Chapter 25: Does God Exist?
The afternoon had enough light left in it for a workout, and Mike used it.
He found a clear stretch of the backyard, ran through a series of high-intensity circuits — sprints, bodyweight resistance, the kind of conditioning that Coach George's practice had been building toward — and let the physical work do what it did. His body processed it differently than it used to.
The Demon Body didn't accumulate fatigue the way normal physiology did — he could push to genuine exertion without the structural damage that would have sidelined anyone else. The soreness was real, the effort was real, but the recovery underneath it ran clean.
He came back inside flushed and breathing hard, which felt right.
[Physique +2]
Connie was in her armchair with a Lone Star and the particular comfortable stillness of a woman who had told the Sheldon-and-the-pastor story to her satisfaction and was now content to exist.
Three empty bottles on the side table.
"Connie," Mike said.
"I know, I know," she said, without looking up. "I'm fine."
"You've had three."
"I've had more than three on better occasions than this and been perfectly fine." She looked at him over the bottle. "I'm seventy-two years old. I've earned the right to my own assessment."
Mike looked at her.
She looked back.
He went to shower.
He was in the kitchen pulling things out of the fridge — Connie had mentioned pork tenderloin at some point and he'd been mentally constructing a pan sauce since then — when her phone rang in the living room.
He heard her answer. Heard the quality of her voice change.
He set down the tenderloin and came to the doorway.
Connie was sitting forward in her chair, the beer forgotten on the table beside her, listening with the focused stillness of someone receiving information they weren't prepared for. Her face had shed the comfortable ease of the past hour.
"We'll be right there," she said, and hung up.
She looked at Mike.
"George," she said. "He collapsed. Mary thinks it's his heart. She's at the hospital — she needs someone with the kids."
They crossed the street together.
The Cooper house had a different quality when they walked in — the particular quiet of a space that was usually full of noise and wasn't. Georgie, Sheldon, and Missy were on the couch together, which was its own kind of information. Georgie had his elbows on his knees. Missy was holding her plastic horse with both hands. Sheldon was sitting very straight, the way he sat when he was managing something he didn't have a category for.
They'd seen George leave — pale, one hand pressed to his chest, Mary's voice with that specific pitch in it that told children, regardless of age, that something was seriously wrong.
Sheldon looked up when Connie came in. "Grandma Connie — is George's dad going to be okay?"
He asked it the way a child asks when they want to be told yes but are old enough to know that wanting something to be true doesn't make it so.
Georgie looked at her. Missy looked at her. All three of them with the same weight behind their eyes.
Connie sat down on the coffee table in front of them — close, deliberate — and looked at each of them in turn.
"George is strong," she said. "He's at the hospital, which is exactly where he needs to be, and your mom is with him." She kept her voice steady, which took something. "We're going to stay right here, we're going to be okay, and we're going to wait for news."
It wasn't a promise about the outcome. It was a promise about the next few hours, which was the promise that was actually in her power to make.
The three of them leaned slightly toward her, the way people lean toward warmth.
Mike went to the kitchen.
Nobody had eaten. It was past six. Whatever else was happening, three kids and one slightly drunk seventy-two-year-old needed food, and food was something he could actually do.
He took stock of what was available — the tenderloin from Connie's fridge wasn't going to work, but the Coopers' kitchen had chicken thighs, potatoes, onions, the reliable staples of a family that cooked in bulk. He pulled things out and started moving.
Connie appeared in the doorway after a few minutes.
"Let me help," she said.
He looked at her. The slight glassiness behind her eyes was still there, and her coordination had the careful quality of someone who was compensating.
"I've got it," he said. "Go sit with them. They need you more than I need help in here."
Connie looked at the stove, looked at Mike, and made the calculation.
She crossed the kitchen and hugged him — brief, firm, the hug of someone who needed to do something with the feeling and that was what was available.
"Thank you," she said quietly.
Then she went back to the living room.
Dinner was simple and hot, which was the point.
Mike brought everything to the table and they sat down — all five of them, the three kids and Connie and Mike — and the act of eating did what eating does in difficult situations, which was provide something immediate and manageable to do.
Nobody talked much. That was fine too.
Missy ate her chicken with the focused attention of a child directing her energy somewhere controllable. Georgie ate steadily, not looking up. Connie picked at things, her mind clearly at the hospital with Mary.
Then Sheldon set down his fork.
He'd been quieter than usual all evening — not the quiet of someone thinking something through, but the quiet of someone carrying something they hadn't said yet.
"Mike," he said. "Do you think God exists?"
The table went still.
Mike looked at him. There was something specific in Sheldon's face — not philosophical curiosity, not the debate-ready engagement he'd brought to Pastor Jeff that morning. Something more personal than that. Something that looked, on Sheldon Cooper's face, a lot like guilt.
"Why are you asking?" Mike said.
Sheldon was quiet for a moment. "At church today, I argued against the existence of God." He looked at his plate. "And then we came home and George's father—" He stopped. Started again. "I understand that correlation does not imply causation. Statistically, there is no mechanism by which my theological position could affect George Senior's cardiovascular health."
"But," Mike said.
"But," Sheldon said. He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
Mike looked at him for a moment — at the nine-year-old who had taken on a pastor that morning with the full confidence of someone who had science on his side, and who was now sitting very still at a dinner table, carrying the particular weight of a child who was afraid they'd done something wrong and couldn't prove they hadn't.
"I think," Mike said carefully, "that if God exists — and I think that's genuinely an open question, not one with an obvious answer — then he's not in the business of punishing nine-year-olds for asking honest questions."
Sheldon looked at him. "You think he might exist."
"I think the universe is complicated enough that I hold the question open," Mike said. "Jennifer taught me that the things that seem impossible sometimes aren't. And the things you think you understand sometimes aren't what you think they are."
He hadn't planned to invoke Jennifer. It arrived on its own.
Sheldon absorbed this with the focused attention he gave things that were actually worth processing. Something in his posture shifted — not resolution exactly, but the specific easing of a weight that had been distributed slightly more evenly.
"If God does exist," Sheldon said quietly, "I'd like to apologize for this morning. And ask him to make sure George's father is alright."
He pushed back from the table, went to the corner of the room, and knelt down.
Missy watched him. Georgie watched him. Neither of them said anything.
Connie looked at the corner where Sheldon was kneeling, and her expression did something that she didn't try to manage.
The phone rang twenty minutes later.
Everyone looked at it.
Connie reached for it and stopped. Her eyes had the particular unfocus of someone who had been leaning on a beer and was now being asked to receive important information.
Mike picked it up.
"This is Mike."
Mary's voice came through — controlled, tired, the voice of someone who had been holding themselves together for hours. George was stable. Still unconscious, still in the ICU, but the doctors were cautiously optimistic. She was staying. She wanted to know how the kids were.
"They're okay," Mike said. "We had dinner. Everyone's here."
A pause. "Tell them—" Her voice went briefly uneven. "Tell them I'll call again soon."
"I will."
He hung up.
Three pairs of eyes across the table.
"He's stable," Mike said. "Still in the ICU, but the doctors are saying it's looking better. Your mom's staying with him."
Georgie exhaled — the kind of exhale that had been waiting for an hour to happen. Missy pressed her face into Connie's arm. Sheldon, still in the corner, had heard everything.
He didn't get up immediately.
He stayed where he was for another minute, finishing whatever he'd started.
Then he stood, walked back to the table, and picked up his fork.
"Statistically," he said, with the careful tone of someone adjusting a prior, "the timing is not sufficient evidence of causal relationship."
"No," Mike agreed.
"However." Sheldon looked at his plate. "It also doesn't not suggest one."
Connie made a sound that was almost a laugh and wasn't.
"I want to go see him," Georgie said. He'd been sitting with the stable news for five minutes and had clearly been doing the math on what to do with it. "I know he's unconscious. I just — I want to be there."
"Me too," Missy said immediately.
Sheldon nodded, once.
They looked at Connie.
Connie was listing slightly to the left in her chair in a way that made it clear she was in no condition to drive, which she knew and they all knew and nobody was going to say directly.
"Keys are in my jacket," she said, to Mike. "Pocket on the left."
"I know," Mike said.
"You don't have a license."
"You're in no condition to drive, and the hospital is twelve blocks away." He found the keys. "I'll drive slow."
Connie looked at him with the expression of a woman making a decision she was going to make regardless of how she felt about it.
"Slow," she said. "And the back way. Less traffic."
"Back way," Mike confirmed.
Missy found a piece of paper and wrote a note before they left — Gone to hospital to see Dad. Back later. — The Coopers and also Mike and Grandma Connie — and left it on the kitchen table with a crayon drawing of what appeared to be a heart or possibly a football. She didn't explain which.
Sheldon read the note, considered it, and added a postscript with a ballpoint pen: Note left at 8:47 PM. Author: Missy Cooper, with editorial contributions. Then he put the pen down and went to find his jacket.
Georgie watched this, said nothing, and held the door.
The hospital was quiet in the specific way hospitals were quiet on a Saturday night — not empty, just operating on a different frequency.
Mary was in the hallway outside the ICU when they came around the corner, and the moment she saw all three of her kids she went very still and then opened her arms, and all three of them went into them at once.
Mike and Connie stood back.
Connie's hand found Mike's arm, briefly.
He looked at her.
She had the expression of a woman who had seen a lot of things over seventy-two years, and who had learned to recognize the ones that mattered.
Down the hallway from the ICU, in a small alcove, there was a chapel — barely a room, really, just a few chairs and a stained glass window and a Bible on a table. Simple. Functional. The kind of space a hospital put in because sometimes people needed one.
Sheldon noticed it on the way past Mary.
He stopped.
Looked at the chapel.
Looked back at his family — his mother holding all three of them, Connie steady at the edge of it, Mike beside her.
He made a decision.
He went in.
Mike watched the door close behind him.
He didn't know what Sheldon was going to say in there. He suspected it was going to be more honest than the argument that morning, and considerably less structured.
He thought that was probably fine.
(End of Chapter 25)
[Milestone: 500 Power Stones = +1 Chapter]
[Milestone: 10 Reviews = +1 Chapter]
Enjoyed this chapter? Leave a review.
20+advanced chapters on P1treon Soulforger