When she stopped singing my eyes popped open and my lips formed a deep frown upon realizing that I was still at Willow Springs and Grace was back at her home.
“Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” she whispered.
“I miss you. More than you know.”
“I miss you, too.”
I appreciated that she didn’t ask about when I was released from this place. She didn’t try to make plans for the future or ask me what, if anything, would change between us once I was discharged. Because I didn’t have all of the answers. There was still a ton of heavy shit I needed to work through, and according to Dr. Kearns, would still be working through long after these thirty days passed.
“Jacob?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know if this is the right time to tell you this but … your father and his company had to pull out of their contract with the hospital. There hasn’t been an official announcement but he’s been gone for the last week. There are rumors saying he had to go back to Washington for family reasons …” Her voice trailed off and I pictured her biting her lower lip with worry. Her thoughts ping-ponging between whether or not she should’ve told me this or kept the information to herself.
“Anna’s dying,” I finally stated.
“Anna?”
“My mother.” My jaw flexed with rigidity at those two words. “Cancer. He told me the first day he was there.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing to say. The world will be a better place without her in it.” I paused before asking my next question. “You want to know why I’m an atheist?”
“Because you’re a scientist.”
I actually chuckled. “My atheism started even before I went to med school or practiced medicine.”
“All the hypocrites you went to church with, you said.”
“But even more than them, the hypocrite who gave birth to me. She named me Jacob and my brother Luke, for Christ’s sake. We’re named after characters in the Bible and she diligently sat in the first few rows of the church every Sunday and yet behind closed doors she was a real live monster. The devil incarnate. How can I be a believer with that type of upbringing?”
“I don’t know, Jacob. No one’s forcing you to be a believer.”
“I know.” I ran my hand through my hair again.
“My mother would force me to read the Bible to her. On days when she couldn’t get out of bed and she wasn’t in the mood to hear me sing, she made me read passage after passage to her. And then there were periods during her manic episodes where she would yell and scream at Journey and I the different passages and tell us we were sinners because we failed to obey her correctly. She’d become volatile over things like me spilling juice on the counter. She even hit me with her Bible a few times.”
“But you still believe, right?”
“I do. I don’t blame God for what my mother did or how she treated us. She was sick and never got the right treatment for her condition. But because of what I learned from her growing up, it’s made me a better nurse and a better sister to Journey who doesn’t have to suffer the way our mother did.”
I shook my head because she made it sound so easy. It almost made total sense.
“But you don’t have to believe in anything, Jacob.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
I pushed out a breath and my eyelids drooped. I hated how tired I felt. It still stunned me how tired I became from doing all this emotional work throughout the day. In my day-to-day life I could perform an eight hour surgery, do rounds, paperwork, and then still make it to the Underground to go through rounds in the ring. But here at Willow Springs it felt like these two sessions per day with some group meditation, and other bullshit sessions like art, were wiping me out.
“That’s because you’re new to this.”
I blinked, not even realizing I’d been saying my thoughts out loud.
