Iain

 

The hospital was cold.

Michele’s gloved hand was wrapped around mine as we made our way to the elevator. Our footsteps squeaked across the floor, that strange, sterile smell only reserved for hospitals overpowering everything else. Wet Floor signs were scattered throughout the lobby.

What happened in Michele’s apartment had confused the hell out of me. We went from playing around to something else in the span of just a few seconds. And when she told me that she had seen Brandon….

Fuck. That wasn’t easy to hear.

I had to be more careful around her. I couldn’t just assume I could come up on her any time I felt like it, even if I thought we were kidding. Whatever had happened between them, it obviously still lived within her.

At the elevator, Michele hit the call button. She glanced at me, curiosity on her face, as we waited.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“My mom?”

“Yeah.”

The elevator arrived, and we stepped on. I considered her question, trying to envision it: right before my deployment, at a going away party that Emily put together, my mother had come. Drunk, I assumed, based on the way she had swayed in the doorway on her way in.

“About five years ago.”

“Wow.”

Her hand tightened around mine, and I shrugged. “It doesn’t feel like that long.” I hit the button for the second floor, turning to look at her, hoping my face wasn’t as hard as it felt. “Our relationship has always been… strained.”

She nodded, as if she understood exactly what I meant. I thought about her own mother, who she said lived in Florida. I remembered the way she had asked me, “Would he find me there?” Why didn’t she go there in the first place? Why had she come here?

There was a lot I didn’t know about her still. The elevator stopped, and we got off onto the hushed floor.

282 was toward the end of the hall. My stomach lurched as we neared it. The reality was really sinking in, what I was doing. Seeing my mother for the first time in five years.

Would I recognize her? She’d been sober that long, according to my dad. Even though they were divorced, he still looked after her. They talked all the time. I had never understood that—his need to constantly be sure that she was okay, even after, legally, it wasn’t his responsibility anymore.

The door was open, and I let go of Michele’s hand before walking in. My dad was there, looking the same as he always did in a tucked in t-shirt and jeans, his scuffed work boots squeaking as he stood to greet us. His blue eyes flicked between Michele and I.

I saw movement in the hospital bed, but I couldn’t look yet. I gestured behind me toward Michele, clearing my throat.

“Dad, this is Michele,” I said quietly, in the same kind of voice you reserve for funerals.

“Son.” He nodded at me, and extended his hand toward her. They shook. “Nice to meet you. I’m Larry, Iain’s father.”

“It’s nice to meet you, too,” she said.

“Iain?”

The sound of my mother’s voice, soft and gruff, implored me to look at her. I approached the bed, eyes skimming from her pale hand with short fingernails, up her arm which had an IV line attached to it, and finally landing on her face. She had more gray in her hair than I was used to. She looked sick, pale and drawn. And she wasn’t drunk.

Not like my mother at all.

“Yeah, it’s me.” I sat on the hard chair next to the bed, not sure what to do with my hands. I settled with clasping them together. She was staring at me.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” she said.

I glanced over at my dad, who was sitting back down, and at Michele, who was standing by the window, watching the scene like she didn’t know how she fit into it. I wondered, again, why she would want to be here at all. Any moment now, the ball was going to drop, and I would have preferred that Michele didn’t have to witness it.

“I hear you’re not feeling well,” I said to my mother, watching her. I waited for any sign of irritation, for an eye roll, for the click of her tongue.

None of that happened. She cast her eyes down to the foot of the bed, nodding. “Looks like I gave it up too late.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“They say I have less than a month.”

I sat back in my chair, the hard, stiff backing jarring my spine. To know my mother was sick was one thing, but to hear her say that she had less than a month to live was another. I swallowed, licking my lips and flicking my eyes over at my dad, then at Michele again. They both looked as grim as I felt.

The room suddenly felt too hot. I stood and walked toward the window, looking out, not knowing what to say. I thought of the last five years, letting it all wash over me as I considered all the times I’d ignored her phone calls, the letters I’d ripped up without reading. So much time wasted.

How the fuck was I supposed to know she’d get sick? I couldn’t have. And now, looking back, was any of it worth it? The anger I’d felt toward her, the five years I’d spent ignoring her, what did it amount to?

None of it was stopping me from feeling the pain, from knowing that I was about to lose her.

I startled at a light touch on my back. Michele stood beside me, her eyes searching mine. Silently asking if I was alright.

I turned around and looked at my mom again, lying there so thin in that white bed. Her cheeks were sunken in, something I didn’t notice before.

“Who is the girl, Iain? Aren’t you gonna introduce me?”

Frozen, I stood there, uncertain. It would have been an easy three words - This is Michele - but all I could think about was my mother’s voice in my head, a broken record playing over and over: It’s all your fault. I had, momentarily, forgotten about that. This woman blamed Emily’s miscarriage on me.

How could I pity her?

Michele’s hand squeezed against my back, a light pressure that brought me back to the present.

“This is Michele, Mom,” I said, doing everything I could to shove those thoughts away. To forget about the past. “Michele, this is my mom, Sandra.”

“And how long have you been together?”

Michele and I exchanged glances.

“Just a couple of weeks,” she said, dropping her hand from my back.

There was an awkward silence after that, and it occurred to me that this would have normally been the time when my mother began to interrogate her. To ask her about her family, her education, her hometown. To ask what she did for a living and how long she’d been doing it. To measure her against some arbitrary idea of what a woman should be in her mind.

But I realized that she wouldn’t do that because she didn’t even know who I was anymore.

She lost that right, if she ever had it at all, a long time ago.

“I’m glad to see you happy,” she said.

 

xxx

 

Mom fell asleep shortly after that. I stared numbly at her for a few moments before my dad cleared his throat.

“It means the world to her that you came, son.”

I looked at him, at his earnest face and frayed shirt collar. I didn’t know what to say.

Michele and I left, not saying a word until we were on the wet, salted sidewalk.

“All things considered, your mom seemed… nice,” Michele said, taking my arm. We made our way to the subway, leisurely.

“I’ve never seen her sober before,” I said. I hadn’t even known that that was on my mind until I uttered the words. But it was true.

“That must have been a shock.” Michele’s grip tightened; she leaned her head against my shoulder as we strolled. “I can’t imagine… what it would be like to see my mom again.”

“You said she was in Florida?”

She lifted her head, nodding. “Yeah. I haven’t seen her in a long time. She moved to Tampa right after I started at Indianapolis.”

“Why?”

“Um… I don’t know, really.” She kicked at some slush on the sidewalk, the sound of salt crunching under our feet as we walked. “She had me too young. She never got to live her life. I mean, that’s all I can rationalize.”

“So, what? You turned 18 and she packed up, just like that?”

“Yes. But... it really didn’t bother me. I mean, it still doesn’t bother me. I know how it sounds, but… in a way, I get it. Growing up, she was a decent mom. She worked hard, and we always had food on the table and a roof over our heads. She just wasn’t… present, in some ways. You know? But I don’t begrudge her a happy life now.”

I wasn’t sure I understood how she could feel that way, but I nodded anyway.

“You’re bigger than me,” I told her.

“I don’t know if that’s true,” she said. We were approaching the subway now, and she lifted her head as we neared the steps. “I just realized that… nothing about my relationship with my mother was anything I could change. I’d done my part, you know? So why get mad?”

“The fact that she left you the moment she could doesn’t… upset you?”

She shook her head. “No. I came to terms with our relationship long before that.”

I couldn’t think of a reply for that, so we descended the stairs into the subway station silently. I tried to imagine myself free from anger at my mother but couldn’t. It was something that came so naturally to me, something I’d been harboring for so long. It was indisputably a part of me that couldn’t be extracted. Even now, while she lay sick on her deathbed, the anger was persistent, resolute.

But I felt something new sprinkled in that felt completely alien in relation to my mother: pity.

Pity for the woman who’d spent my childhood in a daze. Pity for the woman who told me when I was eight that she blamed me for her unhappiness. Pity for the woman who didn’t show up to any of my school or sporting events, who didn’t remember my birthday one year, who didn’t do any of the things my friends’ moms did.

Why did I pity her now? Just because the end was near?

“What’s going on in that head of yours?” Michele asked as we were waiting for our train. I blinked my thoughts away.

“Just thinking about… family.”

“Any brothers or sisters?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No. I was actually a miracle baby. They told my mom she couldn’t have kids, and then I showed up a year later.”

“That’s crazy.” Michele smiled, but it was short lived. “I have a sister. Clarissa. But I haven’t talked to her in almost a year.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged, attempting to appear nonchalant but failing. “She works with Brandon. It’s – it’s hard. I want to talk to her. I wanted to go to her, when I left. But…I just couldn’t.”

What the hell hasn’t Brandon fucked with in Michele’s life? I raised my hand and rested it lightly on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. That must really suck.” I thought of being a kid again, of dreaming fiercely for a brother. I could still remember that feeling, clearly, conjuring it up in my memory banks. It was still so strong I could feel it now: that desperate feeling of need. I couldn’t imagine not having a relationship with my sibling if I did have one.

“We weren’t super close before I married Brandon, but she was the one who actually dragged me to the party where I met him.” I could see her body language changing entirely now; she was clamming up, closing off. Her lips were in a thin line on her face, her eyes drawn forward toward the crummy, wet wall of the subway station. “And after we got married, things… began to change.”

“Change how?”

She began to kick at the ground, at invisible debris on the tile. “Just stupid shit. It started slowly... he was a textbook abuser. He would tell me he didn’t want me to go out some nights, you know, with friends, until it turned into every night I told him I had plans. Then it branched out to other people, like coworkers, my sister, my uncle. He… forced me out of every relationship I had.”

The station began to shake; the train was approaching. I felt completely sick that I had accepted a job from this asshole. Granted, I hadn’t known… but still.

I clenched my fists at my sides as the train eased into place on the platform. I wondered, not for the first time, how safe Michele could possibly be from him. I’d hopefully sent him off in the wrong direction, but how long would that last? I had to keep her as safe as possible, for as long as I could.

“Let’s go back to my apartment,” I said to her. If she was at my apartment, she was safe. “I can make you a delicious, gourmet lunch of ham sandwiches.”

She broke into a wide smile and nodded. “Sure. That sounds great.”

The doors opened and we walked on with a herd of other people. I cast my eyes around at all the strangers in the car, looking for anyone whose gaze lingered our way for too long, for anyone that looked out of place. But nobody did. Everyone looked caught up in their own thing, either listening to music, reading newspapers or books or something on their phones and tablets. Nobody was paying attention to us.

But how long would that be the case?

I glanced at Michele, who looked at ease. I watched her eyes dart around the car, inspecting the passengers. I realized then that she must always be searching for something out of the ordinary. Had she always been that way, or had I brought it on? I reached over and grabbed her hand, squeezing it in mine. Her eyes landed on mine and she smiled shyly. The innocent look sent heat right through me.

I wondered what her future looked like. Would she stay in New York, or would she end up in Tampa, like she said before? She didn’t seem certain about anything. She used a fake name. She could easily pack her bags and leave without even saying goodbye.

I squeezed her hand a little tighter at that thought, and she smiled at me again, her brow knitting in question. I knew without a doubt that if she sensed any immediate danger, she would leave without question. I couldn’t stop her from protecting herself, and I wouldn’t ask her to, but thinking about it made me feel so…empty.

All I could do was keep her as safe as I could.

That would have to be enough.