“I am going to move to the other room now. Brace yourself,” Brenda tells me.
I’ve hooked up my laptop to the big screen TV in our living room. I watch as the camera lens faces down towards my half-sister’s shoes and finally jiggles to a fixed position. As the picture comes into focus, I stare at the emaciated figure propped up in a hospital bed. The last time I laid eyes on my birth mother was over a half-century ago. The unsmiling face of a young woman from those black and white photographs is unrecognizable now after several bouts of fighting, and now losing to, cancer. She is frail, just skin and bones hidden under a flowery housedress. Brenda filled me in on her condition and said that our mother didn’t want to go back to the hospital again, so they converted a room in Brenda’s house to be her hospice.
My mother wears a skullcap. I imagine that the chemo burned out all her hair. An air tube is affixed into each nostril. My mind is all over the place. Is this really my birth mother? Or some complicated hoax to scam us for money? Those fleeting doubts disappear when a reedy, thin voice fills the living room. I clutch Ken’s hand as I hear it. There is no doubt she is Eleanor.
“Gwendolyn, you look beautiful, and who is this handsome man?”
“This is Ken, my husband. We’ve been married for thirty-three years.”
“What do you do, dear?” she asks Ken.
“I fix up houses for people in town,” he replies.
“Brenda told me you were a schoolteacher, Gwendolyn.”
“That’s right,” I say. “Did you continue with nursing when you returned to Jamaica?”
“Yes, and then I volunteered at the children’s clinic for a time, until I got sick.”
You would think that after a fifty-year separation that we would have more to say, but I was warned that her energy is failing, and we would have to keep things brief.
“Gwendolyn, the doctors tell me that my time is short. I asked Brenda to find you so that I could tell you how sorry I am for leaving you and your father when I did.” I can see that saying this is so hard for her. Brenda comes back into the frame and holds our mother’s hand.
The words I longed to hear ring in my ears as I stutter, “I forgive you, Eleanor. For years, I thought that I did something to make you angry, and that is why you left us.”
“No, dear, you were a wonderful child, always so happy and full of energy. It had nothing to do with you.”
“I understand that now and know that you had a hard time back then.”
She said, “Those were difficult times. My parents were very strict.” She pauses. This is difficult for her. “When I told them I was pregnant and was going to marry a white man, they disowned me and stopped talking to me. They told no one about my situation. My mother and father were ashamed of me. I was twenty-one years old and living alone in England. I had nobody except your father.”
“I can’t imagine what that must have been like,” I admit.
“It all became too hard on me, and that is when I saw that you and Stanley would be better off without me. I was not in a good way.”
I have nothing but compassion for this old woman, breathing her last breaths and using what energy she has left to make amends with me. “It must have been very hard for you,” I say. And with that, the last vestiges of my anger and resentment fade away.
“A day didn’t go by that I didn’t think about you, Gwendolyn. I always wondered how you were doing. As time went on, I was too ashamed to try to reach out to you. I am sorry. I should have done this sooner.”
She and I are crying. Ken is fighting back tears. Finally, I put a coherent thought together and say, “I am glad that you told Brenda about me and that we have a chance to visit. Would you like to meet your grandchildren?”
I call Wesley and Erin into the room. On the screen, Brenda sits next to my mother, and her three kids go to the other side of the bed. Then Erin calls in Darren and my grandchildren. Brenda’s grandchildren fill out the rest of our TV screen. Eleanor and I sit back and let everyone talk and get to know each other.
Eventually, Brenda sees that our mother’s energy is waning. This chat is exhausting her.
Brenda gives me the high sign. Her clan moves off screen, and only my mother is left in the center of the screen. Mine do the same and I say, “There is one last person here that wants to say hello.”
I wave a kiss to her, and she waves one back to me. It lands on my wet cheek. “Goodbye, Mom.”
“Goodbye, my precious daughter,” she replies.
Ken and I move off screen and stand nearby as my father sits down where I had been warming the couch. Ken is holding me tightly, lest I might topple over.
“Hello, Eleanor,” he says. I can hear in his voice that he wasn’t prepared for how she looks. “It’s been a long time.”
“Hello, Stanley.”
Our family has a quiet lunch after the video chat. Wesley and Erin understand, but I am not sure the little ones know that we were saying both hello and goodbye at the same time.
Ken and my dad get busy on a leaky bathroom faucet. Saint Darren takes my grandchildren back home. Erin and I have so much to catch up on. The rainstorm has moved on, the dark clouds give way to clearing skies. Emotionally, I am like a wrung-out dish towel. Our feet walk us to our favorite spot. This is a place we’ve come to for twenty-five years. We just enjoy the quiet for now.
Milford Elementary has been shuttered since the school closing. I can't believe that decision was made just a few weeks ago. At some point, they will have to winterize the building. At least they are still mowing the grass. The flower beds around the flagpole needs weeding. I will leave a message for Mary Meade after hours. I’m sure she will appreciate it. We silently trod behind the school to the rear parking lot and off to the far side to the swing sets
The town’s insurance company argued that the monkey bars, slide, merry-go-round, and swings were too dangerous to stay. The words “attractive nuisance” were bandied about, but the townspeople, many of whom had hung upside down from these monkey bars, told the school board where they could go when it was suggested that the cherished welded-steel creations be removed.
In the end, a compromise was reached, and the playground was covered with wood chips.
We sit on the swings and gently sway back and forth. We face each other as we talk.
“I would have liked to be a fly on the wall when Attorney Rosenthal told Shafer and Barney they had the wrong suspect,” Erin says.
“Actually, she let the video of the re-created crime do most of the heavy lifting,” I say.
“Smart.”
“The police knew that they would see it again at the probable cause hearing if they didn’t accept the findings as presented.”
“Shafer could be a hard ass, but I think he’d rather get it right than get totally embarrassed,” she added.
“Then she provided them with an exhibit-quality timeline. One of her paralegals pulled an all-nighter doing that.”
Erin was impressed. “Stillman’s attorney wants to stop them from snooping into the twins’ affairs. I think that was her goal from the outset.”
I smile. “Then like turning one card at a time from a good hand, she gave them old Mr. Chalmers statement, the acoustic findings of the sound of firecracker, which was actually the muffled gunshot, and the statements of the two drivers who tested the story Brian had given Barney about taking Becky home, and finally the pillow I had retrieved from the dumpster.”
“What about the rag?” she asks.
“Becky must have used it to hold the handle when she released the hydraulic jack. Her DNA would be all over it. Otherwise, why would she have taken it?”
“That rag from the body shop and her car on ATM video is hard to explain away,” Erin says.
“The motive is harder to establish for killing Brian than it is for Jake, but when they show the video of her at the body shop, she might give it up.”
She says, “What jury wouldn’t draw that inference?”
“The cops gave Diane Rosenthal a hard time about me going in and talking to Becky, but when she explained how I was going to confront Becky at the insurance agency, they saw the logic. If Becky went out to the dumpster to retrieve the evidence, they knew that their case against Stillman would deflate like a two-day-old birthday balloon.”
I reach into my bag and show her a framed 8x10 glossy of Becky clutching the pillow I had stitched together from the bedspread swathe. “I am going to put this up on my wall in the office. The private investigator, Bill Spencer, dropped it off for me as a present while we were talking with my birth mother.”
“I’ll do the same for you with a copy of tomorrow’s headlines,” she says.
“We should go see Mabel and Sharon and tell them what happened. They should hear it from us and not some nosy reporter fishing for a quote,” I say as I dismount the swing.
“What about your buddy, Simon Stillman?” she says as she leaps off the swing and lands lightly on her feet
I turn to Erin. “I want you to stay away from him. I purposely didn’t tell you what I think they were doing. If anything ever happens to me, there is a letter addressed to you in our safe deposit box. You need to give it to your friends in the FBI. Simon knows about it, and we have a handshake agreement that I won’t say anything and he’ll leave us alone.”
“What if the cops want to keep investigating them?”
“I can’t do anything about that, but I will not help them more than I already did by tipping them off about the Mustangs.”
We walk towards Sharon’s apartment. I know we are going to rock her world. Mabel, I am afraid, will just say thank you, but she knows that her son is gone forever, and nothing we say or do is going to bring him back.
My thoughts drift back to meeting my mother after so many years.
As if she’s reading my mind, Erin says, “It took a lot of courage for your mom to tell her family about you. She kept that secret from her daughter for decades.”
“I could see how much she regretted not reaching out sooner.”
“Had you ever thought of contacting her?”
“Yes, but those thoughts never started out good and always ended badly. I had so much anger and a sense of abandonment, I could never bring myself to do it. Instead, I just channeled all that negative energy into doing positive things for you and Wesley.”
“And your students,” she says.
“I realize now that I gravitated to kindergarten because I was my students’ age when she walked out on me and your grandfather. I never wanted you kids and my students to feel they were alone or abandoned.”
“Do you think you would have worked so hard for Jake and Brian if it wasn’t for your mother leaving you the way she did?”
“Tough question, honey. I have to meditate on that,” I say seriously. “There is so much for me to think about. It’s not every day you solve two murders and get reacquainted with your mother whom you’ve been estranged from for fifty years.”
“I know exactly what we should do after we talk to Sharon and Mabel,” she says.
I smile. “A large pepperoni pizza?”
“Let’s invite Dad and Grandpa too,” she says.
I love this girl.