Miranda manages a stiff smile at me—about as much as anyone should muster up in a situation like this—and steps back.
“Thank you,” Loreena whispers. She sheds the sunglasses as soon as we’re inside.
“I’d offer you something to drink,” Miranda rasps, her voice dry as a thousand year old book. “But I don’t know if that would be right.”
Why should we trust her, she means. We don’t know that she hasn’t laced something with arsenic or pissed into the orange juice.
That might be extreme, but she’s right. We didn’t come here for drinks or a friendly chit-chat.
Loreena proves just how utterly selfless she is by shoving down her own lingering panic after the long drive and standing outside. It wasn’t easy for her, but she did breathing exercises, talked to me, held my hand when she needed it, and relied on the dark sunglasses. She pastes on a shaky smile.
“Can I help you get something? Some water maybe?”
Miranda blinks, taken aback at the offer. “I know, I look that bad.”
“You… I didn’t expect it,” Loreena admits. She picks up my hand again and squeezes. “Are you sick?”
This isn’t a meeting about exchanging pleasantries. We’re so far past that, even though we’re strangers. Loreena gave her truth in that letter, straight up and unvarnished. There’s no need for introductions or small talk.
Miranda’s breath wheezes in and out in the quiet living room we just stepped into. Her house smells like lemons. The kind you use for cleaning, but there’s also a strange chemical scent in here that overrides even that. Something metallic. I think it might be coming from the woman herself.
“I am,” she admits. “Lung cancer. Never smoked a day in my life, but that’s how it goes.” She waves us over to the couch while she hobbles over to one of those chairs that you can lower and raise with a touch of a button. She sinks down into it as carefully as if it were lined with glass, but the real pain is obviously inside of her.
I want to think that it’s good. That she’s getting no more than she deserves. That she can rot and burn right along with her son, but the anger that’s stormed over me ever since Loreena told me what happened to her, has either run its course, or it’s out of steam for the day.
It’s hard to wish horrible things on a person who is clearly already sobroken. I don’t feel bad for all the things I’ve thought and felt. They were justified. Can I let it go now, even just for the duration of this conversation? Can I set my feelings aside and look at an old woman, riddled with cancer, facing down what areprobably going to be her last few months, and find even a scrap of compassion?
Loreena tugs me over to the couch, since I’m rooted in place. The house is nice from the outside, but hasn’t seen an update since the nineties, although it was probably nice back then. I guess it’s still nice enough. The carpet is freshly vacuumed, the floral couch and loveseat are immaculate, the oak coffee table looks like the day it was purchased. Even the heavy green drapes at the windows, swagged in the middle, look as though they’ve been vacuumed regularly to keep the dust from accumulating. There’s even one of those big wall units across the room, with a TV that is anything but flat. Books, photos, and CDs, and little ornaments are neatly arranged on it.
I immediately notice that most of the photos have been faced inwards.
Either Miranda turned them a long time ago, or she faced them away so that Loreena wouldn’t have to look at the man who attacked her.
Loreena doesn’t know how to start, but Miranda does it for her. She folds her hands with the paper-thin skin over her lap. She’s made an effort to dress nicely, though it probably cost her a great deal of energy. A pair of pressed black slacks with the crease ironed down the middle, and a cream knit cardigan over a white blouse.
“How could he have done these things?” she asks, tears glistening in her eyes. They’re green, and while they’re focused, they aren’t clear. “Nothing happened to him. He had a good life. No criminal connections that I knew of. Nothing. How… how could he have done something soawful?”
Loreena and I both draw in deep breaths.
It’s clear from the absolute agony that this woman is in—pain that has nothing to do with the cancer eating away at her—that she knew nothing about her son’s actions. She’s also telling the truth.
I’ve been so clenched up inside that I’ve almost forgotten what it is to feel anything else, but a slow trickle of empathy drips through me. It’s impossible to see someone suffering and not be moved, but now I feel like I can actually be a human being and let it filter through me unfettered.
“I don’t know. I- I don’t,” Loreena says in the most broken whisper.
“He worked in an office,” Miranda says, but it isn’t easy for her. She’s reliving memories of her son, painting them over with the new knowledge of his horrible deeds. “All his coworkers loved him. When one of them had a preemie baby, he helped raise money to pay for their NICU bills. He volunteered. He trained and ran marathons. He had so many friends.” The moisture spills over her eyes and rolls down her ashen cheeks.
Loreena doesn’t hesitate. She gets up and immediately crosses the room. Kneeling down in front of Miranda she takes her hands gently, taking care not to do anything that would hurt the frail woman.
“I didn’t come here to make you feel guilty. I don’t want you to have to pay for what he did. I meant what I said in my letter. I want to offer my forgiveness. I blamed him for everything that happened to me, but I just want to let it go. I want to think it, feel it, breathe it out, and let it pass clean out of my body.”
More tears spill unchecked. They dribble off Miranda’s chin. “There has to be something I can do to make this right.”
“This wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know,” Loreena insists. She swipes at her face.
The fact that she’s crying, wrenches open a wound in me that causes the savage, primal parts of me to want to respond. Seeing Loreena in any kind of pain is devastating. I force my ass to stay right there on the couch, but I do lean forward and clench my hands between my knees.
“If I had, I would have done something. I’m so sorry. I know that it’s never going to be enough.” Miranda’s breathing grows steadily worse. The rasps turn into dry wheezes.
