Your mother, too, had to break free of her chains. The question is: How?
Did she ever tell you the truth about your father, the man you never knew? How did he meet your mother? Why would he abandon you? There are still so many questions. To uncover the truth, you need to go out and find the answers. Should you decide to do so, I would caution you to conduct your research skillfully. As you might imagine, someone as shrewd as your mother would not simply bury her most intimate secrets somewhere they would be easy to find. As soon as you lay your hands on the proof that will back up my claims—for undoubtedly, your first reaction will be utter disbelief—you will need to venture out to come and find me.
But not until the time comes . . . Until then, take some time to think it over. You’ve much to do. Best get started straightaway.
I hope you’ll forgive me for leaving this letter unsigned. It’s not out of cowardice, I assure you, but rather for your own good that I remain anonymous. I’d caution against telling anyone about this letter. You’d be wise to destroy it as soon as you’ve finished reading it. Keeping it will serve no purpose.
Take my words to heart: I wish nothing but the best for you and your mother.
Without hesitation, I crushed the letter in my fist and threw it across the room. Who in the world would send something like that? For what purpose? How did he know so much about my mother’s health? The whole thing was so full of mysteries, I didn’t even know where to begin. It was impossible to concentrate, a serious problem when working with saws, hand planes, and chisels. I decided to put away my tools and head out. I threw on my jacket and leapt behind the wheel of my pickup.
Two hours later, I pulled up to the gates of the nursing home where my mother had lived for the past two years. It was a stately building perched on a modest little hill in the middle of a large park. Thick, broad-leafed ivy crept up the facade of the building, which seemed to make the structure come to life whenever the wind blew. The care workers were kindhearted people struggling to attend to residents who all suffered from the same affliction. It was the same condition, but the expression of the disease was dramatically different in each patient.
Take my mother’s next-door neighbor, Mr. Gauthier. The poor guy had spent the last five years rereading the same page of a book he never got any closer to finishing. He would come back to page 201 again and again, stuck in a loop all through the day reading the very same passage, and bursting out laughing at the end every time. “Ha! What a riot! Oh, that really is something!” he’d repeat.
Mrs. Lapique was stuck in her own loop, an unending game of solitaire—which tried the patience of any sane person watching—in which she would deal the cards facedown and simply stare at them, not even bothering to flip them over. From time to time, she would graze the surface of a card with trembling hand, murmur something inaudible through a timid little smile, then draw back her finger and leave the card unturned. Then she would gather up all the cards and start all over again: graze the surface of a card with trembling hand, murmur something inaudible through a timid little smile, then draw back her finger and leave the card unturned.
Sixty-seven patients in all lived at the New Age Residence, spending their days drifting about like a throng of ghosts, wholly unaware that their lives had already passed them by.
My mother was both a hardheaded woman and a hopeless romantic. Love was her drug of choice, and her habit could sometimes spin out of control, like with any other drug. Countless times I would come home from school to find a strange man in the house with Mom. They would awkwardly pat me on the shoulder and ask me how I was doing, with sheepish looks on their faces . . . How was I doing? As well as any kid who loved his mother but loathed her “suitors.” Without exception, these men would disappear later that night or the next morning. But my mother would never leave me.