As Sick as Our Secrets

by A B Whelan

  My bitter thoughts about Mother make me feel sick and ungrateful. I smash my hands against the steering wheel until my palms go numb. Only a bad son would complain about a little drive when his mother has sacrificed so much for him to raise him by herself.

  The ringtone of my Motorola reverberates around me like an echo in a cave. I mute the instrumental solo—my favorite part—from “Enjoy the Silence” by Depeche Mode on the car’s CD player. My jaw clenches as I answer. It’s Mother. She is letting me know that she will be arriving at the fish restaurant a half an hour late. This happens almost every week, but I don’t mind. I enjoy standing on the pier below the street and looking out at the boats docked in the harbor. I could be mad, cussing her out for considering my wasted time inconsequential, but instead I find tranquility in shutting out the negative and only allowing in positive thoughts. Being late is what women do. Forcing men to wait for them is commonly done to make themselves look important. Little do they know that we have the power to stay or leave; thus, we are the stronger half of the equation. I was late once, three weeks ago, when I couldn’t find my car keys—they slipped through a hole in a pocket in my backpack and dropped to the bottom. Seventeen minutes and twenty-two seconds late. She didn’t wait for me.

  The week before I moved up north, Mother signed a lease on a charming one-story house in Santa Barbara with huge widows overlooking the ocean and a picket fence that offers neither protection nor privacy. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night—drenched in sweat and pained by rapid heartbeats—thinking someone has broken into Mother’s home and is there to hurt her. I’d picture her ravaged body, the lake of blood on the kitchen floor, the smell of iron and gunpowder blended together. At moments like that, nothing else can give me peace of mind but the sound of her voice. She doesn’t mind if I call her in the middle of the night because she understands that I need her to confirm that she is safe, that it was only a bad dream. I’m the only man in her life. It’s my duty to protect her, but I abandoned my responsibilities when I moved away. God forgive me.

  The first two weeks living away from home were the toughest. It took me one hundred and sixty-eight hours away from home to reach my breaking point. When my anxiety couldn’t be suppressed any longer, I packed up my stuff in the middle of the night and hit the road, leaving Stanford behind like an abandoned dog. A good man would never leave his mother unprotected. I am a good son. I want to be a good son.

  That night, I had only put twenty-five miles behind me when I pulled over to the side of the road and burst out of my car. Raging, conflicting feelings fighting inside of me, I tore through the woods and yelled into the night like a howling, rabid wolf. What makes me a good son? Staying at Stanford and getting myself a good education or going home and taking care of my lonely mother? She is everything to me. It has only been the two of us, no one else. She would do anything for me. How many people can say that about their parents? About their mothers? She left her home in Escondido, the house she loved and where she felt safe, to move closer to me. She drives hours every Saturday to meet me. I don’t like that she spends so much time on the road. It’s dangerous. People drive like mindless zombies, selfish bastards. A flight to San Francisco would be easier and safer for her, but when I suggested it, she told me that relationships between two people work only if both sides are willing to sacrifice and meet in the middle. I’m okay with driving. Besides, Giovanni’s has damn good clam chowder.

  “You must come home every holiday,” Mother had said, standing beside the car that was supposed to take me away from my old life, from bad memories, from the town I grew to hate. “On my birthday, we could take a trip to Belize. On Easter, we’ll do the egg hunt for the kids at the youth center. Those poor, unfortunate bastard children will be so grateful. They’ll love it. Oh, and don’t forget the Halloween party. It’s a huge hit every year. And you’ll come home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, of course. We’ll send food packages to people in Haiti again.”

  “I’m not sure I’ll be able to come home for every holiday, Mother. I may have to stay and study sometimes.”

  “You wouldn’t want your mother to celebrate alone, now, would you?”

  And I didn’t. I owe her my life. So I promised her everything she asked of me.

  Now, three months later, this is my twelfth trip to our halfway meeting point.

  I pull over to the side of the road. A surge of anxiety expands in my chest like an unwelcome guest who keeps returning.

  I get out of my car and sprint off the road into the weed-laden dirt. There is a farmhouse in the distance, but I can’t sustain my excessive speed to reach it because I’m low on fuel. I had a long week of swim practice, and I only ate a bowl of cereal this morning. Since Mother isn’t there to cook for me, the quality of my meals has diminished. I no longer wake to the scent of fresh homemade pancakes and maple syrup or sourdough toast and fried eggs with bacon.

  Halfway between the road and the farmhouse, I stop and double over to catch my breath. My eyes are fixed on a huge lump of dirt. I pick it up and send it hurling toward the barn. I swing my arm hard, straining my shoulder. “Arghhhhh!” I scream into the chilled air. A white mist carries my voice far into the distance, toward the tall cypress and pine trees. I want to climb those trees. Or even better, I want to chop them down and burn them. What I need is complete physical exhaustion and a deep, immersive sleep afterward. Nothing else can help me get out of my own head.

  I jog back to my car and get back on the road. It seems to take forever for my body to warm up. I grab my coat from the seat next to me and drape it over my lap. A warm bowl of soup sounds better and better with each passing mile.

  An hour later, I’m standing on the pier by Giovanni’s fish restaurant and listening to the cries of battling seagulls. It’s midday, but the fog still sits heavily over the harbor. This horror movie scenery is much to my liking. I daydream about paddling out in a kayak and boarding one of those sailing boats that are anchored farther out in the bay near the lighthouse. I imagine myself going through the owner’s personal stuff, looking at photographs and ransacking clothes and laundry to give me an idea of what kind of people own the boat. Maybe the mistress is a young woman with long legs that end in a set of slender, swaying hips. I sniff the air. I can almost smell her skin. I could do the most amazing things to her. I’d make love to her like no one has before. I would enter her most inner self and strip her from her humanity. We would be animals. She would never forgive me but would dream about me for the rest of her life.

  “Honey?” My mother’s voice pierces through the images in my head like a spear. “Have you been waiting long, darling?”

  Heat rises to my face, and I drop my backpack in front of me. I can’t hug her now. She’d know that I passed the time waiting with naughty thoughts. She wouldn’t understand what I’m going through. “Don’t play with yourself too much. It’ll drive you crazy,” she had warned me when she thought I was spending too much time alone in my room. I think I was thirteen or so, embarrassed by her assumptions, as I was only writing poetry in my room. But that day she killed the poet in me. I haven’t penned a word since, and I blame her for it.

  I can’t escape her hug. It’s a ritual we’ve both grown accustomed to. She wraps me in her short arms and kisses me on the cheek, close enough to my mouth that I taste her lipstick. She tells me that I’m too skinny and I should forget school and move back home, where she could look after me.

  “I’m afraid you’ll never find a decent girl who will take a good care of you,” she says, licking her finger and wiping something from my cheek. “I wish it was different, but unfortunately, girls nowadays are self-centered and narcissistic and expect men to do everything for them. You’re better off getting a dog.”

  I lean away from her fingertip dripping with saliva. “I can take care of myself, Mother. I don’t need someone to do that for me.”

  We order our food at the window, and she doesn’t have time to elaborate on who I am supposed to d
ate or not date. She pays with cash. She hands me the change she gets back from the hundred-dollar bill. I take it because I’ve already given up on trying to stop her from embarrassing me in public. It’s easier to just go with it.

  “I talked to the dean at UCLA. I know his wife from high school. I could get you in, and you’d be much closer to me, to home,” she says while we take our place at a round outdoor table. This restaurant is my choice, and she hates it because we are forced to watch fisherman hose down their boats after a morning spent fishing out on the water, forced to eat on a wooden table with permanent grease stains, and forced to inhale the true smell of the ocean.

  “Mother, I like where I am. I don’t want to move back.”

  She subtly pouts as she looks out toward the ocean with squinting, inattentive eyes and her lips wrinkled up. I know she is disappointed.

  “The house is so empty without you. And I don’t like the neighborhood. Old people. Sick people. The entire street is like Russian roulette; you never know who’ll die next. Yesterday, the guy with that tacky attempt at a Japanese garden for a front yard died of a heart attack.”

  “You should move back to our house. You loved living there.”

  “No. I can’t do that. It would be too long of a drive to get here. I couldn’t see you every weekend.”

  Tears glisten in her eyes. How could I say something so insensitive? I am almost there—at the breaking point again, the point where I almost tell her that I’ll transfer to UCLA to be closer to her. The waiter’s call saves me from making an emotional decision I’d regret later.

  I get up to get our food.

  We eat in silence for a while. The clam chowder is thick and salty. It makes me forget the long drive and the wasted weekend. Mother then asks me about girls, and I’m all uncomfortable again.

  I tell her that I haven’t met anybody who interests me. She asks me about my grades. I haven’t disappointed her in that area, so we talk about it at length.

  When we’re done with our coffee, I pull out a box of bonbons I picked up for her at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. She doesn’t open it. Mother doesn’t care about the present, only the thought, the gesture.

  “Do you mind if we cancel next week?” I ask. I sound like a scared rabbit. I sit like one too.

  Her face doesn’t give away her thoughts, and I hate that the most. Maybe I should have waited until Friday and cancelled over the phone. Now she will be upset with me for two weeks straight. I picture myself holding the phone and waiting and waiting for her to pick it up, but the call would go to voice mail time after time.

  “Why? Have you had enough of me?” Her voice breaks in the middle of the sentence. I dread hurting my mother. I’d rather face a hurtful breakup with a girl than break my mother’s heart.

  “No, Mother! How can you say that? It’s just that a couple of guys are going up to the American River near Lake Tahoe to do some white-water rafting. They invited me to join them.”

  “What guys?” she asks, nonchalantly searching her purse.

  “Some buddies I met at school. Good guys.”

  She pulls out a tissue and dabs at her nose. “Are you staying there for the entire weekend?”

  “That’s the plan. We’ll put up a tent by the river.”

  She clicks her tongue, her usual sign of scorn. I feel like I’m a little boy again who did something wrong: put too much syrup on the pancake or started the dishwasher without the tablet.

  “How well do you know these people? What if they only want to lure you into the woods and hurt you?”

  “Mother!” I feel an urgent need to slap my forehead, but that move would set her ablaze. She hates when I disregard her warnings and resent her wisdom about life. Instead, I force myself to remain calm. “They’re cool dudes. It’s supposed to be a fun weekend, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know. I heard from a friend”—what friend, she doesn’t have any— “that her nine-year-old daughter was attending a birthday sleepover at a classmate’s house, and she didn’t really know the birthday girl or her friends. And you won’t believe it, but they raped her with a foreign object. They were only little kids.”

  I lean back in my chair. “Jeez! Where do you get these stories?”

  “You think these things can never happen to you, but they happen to average people all the time.” She touches my hand on the table. “Honey, I only want you to be safe.”

  “You don’t need to worry, Mother. I know these guys.”

  “I’d feel more comfortable if you wouldn’t go. It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

  I sigh because if I pursue this any longer, then I’ll only stretch out this frustrating argument that I’ll never win. It’s already getting dark, and I have a long drive back to school.

  “All right. Forget it. I’ll see you next week.” I rise from the table. She joins me, kisses my cheek, and slips her hand inside the crook of my arm.

  We walk like lovers to her car. She cries about how much she will miss me. I hug her and promise that I’ll call her as soon as I get back to my apartment. I wave to her as she drives out of the parking lot.

  I need to get going, but I can’t. The anger inside me wants to break out, but I can’t set it free because whenever I do, bad things happen.

  To air out my head and release some pressure, I start walking down the main road along the harbor toward the tourist shops in the cold, misty air. My warm breath turns into tiny puffs of white cloud, and I pull the hood of my gray Stanford sweatshirt over my head and slip my hands into my pockets. My thoughts set on something sweet and warm, I turn a corner when a waft of something syrupy tickles my nose. There is a clean-faced girl with a long brunette ponytail behind the cash register of a touristy candy and gift shop. I know I shouldn’t step into the store, because what I need to do now is stretch out my limbs before getting back on the road and not allow myself to be mesmerized by some local beauty, but I do it anyway. There is something hypnotic in the way she tosses her ponytail right to left as she talks to a customer. I don’t even look at the merchandise, only into the girl’s eyes, hazel with chestnut-brown dots. She wears tight white jeans and a peach-colored silk blouse with the top three buttons undone. A white apron lies over her clothes, covered with pen drawings. I feel warm in the right places.

  “What can I help you with?” Her voice is beyond sexy. I like her smile. She puts her arms akimbo, and with that she opens her blouse wider. She seems like a typical small-town girl who is too smart and too beautiful to rot away here, and she knows it. She must be dreaming about making it big in Hollywood or singing on TV. Selling taffy is temporary for her, a way to earn enough money for a bus ticket to get the hell out of here.

  I ask for her recommendation on the chocolate and candy selection the store carries. She tries to impress me with her knowledge about the overpriced goods. I order several samplers. She reads the writing on my sweatshirt. She knows I have money and that I’m an out-of-towner. I’m her golden ticket.

  I ask her help choosing a soft plush animal for my little sister (I don’t have one, but girls love sensitive guys). She thinks I’m sweet for buying a present for my baby sis. She picks a white baby seal off the shelf and asks me to feel how soft its fur is. I put my hand on the toy, making sure our fingers lightly touch. Our eyes meet. She is in the bag, but to make sure she understands I’m not looking for a quick one, I mention Giovanni’s fish restaurant and the amazing seafood that brings me here every Saturday. I don’t bring up my meetings with Mother. That’s a turn-off.

  She tells me that if I can stick around for half an hour, till the end of her shift, she can show me around town. I thank her for her hospitality and leave a big tip. I sit down on a bench outside, shivering and munching on peanut butter fudge and saltwater taffies. I watch her through the open door as she serves other customers who were also lured into the store by the lingering, mouthwatering scent in the air. She talks loudly and smiles a lot—she’s trying to impress me. No need. I’m already intere
sted.

  The girl who works the evening shift is late. She comes out to the street to apologize to me for the wait. I don’t want to come off as a loser who has nothing else to do but sit around and wait for a girl, so I tell her that I need to make a few phone calls. We agree on meeting down by the dock where seals lounge about all day. She stutters when she agrees—she is worried I’ll bounce—but I assure her that I’ll be waiting.

  Dark has descended on this mystical fishing town when at last her shoes thump on the wood-boarded dock like rapid drumbeats. When she reaches the platform, her footsteps slow down. She stops next to a light pole and stretches her swan neck in the faint pool of light. “Danny?”

  I step out of the dark, startling her. I’m glad she came, because all this time I was waiting for her, I struggled to ward off hauntingly beautiful images of a pale, dead girl floating in the canal with her eyes open and seaweed tangled in her hair.

  But she is here, and I’m all better now. The short-fused anger that consumed me in high school is under control. I will not hurt this girl. She is not like that arrogant bitch Caroline. This girl is kind and helpful. She is only looking for an opportunity to get out of this small town.

  I put my hand on her damp and fuzzy hair. We are alone, below the street, out of sight, but she isn’t trembling in my company. There is no fear, not even caution in her eyes. I could easily grab hold of her arms or snap her neck and push her into the icy water. I could push her down onto the ground and force myself into her while people mill about a few yards from us, enjoying hot cocoas and laughing. Maybe she doesn’t have a conscientious mother to teach her about strangers.