I got my tote bag back from prison security and checked my cell phone. I swear that’s the first thing I did. There was a call from Mom; it sounded like she had started to leave a message and then just sat there silently. She forgot to disconnect, so I couldn’t call back. No one answered the phone in Dad’s room.
I was near collapse myself, reeling with fatigue, but I hightailed it to the hospital. Rather than sitting upright in a chair by his bed, I found her waiting at the door to Dad’s room, more like a guard.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Everything is fine,” she said.
“You called and didn’t leave a message.”
“You knew it was me?”
“Yeah, you can tell who’s calling.”
She nodded like she’d just learned something new. Rather than going back into the room, she took my arm, which I never remembered her doing before, and suggested we sit someplace else, that nice visitor area at the end of the hall, she said.
She chose one of the unforgiving chairs that faced down the hallway we had come from. She patted the seat next to her, even more gentle than when we had talked the afternoon I called her from this same spot. She put her hand over mine, glancing at her watch as she did so. I couldn’t remember her touching me like that since I was a very little girl, when she would sit on my bed at bedtime and grasp my foot through the covers and give it a playful shake. I couldn’t remember when she stopped.
“What’s up, Mom?” Feeling ever more weary, trying to focus a vision that was a little blurry. “Is there something wrong?”
“I want to tell you a story,” she said.
“Why here? Is it something you don’t want Dad to hear?”
She smiled as if I’d meant to be amusing. “Oh no, Dad knows.” Then she turned her head to the side and waved her hand as if warding off a stinging insect.
“So what’s the story?”
She started, “You were five years old. Ariel was little, and I was in my first trimester with Todd, so I wasn’t showing yet. You remember Uncle John?” She spoke a little more slowly than usual, as if we had a lot of time to kill and she wanted to make the story last. Or as if she was telling me something complicated about economics and it was important I understand.
“Sure. Dad’s older brother by ten years. Battle of the Bulge. World War II prisoner of war. Serious alcoholic. Used to go out to the car to take an extra nip during family get-togethers.”
“He was always after me. John was.”
Whoa. Not the story I was expecting. “As in sexually?”
She nodded. “For a while it was pats on the bum that no one else saw.”
“Why didn’t you tell Dad?”
“You think Dad would have believed me?” Mom looked at me with her face closing together, as if speculating whether I was smart enough to get what she was about to say. “I was able to avoid John most of the time by never being alone with him. But there was a birthday party, your fifth. You were in the kitchen with me, watching me put candles on your cake. Uncle John came up behind me.”
Mom stopped, and took a deep breath. She looked at her watch again.
She said, “I thought it was Dad when he put his hands on my hips and turned me around. John kissed me before I could dodge away. Your father came in and saw us.”
I remembered things from when I was five, but I couldn’t remember that and told her so.
“Of course you don’t remember. This was my life, not yours.”
I pictured instant throwing. Maybe the birthday cake against the wall. What else could there have been? “What did Dad do?”
“He was quiet, but after everyone left he blamed me. He was so angry.” She stopped again, crossed her arms over her elder belly in remembered pain, and added, “I almost lost Todd that night.”
“Did you lie when you told me he never hit you?”
“He didn’t hit me.”
We both stopped, and our eyes connected for longer than they ever had before. I didn’t call it marital rape. Fifty years ago no one did. Fifty years of knowing how a man could hurt a woman, but I had never known my own house. Five years old, what would I have done? I asked, “What happened to Uncle John? I remember seeing him every holiday and family celebration after that.”
“Dad never blamed John. He was the heroic big brother. I was only the wife. Blood—”
“—is thicker than water,” I finished for her.
Now there’s a piece of intel I never had. Over something so small. A kiss. Can the course of life turn on something so small? There was something in me that wanted to go back and view our family past differently from the way Mom knew it, the way she was telling me. Stupidly, still a child in some respects, I wanted to salvage us, to force her to remain the old Saint Mom I knew. “He didn’t divorce you. And he was pretty good to us kids, roughhoused with us, taught us to shoot, even the ride-alongs as soon as we were old enough.” But it sounded lame even before the words finished.
“After that night he never touched me again. But that’s not all. Among your father’s many qualities is the ability to hold a grudge.” She glanced down the hall as if feeling at a distance the tug of anger that connected the two of them. “You think I wanted you to grow up into such a hard person? You think I wanted you to become bait for sex maniacs?” Then she calmed herself down as the rest of us would not. She looked at her watch. “I tried to keep it out of the house, but the more I protested, the more he brought home the stories, left the photos lying around for you to see. Giving you a copy of In Cold Blood for your thirteenth birthday. Looking at me as he did it with a little smile and a twinkle in his eye, daring me to challenge him. He treated it all like a joke between us, and I hated him for it. Oh, I don’t think he had a specific plan to avenge my kissing his brother.” Mom nearly chuckled. “He’s not that clever. But it was after that night that he started to change. I got so tired of fighting him. So I let him suck you into his world. And that’s what happened, didn’t it? He took all of you.”
I was caught partway between adult sympathy and protecting anything good in my memory of childhood. “You gave up easy. Those photograph albums that don’t have pictures of me after the age of ten. That’s why you stopped taking pictures of us, because you’d given up.”
Mom must have been able to tell this was hurting me even if I swore it wouldn’t. She stroked my arm as if it would calm me. I was surprised that it did.
She said, “What possible good could have come out of making you love me, but hate him? And I didn’t give up. I tended the house and sewed little dresses and listened to the occasional sly remark about how I wasn’t like the rest of you. I never gave up, I only kept trying to show what normal looked like. Even now I’m not sure there isn’t a good reason for keeping my mouth shut.” She looked at her watch again. We had been sitting there about fifteen minutes. “But you know, dear, there comes a point when you’ve had it with self-sacrifice.”
I felt my heart speed up, still not knowing why. I always thought I knew Mom. I still did. “So why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I want, just once, for you to know me. Me. This is my one chance to either win you back or lose you forever. I know I don’t have your love, but oh my dear, I deserve it. I deserve it.”
I held up my hands as in giving up. “I don’t understand. What do you need me to do?”
“I want you to give him up,” she said.
“It’s not up to me,” I said.
“No. It’s up to me,” she said. She looked down the hall toward Dad’s room, and I looked, too. A nurse had gone in. She wasn’t in there very long. As Mom and I watched, she came back out, moving faster now, back to the nurses’ station. Immediately there came a voice over the PA system, “Paging Dr. Sinclair. Paging Dr. Sinclair.”
Mom looked at her watch again. “I’ve spent so much time here I know that code. We can go now,” she said. “I think we can go.” But she didn’t move.
I jumped up from the chair, wanting to run down the hall and stay by Mom’s side in equal measure. “You’re telling me Dad is dead.”
“He wasn’t altogether, when you arrived.” Mom didn’t stand. She placed the hand that had been holding mine over the other, which rested in her lap.
In a voice too small to be Brigid Quinn’s, I said, “Mom. What did you do?”
She took my hand in hers and pressed my palm to her cheek as if she was forcing me to reassure her rather than the other way around. “If you know nothing else, you have to know I did nothing. I just let him go. Maybe it was a heart attack. I only know I watched his breath get lighter and slower, and with each one I felt this lightness growing in my chest, like a response. I couldn’t force myself to stop the lightness. So I did nothing, didn’t call someone to bring him back. I wanted to let a little time go by to make sure he was gone. That’s all I did.” Maybe later reality would hit her, but for now she seemed ethereally calm as she said, “I’ve never watched someone dying before. I suppose you have.”