by RM Brewer
"What do you mean, he caught it from the dead guy? Because you touched him in the river, or what?" his Mom asked. Her voice was louder now and she had a look on her face Noah recognized as concern and, maybe, a little bit of irritation.
"Fester said the guy's arm kinda squirted some stuff on him ... when he was taking the guy's watch." Noah felt so embarrassed. He knew his mother wouldn't approve of what Fester did. "I didn't want to tell you he took the watch. Fester was already in trouble. Anyway, his dad took it away before he left town."
"Do you mean to tell me Fester stole a watch from that poor man in the river? You should have told me," Noah's mom said, a sad tone creeping into her voice. "Things like watches and personal items might be important to his family, if they ever figure out who he is. Regardless, we need to get to the doctor as soon as we're finished with the police. Lord knows what disease you might have caught from the man."
"I know. I'm sorry, Mom." Noah could tell his mom was angry. Even worse, she sounded like she was disappointed in him. He stared out the car window, watching the tree-lined streets go by, when an old memory crept into his mind. He could picture her standing in her bedroom, taking items out of a wooden box on the dresser. A watch, a tie tack, a wedding ring. All carefully handled and preserved. The last pieces of his father's life. She would hold them, letting the tears fall. Noah would try to comfort her, not really understanding what was happening. She would tell him everything would be okay. She said she just wished they could all be together. When he was seven years old, she asked him to help her put the box away in the attic.
"I don't need these to remember your dad anymore. All I need to do is look at you. You're starting to look so much like him," she said. Since then, Noah, couldn't remember his mother being sad like that. He hoped telling her about the watch wouldn't make her sad again.
"When we find Fester, I'll tell him to get the watch back from his dad and we can send it to the guy's family. Oh, yeah, I just remembered. Fester gave me some numbers that were written on the back of the watch. Maybe they were phone numbers," Noah said, pulling the crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket. "It says 415645 and 1235216," Noah said.
"Those don't sound like phone numbers," Noah's mom said. "Maybe they're birthdays or important dates or something. When we get home, we'll see if we can make any sense of what they mean."
They pulled up into the police station parking lot. His mom put her hand on his shoulder as they walked in. The station was completely empty, with the exception of Officer Wending, who was taking his coat off.
"Well, hello again," Officer Wending greeted them. "Lots of action around here lately. Finding bodies everywhere, it seems. Found another one in the middle of a forest road offa highway 96. Now, what can I do for you two today?"
Noah didn't like Officer Wending at all after what he made Fester do with the dead guy at the river. He wondered if Wending was trying to impress them with that bit of information about dead people. Before his mom could answer the officer, a woman came through the front door. Noah and his mother turned around at the sound of the door opening. Outside, two EMTs, one a very large man and the other an Asian woman, stood next to an ambulance, watching the woman walk in. Noah thought she looked a little shaky, as if she was dizzy or something. The woman sat down in one of the chairs by the door and smiled warmly at Noah and his mom.
"I need to use your phone right now," the woman said to Officer Wending.
"I'll be with you in a moment, Agent Watts," the officer replied.
Chapter 6
After almost two decades of looking for Kari, Leah was tired. When she started her search, she was not only seeking Kari, but redemption as well. In the early years, she thought maybe if I can find her, they'll stop blaming me for something I had nothing to do with. Maybe her mother would understand what really happened. Maybe her father would come home. But, each year, she had no success and the guilt continued to pile on. Years of feeling responsible for things beyond her control and sadness over not having any contact with her family wore away at her self-esteem. Deep in her heart, she knew it wasn't the answer, but whiskey and pot were the only things that gave her any relief. She felt like they were the only things she could count on.
As she grew older, Leah held a few odd jobs, mostly at convenience stores and gas stations, all paying barely enough to live on. She didn't have long-term relationships with anyone, not men, women, friends or lovers. The only person she allowed herself to get even remotely close to over the past two decades was a biker named Rivet, who ran a lucrative marijuana distribution and delivery service. She looked back with a bit of sadness, realizing, other than her childhood before Kari was missing, the years with Rivet were some of the happiest of her life. While she was with him, most of the time, she was too stoned to think about the past and too drunk to worry about the future. She didn't even mind that Rivet was an idiot. At least, not until he walked out one day and didn't come back.
Now that Rivet was gone, Leah felt like she needed to get her bearings. While she was happy he was gone, she still found herself feeling abandoned. The whiskey wasn't stifling her guilt over not seeing her family, either. She had no contact with her them for almost five years and sensed a building need to see her mother. Yet, every time she made up her mind to visit, shame over the condition she was in and fear of her mother's rejection gripped her so fiercely that she could never make it out of the driveway.
Finally, she made up her mind to accept the fact that a change was needed and allowed herself three days of sobriety. On the third day, she forced herself to get in the car and start driving. Her mother was staying at the Emerald Pines nursing home, north of Crescent City. The drive was only fifty miles from where Leah lived, yet they were worlds apart in so many ways. Since her mother turned eighty last year, Leah started to feel like time was running out for reconciliation. At the very least, she needed to put some things to rest before her mother was gone. She promised herself she wouldn't let her mother hurt her again. This time, she wouldn't allow her mother to judge her life or the decisions she'd made.
Driving into the parking lot, Leah thought Emerald Pines would be a beautiful place to live out the last years of a life. The building was surrounded by tall pine trees and giant redwoods, casting a cool shade across the lawn. Inside, the facility was airy and well maintained. She walked to the reception desk.
"I'm here to see my mother, Karen Fenton. Can you tell me what room she's in?" Leah inquired.
"Sure, but when was the last time you saw her?" the receptionist asked.
Leah was a little surprised and irritated by the question. "What does that matter?"
"Well, ma'am, it's just that you walked right past your mother. She's sitting on the porch in a rocker next to the entry door."
"Thank you," Leah said, but she was embarrassed at not recognizing her own mother and turned quickly toward the porch. From the corner of her eye, she could see the receptionist keeping a watchful eye on her.
"Momma?" Leah said, approaching the old woman bent over the tray in front of her. The woman looked up and Leah could see her mother's eyes. They were cloudy now, not like the steely blue she remembered. Her mother's face remained expressionless as she tried to focus on Leah. Finally, recognition swept over the old woman's face and Leah thought she might even have seen a smile for a brief moment.
"Leah. You're here," she said, reaching out a hand to her.
She took her mother's hand. Deformed by arthritis, her fingers were bent and knuckles distorted, yet, she still had a strong grip and held onto Leah tightly.
"You haven't visited in such a long time, I thought maybe you moved away and didn't tell me," Leah's mother said.
"No, Momma. Just busy, I guess." Leah waited for her mother to pile the guilt on, for the retribution to begin.
Surprisingly, her mother had little else to say. They spent a few strained hours on the porch, discussing the weather, recalling the less painful of their shared memories. Eventually, the conversa
tion stalled completely. Leah decided she wasn't ready to talk about parts of the past that mattered to her right now. She still felt too distant from her mother.
As she got up to leave, Leah's mother asked, "How's that boyfriend of yours? Ribbet, or whatever his name is?"
"Rivet, Momma. Anyway, it doesn't matter. He's gone. I'm better off without him." Leah allowed herself to realize what a ridiculous name Rivet was. She laughed softly at herself for ever becoming involved with the man.
"Good for you. I always thought that man had a name like a frog or something."
Leah considered her comment for a moment and they both burst into laughter. She didn't recall the last time they'd laughed together. She thought it a fitting way to end the first visit and promised her mother to come back soon. Leah didn't know if she would want to, but a week later, was compelled to drive to Emerald Pines again. She pushed her mother's wheelchair across the courtyard to a sitting area underneath a large tree. A cool breeze blew and she covered her mother's shoulders with a blanket.
"Are you getting enough rest lately? You look so tired," her mother said.
"I'm trying, Momma. I guess those old ghosts of the past still haunt me at night," Leah said, fighting back the tears.
Her mother remained silent for a moment, then nodded. "You mean Kari's ghost? Or your dad's ghost? Or that Ribbet man? There's a lot of ghosts to choose from in one lifetime, aren't there?"
Surprised by the interest, Leah looked at her mother, questioning.
"You know, I've got some ghosts of my own to shoo away," her mother said. "I hoped you'd come back and see me one more time before I headed off to the pearly gates. I might even end up in hell after what I let you go through."
Leah was shocked at the change in attitude. Her mother was usually filled with statements of disapproval. Leah realized she never heard her apologize for anything before. "What are you saying, Momma?"
"I should never have let you think your dad leaving or Kari getting lost was your fault. Kari going missing was nobody's fault, 'cept the one who took her. I lost all of you - your father, your Aunt Carol, and you - by lettin' my bitterness take over. I never told you this, but I hated living out there in the middle of Goddamn nowhere. Your father made me go there. I had a job when I met him. I was happy. We got married and he dropped me off in that old drafty farmhouse to take care of your grandpa. I was only eighteen years old and here I was, helping an old man hold his limp dick to pee in a plastic jar."
A man in the wheelchair next to Leah's mother looked up at them with disgust and rolled away to the other side of the sitting area. Leah and her mother exchanged glances, then both were overtaken by uncontrollable fits of laughter. As they shed joyful tears together, a tiny bit of forgiveness crept into Leah's heart. They talked for hours that day. The discussion turned to Leah's father. Leah's mother said no one saw him since the day he walked out the door.
"That's because he wasn't likeable enough for anyone to wanna look for him," her mother said, with a laugh.
Leah shared her feelings about the search for Kari and explained how she wanted to give up so many times, but couldn't bring herself to. "I blamed myself, Momma," Leah said. "I know now that's crazy, but when I was little, well, who else was there to blame?"
"Don't you do that. I should never have let you feel that way. You were only a child. You go out and live the rest of your life for you now."
Leah felt the exchange between them helped to heal some old wounds. A big part of her wanted reconciliation, to gain some sort of closure and rid the bitterness that fueled her self-destructive life. Yet, she thought, a bigger part of her continued to harbor anger and resentment toward her mother. Leah didn't know which feeling was more powerful, but decided to let the relationship develop and see what happened.
She knew her mother sought forgiveness, but Leah didn't know if she was capable of giving it. Some days, she thought she'd be justified if she let her mother die all alone in the nursing home. Other days, she was filled with guilt over having those types of thoughts. She also was a bit disgusted with herself. Her mother's approval would likely never come to the level she needed and she was confused over having the need to seek it to begin with. Why should she care what this old woman thought?
One thing was clear though, at fifty years old, it occurred to her that she could take control of her life. She was finally aware that her own decisions would determine her fate. So, partly out of guilt, but maybe more out of a need to understand her own feelings, she decided to try to reestablish a relationship with her mother. She continued to visit Emerald Pines whenever she could and they would go on short road trips to the farmer's market or on drives into the forest.
Leah had six months with her and then she was gone. On the day her mother died, Leah walked up into the woods they both loved so much, sat down under a beautiful old tree, and wept. Looking up, she saw the tree branches waving gently in the summer breeze, the dragonflies diving and soaring overhead, and cried again over so many lost years gone by.
Chapter 7
Almost a year later, Leah woke to her alarm ringing. Reaching to turn it off, she realized she was in pain, with a dull ache in her legs and hips. Dismissing it as nothing serious, she got up and went to work her shift at the Chevron station.
A month later, Leah was, for all practical purposes, disabled. She'd known her doctor for ten years, but never heard him use words like multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue syndrome. He said any one or a combination of these diseases could be the cause of her pain.
"How could I possibly have all of that? I felt fine until only a little while ago," she said.
"Sometimes, there's a sudden onset of disease due to extreme prolonged stress or, possibly, exposure to external stimuli," the doctor explained. "We don't really know what triggers this type of breakdown in a body, but it seems to be an overall failure of your immune system. Your condition might have started a long time ago, maybe when you were exposed to the radiation."
The realization over what the doctor was telling her slowly seeped in. Leah was bewildered. And angry. "What can I do to stop this from happening?"
The doctor set the paper with Leah's test results on his desk and looked directly into her eyes. "First of all, you need to change your life. That means an end to the drinking and hard drugs. I can help you apply for social security disability. I know it won't be much to live on, but you won't have a lot of time left unless you stop what you're doing, including working all hours of the day and night. Regardless, if you keep going like you have been, you won't be able to work anyway," he answered.
"Disability? Did you say social security?" she asked. Leah was realizing what punishing herself had really cost. Much of her past lost to alcohol, weeks at a time with no memory of what she'd done or who she'd been with. She wanted to start over. She wanted those days back. Now, the doctor was telling her that she could be losing some of her future as well.
"Yes. You know, you've got no cardiac or lung damage, but if you don't start getting rest, the pain will likely increase, as will the tissue and organ damage causing your symptoms. What we can do right now is try to control your pain with medication. I know that you won't argue with medicinal marijuana."
Leah almost wanted to laugh. Even a diagnosis like the one she was hearing had a silver lining.
"Your symptoms might diminish over time, but it looks like there's some permanent kidney damage and some bone loss."
"Bone loss? What do you mean? Do I have osteoporosis?" Leah wondered when the doctor would stop with the list of tragic illnesses. She questioned if this diagnosis really was her destiny. Hadn't the universe handed her too much to deal with already?
"No, you don't have it over your entire body. The bone scan we did during your last set of tests showed significant bone loss in your legs. That's quite odd, combined with your other symptoms. We should probably look into it further to see if we can arrest that process somehow. I'd like to schedule some more tests," the doc
tor said.
Leah didn't know what to say. She knew she was angry, but she didn't know where to direct her anger. She felt claustrophobic and just wanted to get the hell out of the doctor's office before she started throwing things. "I'll think about it, doc. I don't have a whole lot of money for this, you know," Leah said.
"Well, in the meantime, you head over to the social security office and get your application for disability started. I'll write whatever kind of letters you need. Regardless of how you got into this situation, whether it was by your own hand with the drinking or from your exposure to radiation as a child, you've got some things to deal with now that aren't going to go away."
"But, I'm not dying or anything, am I?" Leah asked the question, thinking if he gave her the wrong answer, she would just give up. Run herself into a tree, jump into the river, get it all over with.
"Like I said, Leah, we need to do some more tests."
Leaving the doctor's office, Leah went to the parking lot and sat in her car, trying to compose herself, working hard not to cry. She looked up at the sky and said, "Haven't you done enough to me already? Wasn't my entire childhood enough for you?"
She started up the car and sent a few handfuls of gravel flying as she tore out of the parking lot. She contemplated several large trees near the road, wondering if she could get the old beater she was driving up to a high enough speed to kill herself. She dismissed the idea, thinking, with her luck, she'd end up paralyzed or something, waiting out her last years in a nursing home while her strong heart continued to beat itself to death.
Driving home through a storm of tears, she was surprised at how easy it was to fall back into a well of bitterness. She decided to take the long way home to clear her head. As she drove through the forest, she realized even though her choices were limited, she still did have choices. It was either die, or die trying to live. She thought about what she was willing to do to avoid going through any more pain. She'd almost run herself into a tree, for God's sake. Yet, she never considered the idea of putting as much effort into trying to stay alive. Leah made the decision to change, to have a future. She chose her life.
