Unlike when Sheriff Davis had stopped me from helping last time.
* * *
It probably wasn’t appropriate to laugh when I could hear my mother yelling at the nurse as I entered the hallway with her room, but after the couple of days I’d had, I welcomed the news that my mother was still the same person.
Granted, it wasn’t like “the same person” was some angel. I heard her say “do your fucking job!” just before I walked in. But after talking to the dead for a bit, I was happy to be speaking to someone who had nearly entered that realm.
And I was determined to not let it go to waste.
“Steele! Steele, my boy!” she said. “About time that you entered. Nurse, get out of here.”
“With pleasure,” the nurse said.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
The nurse gave me an appreciative nod but wasted no time hurrying out of there. She shut the door behind us, and I pulled up a chair. My mother, not surprisingly, looked tense, old, and clammy. In some respects, a hospital visit like this was surprising not in that it had happened, but in that it hadn’t happened earlier.
“What took you so long to get here?”
Treat her right. You’re going to have to be patient. You don’t want to be looking back on this like you do Dad.
“I was visiting Stan and Dad at the graveyard.”
My mother’s face softened. It was the first time that I had seen her face do that in years, at least. I certainly couldn’t recall her even doing it like that in ages.
“Why would you do that?”
“I…”
I stopped myself. I didn’t want everything I said to be thought before I spoke it, but I had to make sure I chose all my words carefully.
“I was thinking about how I’ve been afraid to face it, Mom,” I said. “I just am so angry and bitter about it, but that prevents me from going to see them. I felt like after…after someone asked me about it and I pushed away, I needed to go and see them. So, I did.”
“Huh,” my mother said.
She almost looked like she wanted to say something derisive and dismissive, but faced with my attitude, she was disarmed and unsure how to respond.
“I’ve been miserable since they died,” my mother said.
I reached out and held her hand. It was a gesture I hadn’t planned on making, and when she didn’t take it back, I almost removed it.
But I held on.
“You all were my everything,” she said. “And then, bam, just like that, two of you were gone. What did I have left to live for?”
“Me.”
Mom looked into my eyes. Her eyes looked hollowed out and empty, but as if they had once burned brightly. Her eyes were not the eyes of someone incapable of loving; they were the eyes of someone who very much had all the capacity for love but none of the fuel to light the fire for it.
“I know, and I should,” she said. “But I have never trusted myself enough to, Steele.”
I squeezed her hand. That was for me more than for her.
“After their deaths, I didn’t want to raise you. I didn’t trust that I could do it without somehow setting you up for a tragic end of your own. We moved here thinking it would be a quiet life, and instead, we wound up in a horrible place that has only gotten worse with time.”
She shook her head. She spoke less with tenderness and sadness and more with just bitter regret. She didn’t cry, because just as she had no fuel for joy, I didn’t think she had fuel to show emotion through tears.
“And once I started thinking like that, it became final. It had to be. I could not change my mind.”
