She was waiting for him on the front porch when he returned, watching him as he got out of his car and came wearily up the steps. She rose from the porch swing as he approached, but he motioned for her to remain seated and went and sat next to her. She shifted a bit and then reached over and took his hand in both of hers and placed it in her lap. It occurred to him that this was the first time his mother had taken his hand in hers in twenty-five years. He shook his head ruefully, then allowed his head to lean in to hers, and they sat there for what seemed to him like hours, and then she was shaking against him and he lifted his head to see the tears streaming down her face. “Mam, don’t,” he started, but that was a mistake, because all of a sudden her tears acquired a voice and she was making a keening sound that made his hair stand up. If grief had a baby, she would sing like this. The line went through his mind, and he was not sure if it was something he had heard before, a line from a song, maybe, or if it was his own. But he could barely complete the thought, because the woman next to him looked like she was going to keel over. She had released his hand and was holding herself from the waist and rocking as if she would fly apart should she let go of her body. And those terrible sounds kept pouring out of her, released to the air like a poisonous vapor, and he thought absently, How could this frail, small body have carried the weight of this? As if her pain were a living, physical animal that had lain curled up inside her until this moment.
Anton’s senses felt dull, hazy, his default reaction in the face of other people’s sorrow. When Katherine had sobbed at her beloved uncle Jeffrey’s funeral, all he could do was pat her repeatedly on her back and say, “There, there. It’ll be okay.” His stilted, miserly reaction had led to one of their rare fights, with Katherine accusing him of compounding her loneliness rather than mitigating it. “It’s like you disappeared,” she’d said days later. “You were there, but you disappeared.” And he had dropped his head in acknowledgment, knowing she was right, unable to explain to her how people’s pain paralyzed him, how desperately he wanted to help alleviate it, and how completely he knew that he couldn’t. It was one of the functions of being a governor that he was dreading, truth be told—the comforting of strangers after touring an area struck by a tornado or a flood or a school shooting, the glare of the TV cameras turning every interaction into a performance. Sometimes, even in the midst of campaigning, he would think that he was a politician better suited to an earlier age, say, during the Depression, when the voters themselves were more stoic and close-lipped about loss. Now, it seemed, a calamity was not a calamity until you tweeted it or spoke about it to Anderson Cooper in prime time. He had inherited none of Pappy’s easy affability or David’s intense charm; he was a technocrat, he wanted to fix problems and improve people’s lives but without too much interaction with the people themselves.
“Say it, son, I beg you,” Juanita was saying, and he blinked, pulling himself out of his disappearance, trying to focus on her.
“I’m sorry. What?”
“I am begging you. To forgive me for what I’ve done.” He looked and saw that her hands were folded in a pleading gesture. Her pixie-like face no longer looked young; grief had given it a timeless quality, like one of those stone statues from antiquity. He stared at her in fascination, unable to speak, but this only made her sob harder. “You’re angry with me, Anton.” She sniffed. “I can tell. And I don’t blame you at all. Not at all.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to her. She took it uncertainly, and he gestured toward her face, and she wiped her eyes with it before handing it back. He held the damp cloth in his hand, thinking, I have my mother’s tears with me. I will carry my mother’s tears home with me, and I will have them forever. Something pinched at his heart then, and he said, “What happened, Mam? Why’d you leave me all alone like that?” And as he heard the question, he realized that he had waited a lifetime to ask it.
“Anton,” she said urgently, her eyes searching his face, “you’ve got to believe me. I was planning on being gone for half hour. An hour, tops. But . . .” Here she stumbled, her expression wild. “I don’t know what happened . . . I remember taking one hit . . . and then someone, one of the men in that house . . .” She stopped, shut her eyes, rocking slightly, her mouth moving wordlessly.
He wanted to end her embarrassment, say it was okay and she needn’t continue, but his need to know was too great. “Did you think of me during those days?” he cried.
She didn’t answer, just sat there with her eyes closed, whispering words he couldn’t hear. He couldn’t tell if she was praying or saying something to herself, but just as he was about to ask, she opened her eyes, reached over, and took his hand back in hers. “I was a druggie, Anton,” she said quietly. “Your mama was a druggie. And I owed money to this guy Victor. He was my dealer, see? And so he kept me there in that house. To repay his loan. You get what I’m saying, baby? Every time I came to, I remembered you and I tried to leave. But those men wouldn’t let me. And Victor would give me another hit and off I’d go. I lost track of time after the first few days.”
It was the most exquisite pain, listening to his mother telling him that she’d been raped, prostituted off, but below that pain was relief. At last he was finding out the truth, no matter how stomach-churning that truth was. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, and for the first time, he was sorry for her rather than for himself. For the first time, he was no longer the protagonist in his life’s story.
They were quiet for a long time, and then she said, “I went to college for a semester, you know,” a different note in her voice.
“You did?” he asked, wondering what had made her think of that.
“Yup. Community college. But then I got pregnant with you.” She looked at him shyly. “It was a big scandal. Because of who your daddy was.”