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WE DROVE OUT TO THE place where my mom had been shot in the head, less than forty-eight hours ago, in the rain. Not a sentence or a word was spoken between us the entire ride.
The place where my mom was shot in the road was exactly what LeBleu had described it to be, and exactly nothing more. It was dirt. The dirt was shaded dark from when it had rained, almost like dried mud. The road was abandoned. And if I had to guess, because I couldn’t remember ever being on it before in my life, it led nowhere. It was just a forgotten, dirt road. Small towns were full of them. They were developed and bulldozed for reasons that I didn’t quite understand. Other than mud riding or teenagers riding their bikes up and down them for someplace to go, I saw no real value in having them.
I got out of the police cruiser, front passenger seat, which was new for me. Even though I was a cop, I was often arrested with bad guys and thrown in the back of NCIS police cruisers because, in most cases, the arresting agents never knew that I was a cop. Most of them never knew that I was on their side. This was to protect my cover. They were never told. Only a handful of agents in the Naval Criminal Investigative Services knew of my existence. And only a handful in my unit could even have identified me.
I stopped over the spot where my mom was shot, and I stared at the space. I got down on one knee; blue jeans dipped in the mud. I reached my hand down and felt the dirt. There was nothing to see, nothing to feel. No tracks left — no evidence of any kind. The rain had washed everything away as it had never happened.
I said, “Why the hell did she come out here? Who could’ve convinced her to come out here for a secret meeting in the middle of a rainy night?”
“Son, I got no idea.”
“Where’s the bullet casing. Did you guys find it?”
He said, “The shooter took it with him. That’s what we figure. Believe me, we were all out here all day, looking for it. I was on my hands and knees looking around. We figure maybe the rain washed it away, but no way. We woulda found it.”
I nodded and said, “Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The rain would’ve probably washed away fingerprints, but you’re probably right. The shooter took it with him.”
He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “We’re going to find this son-of-a-bitch. Don’t you worry about dat.”
“Take me to the station. I need to look at her office.”
I got up and walked over to the car and got in. LeBleu got in next. He fired up the engine, and we drove off.
*****
THE POLICE STATION in Killian Crossing was exactly the way I remembered it—forgettable. It was the same location and same old, white paint. The front of the station was made of huge glass windows that looked like the place was built to be a storefront and not a police station, which was exactly right. I remember that it was originally a small paint store, but what does a tiny little town need a paint store for?
I said, “This place looks a hundred years old still.”
LeBleu said, “It is a hundred years old. It’s still got da third bathroom.”
“Third bathroom?”
“You know. For black people?”
I nodded. I never realized that was what the third bathroom was for. I had forgotten that it came with three. There was a men’s, a women’s, and a janitor’s closet that actually had a toilet in it.
I changed the subject and said, “I don’t remember you from when I was a kid. Are you from here?”
“Nah. I’m from Tennessee. But I’m from a similar small town just like dis one. I moved here for da job. Yer ma hired me.”
We pulled into the police lot, parked and got out. I followed LeBleu into the police station. The interior had the same old telephones with dull buttons and long, curly cords and brown, splintery desks with steel legs and vinyl, black chairs that rolled on worn-out, plastic wheels.
There was a green leather sofa in front of a secretary station that doubled as the county’s dispatch. The furniture was prehistoric like it was all built by the dinosaurs from the Jurassic Age and then handed down to their offspring and then inherited by humans and now they sat in this office.
Two other patrolmen were standing near a coffee machine, waiting for it to brew a fresh pot, and wondering who the hell I was.
Both patrolmen wore crisp, tan uniforms. Both were about the same height, same age, and had the same cop demeanor and same stance, the same haircut even. They could’ve been brothers.
I scanned the rest of the station and compared the people in the office with the number of patrol cars out in the lot. This must’ve been the full crew, with maybe one guy off today. The math added up. And maybe they had a couple of guys on reserve like civilian deputies.
I moved my attention to the walls and the doors and windows. There was a framed copy of the US Bill of Rights, blown up to be about three by three feet. It hung over the center of the room, next to my mother’s office door. None of the interior walls were blank spaces. Every inch of real estate was covered with a plaque or a sign or a copy of Mississippi statutes or an inspirational poster with cop jokes like a photo of a cop pulling a guy over that read “A cop pulled me over and said, ‘papers!’ So, I said, ‘Scissors, I win!’ and drove off.” Or another one had a picture of a SWAT team pointing their assault rifles at a Chihuahua. It read, “FREEZE!”
I had a feeling that my mother had something to do with the posters. She always did have a sense of humor like that.
LeBleu said, “Guys, dis is Chief’s son, Jack Widow. Dis is Gary and Greg Ferges. They’re brothers.”
I nodded, realized that I was right, and we all shook hands.
One of them, I didn’t know which, said, “Don’t worry about the Chief. She’s going to pull through.”
The other brother said, “The doc said so.”
They reminded me of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet—interchangeable, as well as lying through their teeth. I knew it, and I’m sure that they knew that I knew it.
I ignored them and asked, “What did the state police say?”
LeBleu said, “They’re sending a guy. But he won’t arrive until next week.”
“Next week!”
One of the brothers blurted out, “Because she’s alive.” Which inferred that they were waiting for her to die before they would commit to sending someone to investigate. I clenched my fists in anger; no one saw.
The other brother slapped him in the bicep and said, “He means that they want to wait until she wakes up. That way she can give a statement like a witness. No reason to come investigate now. We’ve already run a crime scene analysis. There’s nothing.”
I nodded, but I didn’t like their answers. I looked around the room and judged them, which I didn’t mean to do, but my mother was dying in a hospital bed, and I had plenty of experience with police work. No one was going to find the shooter. I’d have to do the heavy lifting myself, which was fine by me because I wanted to be the first person to find him.
“They’ll send a special investigator if she doesn’t. Uh. If she don’t change conditions,” LeBleu said and then stopped.
I said, “I got it. I want to take a look at her office.”
“Of course. You can just go right in.”
I turned and went in. Flashbacks of being a little boy ran through my head. I remembered growing up here, playing around the police station. I remembered playing with my cop toys in the corner, while my mom ran the station. I remembered reading books and her checking them off my reading list in the third grade. I remember having a little desk, off in the corner of her office. I remember she gave me a rotary phone that was plugged into nothing. I used to pretend to take important calls on it when she was on the phone. I remember her being pissed off at me for ripping her papers to shreds one day when she was out.
I was only about six years old.
I used to have a little yellow, plastic desk in the corner. She kept it there even when I grew up, a bit of nostalgia from my childhood. I used to sit at my desk when I was five years old and talked on a pretend phone, playing that I was conducting police business. Meanwhile, she was conducting actual police business on a real phone or sorting files or filling out paperwork.
She had kept the room virtually the same, but my little desk was gone.
In the corner, there was a small, outdated library of books on criminology and pathology and forensics and law on a little black shelf, which was the same shelf that she had had there when I last stood in this office. The books were the same, old, hardbound things that she had had decades ago. The shelf was old now but still stood proud. I remember helping her put it together. It was a big deal for me because it was our first furniture-building project.
One thing about me that people find odd is that I love to read books. I almost always have a book with me. Usually, they’re secondhand paperback books. I read them all the time. I am addicted to them. I like going to those tiny bookstores that sell used books—an all but extinct American find.
I read old things, new things, fiction, and nonfiction. I read just about anything.
Right now, I had in my back pocket, a worn-out copy of Stephen King’s Misery. It had black binding and several creases in the spine. The book had the cover of the old movie from the late eighties or early nineties; I wasn’t sure which. The pages were stained yellow and smelled like old trees, a smell that I loved.
I took the book out of my pocket and tossed it on my mom’s desk. I sat in her chair and started to go through everything that was out and open. I found nothing of interest, only official documents.
Her desk was well-organized but cluttered at the same time. My mom had a sense of chaotic organization that I always loved about her, but it wasn’t a trait that I shared. No one would consider me to be an organized person. The only reason why I had always had organized quarters in the Navy was because I had never owned much—my uniform, dress uniform, my medals, and BDUs. I only owned two pairs of jeans and four T-shirts, for when I had shore leave. I never had anything fancy.
One single photograph sat on my mom’s desk. I stared at it. It was a photograph of my high school graduation, one of the last times that we had seen each other. We stood together for the last time as a family in a photo, just the two of us. It made me feel about as horrible as a man can.
I turned my attention to her computer. It was an old thing, like the rest of the office. I clicked the keyboard, and the screen lit up. The background was the Marine Corps logo. My mother had started out as a Marine cop and then returned home to become a local cop. Once a Marine, always a Marine.
The computer had no password. It just opened to a Microsoft Windows screen. I searched through her desktop. I spent about thirty minutes doing that. I searched through files and Microsoft Office documents. I looked for anything interesting and recent—anything that would lead me to a clue as to who she had met with, but I found nothing.
I waited to go through her emails until the end of my search of the local files.
I opened her emails and started to look through them. I spent more time on this, but I didn’t search too far back because whatever might be there wouldn’t be far in her email history. I spent about forty-five minutes doing that.
I found the chain of emails from the FBI’s local field office in Jackson, Mississippi. Some agent there had said that he appreciated her inquiry into the missing girls, but it was still an ongoing investigation, and they were already working around the clock on it. But they had been doing that for five years apparently and without any results.
The response seemed generic, a complete blow off as if the guy was saying “Hey, lady. Let the big boys handle it.”
I’d seen emails like this one before in my career. Bureaucracy was full of bullshit, generic rejection responses.
The only real information that was important was that my mom had mentioned the missing girl’s name; it was Ann Gables, which made me think immediately of Anne of Green Gables. Not sure if there was a correlation or not. Not sure if Ann’s parents had liked that novel or if it was a coincidence. Or maybe they didn’t even know about the novel. Maybe they named her after the TV show.
After this email, there were no emails of interest about Ann Gables or the missing girls or the town of Black Rock.
I leaned back in the chair and thought about what to do next. But my thoughts were interrupted because the telephone rang out at the station. Deputy LeBleu answered it. After a few moments of talking, he hung up and stepped into the room, stood in front of me.
He looked at me and said, “Dat was the hospital. Yer ma is awake.”
*****
WE SPED THROUGH THE streets that I had known as a boy. LeBleu didn’t use his sirens because traffic was light. We ran stoplights and signs and blared through a school crossing.
We stopped in the hospital parking lot and left the car parked in the emergency vehicle section.
I followed LeBleu into the sliding doors of the emergency room, and we walked past security and back to the critical care unit and then around another corridor to my mother’s room. We passed the sofa that LeBleu had fallen asleep on.
Two nurses and a doctor in scrubs stood in the doorway.
The doctor came up to me as soon as she saw me and held her hand out.
She asked, “Are you the sheriff’s son?”
I nodded.
She said, “I’m afraid that I have bad news.”
I stayed quiet.
She said, “Come with me. Let’s have a seat.” She gestured to the waiting room, which was empty, and she pointed at a seat.
I shook my head and said, “Just tell me.”
She nodded and said, “The bullet lodged inside your mother’s skull. It didn’t kill her, what usually happens with this kind of injury. Sometimes we can operate, but not this time. We’ve conferred with experts from Jackson Memorial and even called the Air Force hospital down in Biloxi. The doctors at both locations confirm that an operation wouldn’t be worth the risk. Because of the location of the bullet, she’ll definitely not survive it.”
I stared at her forehead for a long moment, unable to move my eyes away from it. Finally, I asked, “What’re the chances?”
“Of survival from the operation?”
I nodded.
“Zero. I’m not exaggerating. It’ll kill her. One hundred percent certainty that an operation will kill her.”
“What are her chances without?”
The doctor paused a long, forlorn beat and took a deep breath and said, “Not much better.”
“Give me a percentage, doc.”
“I don’t know. Maybe ten.”
My shoulders sank, and my eyes slumped down. I stared at her nameplate, didn’t even read it.
She said, “I’m afraid the bullet will probably kill her. It’s only a matter of when. All we can do is make her comfortable.”
I looked down at the floor and stared at that universal hospital tile for a long moment. No one interrupted me.
Finally, I asked, “How long?”
“I think hours. I’m really sorry.”
*****
I SAID, “CHIEF.”
I sat near her as she lay dying.
I wanted to tell her that she had a fighting chance, but I didn’t want to lie to her.
The nurses and doctors and x-ray technicians were working around the clock to keep her alive. She knew that, and I knew that. I could see it in her eyes. But all she cared about was seeing me for the first time in sixteen years. Her face lit up when she laid her eyes on me. And I couldn’t help but return a smile. I was happy to see her.
My mother was a fighter. She had always fought and won, but this time she could fight, but there was no winning. It was over, and she had no fight left. Her understanding of this was written behind her smile. I could see it, but I didn’t say it. No point.
I don’t even think that the doctor had to tell her that she was going to die. She knew it.
Out in the hall, the deputies and the doctor and the two nurses stood near the nurses’ station, waiting in case we needed anything or in case my mother had pain, but she didn’t complain. She never had. Even on her deathbed, she smiled at me like she was staring at an angel, but I was the one looking at the angel.
My mother was devastatingly beautiful—a fact that I had to cope with my whole life. It caused me a lot of grief when I was a kid because I had gotten into my fair share of fights at school with the other kids who would make comments about her. They used to call her a MILF and a cougar—negative words, in my opinion, at least when they used to talk about my mom. But I put a stop to that quick.
In my early teens, only new kids made the mistake of making those kinds of comments. Once I corrected them, they never did it again. My mom would discipline me for putting kids in the hospital whenever they said something rude about her. It became a cycle—they’d make snide remarks, I’d correct them, and she’d punish me, and so on. In my later years, I learned to accept their comments as the way of the world. Boys were going to make rude comments about her, and there wasn’t a whole lot that I could do about it. She had taught me that violence never solved anything, but it did. For me, often using a little violence got the job done.
Suddenly, a nurse that I hadn’t met yet, and one that I thought wasn’t familiar with the situation, came in from the hallway and asked, “Is everything okay?”
Her scrubs smelled of cigarette smoke. It wasn’t overwhelming, but it was beyond faint. I figured that she’d just started her day. She probably had one last smoke before she clocked in for her shift.
The nurse was perhaps thirty years old and shaped like a raindrop—small top half and a heavy bottom half. She had short blonde, slightly curly hair and piercing blue eyes, her most noticeable physical feature. She must’ve had colored contacts on top of her real blue eyes because they were unnaturally blue like the Pacific Ocean, which I had seen a thousand times.
I said, “Everything’s good.”
The nurse turned back to the hallway and walked out of the room, where the doctor greeted her. I could hear them speaking, but couldn’t hear what they were saying, exactly. I imagined it was something like, “Leave them alone” or “They’re fine” or “Stay out of there.”
Then they must’ve told her that I was the Chief’s son because she stared back at me in disbelief.
I turned back to my mother, ignored them. I looked at her with the gentlest expression I could muster. I didn’t want her to think that I hated her or that I was still mad at her after all this time. She looked back at me and smiled wide. Her hair was thick and black with long gray strands. She’d always had long, thick hair. Now it was draped across the pillows that propped her up, pouring over the fluffy layers like black and gray lava spilling out over hills and crevices and rocks.
She looked at me and struggled to sit more upright. I reached down and held her hand in mine. Again, I noticed that it was such a tiny little thing in my giant hand.
She asked, “How are you?”
These weren’t exactly the first words I expected to come out of her mouth, but what are you supposed to say after your only child returns to you after having left for sixteen long years?
I said, “Save your strength.”
Without letting go of her hand, I grabbed a couple more pillows and layered them behind her. She fell back against them and rested there like a turtle on its back.
She said, “I’m fine. Your mother was a Marine, remember?”
I smiled at her but gave no verbal response.
She coughed for a long minute, and the staff started to stare in through the window again, but then she relaxed, and they went back to talking to each other.
I asked, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I told you. Quit asking about me. I want to know about you. I can’t believe that you’re here.”
She said it euphorically, which made me realize that she was probably very doped up on painkillers, maybe morphine.
“Where else would I be?” I said, and then I paused for a long beat and said, “I’m so sorry I never called.”
“Hush. Don’t say anything about it now. It’s my fault.”
I shook my head and said, “No. It’s my fault. I was stubborn and proud—maybe. I should’ve called you. I have no excuse.”
“Forget it. I knew where you were.”
“You did?”
“Yes. In the Navy.”
“You knew that?”
“I knew. I’ve got connections still. Ya know? Perks of being a Marine. I followed your career for a bit. I almost called you several times. But I knew that you had a right never to want to see me again.”
“I didn’t think that you knew.”
“I knew. I’m very, very proud of you.”
“Do you know everything?”
“I don’t. I lost you a few years ago. You were in special operations?”
I nodded and said, “Something like that.”
“Tell me. What were you doing?”
I paused a beat. I had never told anyone exactly what I had done, not that it was some big secret, not anymore. Once a case was closed, and convictions were handed out, it didn’t matter who knew what, I suppose. I said, “I joined the Navy. But I started to have trouble. You know...”
“Taking orders? You always were stubborn.”
“Yeah. I was about to drop out. My four years were over.”
“What happened?”
“I was recruited by someone else.”
“NCIS?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“They called me once. Background investigation.”
I nodded. It made sense. For the kind of undercover work that I was doing, they must’ve done an extreme background check. They probably even called my seventh-grade teacher and asked how many times I had detention.
I nodded and said, “NCIS recruited me. Sent me to school. Trained me. I worked for them for about eight years.”
“What did they have you doing?”
“Special Ops. Like you said. You got it.”
“Investigations? That’s what you were always good at.”
I nodded, said, “Sometimes.”
“Undercover work?”
I nodded again.
“Where? SEALs?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Your body. Look at you. You must be in the gym every day!”
“No. They made us train hard.”
She said, “Wow! My boy is a SEAL? Team 6?”
I nodded and then I said, “Actually, DEVGRU, but yes. The same.”
She smiled at me with a wide, coat hanger-shaped smile. She said, “I’m so proud of you.”
A few tears started to trickle out of her eyes.
I said again, “I know. I know. I’m sorry that I never called you.”
“Don’t you be! Don’t you worry about that! I deserved it!”
I shook my head and said, “No! You didn’t!”
I didn’t cry, not my nature, but I was about as close as I’d ever been. I had run away from my past and from my mother over an argument and I had never looked back — one stupid argument. At first, months went by and then a year and then two and before I knew it years had gone by. I guess out of sight was out of mind, and I had been blinded. I should’ve called. I should’ve done so much more, but it was too late now.
She said, “It’s in the past now. Live your life. I’m so proud of you.”
I stayed quiet.
“Listen to me. I’ve got to tell you something.”
“You really should rest.”
“Listen. Okay?”
I nodded.
She said, “You’re a good man.”
She paused. The room filled with a heavy silence. Then she said, “I’m a proud woman, but the hardest job I’ve ever had was being your mother. Raising a boy without a daddy is tough, even for me. But I did all right. Look at you. A Navy SEAL and a cop at that.”
“It’s because of you,” I said.
She nodded and smiled. “I taught you about weapons long before those frogmen did.”
“You did. You taught me everything I needed to know years ago. You’re the reason why I got through SEAL training.”
“That’s not ‘cause of me. It’s your genes. It’s your heart. You’ve got warrior in your blood, way down deep. Like your grandpa,” she said and then paused and said, “Like your daddy.”
I ignored the last part and said, “Either way, I never rang that quitting bell because of you. Every time I heard it ding and another guy quit, I wanted to follow. But I couldn’t. You instilled that in me. I never gave up.”
She said, “I trained you how to fight like a Marine. How to speak like a Marine.”
She stopped, paused and took a breath. She said, “How to treat a lady. How to take care of yourself. Most importantly, I taught you how to think for yourself.”
She coughed again for several minutes and then she righted herself and said, “I raised you to do the right thing. But there’re things that you do, things that you naturally are, that I never taught you. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever known. You’re honorable. The only other men I’ve loved almost as much were your grandfather and your daddy.
“That’s what I regret. I regret never telling you the truth about your daddy when you were young. I never should have lied to you.”
I squeezed her hand and said, “Don’t worry about that now. I’m the man I am because of you. Not some guy I never met.”
She said, “Use your talents for good. I want you to help people.”
She clutched my arm like she was having an attack. She coughed a bit until it subsided, almost as quickly as it had come on, and then she began breathing normally.
I breathed in and breathed out, in relief.
We were both quiet again for a long moment until she said, “Since the day you were born, I tried to raise you the best that I knew how. I’m only one parent. I tried my best to be your mother and father, but there’s no good substitute for a real father. I want you to understand that I had my reputation to think about. I left here when I found out I was pregnant with you. I drove down to the Gulf Coast. You were born, and we lived there for almost a year, but I didn’t make enough money to stay there. Biloxi didn’t have a lot of jobs. It was all hotels and casinos. I worked in one of those resorts for months, working security. Imagine, I had been a cop in the US Marine Corps, and there I was, a single mother, pregnant and working security in a casino.”
She chuckled lightly and then continued, “I couldn’t make enough money for us there, so we returned home and have been here ever since.”
I listened.
She paused again. I thought she was about to have another coughing attack. Instead, her voice cracked and went up in pitch, and her eyes brimmed with more tears. I hadn’t seen my mom since high school, but I had known her for eighteen years before that. I had seen her enforce the law, beat up guys three times her size, take down criminals, solve murders, and look at the vilest things imaginable done to people by other people, but I had never seen her shed a tear, not until today.
She said, “Please don’t hate me. I don’t want you to hate me. That’s why I’m trying to explain my reasons. I want you to understand why I lied to you about your father.”
I reached out and caressed her forehead, lovingly. I squeezed her other hand and started to speak, but she went first.
“The voters in this town can be judgmental,” she said. “This is the South. And I needed my job back to give you the best life that I could. So, I lied to you. I lied to everyone. I didn’t want them thinking I had gotten knocked up by a drifter. I didn’t want them thinking that your mom was a slut, and that’s exactly what they would’ve thought.
“But mostly, I didn’t want to lose you. I lied, and I kept lying, and the years rolled by. Before I knew it, I had lied so much and so often that I started to believe my lies more than the truth.”
She paused again. She closed her eyes for a moment and breathed in deeply, hesitating as if she had a long-held secret she was reluctant to share. “I don’t know why I lied to you for so long. Really, I don’t.”
Another hesitation before she said, “I told you that your father was dead. That he died in combat. A war hero. I lied to you. Your father’s alive.”
“I know, Chief. You told me this before.”
In fact, she had told me this in our last conversation, which was why I ran away, to begin with. But she didn’t acknowledge it. She acted as if she had forgotten that her confession, all those years ago, was what drove me away in the first place. She had lied to me my whole life. Everyone in the town, all my friends, everyone had thought that my father was some war hero who died in combat, but there was no such person. She had told me the truth. We had argued. She said things, and I said things. Simple as that. I ran away thinking that my whole life had been a lie. But time had passed, and now I was only angry at myself for not coming back sooner.
I said, “I was stupid to run away.”
She shook her head and said, “No. You did the right thing.”
I disagreed but didn’t answer.
She said, “He’s not dead, and he never abandoned us, not really, not on purpose.”
I stayed quiet. She’s told me this before.
“Truth is he doesn’t know about you, but not because he left. Because I never told him.” She paused longer this time, maybe waiting for some kind of emotional outburst from me or a sign that I was furious with her. I could see that she had carried the guilt around for years that she’d never told me the truth until now and then when I left she carried more guilt because she’d never told me that it wasn’t his fault until now.
I remained silent. No reaction, no outburst, just a calm quiet. I think that my silence stung her worse than any expression of rage or anger or spite would have. There weren’t many things I regretted because I wasn’t that kind of guy. Regret was something that simply wasn’t in my nature because it was like a sponge—it soaked up all your time and thoughts.
She said, “I wanted to tell him. I looked for him when I found out I was pregnant. You see, he was in the Army, and then he rolled out and became a drifter, which is typical for ex-military guys. I wanted to find him and tell him about you, but I didn’t have the chance. Not when I was further along in my pregnancy.”
She stopped cold and stared at me with those huge, pleading eyes. I could see that she didn’t want me to hate her, and it broke my heart even to think that she believed I would.
I said, “I don’t care about him. I only care about you. He’s ancient history.”
She breathed a long sigh of relief that could’ve extinguished a candle on the other side of the bed, and then she said my name like she always had—last name only, military style. I cocked my head and stared into her eyes, thinking to myself that this might be one of the last times I ever saw life in them. But I was wrong. It would be the very last time.
“I was so afraid of what you would think of me. I meant to tell you so many times.”
I felt my heart wrench and twist behind my ribcage. With a lump in my throat, I said, “I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, son,” she said and smiled. Silence fell between us. She must’ve started thinking about my dad because she laughed and said, “He didn’t own a thing. Not one item to his name except for a toothbrush he kept in his pocket.”
I thought about this for a moment. A toothbrush? I guess that would be one thing a drifter would need if he wanted to keep his teeth clean. It made sense.
A drifter would need a toothbrush, money, and identification.
“A toothbrush,” she repeated and then her chuckle quieted and vanished. A moment later, a hearty smile spread across her face as if she remembered a lost love. Her eyes stared past me into the corner of the room and moved up to the ceiling.
Suddenly, she laughed out loud.
I asked, “What?”
“Your name. Jack Widow.”
“Yeah?”
“You never asked where it came from?”
“It’s not from him?”
She shook her head, and I wondered if the morphine drip was kicking in overtime. Then I knew why it was so funny because she said, “It’s the name of a marijuana plant.”
I laughed and said, “You named me after pot?”
“Sorry. I had to give you a last name.”
“Why not use his?”
She said nothing for a moment and then she said, “I can’t remember.”
“Don’t worry about it. Jack Widow is really good weed,” I said, but I didn’t know.
She laughed and then struggled to sit up straight without the pillows, reaching her arms out to me like she wanted a hug. I leaned forward and held her tight. She felt so delicate in my arms.
She pulled me down closer to her and whispered in my ear. “I love you, Widow.”
I asked, “Chief, who did this to you?”
She said, “I can’t remember.”
*****
LATER THAT NIGHT, MY mother died in her sleep. I watched her fall asleep then sat back and reminisced silently about my happiest memories of her. I’d lived a good life here, good childhood. Halfway through the night, she coughed in her sleep, only a few times at first and then the cough grew louder and louder. I felt her hand squeeze mine for a moment, and then she was gone. Every part of her was completely still, and her hand had gone limp in mine. I never bothered to get the nurses or the doctor because I couldn’t bring myself to let go of her hand. I don’t think that they wanted to come in and bother me either. She died as peacefully as anyone could. I leaned forward and brushed her hair from her face with my fingertips, combing it downward and to the side. I reached up and felt her face. Her skin was already starting to turn cool, and the lines in her face had relaxed. She had passed on.
I had no time for mourning. Now I had something to do—find the guy who shot her and make him pay, but first I had to bury her.