by Celia Aaron
“Oh, well, I meant your foster mother.”
“Right.”
The woman cleared her throat. “Well, like I said, she’s been asking. The doctors don’t think she has more than a week left. I don’t think she’s got but three days, honestly. So…” She trailed off.
“Why does she want to see me?” I hadn’t seen Mama Reed since the day I shot her husband. She never came to visit me, never even came to my sentencing to speak for or against me. She just disappeared.
“She hasn’t really said. But she hasn’t asked for anyone else. Just you.”
I could imagine her accusing me of murdering her husband in cold blood, maybe going apoplectic at the sight of me. Or maybe she would forgive me? I could imagine the former far easier than the latter.
I looked at Eden. She must have heard the conversation through the speaker because she raised her eyebrows and whispered, “What could it hurt to see her?”
A lot. It could hurt a lot. Reopening the wound her husband had made didn’t seem like a particularly rosy scenario for me to walk into. I couldn’t relive it, wouldn’t. Helen’s death had already broken me once.
“Are you there?” Her voice wavered.
“Yes, Lydia did you say?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think it would be a good idea. We have a past, and it’s not a good one.”
Lydia lowered her voice. “I know. She told me about it. About you. But I’ve seen these types of cases time and again. She’s dying. You hear? Really dying. And if she isn’t able to get whatever it is off her chest, she won’t go easy. It’ll pain her to the last.”
Shit. My past was my past. I rubbed the inked bars along my ribs. But if Lydia was right, and I stole peace from a dying woman, I knew it would never sit right with me, even if that woman was Mama Reed.
“Fine. Give me the address.”
“Come back as soon as you can.”
“I will.”
“And don’t stay too long.”
I smiled down at Eden. She’d driven me to the airfield. She chewed her pinky nail the whole way, nerves getting to her. I wondered if she was more nervous for me or for the project.
“I think you already covered that.”
“Right. Well, just, call if you need me. I’ll be here. Working.”
“You mean bitching out Frank?”
She finally gave me a small smile. “That’s what I meant when I said ‘working.’”
“Better him than me.”
Tom stashed my small bag and pulled down the now-familiar steps for me. Then he turned his back to us, giving us some privacy out in the middle of the wide expanse of runways.
She gave me a look of mock incredulity. “I have never bitched you out.”
“Right.”
She started to protest, but I kissed her words away. I leaned her back and slipped my tongue in before standing her up straight again and releasing her. I wanted to give her a little something to think about while I was away.
“Oh, goodness,” she breathed and readjusted her sunglasses.
I left her like that, slightly flummoxed.
“That’ll have her waiting here for you like a chauffeur when you get back.” Tom grinned at me as we boarded.
“That’s the idea.” I waved my goodbyes as we taxied away. She waved back and placed her hand on her chest as if trying to still the beating of her heart.
Once in the air, I spent the hour and a half thinking about Mama Reed. My memories were mostly bad, but I couldn’t tell if they were unfairly painted in a negative light by my rebellious youth. I remembered Mama Reed whipping me, screaming at me, yanking my hair, and any number of other terrible things. But I also remember her holding Helen in her lap when the girl was sick, making sure the children in her home were fed, even if it was with expired canned beans or something similar. Maybe she did the best with what she had or maybe she was a monster. I couldn’t judge. Not now. Time had faded my mental photograph of her, making the dark streaks more vivid and blurring through the lighter areas.
I was jolted out of my sea of memories when we touched down. I didn’t realize we were already back in the city. The high-flying life was becoming commonplace for me.
Tom unloaded my small bag. The wind here had a bite to it, the chill finally setting in from a cold front pushing down through the southeast. The beach would still be warm for Eden’s party, but Birmingham had turned crisp and cool.
“Should I wait here for you?” Tom asked as we strode out to the cars.
“No. I’ll likely need to stay the night, hopefully no longer than that. I’ll call you tomorrow, if that’s all right. Sorry to cut into your beach time.”
“Beach time?” He took off his cap and smoothed down his wispy gray fluff. “Hell, I got a woman here in town, a widow, that’ll do things you’ve never even seen in the funny papers. I don’t mind spending the night back here with her one little bit.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at the old timer. “Seriously?”
“You think my Top Gun stories are just meant to entertain the fellas?” He waggled his eyebrows.
“I suppose not.”
“All right. Give me a call when you’re ready to fly south. Otherwise, I’ll be warming up with Widow Lancaster tonight.”
I thanked him and dropped into the waiting car. I pondered whether I should go and see Ms. Temple first, tell her the news, or just go straight to Mama Reed’s address. In the end, I figured this was something I needed to face alone. I gave the driver the address, and he took off through town as the winds began to pick up. Large drops of rain, fat and heavy, slapped the windshield as we crested Red Mountain, the trees shaking their leaves into the roadway as the storm grew closer.
“About to get drowned out here,” the driver said.
“Looks like it.”
The sky darkened as we wended our way through an affluent neighborhood full of newer garden homes. Mama Reed lived here?
After passing through a crepe myrtle-lined street, we pulled up in front of a modest brick home.
“You sure this is the right place?”
The driver repeated the address back to me and confirmed the correct house number on the mailbox.
The deluge hit, rain pelting the car and creating a milky curtain all around us.
“Shit, man, missed your chance.”
“I’ll live.” I scooped up my bag and hurried from the car. I slammed the door and sprinted to the front stoop. The car pulled away as the door opened behind me.
“You must be Jack.” I recognized Lydia’s voice. “Come in, come in. I’m Lydia. We spoke on the phone.” Lydia was tall for a woman, maybe six feet. She had short cropped black hair, chestnut eyes, and dark brown skin. Her face was round, and her eyes seemed kind. I guessed she was in her fifties. She wore pink scrubs and socks with grips on the bottoms.
I followed her to the living room, my shoes squeaking on the wood floors as the rain created a low roar against the roof. The house was unnaturally clean, unused almost. The walls were bare, and the furniture, what little there was, seemed untouched. The home didn’t have a smell, other than the faint odor of rubbing alcohol or some other antiseptic. It seemed as if no kids, or pets, or guests, or anything had ever so much as sneezed in this house.
“She’s napping right now, so we have a while to talk.” Lydia said.
In the living room, I settled on a suede couch that still smelled brand new as Lydia sank into a recliner and pulled a cross-stitch hoop into her lap. She snugged a thimble on her finger before pulling a needle with red thread from a pincushion on the side table next to her.
She held up the hoop for me to see her work. It was the classic little old lady stuff—a cottage, the sun, lots of flowers, but the text said, “I didn’t choose the thug life, the thug life chose m.” She’d started the ‘e’ but hadn’t finished it.
“Nice.” I wasn’t sure how she expected me to respond.
“I sell them on the Internet to stupid white gi
rls, and it helps me pass the time.” She plunged the needle in and drew it back out, her fingers nimble as spiders’ legs. “I wasn’t sure you’d come. I’m glad you did, though. It’ll ease her passing, I think.”
This whole situation was off. From her nonchalant stitching to the niceness and newness of the house. My stomach churned, a vat of acid eating me from the inside out. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Just old. Kidneys are a mess. She quit the dialysis a month ago. Said she just wanted to die in peace. That’s when I started coming to see her. I specialize in end-of-life care.” A few more quick stitches.
I needed to make sense of this somehow. “Do you know how she got this house?”
“Oh, I thought everybody knew. You remember that Lowood explosion? She got a big settlement from the gas company on account of her injuries. I think she may have broken a nail or dropped a cup on her foot from the surprise of the explosion. But she wasn’t really hurt. The gas company, though, they paid everybody who so much as said ‘boo.’”
Made sense. Mama Reed was sharp as a tack and twice as apt to draw blood. I looked around at the cookie cutter home, the empty mantle, the unused dining table. She may have beaten the gas company, but death was about to beat her.
“Have none of her other foster children come?”
“No. Not a one. A bunch of lousy ingrates, I say. A woman sacrificing her good years to raise someone else’s children. And those children don’t even have the decency to—” She shook her head and missed a stitch. She squinted down at the fabric and carefully unthreaded her last stroke, pulling the thread taut before trying again.
The rain pelted down harder, then softer, but never stopped. Wind pushed the water onto the windows, leaving streaks and runnels that distorted what little view there was.
“You’d best settle in. I can’t wake her when she’s like this. Medication, you know? It could be an hour or two, maybe more, before she comes back to herself.”
I wished I’d called before coming, to set up some time when I didn’t have to be here like this. The house seemed smaller by the minute, the rain somehow shrinking it, making it wilt and diminish. The empty walls and empty rooms should have given the feeling of space. Instead, I felt as if I were in a mausoleum, packed tight with death and decay.
I wanted to burst out the door and run, just keep going until I made it somewhere safe, somewhere the past couldn’t find me. Instead, I opened my bag and took out my sketchpad. I needed to stay, to wait it out. Maybe I owed her this. Maybe it was another form of my penance.
I flipped through the pages of Belle Mar designs until I reached a blank sheet. I took to sketching, the scratching noises of my pencil tip a welcome respite from the intermittent silence and the slight clink of Lydia’s needle and thimble. I didn’t set out to draw anything in particular, but I soon found my pencil influencing familiar lines and curves. Eden’s face took shape beneath my hand, her profile emerging from the white background. I labored over the exact descent of Eden’s nose, the slight lift of its tip. I shaded her pupils, smudging the black a bit to give depth to her irises. Her thick, arched brows gave her a serious air as I filled them in.
Time passed, I didn’t know how much, as I continued making her image. I drew and redrew the shape of her chin, the slight jut of it from her confident bearing eluding me. Her smooth neck flowed from the tip of my pencil. The long line of her throat merged into the femininity of her shoulders, soft and rounded. I began to feel more at ease, the familiarity of her giving me a comfort I didn’t know existed.
“Oh, who’s that there?” Lydia’s voice broke the spell.
I slapped my pencil down on its side and closed my sketchbook. “Just a face.”
“Seemed like a nice one to me. Someone special?”
I shrugged and didn’t answer.
The rain had eased as I drew. The whisper of water was now gone, leaving only silence and the ticking of the thimble and pulling of Lydia’s thread.
A moan rattled through the air and shot a chill down my spine. Lydia stowed her cross-stitch and rose. She stretched as the moaning grew louder. She checked her phone as Mama Reed’s voice, crackling as if it might break, called her name.
“I’ll need to get her situated, and then I’ll come get you.” She didn’t look at me as she spoke.
After a couple of text messages, Lydia walked into the back of the home and out of my view. Fifteen minutes filled with grunts, grumbles, admonitions about bedsores, and a host of other sounds went by before Lydia reappeared.
“She can see you now. Let her get it off her chest. Whatever it is. Just call for me if you need me.” She returned to her needlework.
Given how long it took to get her into motion when Mama Reed called for her, I didn’t pin much hope on Lydia’s assistance.
I forced my feet to carry me back into the dark hallway. The antiseptic smell grew the farther I went. I passed two bedrooms, both empty. The door at the end of the hall hung open, but it was even darker in there than out here. The blinds were drawn, blocking out what little light the clouds allowed to pass.
I steeled my nerves and entered the room. Mama Reed lay in a hospital bed. There was no other furniture except a small chair at her bedside.
Just her, small and withered beneath the covers. She couldn’t have weighed even a hundred pounds. She was nothing like I remembered. Her hair had grayed completely, and her eyes were milky with cataracts. Her hand lay on top of the sheet, and even in the darkened room I could see it was bony yet somehow swollen.
Her eyes moved to me, up and down they went. “You—” Her voice was a croak. She coughed violently, shaking her small frame and the bed, but disturbing nothing any further from there. When she’d settled back down, she continued, “You look like Jack England.”
I stepped the rest of the way into the room and sat down. Her head was elevated on the bed. We were nearly at eye level. “I am.”
“No, no. You’re too big. Why, he was big, but not as big as you.” Her breath was thin, as if her lungs were nothing more than parchment paper sacks.
“That was a long time ago, Mama Reed.”
She closed her eyes. “I haven’t heard anyone call me that in a long time.”
“Your nurse Lydia said you’ve been asking for me?”
She opened her eyes and inspected me again now that I was closer. “I asked for Jack. For Jack. Are you Jack?”
“Yes.”
“You’re the Jack who killed my husband?”
I clasped my hands together tight enough for my knuckles to crack. “I am.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“I know.”
“It should have been me that done it.”
I shook my head slightly. I must have misheard her.
“I should have killed him when I first found out. I knew. I knew.” Her voice, already thinner than a sliver of ice, cracked, broke. “I knew he was after her. I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t ever think he would…” Her voice trailed off into a heavy wheezing, the parchment bags in her chest taxed beyond their limits.
My head spun. The fifteen-year-old me would be on top of her, squeezing the life out of her at this moment. This me was frozen. She let Helen suffer abuse, abuse I had never even known about. This woman who was supposed to protect Helen ultimately abandoned her. Anger rose and rose, higher and higher the flame burned. I unclasped my hands and gripped the rails of her bed.
She wasn’t crying, maybe she wasn’t capable of it anymore. The cold metal of her bed rails under my hands were my prison bars. I squeezed them harder and harder until my palms ached.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish I could take it back. I do.” She was wheezing now, her exertions spent on her confession. She kept repeating “I’m sorry,” just as her husband did before I took his life.
Vengeance burned in my breast, singeing the flowers I had planted there in Helen’s memory.
Who was I? Standing at this crossroads, I could
go back toward the steely bars on my right side or veer to the left, toward Helen and perhaps Eden. I wanted justice for Helen that day so long ago when I took a life. I still did. But taking another life would not be justice. Helen would not want it. I did not want it.
I let out my breath and leaned away from the bed. Mama Reed’s hand scrabbled at the sheet as if she were trying to reach for me. I was shaking and couldn’t trust my hands, couldn’t trust myself not to hurt her—not on purpose anymore, but by accident.
“Please,” she whispered, “please forgive me.”
I stood, towering over her pitiful body now destroyed by nature and time.
Long moments passed as her labored breaths came shallower and shallower. She looked at me, though I wasn’t sure if she could even see me anymore in the waning light.
“For Helen, I forgive you. She would want me to. She would give you her forgiveness freely, and so do I.”
A tear rolled from the corner of her eye slowly, as if it resented being dislodged. She closed her eyes again and laid her head back on the pillow. Her breaths slowed and after only a few short moments, halted altogether.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JACK
I STAYED IN BIRMINGHAM for two days longer than intended. I made Mama Reed’s funeral arrangements and spoke with the county administrator about her estate. She had no natural or adopted children, only the long line of fosters like myself. I arranged for the money and the property to go to a charity that specifically helped foster children transition into their adoptive homes.
Her funeral was brief. The cloudy, cold day sped the preacher along through his sermon. Only a couple of other foster children showed up to send Mama Reed off. They were strangers to me, having come and gone before I ever made my way to Lowood. Ms. Temple accompanied me and said a few words, serene and comforting, though she knew I had already made my peace.
After the funeral early Friday morning, I returned to the airport where Tom waited.
“Everything all right?”
I slung my bag into the aircraft before climbing in. “Yes. Just ready to get back to it, is all.”
