“Thank you.”
I’m alone with my mother now, her eyes boring into mine, and those feelings of neglect come raging back. Mom was placed in a home in Breaux Bridge after her suicide attempt. We were still too young to care for her ourselves—at twelve and fifteen, we were sent to live with an aunt on the outskirts of town—but the plan was to take her out when we could. Care for her when we could. Then Cooper turned eighteen, and it was clear that she couldn’t go with him; he couldn’t stay put for long enough. Couldn’t sit still. She needed routine. Clean, simple routine. So we decided to move her to Baton Rouge when I got into LSU, and I would take over after I finished college … but then we came up with excuses for that, too. How would I get my PhD caring for a dependent and disabled mother? How would I ever meet someone, date someone, get married—although I had been doing a pretty good job of sabotaging my chances of that without her help, anyway. So we kept her here, in Riverside, still telling ourselves it was temporary. After graduation. After we had enough savings. After I opened my own practice. The years stretched on, and we quieted our guilt by visiting every weekend. Then we started taking turns, Cooper and I, going every other week, rushing through each visit, checking our phones because we crammed it between other obligations. Now we mostly visit when the nurses call and ask us to. They’re good people, but I’m sure they talk about us when we’re not around. Judge us for abandoning our mother, leaving her fate in the hands of strangers.
But what they don’t understand is that she abandoned us, too.
“Sorry I haven’t come to visit in a while,” I say, my eyes searching her face for any sign of movement, any sign of life. “The wedding’s in July, so we’ve got a lot of last-minute planning to do.”
The silence between us stretches out, lazy, though I’m used to it by now. Talking to myself. I know she won’t respond.
“I promise I’ll bring Daniel by to meet you soon,” I say. “You’d like him. He’s a really good guy.”
She blinks a few times, taps her finger against her armrest. My eyes dart over to her hand. Staring, I ask again.
“Would you like to meet him?”
She taps her finger again, gently, and I smile.
I found our mother sprawled across the floor of her bedroom closet shortly after Dad was sentenced—the closet where I found that box. That box that sealed his fate. The poetic symbolism was not lost on me, even at twelve. She had tried to hang herself using one of his leather belts until the wooden beam snapped, sending her crashing to the ground. By the time I had found her, her face was purple, her eyes bulging, her legs twitching. I remember screaming for Cooper, screaming for him to say something, to do something. I remember him standing in the hallway, stunned, motionless. DO SOMETHING! I screamed again, and I had watched him blink, shake his head, then run into the closet and attempt to perform CPR. At some point, it dawned on me to call 9-1-1, so I did. And we were able to save some of her, just not all of her.
She was in a coma for a month; Cooper and I weren’t old enough to make any medical decisions, so that decision rested on our father, from prison. He didn’t want to pull the plug. He wasn’t able to come visit her, but her condition was made clear—she would never be able to walk again, talk again, do anything on her own again. But still, he refused to give up on her. That poetic symbolism wasn’t lost on me, either—that he spent his days outside of a cell taking lives, but once he was incarcerated, he was apparently determined to save them. We watched for weeks on end as our mother lay motionless in a hospital bed, her chest rising and falling with the help of a machine, until one morning, she made a movement on her own—her eyes fluttered open.
She never regained movement. She never regained speech. She had suffered from anoxia—a severe lack of oxygen to the brain—which left her in what the doctors called a minimally conscious state. They used words like extensive and irreversible. She’s not all there, but she’s not gone, either. The depths of her understanding are still murky; some days, when I find myself rambling on about my life or Cooper’s, about all the things we’ve seen and done in the years since she decided we were no longer important enough to stay alive for, I can see a flicker in her eyes that tells me that she hears me. She understands what I’m staying. She’s sorry.
Then other times, when I look into her inky black pupils, nothing stares back but my own reflection.
Today is a good day. She hears me. She understands. She can’t communicate verbally, but she can move her fingers. I’ve learned through the years that a tap means something—her version of a head nod, I think, a subtle indication that she’s following along.
Or maybe that’s just my own wishful thinking. Maybe it means nothing at all.
I look at my mother, a living, breathing embodiment of the pain my father has caused. If I’m being honest with myself, that’s the real reason I’ve left her here for all these years. It’s a big responsibility, yes, caring for a person with a disability as severe as hers—but I could do it if I really wanted to. I have the money to hire help, maybe even get a live-in nurse. The truth is, I don’t want to. I can’t imagine looking into her eyes every day and being forced to relive the moment we found her over and over and over again. I can’t imagine allowing the memories to come flooding into my home, the one place I’ve tried so hard to maintain some semblance of normalcy. I abandoned my mother because it’s easier this way. Just like I abandoned our childhood home, refusing to dig through our belongings and relive the horrors that took place there, instead just letting it sit and rot, as if refusing to acknowledge its existence would somehow make it less real.
“I’ll bring him by before the wedding,” I say, actually meaning it this time. I want Daniel to meet my mother, and I want my mother to meet him. I rest my hand on her leg; it’s so frail I almost recoil, twenty years of immobility deteriorating the muscles and leaving nothing but skin and bone. But I force myself to hold it there, squeezing her gently. “But actually, Mom, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. That’s not why I’m here.”
I look down at my lap, knowing full well that once the words escape my lips, I can’t reel them back in, swallow them back down. They’ll be trapped inside the mind of my mother—a locked box with a missing key. And once they’re in there, she won’t be able to get them out. She won’t be able to talk about it, verbalize it, get it off her chest the way that I can—the way that I am, right here, right now. Suddenly, it feels incredibly selfish. But I can’t help myself. I say it anyway.
“There are more missing girls. Dead girls. Here in Baton Rouge.”
I think I see her eyes widen, but then again, I could be wishing.
“They found the body of a fifteen-year-old in Cypress Cemetery on Saturday. I was there, with the search party. They found her earring. Then this morning, another one was reported missing. Another fifteen-year-old. And this time, I know her. She’s a patient of mine.”
Silence settles over the room, and for the first time since I was twelve, I yearn for my mother’s voice. I desperately need her practical yet protective words to drape over my shoulders like a blanket in winter, keeping me safe. Keeping me warm.
This is serious, honey, but just be careful. Be vigilant.
“It feels familiar,” I say, gazing out the window. “Something about it all just feels … I don’t know. The same. It’s like I’m having déjà vu. The police came to speak with me, at my office, and it reminded me of…”