Mom sits with Sara who still sleeps deeply and softly hums a song I don’t know. The air holds the fragrance of dying roses. The time in this room seems a never-ending compilation of milliseconds, which gather into actual seconds and those seconds into minutes and those minutes into this last half hour. There are beeps from various expensive machines I can’t name. There’s a smell like someone tried to get the room cleaned, but whatever nastiness was there wouldn’t be removed by chemicals. I stand downwind from Mom so her magnolia perfume relieves my nostrils every few seconds.
“You need to fix this with Layla,” Mom whispers. The first words she’s uttered since the fight at the house.
“You’re gonna lecture me about my child?”
Mom gives me that look, the one that crinkles the skin around her mouth. Her eyes transform into icy black lakes. “Yes, because you are my child!”
Sara wheezes, uneven and raspy. Her body struggles for one breath, then another, then another. Her body jerks and moves at irregular intervals. She can’t even get peace when she closes her eyes.
“I raised you better than this, Jackson Blaisdell Potter. Much better. The things you said to her, it was beneath you.”
Layla’s words echo in my ears, better his whore than your daughter. I swear the girl split me clean in half. King Solomon couldn’t have done a better job.
“Why does everyone take her side?”
“Because the one person who should, doesn’t.”
It would’ve been better for Mom to just take a knife and stab me in the heart than for me to see the disappointment lingering in her eyes.
“Damn, can y’all find somewhere else to fight?” Sara groggily croaks.
“We’re sorry, sweetheart. Just go back to sleep,” Mom croons.
“Naw. I’m awake now.” Sara shakily pulls herself up in the bed, small and shrunken.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
Mom purses her lips but doesn’t respond. She smooths the edges of the bed and stands up to fluff Sara’s pillow like a parent dealing with a cranky child. Their friendship makes even less sense than mine and Lebanon’s. Though we haven’t had anything resembling a friendship in decades. But more things than love bind people together, secrets and lies make just as hearty a bond as love. Perhaps it’s the wonder of having an unlikely companion, someone who mirrors your opposite in every way. All the places in which we feel we lack—perhaps we’re drawn to someone who has what we crave in abundance. Sara is hard. Mom is softer. Sara is quiet. Mom speaks her mind. There are ways in which Sara seems resigned to the atrocities of the world; Mom rebels against them. And as I sit in this room smelling of disinfectant and dying flowers, I see Layla and Ruby in fifty years. The terrifying wonder of friendship and family embodied by the two women in this room who hold vast secrets I doubt we’ll ever know.
“Close the door,” Sara orders. I walk over and do her bidding. Sara reaches across Mom and opens a drawer. She grabs a tin decorated in roses, opens it, and pulls out a small plastic bottle of Jim Beam hidden under a stack of yellowed papers. She paws and twists until Mom gently takes the bottle, opens it and passes it back to Sara.
After taking a couple of gulps, she looks at Mom. “What y’all goin’ on about anyway?”
“Nothing you need concern yourself with,” I answer.
“I wasn’t talkin’ to you. This is grown folks’ business, boy.” She takes another swig and looks at Mom. “You was always too easy on him.”
“Yeah, guess she should’ve been more like you as a parent,” I retort.
Her face twists into an ugly smile. Stale, tawny light in the room gives her eyes a hellish look. “Oh, so you’re here about the boy or something about him. That’s what you were arguing about? I swear, he’s been a pain in my ass since he came on this earth.” She takes another drink. Half of the bottle is already empty.
“Sara, settle yourself,” Mom orders.
“Ain’t no point in hidin’ anythin’ now. I’m dyin’. You ain’t gonna be on this earth a lot longer either. Secrets, all this shit. It eats you up till you nothin’ but bones. I’m just bones now. Just bones.”
“Don’t pay attention to her,” Mom says as she tries to take the liquor away from Sara, who tries to valiantly tussle, to keep her good friend Jim. After a minute, Mom manages to snatch the bottle away and stuff it in her purse.
“I hate you,” Sara slurs her words and unsuccessfully grabs for Mom’s purse.
“No. You don’t. Forever and to the end.”
Sara’s face softens for the briefest moment and a thin sheen of tears shimmers behind her brown-black eyes. “I should’ve stayed in Tennessee. I found someone there. Jonas loved me, but don’t nothing last for me. I can’t ever be happy.”
Rocking back and forth, she murmurs, “He was there and he loved me and we was a family.”
“Was Jonas Lebanon’s father?” I ask Sara.
She shrinks back into bed.
“Jackson...leave this be,” Mom cautions.
“Better off he knows, that someone knows—” says Sara.
“Sara, answer the question. Was it this Jonas guy?” I ask again, pressing for answers to secrets concealed in whispers and knowing glances among our mothers.
“Sara, we keep this to ourselves. For the good of everyone, you owe Naomi that. You owe yourself. You owe me!” pleads Mom, the earnest fear in her voice rattles something deep in me, but the need for the truth, closure for Lebanon, pushes me to know. Maybe that’ll help him. Knowing his father could free him in a way my friendship, my protection and my fear have been unable to do.
“Sara, you need to tell someone. Your son needs to know about his father. Even now, it’s not too late. It’s okay. Maybe you’re not clear on who it is, maybe you need to backtrack, think hard about who you were with at that time. We all have secrets. We all have shame.”
I speak to Sara like a member of my church who needs to unburden but doesn’t know where to begin. Someone who believes what they’re holding in could destroy them if they revealed what it is they’re hiding.
Sara’s lip quivers. She closes her eyes and her mouth moves but utters no sound. Is she praying? I’ve never seen her do anything resembling prayer, but could this be it? Could this be her breaking point?
I press on, “Was Jonas Lebanon’s father? Can you tell me that?”
Sara’s mouth ceases to move and her eyes open. Tears leak from them. “No, foolish boy. My father was his father!”
Those five words don’t register with me at first, or rather the horrific gravity of what was said doesn’t register. I glance at Mom. There is no look of shock on her face.
“You knew this? You knew about Lebanon’s father?”
“Why did you say anything, Sara?” Mom hisses.
“I deserve some peace. I do,” she answers.
Mom looks past me. She smooths her dress and folds her hands in her lap. “I didn’t want you to know about this. About the hard things, son. About things I had to do or things that happened long ago. Things I never even told your daddy.”
My chest thumps with the regularity of a poorly dribbled basketball. Insane heat burrows its way to my stomach.
“Sara’s father was... He did things to her,” explains Mom. “So, myself and Naomi set out to get Sara settled in Tennessee, but Saul, Sara’s father, found out. And we protected our friend.”
“He was a bad man. He was gonna kill me. He was a bad man so got what he got.”
Sara looks as far gone as Mom. Like they’ve both been sucked back in the past.
“What does that mean? Got what he got?”
Mom finally meets my eyes and I know the answer. To save a friend, a sister, Ms. Naomi, Sara and Momma killed a man. They killed Sara’s father.
The friendship between Sara and Mom never made sense, but it does now. And though Mom tried to spare Lebanon the pain of his true parentage, though Sara in her own toxic way tried to drown her memories in liquor, though Ms. Naomi remained the sweetest soul somehow, all their children wound up continuing their dysfunction, reliving their sins. And now too their grandchildren are paying the price.
Mom’s arms encircle my waist and hug me. “I’m so sorry. I never wanted to hurt you or Lebanon.”
“John 15:13, Mom. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”
Sara tugs at Mom’s dress. Wiping away tears, Mom sits on her bed and hugs her. It started low at first, like a gurgling murmur, then sobbing, then wailing, forceful and relieving. A nurse opens the door to check on the commotion. Mom is rocking Sara, comforting her. “It’ll be okay. Hush now. It’s over and it’ll be okay. God’s got you. Got us.”
With easy and experienced grace, the nurse closes the door to allow us the private moment, the one forty years in the making, the one where Sara’s hard shell cracks and shatters and perhaps something human is left for the small time she has remaining on this earth. The sobbing turns into moaning and deep uneven breathing as Sara falls back asleep.
Holding Mom close to me as we exit the room, I hear my name softly called from behind and turn around to find Dr. Savoie near Sara’s hospital room door.
“I thought that was you,” she says triumphantly. “I have someone asking for you and here you are. Isn’t that something?”
“We were just finishing up a visit. It’s so good to see you, Dr. Savoie, but I should be getting Mom home. It’s getting pretty late,” I respond trying to extract myself. All the knowledge I have, all the things I must fix and say and do, I can’t shoulder another burden right now.
Not today.
“Oh, well this shouldn’t take long. I’d consider it a personal favor, give you half off your next flu shot.”
Dr. Savoie chuckles, then smiles, hopeful and genuine. I’d be a horrible pastor saying no to someone like that, someone who can heal the people who come to her. I guess it’ll take only a few minutes. I can give someone who needs me, who still believes I have something to offer, a bit of my time. I turn to Mom.
“Don’t worry about me, Jackson. I’m just gonna sit here. Me and the Good Lord have much to discuss.”
I kiss her damp cheek, salt from her tears mixes with her magnolia perfume.
Two minutes down the hallway, Dr. Savoie and I walk through the glass-encased bridge connecting the hospital to the next building. I seek out the tops of skyscrapers miles away, eyes full of electric light. I know exactly the path we’re taking.
I could do it blindfolded.
“I know you were getting ready to leave. That’s not lost on me, Pastor, but we have a new resident and she was insistent on talking to you.”
“I understand,” I say and try to smile easy and calming.
The front station, painted in a cheerful light blue, holds two nurses, both of whom glance up at us and quickly return to the paperwork piled up on their respective desks. Walking past the large, ornate, gold lettering of The Lazarus House, pictures of the smiling residents decorate the walls surrounding the sign. Centered below it, a bigger framed picture of myself, the hospital CEO, the mayor and other politicians. All of us smiling, all of us looking like we’re good people, and all of us with secrets we’d love to bury underneath the dirt we ceremoniously dug up with silver shovels. Perhaps we thought building a wing on the hospital as a haven for the elderly would help us barter our way into Heaven and make up for our other shortcomings.
As we come to a room, a woman with dark brown skin and soft wrinkles sits in a chair rocking back and forth. Her face is familiar and in my head. I try to place her: a member from my congregation, one of the people I’ve served meals to at Pacific Garden Mission, someone from the neighborhood.
Who is she?
The radio plays Mahalia Jackson who reverently sings “Lord, Don’t Move the Mountain.” Her voice baptizes the dusty air. Few know this song now. Mom used to sing this when she cooked meals for my dad before he came home from work. The song she hummed the night after the police came to tell her my father, her husband was dead. I still remember the pristine voices of the choir at Calvary Hope Christian Church singing it at his funeral as I bawled on the front row, Lebanon’s arm around my quaking shoulders.
The woman in the chair grins at me like an old friend and I easily reciprocate. I feel at ease in this room with this woman and I don’t know why, but now I want to help her, do whatever it is she asks.
“Pastor Potter, this is Thorolese Myllstone. She said she knows you.”