Abandoned

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Heather Hollister sits across from me, dressed in hospital clothes. Her hair has started to come back, a light fuzz on her head. Her eyes have stopped darting, but they are hollow and deep, filled with too much thinking.

She got worse before getting better, while I was locked away. She required restraints for weeks, both actual and chemical, as she raved, and wept, and screamed. Her doctor had advised strongly against telling her about Avery’s death, saying that it could drive her over an edge she’d never return from. Shielding her from the fact of Avery’s death had also required keeping her from the hope of Dylan’s life.

But she has begun to settle, and now, after much debate and arguing, the doctor has agreed that it’s time to offer her the truth of both.

Daryl Burns waits in the hallway. He is not up to the beginning of this task. Some part of me wants to curse him for this, for his weakness, but I have long been aware that in some ways, key ways, women have a strength greater than men. When it comes to family, especially to our children, we are able to do and stand almost anything.

I met a woman once who’d come very close to being the sixth victim of a serial killer who targeted escorts. He would set a date, and then he’d show up and torture them with cigarettes before killing them with a butcher knife. She was an Asian woman, and her husband had killed himself after losing all of their money gambling. He left her and their six-month-old son with nothing, and they were poor already. She was finding it impossible to make ends meet and was a month away from eviction when she decided to start selling herself.

I remember her with such clarity because she was such a proud woman. Not arrogant but dignified. She had a sense of herself, of her own hopes and of what was right and wrong. Selling her body was something that degraded her in the deepest ways, so I broke my own rules and I asked her why.

“I’d live in a box on the street and eat dog food before doing this, if it were just me,” she’d said. “But I have my son, you see? He’ll have a good home and good clothes and go to school and his children will prosper. Yes.” She’d smiled at me, a heartbreaking mix of serenity and sadness. “God will forgive me if my son lives a better life. It’s enough.”

Her husband had solved his poverty and his shame by jumping from a building. The woman remained, suffering, and her son was healthy and never hungry.

“She shaved your head too?” Heather asks, startling me.

I had told her about Dali as Mercy Lane.

“Yes. She did.”

She sighs, looks away. Her eyes crawl back to mine again. “Did you …” She hesitates, dreading the question but fascinated nonetheless. “Did you see the darkness?”

I shiver. My mouth goes dry. “Yes.”

She closes her eyes once, then opens them, a gesture of shared pain, and in this instant I understand the binding power behind support groups. Heather Hollister understands what I’ve been through. She knows. No one else does, not really. We are all alone, in the deep-down places, but sometimes others are alone with us.

I take a single deep breath and attempt to empty my mind. This will be a terrible, terrible moment, but it will also be a moment of hope. Will the mix of the two make the other more powerful, or will they lessen each other?

“Heather, I need to tell you some things. One of those things is very, very bad. One of them is very, very good.”

She regards me with her hollowed eyes. “Will it make a difference which one you tell me first?”

“No. The terrible thing is going to be terrible, period.”

She squints at me. “It’s about my sons, isn’t it?”

I gape, pulled up short. “Yes,” I manage to reply.

She nods. “I thought so. One of them is dead, and one of them is alive.” Her gaze is intense. “That’s it, right?”

I swallow, fascinated, terrified. How does she know? “Yes.”

She stares away from me toward the window, listless.

“I think I could spend the rest of my life just sitting by an open window with a view of the outside and the sun. When I was in that room, the only place I could see sunlight was inside myself. I used to close my eyes in the dark and ‘call forth the light.’” She smiles crookedly. “That was a saying from my dad. I was scared of my closet when I was five. I was sure there was a monster in there. Who knows? Maybe there was. Dad didn’t pooh-pooh the idea. He treated it very seriously. All you have to do, honey, he told me, if the monster comes out, is call forth the light. There’s not a monster that’s been made that can stand up to real light.” She turns her eyes back to me. “It’s a nice idea, don’t you think?”

“And a true one.”

She half-frowns, semi-shrugs. “Maybe. Regardless, when I was in that hellhole I remembered what he said. I’d close my eyes and call forth the light. I’d be on the beach with my sons. Avery and Dylan. They never got older, and they always loved me, and we never stopped laughing.” She pauses. “There were cloudy days, of course. Sometimes the sun turned dark, or the rain fell. Sometimes I’d find myself on the beach at night, and the ocean would be gripped in a storm, with waves a hundred feet high. I’d stand on the sand and gape up at the dark water, always opening my eyes just before it crashed down on me.” She shifts, sighs. “Sometimes there were creatures on the beach. Vampires would come crawling out of the water, rotting and hungry and covered in seaweed. They always had Douglas’s face. But on the sunny days, it was just crystal-clear water as far as the eye could see, white sand, blue sky, bright sun, and my boys.” She stares down at her hands, blinking away tears. “They kept me alive. I don’t mean physically. They kept the most basic part of me alive. A seed of myself, that’s how I’d think of it. No matter how bad it got, I told myself I could hide away that seed, so if I ever got out, if I somehow survived, I could regrow the me that used to be.” She clenches her hands into fists, flips them over, watches them uncurl and gazes at her palms. “My sons did that for me.”

She falls silent now and watches the sun falling through the window. I wait, letting her ruminate, sensitive to the otherness she’s feeling. The moment passes, and she turns back to me.

“Which boy died?”

“Avery.”

She closes her eyes tight, and a flash of sorrow rushes across her face, there and gone.

“Avery, the oldest. I had a C-section, and they pulled him out first, and he cried like no one’s business. Dylan was always the quieter boy. Not more thoughtful, just less aggressive. Avery loved music. He’d dance to my CDs, bobbing up and down on the carpet in his diaper.” Her body trembles, her eyes still closed. “Avery Edward Hollister. One day, not too long before I was taken, I had both boys with me. We’d just come home from the store, and I was distracted for a minute. Avery slipped away, and the next thing I knew, I heard the neighbor screaming for help. I dropped the groceries and picked up Dylan and ran over there.” She shakes her head in fond disbelief. “Avery had gone into the yard next door. The dog there was unfriendly and was trying to make a meal of him. The neighbor woman was struggling to hold the dog back, while Avery, completely unaware, was yanking up flowers from her garden by the roots. I ran to get him and he just grinned when he saw me, one of those big, beautiful baby grins. He held up the flowers and said ‘Mama!’” She falls silent. “I guess he’d seen those flowers earlier and had been planning all along to pick them for me when we got home.”

She pitches forward in her chair at the last part of this eulogy, bending at the waist, wailing without words. I come forward and take her in my arms, and we are alone together.

Heather’s grief—at least this incarnation of it—passes. She pulls away from me, and I return to my chair as she returns her gaze to the window and the sun.

I’ve seen this before, I think, feeling a shudder of déjà vu. Another prisoner freed who couldn’t keep her eyes from the light.

“Where’s Dylan?” she asks me, her voice quiet, still sorrowful.

“He’s here. But I need you to listen to me now, Heather. This is really important. If you want Dylan, you need to hear what I’m telling you.”

She frowns, her eyes piercing. “What do you mean, ‘if I want Dylan’?”

Here it is, the telling point, the place where I learn whether Heather’s light has gone out for good or if she’ll find her way back to shore. If ever there was an impetus, this will be it.

“Dylan is being cared for by social services, Heather. They’re concerned about your state of mind. They’re not sure you can take care of him.”

The frown deepens, then smooths out. “I see,” she says. “They’re afraid I’m too crazy to be a good mother right now, is that it?”

Why soften the blow?

“Essentially, yes.”

Rage spasms across her face. “But I’m his mother!” There’s a crazy edge to her voice.

I lean forward, trying to reach her with my words, with my own intensity. “I want you to have this, Heather. Hell, I need you to have it. I think Dylan belongs with you, period, and I think you can pull it together enough to make that happen. But if you can’t, and you don’t—and they’ll be watching—then he’s going to be taken away from you. At least for a little while, and there’s nothing I’ll be able to do about it.”

She glances at the sun, back at me, clenching and unclenching her fists. “Do you?” she asks haltingly.

“Do I what?”

She grabs my hands in hers, surprising me. “Do you think I can take care of him?”

I look right into her eyes and tell her the last of it. “His dad killed his brother. I don’t think anyone else can take care of him, after something like that.”

Her mouth opens, closes. “Douglas did that? He killed my Avery?”

“Yes.”

The rage mutates into something harder and more enduring. Mother anger. “Scum,” she hisses. She drops my hands, stands up, paces around the room, shaking her head. “Jesus!” I watch her pass through the desire to kill, the need for revenge, the despair at what she’s lost. She stops, and she turns to me, and I see the light I was looking for. Bleak but strong. “Help me,” she pleads. “Please, please help me.”

“Yes,” I tell her. “Of course I will.”

Something lifts inside me now that I know her hope will survive against her despair, and I look to the window myself, searching for the sun. My four-fingered hand finds my belly and cradles it and the burgeoning life within. For all its horror, life is filled with so much wonder sometimes, such beautiful irony. I am happy I’ve chosen life over death, whatever that means, wherever it takes me, whomever I lose. Life is monstrous, but life is beautiful.

“Let’s go see your son,” I tell her.

She smiles, and for a moment she is the sun.