“Twenty-seven,” I say. “Yeah, she’s young. But she’s not a child.”
She sits there smoking for a few minutes before speaking. “I thought I’d strike out on my own, you know. Have a glamorous life. Be a Broadway star. You know what they told me?”
I shake my head.
“They told me I was too old. That I should’ve started earlier. I wanted to take acting classes, you know, but where was I going to get money? My father wasn’t going to give me money. If I contacted him, he would have been furious, would have sent me right back home. And your father, of coursehewasn’t going to support me. At thirty-five, I was already done with life. I had no purpose in my marriage, no prospects as an actress, no skills to get a job…”
“What have you been living on the past ten years?” I ask. “Welfare?”
She gives a mirthless laugh. “I’m still married to your father,” she says. “I wouldn’t qualify for help. I did things… The things a woman with no prospects has to do to get money.”
I close my eyes for a second. I don’t want to feel for this monster, but I do. She’s my mother, after all. She may be a monster, but she’s a human one. I have compassion for her the way I would if a stranger told me this story. Because that’s what she is. A stranger.
I never knew her then. Kids don’t know their parents at that age. Parents are rulers, providers, protectors, jailers, and sometimes heroes. They are not complex human beings who make mistakes and have flaws and opinions and dreams that they gave up. Even having parents who talked to me about those things didn’t really make me see them that way, as someone with internal struggles equal to mine.
I’m just starting to want to know my father as a person, now that he’s not in control of my life. I could stay in contact with my mother, try to get to know her, too, with all her hurts and failures. I could help her.
But then I think of something King said. That people make their choices, and that makes them who they are. They do right or they do wrong, and each choice adds to the sum of their character.
My mother made her choices. She hurt me. Maybe she hurt my brother. If she’s telling the truth, and Dad somehow found out, and she made him think Jonathan was the one hurting me, then she got him killed. And yes, she has a horrible life now, but it’s one she made for herself. I won’t invite it into my life. After all, I want kids. I want to be a good mother. And a good mother would never have someone in her life, and one day her kids’ lives, who’s made the choices and done the things my mother has done.
There’s one thing that might have swayed me. Maybe that’s the real reason I came.
To see if she’d changed.
And now I know.
Because the last choice she’s made, the one she made today, the one that lets me know she’ll never change? That was her choice not to apologize.
I didn’t come here for that, didn’t even expect it. But she could have offered. She could have taken responsibility, told me she’d made a horrible mistake, told me it haunted her every day of her life. She could have cried and begged forgiveness. Or even just acknowledged what she did and that it was wrong, that it hurt me.
I may never have forgiven her, but she could have asked. Maybe that’s why I came. Just to hear her excuse, to see what she’d say, as if anything she could say would justify what she did. Still. Maybe I wanted that, the impossible. I wanted her to have a reason good enough to make me understand how you could do such a thing to a child who trusted you, a child you should have protected.
I push back from the table, the chair nearly dumping me on the floor with the uneven legs before I catch myself and stand. “I think I’ve heard all I need to hear.”
“That’s it?” she asks. “I thought you came to kill me.”
I sling my bag over my shoulder and face her squarely. She doesn’t stand, just looks up at me through the smoke, her strung-out face framed by the linoleum-striped floor and the gaping hole where a cabinet door is missing behind her. She doesn’t sound like she’d mind if I killed her.
“I think you’re doing a bang-up job of that on your own,” I say. “Guess karma’s a bitch.”
“If karma were real, we’d all be living like this,” she says, gesturing around with the stub of her cigarette. “You think you’ll be different, but I was there once, too. Just married to some big shot, I bet. I was just like you. Thought I’d have it all. Now look at me.”
“You left,” I say. “That was your choice.”
“Stay in the Life, do what they do, and you’ll become a monster, too,” she says. “You just watch.”
“No,” I say firmly. “I’m nothing like you.”
“And watch those babies around that big shot husband,” she says, tapping her cigarette. “Your father killed his son. Would have killed you, too, if he found out.”
I just stare at her. “If he found out what? That you were abusing me? No, Mom. He wouldn’t have killed me. He would have killed you.”
Mom crushes out her second cigarette without taking her eyes from mine.
“You know, despite everything, I admired that you left,” I say. “I really believed you when you said you were protecting me. I admired you for having the guts to leave such a powerful man. For going off on your own, to find your way, do your thing, and take your daughter out of harm’s way, even if that harm was you. You told me you left to be free, and I really believed it. All these years, I believed it. But you never really had a choice, did you? You weren’t leaving to protect me. You were leaving to protect yourself.”
I don’t wait for her answer. I got all the answers I wanted and more today.