Her eyes come slowly back up. Our eyes lock. She harrumphs and shakes her head, as if disappointed in herself for trying. She holds the mail back out to me and says, “Can you just tell me what it is, Nina? You know I can’t see very well. The words, they’re all a blur.”
“Of course. I’m so sorry, Mom. I don’t know what I was thinking.” I take the mail from her, and then I thumb through an electric bill and the cable bill.
“And what’s that?” she asks, pointing to the envelope still in my hand.
“You got a ticket, Mom,” I say, feeling hot all of a sudden, the room suffocating. “For running a red light.”
She doesn’t try to argue. She doesn’t claim that the woman in the picture isn’t her, because it obviously is. She stands quietly, as if waiting for me to speak.
“Can you still drive, Mom?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I have good days and bad days,” she tries telling me. But macular degeneration, from what I know, is degenerative and incurable. The progression can be slowed but it can’t be reversed, which means that every day should be the same or worse.
I say, “I didn’t think you were driving at all. That’s why you’ve been needing me to help take you places.”
“I don’t do it often,” she says. “Hardly ever. I needed something from the grocery store, Nina. You were working. It couldn’t wait.”
“What did you need so badly that it couldn’t wait?” I ask, because every weekend I’ve been taking her to the store and helping her with her groceries.
She changes tack. “It’s not that it couldn’t wait. That’s not what I meant. It’s that I didn’t want to bother you. The last thing you need to do after work is to be bringing me a gallon of milk.”
“Milk. That’s what you needed so badly? A gallon of milk?”
“I was in the middle of baking. I didn’t want it all to go to waste.”
“But all this time you’ve been telling me that you can’t see well enough to drive.”
“What are you suggesting, Nina?” she asks. When I just stare at her, saying nothing, she comes back with, “Do you think that I’m lying? That I’ve been making it up? You’ve been to the doctor with me, Nina. He did tests. He diagnosed me.” He did. She’s right. He dilated her eyes and injected a dye into her arm, which traveled through blood vessels to her eye to look for leakage under the macula, which it found. But as for her actual ability to see, he used a vision test, an Amsler grid, that relied only on what she said she saw, so that I start to wonder if her vision is not as bad as she makes me think it is. My mother was mostly independent until the day the doctor diagnosed her with macular degeneration and then, almost overnight, it was as if she was completely dependent on me. We used to go weeks without seeing one another, mostly because of the way Jake felt when I spent my free time with her and not him. But after the diagnosis, we hardly ever went two days without seeing each other, and every time I was away from her for too long, there would be something she needed that would bring me back to her.
“Truth be told,” she goes on, “I shouldn’t have been driving at all. See? I couldn’t even see that the light was red,” she says.
“You have to be more careful. You could have hurt yourself, Mom. You could have hurt someone else.”
As I walk away from her, moving down the darkened hall where the sun doesn’t reach, I can’t stop thinking about how the date of the violation is the same day that Jake was killed.
In my room, I pull up a map on my phone. I enter the intersection where my mother got her traffic violation. I enlarge the map. The grocery store where my mother buys her milk is at best a mile from her house. On a good day, she could walk there.
The traffic violation she received was at an intersection over fifteen miles from her house.
When I see where the intersection is, I go absolutely still. Rigid. Silent. I practically stop breathing. I stop thinking about breathing. I can’t feel my body all of a sudden. I feel physically and emotionally numb.
The red light my mother ran through is two blocks from where Jake works. I look back at the images on the ticket, specifically the one taken just before my mother turned left through that red light.
There is just enough shown of the car in front of hers, for me to know that it’s Jake’s.
Wherever he went that day, she followed him there.
She never liked Jake. She was never coy about it either.
I would say it’s impossible. My mother could never kill or even hurt someone.
But then again, I didn’t think Lily could either.
My mother knows everything about me, including the code to our safe.
I told her once because I thought it was prudent that someone should know how to get into the safe, in case of an emergency or if something happened to both Jake and me. We keep cash in there. It’s where we keep the social security cards, financial documents, passports and our wills. It’s where we keep our gun.
She knew the passcode to the garage. She knew my work schedule.