REVIEW AMERICANA

 

Fall 2018

Volume 13, Issue 2

https://americanpopularculture.com/review_americana/fall_2018/brown.htm




L.M. BROWN

 

 

Crashing

 

Every Tuesday, Catherine drove into town to clean the house for her son. The new dog meant she had to clean her house before she went too. It was Dermot who wanted to get a terrier. Catherine tried to talk him out of it. She said it would be more work, and she hadn't even thought of the dog shedding hair all over the place or that every morning at the crack of dawn the dog would be yapping at their bedroom door. Dermot said a dog would get him out walking and get him up in the morning. She should never have believed that. Dermot was never an early riser in all the years she'd been married to him.

With all that had to be done, Catherine had started to dread Tuesdays. She was sorry she didn't ignore the phone ringing Monday night when she was on her way to bed. She might have if Dermot hadn't shouted, "Are you going to get that?"

She said hello.

"Hey Ma," her son said. "You wouldn't bring some home-cooking tomorrow, would you? I'm getting fed up with the chipper."

"Oh, it's so late. You should have asked me earlier," she said.

"I didn't think it was a bother. I didn't think you'd mind cooking something for your son every now and again."

His voice had risen like it used to when he was a boy and got upset. She felt guilty and a little appalled, but she apologized for upsetting him. It wasn't going to help his pain. He'd had one surgery for a prolapsed disc and might have to have another one soon.

She said of course she'd bring something in. When she hung up, she stood in the dark hall for several seconds and heard Dermot laugh at something on TV.

Her day had been planned to the last minute, and now everything had to be changed. Instead of buying the chicken Kiev on the way home for dinner, she had to defrost the beef overnight and make a stew, which would take at least an hour off her morning. Then she was struck with the idea that there might not be enough beef, and it would probably be best to bring the whole pot to her son and get the chicken Kiev anyway, which meant cooking two dinners and she hated cooking two dinners in the one day.

These thoughts kept going around in her head, so it must have been after midnight when she finally drifted off.

When she woke, the dog was yapping in the hallway, and Dermot was sound asleep. He slept like he'd been knocked out, like waking up he had to come back from the darkest reaches of the world. She'd never known anyone to sleep like him. Her mother used to say it was because he was bone lazy and sleep was his natural way of being. She laughed when she said this. She thought Dermot harmless even when he used to sit on a barstool until he couldn't sit anymore.

He'd phone Catherine for a lift and then take the chair in the living room and wait for his dinner to be put in front of him. But there was not a bit of harm to him, not like some of them out there, Catherine's mother would say.

"Some of them" being Catherine's dad who didn't drink, but had a temper that boiled through him. He was never still, even watching television he'd fidget around the armchair, lighting cigarettes and shouting for tea or looking for the paper and the keys to the car that he needed to have in plain sights always. Then he might start watching what was on and get annoyed with it. Catherine would feel the room warm up with his irritation, and she learned to abandon whatever she was watching. Her mother would sometimes stay and watch TV with him and shouting would ensue. Although there were never any hands raised, the shouting was scary because of the way his broad faced scrunched up and spit flew from his mouth.

Dermot never shouted. "Thanks for the tea," he'd say to Catherine. Then he'd fall asleep on the armchair with the tray over his legs and gravy on his Sunday shirt.

He worked in a garage, but he had a bad back too.

"It runs in the family," he'd said when their son had to have surgery though there was never any prolapsed disc with Dermot, nothing the doctors could point out on the x-ray and try to fix. His pain was muscular, which made working as a mechanic hard because of all the lying down and lifting. He had to give it up when their son was in secondary school.

Dermot gave up the drink around that time after a visit to the hospital from crippling pains in his belly. He had blood taken and tests done. The doctor was a small Indian man with a stare that filled the room. He stood at the side of the bed and asked how much Dermot drank in a day. Dermot said not too much and the doctor looked at him as if he were a child who said horses could fly.  "Keep it up and you'll last ten years at most, maybe five," the doctor said.

The doctor apologized to Catherine, who was sitting on the chair by the bed, and she had no idea why until he said that as far as he was concerned her husband was taking up a bed that people with real medical problems needed.

"He should shoot himself. It would be easier and less expensive," the doctor said in such a serious expressionless manner that all Catherine could do was nod and say okay.

Dermot was discharged, and he went straight to bed when he got home. He didn't go to the bar the next night or the next.

The dog was scratching the door.

"Dermot, the dog needs to be taken out," Catherine was sitting on her side of the bed. The rain splattered against the window, and she felt a heavy gloom when he didn't respond. She put a hand on his side. He was curled up like a child, and sometimes she was sure he could hear her.  She'd imagine him smiling with his eyes closed. Now she didn’t want to imagine him smiling or awake because it made her feel helpless. The dog was yapping and scratching at the door. If someone didn't take him out soon, he'd probably pee on the carpet.

"Dermot please," she said, "I've got to get the stew on."

He moaned something incomprehensible. She gave him a shake. He'd grown thin in the last years, and she was struck with the notion that she could blow him off the bed, which saddened her.

"Dermot, please," she said.

"It'll be okay," he mumbled.

She didn't know if he meant the dog or the fact that she had to do the stew. She did know that she could spend several more minutes shaking him and pleading for him to get up, and it would do no good. With the curtains opened to let in the bits of stray light, she got dressed.

The rain on her face surprised her by being cold. In April, she never knew what it would be like when she stood outside. She should have worn a hat and gloves, but the dog had hardly given her enough time.

She walked the dog to the small green across the way that separated her home from the larger houses where her son and his friends used to play. Other children played there now, but it was quiet in the early morning. It was not yet time for the children to leave their houses with their parents to walk hand in hand to the primary school or to saunter in groups to the secondary school.
 
The dog peed straightaway, but Catherine had to walk around the green twice before it did the other business. She said under her breath, "Oh come on now," and pulled hard at its leash. Then she felt guilty, bent down to pet it, and got all muddy from its paws.

Dermot was still in bed when she got back to the house. She dried the dog and thought that she'd have to peel the whole bag of spuds because her son was a demon for potatoes. He liked the carrots too. He'd complain if he put a ladle into the saucepan, and it didn't come up full of vegetable and meat. He'd say, "I thought it was a stew not soup." Once when Catherine had said that was exactly what was before him, he'd actually looked up the definition of stew and showed her that it was a dish of meat and vegetable cooked slowly in liquid.

"See," he'd said, "cooked in liquid, not swimming in it."

The floor above her creaked with Dermot's rising. She'd finished peeling the fifth spud, cut it up, and wiped her hands on her apron before putting on the kettle and heating the pan to fry his egg. He liked his egg soft. "Put a fork in it, and it should flow like melted gold," he liked to say.

The bacon and sausages were only on the weekends. When their son was young, the Saturday fry up was one of Catherine's favorite meals. They’d sit around the table with a mountain of pig and toast, refill one teapot after another, and talk about their week.
 
Saturdays saddened her now, so did the sound of the kids playing, especially on a summer evening with all the windows open and the freshness in the air. She'd be hit with the silence in her house, the room upstairs not being used anymore, and all the time that had slipped away.

Dermot came into the kitchen rubbing his hands. A strand of his hair was sticking up at the back of his head. "My belly woke me up. I swear to God, I heard it growling in my sleep."

He stood by the range that emitted a soft heat from the fire and said he might need two eggs today since he was trying to cut down on the bread. The dog was lying on its bed by the range. It was quiet now, and he watched Dermot without raising its head. Catherine got a kick out of him when he did things like that. The dog appeared to be snubbing Dermot.

"I think he's mad you didn’t walk him," she said.

Dermot scoffed and said he doubted any such thing. "Is there tea brewing?"

Dermot was having a cigarette and re-reading some of the papers from yesterday. Catherine had decided after she'd peeled all the vegetables and had fried the beef till it was brown that it would be better to bring it to her son's house as was. Then she could boil up the stock and have the stew cooking while she cleaned.

Her son's house was a shock every week. She didn't know how so much dust and dirt could accumulate in so little time. Her son always apologized. "I'm sorry Ma," he'd say, "but it was a really bad week. I could hardly stand."

He was thirty-three, the age of Christ when he died, and Catherine felt bad for his suffering so young. She felt terrible that sometimes she'd park the car, and she’d not want to go into his dark house where the curtains were still drawn at 11 o'clock in the morning. And the smell. It could be the laundry or the food in the kitchen or the lack of air in the bathroom. Usually, she couldn't detect it once she was done cleaning. A couple of times when he wasn't home she stepped out of the house for a few moments and stepped back in to see if she'd just gotten accustomed to the smell while she'd worked. She could never be sure if this was the case.

She always started in the kitchen with the dishes that would be left for a few nights and then the shelves and windows and floors. He didn't use the cooker much, but the microwave made up for that. Then the downstairs bathroom that she instructed him to bleach at least twice a week, so it would be easier for her back. He promised he always did it, but one week she'd left an empty bottle of bleach by the toilet, and he'd gotten no new one and still said he'd bleached the place.

While she was cleaning the bathroom and the living room, the meat and carrots would be stewing and before she went upstairs to his bedroom and the other second bathroom that took longer because of the bath, which he used every night on account of his back, she'd have the potatoes on. She felt relieved to have it all worked out, but aggravated that she was still nearly an hour late at setting off because of the preparation.

Her son had called her twice already to ask where she was.

The day hadn't brightened. A steady rain was falling onto the windscreen, the kind of rain that you'd hardly hear, but would soak you all the same. Catherine didn't like driving in the rain.  The splattering of drops on all sides of her made her feel hemmed in and tiny. She tended to lean forward with her chin nearly over the steering wheel, so the tension would send shooting pains around her shoulders. 

Her house was five miles from the town and her son. A new motorway had been built that she could go on with three lanes of traffic, but she'd only driven on it once and would never do it again. She preferred the old road and didn't care about being stuck behind a tractor or the sharp bends that forced her to slow down to thirty miles an hour.

The bend by the Daly house was the worst. An octogenarian, Mags Daly, lived up the hill from there and had been writing to the council for years to get the road widened but nothing had been done. The new motorway meant it was very unlikely to get done now.
 
Catherine thought about taking the motorway because she couldn't stand any further delay, but she took too long to put her indicator on, and someone beeped behind her. She had no choice but to continue onto the old road. 

She kept going over in her head what she had to do, clean the kitchen first and then put the pot on, and then rush to the bathroom. She might have looked at the pot with all the food that she’d set in the passenger seat. She might have reached a hand out to make sure it was steady and would not fall, but then she was looking back on the road. 

She'd remember the rain was falling in slants, and the trees were heavy with water. Then the sudden flash of movement and his face was so close to her and the sound of her scream and the thud.

The wipers went over and back. Potatoes and carrots were on the floor beside her. She turned off the engine. Every part of her was trembling. She thought she might get sick, but she couldn’t. She had to phone 911 to report an accident before she could get out to see what that was, but she knew what it was. She’d seen his face, the pale skin and blond hair, the flash of a man that was there one moment then gone the next as if a great big hole had opened under him.

She was surprised her voice sounded the same when she told the emergency worker that someone was hurt on the old road at the Daly bend. She was slow getting out. But when she saw his body, she ran until her legs gave way with the shock and she fell onto the wet ground.

He'd been thrown to near the middle of the road, and his body was twisted in a strange way. The legs were folded up as if he were on his side, but he was lying on his back with his face to the sky. Blood ran down his cheeks, and he had a great gash in his head. She wanted to scream at the rain to leave him alone. It pelted his face that looked so young. He was not yet a man. She could feel his youth as if it were a shining thing around him, and she knew she shouldn't move him. She'd seen it on TV enough that it was best to let the medics take care of him, but she couldn’t let the rain fall on him like that. On her knees, she held the side of him and pulled him to her.

She wiped his face and the warmth of his skin made her cry out. The blood kept coming out of the hole in his head. She kept cleaning him with her cardigan. She wanted to see his face. He didn't look upset or angry. His mouth was held in a soft line.
 
"It'll be okay," she said. She felt the warmth fading, and she hugged him to her and said, "No, don't. They'll be here soon. Please don't go."

They found her on her knees hugging him. Her clothes were soaked from the rain and blood. When they tried to take him, she fought them. She held him to her and said, "No, no, it'll be okay." She was sobbing because she knew it wasn't okay. She'd held him as the warmth drained and she'd known he was gone before she’d heard the sirens and before the medics came rushing to her.

Yet she wanted to pretend it wasn't so, and if she could keep him for a little longer, she could pretend he was that warm shiny body she'd first seen. They eased her away. Faces would come back to her in the next few days, and she’d know they were the medics who held her arms softly and brought her to the ambulance to check her for injury.

"I didn't see him, and then he was there all of a sudden," she said while they checked her over.

At one stage, she threw the blanket from her and said she needed to get to her son. The stew needed to be cooked and the house cleaned. "You should see his house," she said. "He's in pain you see."

And she looked at the faces that would come back to her now and again, round cheeks and soft eyes, and she said, "Is he hurt? Will he be okay?"

They had to sedate her when she'd tried to get up a second and third time. She was brought home, though she'd remember little of the journey, and Dermot bringing her upstairs and helping her shower or sitting in the kitchen with some tea for a long time without drinking any.

The car was taken from the scene, and Dermot phoned her son. He asked to speak to her, and she was brought to the phone in her nightdress. Every now and again, she’d be hit with a fit of trembling, and she'd remember the boy’s face.

"Are you okay, Ma?"

She said, "Yes, I'll be okay." But it didn't sound like her, more like a voice that had been buried deep inside her. She thought it was muffled, but her son didn't say anything.

He asked if she wanted him to come out.
 
She said, "No, driving's not good for your back. I'll see you tomorrow."

In bed, she closed her eyes, and she saw the boy. She opened her eyes again and stared at the drawn curtains. She wished the rain would be louder, so the sound might take up space in her head and mute out his face and the stillness of him and the gentle mouth.

She slept on and off. Hers was a fitful sleep that never released her fully. She felt she was swimming, reaching the surface, and falling back under water again. She didn't hear Dermot get in the bed beside her.

The dog woke her in the morning. Dermot was asleep and snoring lightly. She opened the curtains to see that the rain had stopped though the day had an ashen quality to it. Her stomach was sick, and she was a little light-headed. She put a hand on Dermot's side, but she didn't say his name. It got rooted in her stomach. For a moment she thought she'd cry, but it passed.

She dressed in a pair of black pants that were around-the-house clothes and a woolen cardigan. The dog was all over her when she opened the bedroom door, and she told it to hush.
 
In the kitchen, she had a quick banana and put the kettle to boil. She nearly went out in her slippers, but she remembered in time.

Outside, the air was warmer than yesterday. She looked at her car. The left side was dented, and the light was smashed. She felt her neighbors watching her and thinking she was the woman who’d hit the boy and cradled him and fought him being taken away.

Her legs went weak and she thought she might fall but the dog was pulling her and she was going to the green where she walked in circles. She saw the arrival of the police car from there and stopped frozen. 

The police knocked and stood and knocked again before she saw them being swallowed up by the house.
 
When Catherine walked in, they were in the kitchen. Dermot, in jeans and a t-shirt, was barefoot. A female officer was sitting at the table opposite him. A male officer was standing by the range. The dog scampered into the kitchen to his bowls of water and food.

"There was a witness," the woman said.

Catherine said oh.

The woman said Mrs. Daly had been watering the plants in her front room, and she'd seen the Flynn boy walking from his house in the rain. The Flynns lived on the same slip road as the Dalys, and she knew the boy hadn't been in school for a few weeks. There was something with the boy she thought wasn't right, but it took several moments before she realized he wasn't wearing a jacket, and he didn't seem aware of the rain. She was still watching him when he came to the main road and stopped. He looked to the left and then stepped back.

The woman stopped talking. Catherine said, "Go on."

Mrs. Daly said she saw the car coming, a flash of color, but her attention was on the boy. She didn't think anything about the car until seconds before it happened when she knew he was going to run out.

The male officer said, "It wasn't your fault. He ran out in front of you on purpose."
 
"I nearly went on the motorway, but there was a car behind me," Catherine said.

"Then it would have been someone else," he said.

Catherine couldn't imagine anyone else being on that road with him. No one would have held him like she did.

"See it wasn't your fault. There was nothing you could have done," Dermot said when the guards were gone. He'd lit a cigarette and had opened the back door to let out the smoke. The dog was in his bed. 

"It's a shocking thing to do to anyone," Dermot said. "Pure selfish."

She closed her eyes and saw the wet corner of the road. She couldn't think the boy selfish. It was fear, she thought. He didn’t want to go alone.

She cracked the egg into the pot and saw the perfection of it, the single yoke caught in the white.

The pot from yesterday was on the stove with all the food inside. Dermot said he'd picked everything from the floor yesterday. He said there was some mess, but he made sure to wash all the vegetables thoroughly, and he threw out the beef.

Catherine thanked him because it seemed expected. He said he'd also washed the car and checked to make sure nothing was wrong. He didn't say anything when the egg was put before him a little hard. He stared at it for a few seconds before pushing the plate away, and she went to the fridge to get another one.

She didn't go to her son's house that day or the next. The neighbors called. Ester from across the green came with a troubled face and pie. She wouldn't let Catherine make the tea.

"Sit down you," she said. "It's an awful shock." 

With the teapot between them she asked how Catherine was.

"I don't know," Catherine said, and this was true. She might be doing something like making the beds or making the dinner and she'd feel his body in her arms and she wouldn't know how she was in her house. Sometimes, she didn't know how to continue. She felt like she was pushing through a wall.  
 
Nuala from next door arrived and said her son had gone to school with the boy. They'd been friends, and she wanted to know what happened, if he'd really jumped out. Catherine took Nuala into the kitchen and told her how fast it all happened. One minute nothing, then his face, but she couldn't tell her about holding the boy in her arms and begging him to stay.

Catherine heard the funeral notice on the radio and had to sit down. She'd been expecting to hear it. She turned on North West radio to listen for it, but still to hear his name aloud made the ground slip from under her. He was just eighteen years old.



Friday, on the way to her son's house, she took the motorway. She wanted to take the old road, to drive that patch without the rain. But if she went that way, she was afraid she'd stop at the bend and not go any further. To go there was to make time stand still and then bring it back. Maybe she was still sitting there on the cold asphalt, and he hadn’t left, but then she remembered the removal was on that day. She’d thought of going, but it was another thing she couldn’t do, not from the shame of it, but from the intimacy. She’d want to touch him, to reach out and lift him up, to cry over him again, and she was afraid of that need.

Her son's house was a narrow two-story with the door opening up onto the street and a small patch of garden at back. She had the key in the door when her son opened it. He was tall, and he used to be thin. But now he had extra weight on his cheeks, and his belly flowed over his jeans. He kissed her cheek, and she smelled cigarettes. "Hi Ma," he said. "Good to see you."

He took the pot from her hands and led her into the kitchen, which was the worst she'd ever seen it. Dishes were piled high, and she could see the stickiness on the table. She stopped at the door while he put the pot on the cooker. She hadn't been able to cook the stew at home. It felt wrong to her. There were little ways to keep the boy with her. When she put the pot in the car, she thought of him walking down his road.

Her son was putting on his jacket. He said he had an appointment with the doctor, and he'd be back as soon as he could. She'd browned the beef and boiled it in stock with the carrots. Then she stood still in the room. Her son hadn’t asked about the boy. He was eighteen, she would have told him, so young, "Remember you at eighteen? The world ahead of you?"

The food on the dishes was caked and hard, and her arm hurt from scrubbing the table. She cleaned on auto-pilot, as something she needed to do, but she felt as if she wasn't really there. She was watching herself scrub and opened the door to let in the blast of air.

The stew was boiling for minutes before she realized she hadn’t turned it to simmer. She had to scrape the meat from the bottom. The bathroom downstairs wasn't too bad. Still she was slower than usual. The boy wouldn't let her rest. On her knees in the bathroom upstairs, she remembered the hard road under her and the stone digging into her skin with his weight resting on her. When they'd lifted him off her, she couldn't stand. Her legs were a dead weight.

Her face in the mirror seemed wrong. She sprayed windex on the glass and wiped it with a paper towel, like an unveiling with the spray being rubbed off to see her face. Only it wasn't her. By the third unveiling, she realized the difference was in her eyes. They looked at her differently, but that just confused her. If the eyes looked at her differently, wasn't she different?

Wasn’t it the new mouth, the new chin, raised upward now, because she would have fought if it had meant something? If it could have brought him back for even five more seconds, she would have clawed at them, and this was in her face now, but not all the time. Other times, she didn’t remember the fight as much as the pain and the shock, and the way she’d crawled to him on hands and knees. 

She was upstairs when her son came back and shouted, "Hello Ma, something smells good."

She remembered the stew. The potatoes had been put in ages ago; she couldn't remember when. Her son was taking off his jacket. He was smiling until he saw her. A stocky middle-aged woman in her sweatpants gripping the bannister and looking like she might topple forward because she was trying to go that fast.

"Are you alright, Ma?"

"The stew," she said.

"Ah Ma, I've been looking forward to that stew all week."

The potatoes were overcooked mush, and she stood by the pot staring in. He came beside her and sighed.

"He was eighteen, did you know that?" she said.

"You're lucky you weren't hurt," he said.

He asked if she was doing okay. She said sometimes. He nodded and said he was sorry for it. After awhile he said he'd have a little of the stew. He took a plate out of the cupboard, a plate that she had washed and dried and put there, a plate that he might leave in the sink for her to wash next week, so it would be better to wait until he was done and clean it now.

On the way home, she'd have to get a piece of meat at the butchers. Dermot would not eat what she'd made. He'd walk into the kitchen and walk out again and close the living-room door in anger. The television would be on, but if she wanted to watch, he’d tell her he needed to be alone.

"It's not so bad," her son said.
 
She smelled the burning. The bottom of the pot would be ruined.

                                                                   

Saturday, late morning, Catherine changed into a black skirt and blouse and left the house when Dermot took the dog out for a walk. She couldn't tell him she wanted to go to the funeral. He would have told her not to go. If ever she brought up the boy, he'd sigh with consternation and say it was an awful thing to do, or he'd tell her he didn't like to think about what happened, so she never said how she'd held the boy or how it hurt to hold it in.

She parked away from the church and waited until most of the people were gone inside before getting out of the car. A group of kids the boy's age, dressed in black dresses and pants remained outside talking. She wondered what he had been like before the walk to the main road, if he'd chatted as these kids. Two girls were talking alone, and three boys were together. She was at the church gate when she saw one boy nudge another, and she saw the first boy was Nuala's son. The other boys were looking at her now. The girls had stopped talking, and one turned to the boys. Catherine couldn't hear, but Nuala's son must have said that's Catherine Molloy, the woman who hit him, because the girls were watching her now. Their faces had opened with a curious sympathy while the boys looks were wary and unsure. She couldn't walk by those boys and turned back to the car. By the time she sat inside, the kids were gone.

                                                 

Tuesday, she rose, as she had done for the previous weeks in a dazed stupor that made her feel she had not woken at all. She took the dog out to the green. They walked slowly, not from tiredness, but from the notion that she didn't know this place at all. Oh, she knew it, the green and the houses and the school up the road and the quarry, but only the outline. She had no idea what it was like inside those houses. Some she could imagine. Ester would be waiting for her boiled egg and stewing the tea, and Nuala would be screaming at her son to wake, but there were neighbors Catherine only nodded at. Their houses stood a stone's throw from her home, and she had no idea who they were or what they might be doing right now.

Sometimes, the vastness of what she didn't know would overwhelm her. She'd have to stop in the green and take deep breaths. It wasn't fear she felt then, or nerves. She imagined it was like an insect having the rock lifted from over them, stunned by the bright light yet too ignorant to process it.  She knew that the boy's house was on the hill on the slip road. There was the Daly house and then the blue bungalow that didn't face onto the road, but faced towards town.

The afternoon of the funeral, unable to settle, she'd gone for a drive. The first time on the old road since the accident. She parked just beyond the bend, and it was a long time before she got out of the car and walked to the road he'd come from -- a narrow gravel road with high hedges where he would have hidden.

Before she knew it, she was walking on that road. She knew the house immediately. The porch outside was made of glass. The garden was well tended with flowers and hills rising in the back and the side. The blueness of it, the quiet of it, it was where he’d come from. She stopped by a curve in the road, a perfect focal point, where she would not be seen and she didn't move until she heard a door open. A body came out, but she didn't wait to see it was male or female.


The next morning, she brought the dog home and fed and watered him. With the sound of the floor above creaking from Dermot’s footsteps, she got the pan out and heated it.

“Not a bad day out there,” Dermot said as he walked into the kitchen..

He sat at the table. If he was aware of her lack of reply, he said nothing of it. He browsed through yesterday's papers as always while she put on the toast and made the tea. Every action was harder than the last, but she bore it because she didn't know how not to.

"Thanking you," he said when the egg was before him. He pierced it with a fork and smiled. Perfect.

"How long will you be away today?" he asked.

She said she didn't know. He laughed and said it all depends what he has waiting for you.

She said, "Yes, I'll head off now though, so I won't be out all day."

She drove through the estate and the village and under the bridge without any clear thought, but once she past the ramp for the motorway, her heart started to quicken, and she had to grasp the steering wheel tightly for the sweat on her hands.

She came to the corner and turned on to the slip road, and thought this is the car that took their boy. It still held the marks of his body. If she had considered this before, she wouldn't have gone, but it was too late now. The road was too narrow to turn around and someone might have seen her already. His mother might be at the front window watching her approach and then to see the car turn would be dreadful for its cowardice.

Catherine parked the car by the low wall in front of their house. It was hard to breathe now. She was scared her heart might burst from her chest, and she didn't know if she could walk. The trembling seemed to be in her blood. Her hands still gripped the steering wheel. What would she say if she went to their door? She hadn't thought of that. She'd thought of nothing apart from what the parents must want to know. She had no idea how to begin telling them.

The knock on the driver's door didn't alarm her, though it came again before she was able to look. She saw a man with a narrow face and deep wrinkles around his eyes. His brown hair was to his shoulder and turning grey. 

"Catherine Molloy?" he asked. She nodded and tears came to his eyes. He thanked her for coming and said, "She wants you to come in."

He stepped back from the door to let her out, and they stood on the side of the road, uncertain, but not uncomfortable. He was wearing dirty jeans and wellies. "I have things to attend to, but you go on. She's waiting for you."

The boy's mother was standing by the living room window. Catherine saw with a glance that she was in jeans and a sweater and had the same color hair as her son, but she could not meet the woman’s gaze as she approached.

Catherine took the step to the front door. His mother was in the hall now. Her face was soft, and Catherine wanted to run from the pain in her eyes, but his mother stepped forward and took Catherine’s hand. His mother wasn't a tall woman. "Thank you for coming," she said.

Catherine nodded. His mother's eyes were a pale blue and filled with tears.

Catherine followed her into the living room where a fire was lit. His mother motioned for Catherine to sit on the couch. She offered tea and Catherine said no. Now in the house with the woman before her, all uncertainties had fled.

His mother sat beside her and said, "Tell me."

Catherine told her about the rain and nearly taking the motorway. She told her how fast he appeared and how close he was, and she didn't have a chance to stop in time. She said, "He didn’t look frightened."

His mother wiped her cheeks. They stared at the fire for a moment before his mother said they were watching him all the time. Always someone in the house, though he seemed okay that day. He asked her to make him a ham and cheese toasty, his favorite. That's what she was doing when he walked out into the road.

The fire spit out embers that fell against the fireguard and dropped to the tiles of the fireplace to die out.

Catherine said, "I held him." She stopped, but the mother's hand squeezed hers. Catherine continued, "I held him, and I loved him like my own son."

His mother made a sound that tore at Catherine. Tears streamed down their faces, and nothing was said for a long time. Finally, his mother rose and asked Catherine to follow her.

Wordlessly, she led Catherine down the hallway to the second door on the right, and his mother opened it to a room with single bed and posters on the wall.  

She smiled at Catherine when her phone rang. Catherine took it out of her pocket to turn it off. The silence that came then was a relief. Catherine could not tell her that the caller was her son. She stepped inside the room and saw a book lay faced down on the bed, a hoody was on the floor, and balled up papers had been tossed under the desk.

Catherine imagined the boy sitting at his desk staring out at the rain and waiting to know the right things to write. She wondered if he'd found the words and if his mother had something to hold onto.

Catherine thought maybe someday she'd ask her. 

 

 


 

Back to Top
Review Home

 

© 2018 Americana: The Institute for the Study of American Popular Culture
AmericanPopularCulture.com