Chapter Seventeen

Waiting in Waverly General Hospital, Rev. Eric Lancaster could only apologize so much for how he’d behaved. He could only feel so guilty. He could only be a monster for so long before the whole situation became tiresome. He understood the concept of weaponized shame. It wasn’t a practice he condoned, even if people occasionally thought he practiced it as a minister. Some incorrect, judgmental liberal thinkers even thought his religion ran on it. But Eric felt they were incorrect about his faith.

And he thought his daughter and Mary Harrell were basking in his punishment a bit too much, misrepresenting what had actually happened over the course of the past year. But he’d learned from raising teenage girls in this day and age that a man corrects or instructs a woman at his own peril. So, he didn’t tell Jessa she was in any way wrong about the way things had happened. Eric just remembered the events differently, and he kept these thoughts to himself while she glared at him, shouted at him or kept a tally in her head of how many times he touched or looked at the baby.

Eric knew his daughter. She was not a subtle creature. You were either with her or you were her enemy.

It was true that Eric hadn’t met Lydie before today. But it wasn’t like he had never set eyes on her before. Actually, he and his wife Rachel kept regular tabs on the baby through Jessa’s frequent Instagram photos. They hadn’t “liked” any of the images. They didn’t dare give their daughter the satisfaction, but he did have a number of screencaps saved on his phone.

Instagram didn’t do her enough justice. Lydie was a truly beautiful baby, the spitting image of her mommy, except Lydie had Wade’s unfortunate nose. Of all the gene pools that his lovely daughter could’ve taken a dip in, why on Earth she would choose to be with that Harrell kid? Eric knew the answer, but he was still baffled by her choices. Jessa liked Wade because he had no spine. She did not react well to being challenged. Knowing that, he still couldn’t respect the little jackass. Wade had been a whiny little boy, and now he was a sad, worthless teen.

Granted, the boy had no father, and that was sad. But Eric just didn’t like him. Wade was a weirdo, and he seemed a little gay.

Eric hadn’t “abandoned” his daughter. That part, Jessa and Mary kept getting wrong. He knew where she was from the moment she’d left home, shacked up in some basement with that Wade. It wasn’t that she got pregnant, though the Lancasters weren’t in any way happy about that as it unfolded.

She says they kicked her out, maybe even believed it with her way of revising the past so that she was always victimized, but it was untrue. The way Jessa stormed her way out of their house, Eric couldn’t very well just let her back in the door without her doing some serious coming-to-Jesus. Jessa had yet to apologize to her mother Rachel. Instead, she showed up at the church today, kicking in a door and raising the same sort of hell.

Δ

The incident in the living room from eight months ago had been seared into Eric’s brain.

“You two are a bunch of hypocrites,” Jessa had yelled approximately three minutes after telling them that she was pregnant. “I know that the two of you didn’t wait ’til you got married! And now this happened to me, and you act like there’s no room at the fucking inn!”

“We said nothing to you about it,” Eric had said. “Your poor mother hasn’t even stopped crying yet, and you DARE compare yourself to the Mother of God? Are you kidding me with this right now?”

“You two are a bunch of racist, closed-minded liars!” Jessa yelled. “Christians, my ass! You support putting babies in cages, so why should I expect any different from you when it comes to my pregnancy?”

Tears continued to stream from Rachel’s face, her sobs made her breathing erratic. Jessa stormed up the steps and began angrily packing a bag. Eric just watched as his daughter continued to set fire to every bit of good will he was willing to show her.

“You are such a liar, Daddy,” she spat. “You are nicer to strangers than you are to me. All you want from me is to be your little fucking pageant princess. Well, Daddy, I’m no princess!”

“Have you been drinking? The hell is this?” he asked her, voice raised. “You’re acting like we’re in ‘Footloose,’ Jessa.”

Jessa smirked at him, but joking only threw fuel on the fire, rather than douse her indignation.

“Fuck you, Daddy.”

Eric knew better than to stop his daughter’s tirades. Jessa’s sister had run for the hills as soon as the whole scene started, but Eric and Rachel were trapped by the circumstances of Jessa’s uterus. And Jessa was making everyone pay.

“You’re a whore too, Mama,” Jessa yelled as she walked down the steps. “Don’t you fucking look at me.”

This was the language that his daughter used when things did not go her way. She used it when they wouldn’t buy her the Justin Bieber album. She used it when they grounded her for bad grades. She used it when her sister upset her.

That night, Jessa stormed out, took her car and, so far as he knew, hadn’t been in touch with her parents since. Dumbstruck at the time, Eric muttered that maybe Jessa had been a little upset about her own choices. And Rachel, unsure of why he would dare make a joke when they’d just lost their daughter forever, had never looked at him the same way since.

But you cannot negotiate with terrorists, especially teenage girls.

To hear her now, Jessa had been the Little Match Girl, left homeless by cruel and unforgiving parents. Jessa had fed this bogus version of events to Mary so often that Mary was defending a girl she couldn’t stand. She was begging to come back, but she wasn’t apologizing. She kept holding the baby in front of him, trying to get Eric to play or cuddle or something. And it was brazenly disgusting.

When the doctor needed to talk to Jessa about Lydie, Eric excused himself into the hallway. Then, he went outside to smoke and make some phone calls. (He didn’t dare call Rachel and tell her any of this had happened. That was definitely an in-person conversation.) The time was almost 5 p.m.

He tried his secretary Virginia on her cell phone. She answered on the first ring.

“Hey, sorry I stormed out so quickly and never came back,” he told her. “You won’t believe the day I’ve had.”

“Where are you now?” Virginia asked. “Are you still with Jessa?”

“The baby got stung by a bee, so we ended up in the emergency room.”

“Oh, my goodness,” Virginia exclaimed. “Is the baby OK?”

“I think so,” Eric said. “The doctor is talking to Jessa now.”

“I’ll put a note on the bulletin that she’s in the hospital,” Virginia said. “I have to update it anyway.”

“Who’s here? Anybody I can visit? Jessa’s being ... a lot right now.”

Virginia consulted her computer. “Max Emmett had some kind of accident at work. Betsy Jones was supposed to have an appointment today, and she walked in on his assistant doing CPR on him. Betsy called 911 and everything.”

“The dentist who only shows up on Christmas and Easter?”

“Yes.”

“The guy that brings business cards?”

“That’s the one.”

“What kind of accident?” Eric asked.

“Well, you’re at the hospital,” Virginia said sarcastically. “You can find that out easier than I can. Betsy said someone probably clobbered him over a root canal.”

Eric chuckled, and his secretary joined him in it. Then, ever the assistant, she told him to put his game face on before going to see the dentist.

Δ

Eric went back inside the hospital, showed his clergy card even though they knew him at the front desk, and they told him where to find his holiday-only congregant. Why not visit the heathen? The minister reasoned to himself that it was a solid good deed, something that would cleanse the soul. It got him away from Jessa. And, heck, everybody deserves grace.

Eighth floor. He took the elevator up and walked toward the dentist’s room. To his surprise, just outside the dentist’s hospital room, Rev. Lancaster saw Wade, who’d been missing all day long, bickering with some black lady in scrubs. The lady kept pointing at Max Emmett, and she was crying for some reason.

With his usual puzzled, gape-mouthed expression, the boy looked over the lady’s shoulder and met the minister’s surprised eyes. At first, Rev. Lancaster remained stone-faced as he walked up to the two, too many questions battling it out in his head, and it was fun to watch the boy squirm.

Then, a scream rose out of the hospital room, a shrill, piercing exclamation in reaction to intense pain. The dentist was convulsing and screaming, awake and in agony. Wade’s attention turned toward Dr. Emmett. The woman in the scrubs looked on in terror.