming her lungs anyway.”
I take a breath, press my eyes closed again. All I want on this earth is for Zenny to be holding my hand right now, to be rubbing my back. To be in my arms so I can smell the sweet rose smell of her and bury my face in her hair.
“If we talk to her and she says the directive still stands,” my voice is a charred nothing of a whisper, just dead air saying dead words, “what does that look like?”
“She can keep the mask on,” Dr. McNamara says softly. “And it will still help. A couple days, maybe. Or if she’d like, she can take the mask off.”
I swallow. I wish for Zenny like I’ve never wished for anything before, but she’s not here, she’s not here to hold me or to comfort me or even just to stand next to me. I’m alone, because even with my brothers here and my father here, I have to be the strong one. The one leading the way. “And then what?” I ask in a raspy voice.
“She’ll be more comfortable. We’
ll take out the NG tube and she can drink to thirst. We’ll also be able to provide morphine. It will help with the air hunger.”
“Air hunger?” Aiden repeats, looking stricken.
Another weak smile from Dr. McNamara. “It’s what it sounds like. It’s very uncomfortable, but the morphine muffles the sensation almost to nothing. We can start out low, so she will be lucid at first, and then increase it as needed.”
“And if she’d make it a couple days with the mask, how long could she make it without one?”
“It wouldn’t be long,” Dr. McNamara admits. “And if this is something you talk to your mother and she wants to pursue, then we’ll bring in her palliative care doctor for a more in-depth discussion. But I will say this, as an ICU doctor and as a daughter myself: life isn’t measured in days. It’s measured in moments. When you decide with her what happens next, consider what moments you want to create for her now.”
I turn back to Mom, I don’t know why, but I just need to see her right now, reassure myself that she’s still here. And she’s holding up her whiteboard.
It says, mountain dew?
Chapter 30
We take off the mask and swab Mom’s mouth with ice water, not Mountain Dew, which earns us a fuss from her.
She’s tired but lucid, and we talk. Alone as a family, and then again with the doctors at her bedside.
The DNI stays.
She wants to take the mask off for good in the morning.
I make the phone calls I have to make, and then I stare at my phone for a long time before letting out a mumbled fuck it and sending a text to a number I have memorized by heart after only a month.
hey. it’s sean. i know things ended badly between us, and i know you probably have real reasons for staying away. that’s my fault, and i don’t deserve anything from you right now, but mom is coming off her ventilator tomorrow morning and i just miss you so fucking much. i keep trying to pray—for mom, for me, for everyone—but i think i’ve forgotten how.
Need you Now (Top Shelf Romance Book 2) Page 138