Page 35
He nodded.
“Were the two of you alone?”
“Yeah. Neither of my folks had much in the way of family. That’s when I got so scared. That’s what I remember most about that time. My mom had just started using a wheelchair. It was tough for her to get around the house because some of the doorways weren’t wide enough. I couldn’t carry her or anything. We had decent medical insurance and sometimes there were nurses, but it wasn’t enough. My dad sent money, but that wasn’t enough, either.”
Heather’s stomach tightened as she tried to imagine a grown man leaving his ten-year-old son in charge of a disabled woman.
“When he left, he said it was up to me. That I would have to be in charge and take care of things. I didn’t understand what he was saying. When I started to cry, he slapped me across the face and told me to quit acting like a girl.”
Heather pressed her hand to her mouth to hold in a soft cry of pain. Pain for him and the child he had been. She slid toward him on the sofa but didn’t touch him. She wasn’t sure if she should encourage him to keep going on with his story or tell him to stop. She wanted to do whatever would make him feel better. But before she could decide what to do, he started talking again.
“My mom got progressively worse. I would come home from school every day and take care of her.” He closed his eyes against memories she couldn’t begin to imagine. “She suffered a lot.”
“So did you,” she said gently, and touched his arm. “You were too young to be dealing with that kind of pressure. I’m surprised the court didn’t put you in a foster home.”
“I don’t think anyone knew. The nurses came during the day and they all thought my dad was at work. My mom didn’t tell them anything different. I think she was afraid of going to a nursing home.”
He clutched his hands tighter, until she could see white on the knuckles and the ridges of his tendons.
“I tried,” he said. “I tried so damn hard, but it was never enough. The more incapacitated she became, the more I had to do for her. Finally, the nurses told us she was going to have to go on a respirator.”
A shudder rippled through him. His voice dropped to a whisper. “That night, my mother told me she didn’t want to try anymore. She was in pain and she was dying. She refused to live her last days breathing with the help of a machine. So she wanted to kill herself.”
Heather sucked in a breath. She sensed what was coming next and didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to know what Jim had been through. But she couldn’t stop him from speaking. She could only listen and pray that she was wrong.
“I was feeding her soup,” he said. “She looked at me and told me she couldn’t do it herself, so she wanted me to kill her.”
The scent of the heating coals drifted into the room. Two houses away, children played outside—a noisy game that had them shrieking with laughter. But here in Heather’s house, time stood still. The words repeated themselves in her brain, bending and weaving together until the vowels and consonants made no sense. And yet a very clear image remained. A dying mother had asked her young son to kill her.
“How old were you?”
“Thirteen.” He sagged back against the sofa and rubbed his face. “I couldn’t do it. I cried and yelled at her and told her it was wrong, but she was relentless. Day after day that was all she talked about. She’d figured out how and she even wanted me to help her write a letter so everyone would understand it wasn’t my fault. She said if I didn’t do this one thing, she would never forgive me. She would stop loving me.”
The last sentence had been a mere whisper. Heather had sensed it more than heard it. She stared at Jim, numb with shock, but he wasn’t looking at her anymore. She doubted that he even remembered she was in the room.
“The day they came and put the breathing tube into her, she screamed at me, swearing she would never forgive me. Then she stopped screaming. After that, she wouldn’t look at me except with hatred.”
Heather’s stomach lurched uneasily while cold sweat dotted her brow. It wasn’t supposed to be like this for anyone, she thought in horror. How had he survived the ordeal? How had he turned out so incredibly wonderful when this was his past?
“After that, she deteriorated fairly quickly,” he went on.
His voice had changed, now sounding almost normal, as if he was telling someone else’s story. Maybe that was how he kept his sanity.
“They moved her to a nursing home. By that time, I was in foster care. I visited her every day, but when I came into the room, she closed her eyes. No matter how I begged her to forgive me, she pretended I wasn’t there. Even at the end, she wouldn’t forgive me. I remember standing by the side of her bed, sobbing. I told her that I’d done the best I could, but I couldn’t fix her. She was my mother, so I couldn’t kill her. I could only love her and want her to love me back. I begged her to give me just one look to let me know it was okay between us.”
He was silent for several minutes, then he continued. “Finally, I bent over to kiss her goodbye. The doctor told me she probably wouldn’t make it through the night and I begged her one last time to forgive me. Instead, she kept her eyes closed, and with what I guess was her last bit of strength and ability to move, she turned her head away.”
He gave a half-strangled laugh that was one of pain rather than humor. “She could only move about a half inch or so, but I knew what she was doing. Rejecting me with that final act. She shut me out forever.”
“I’m so sorry,” Heather said, wishing she had something helpful to say. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so incredibly inadequate.
“Me, too,” Jim said lightly. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
She reached up and was surprised to find her cheeks damp. She sniffed and wiped away the tears. “What a horrible experience,” she said. “It’s so sad. I don’t pretend to understand what your mother was suffering, but it must have been awful. Even so, I can’t forgive her for what she did to you. You were so young.” More tears rolled down her cheeks. She brushed them away impatiently. “Sorry, Jim. I don’t think I can help it.”
His jaw tightened. “I wish I’d been able to fix the situation, to fix her, but I couldn’t. That’s what I regret the most.”
He was lying. Heather knew that with the same certainty that she knew the sun would rise the next morning. Jim was in pain, not because he hadn’t been able to “fix” his mother, but because she’d made an impossible request and then rejected him for failing her. What he remembered most was the withdrawal of her love because that was her real death to him.
