The Son

Chapter Sixty-four. J.A. McCullough

Ted had not left her so much as asked to be released. There had been some final revolution of the blood and he’d gotten tangled with a woman half his age. She was angry, she was worried about him, about the convenience this woman — a schoolteacher — might see in him. Which only made him furious. You could have kept me, he said, you could have kept me a hundred or a thousand different times. But of course she could not have. It was not in her.

It was true that she was lonely, that she was occasionally struck by a physical need that she had not felt for him in decades, but mostly there was a lightness. She wondered what was wrong with her. She had always been a person who did not need much affection, she did not need much from other people, but of course there was the downside; she did not have much to give, either.

Her worry that Ted might be her last lover turned out to be ridiculous. There were other companions, men who could have, and still did have, younger women, but they were companions nonetheless; there were things they could not share with young people, and she suspected, though not a single one had admitted this to her, that decades of being the less attractive partner might take a toll. She wondered what it would be like to look into the mirror and see yourself, white haired, slough skinned, your wilting everything and uncountable skin tags, right next to some perfect young specimen of the human race.

She was not sure. She had not compromised. She had not compromised and in that way, she’d escaped. I am the last of my kind, she thought, the last the last the last… but even that was a kind of vanity, there could be no last of anything, there were uncountable billions to come.

Milton Bryce became a widower, there had been another chance, she had known him nearly fifty years, and they had talked about it, how the two of them might form a sort of partnership, they had kissed but not otherwise touched, they were both into their seventies, he was a good man, but there was not a drop of fire in him. It was better to be alone. She was not some spinster. There were things she had not done, perhaps she had missed out, but the Colonel had not remarried, either. There was a reason for that.

Maybe if she’d gotten sick she would have felt differently. But even then she would not have wanted a lover taking care of her, even after two decades she had not liked using the toilet in front of Ted, had not liked brushing her teeth in front of him and when she got out of bed she always put on a nightgown, it was not modesty. It was just that without keeping something to yourself, the only thing left was comfort.

SHE HAD ALWAYS suspected (known, she thought) that she might outlive Thomas. There were people with a will to survive, people who might drag themselves across a desert, but Thomas was not one of them.

At a certain point, she had begun to think he would dodge it, he had been with the same partner (lover, she thought, husband) for over a decade, then quick as that, his partner was dying and they all knew what that meant for Thomas. It did not make her special. All stories ended that way. And yet it seemed to her that she had willed her son’s fate, that by somehow suspecting it, considering it, she had witched it up out of the future, where a child’s death was supposed to remain.

As for the man Thomas lived with — Richard — she had never cared for him. He was not sure of himself and he compensated. Thomas and Susan both found him hilarious, but he was not and she hated the sight of him at the hospice, you have killed my son, that was all she could think. She had to fly back to Midland in the morning. “When will you be here again?” Thomas asked her. For the funeral, she thought. Richard hated her even as he was dying; she hated him right back. But there was something in her son’s face.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll be here tomorrow.”

She’d been trying to unload some acreage in the Spraberry to Walt and Amos Benson. They wanted to take her out at $16.26; she was looking for $19.00. It was high but things were happening.

“Come out to the ranch,” they said. “We’ll get the quail opener.”

There was nothing she would have liked better; the Bensons were old friends, Walt’s wife had died a year earlier and there had always been some spark… but she couldn’t. She had to go back to San Francisco. She did not want to tell them why.

So she had flown back and spent the night in the hospice, staring at the gaunt-faced man in the bed, knowing she would be looking at her own son there soon enough. The man’s parents had not been told. She wondered if she ought to find out who they were and call them. She decided she should, they had a right to know, but then she wasn’t sure, and then she had never been more afraid of anything, she made one bargain after another, her own life, all her money, speaking to God the entire night. None of it meant anything. She would lose her son. In the morning she slept two hours on her Gulfstream and woke up in Midland to meet with the Bensons again. She told them that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait.

“Is that what your price is based on?”

She was too tired to explain.

“Honey,” they said, “what’s wrong?”

She wanted to go to their ranch, she wanted to sit on their patio and drink wine with Walt, she wanted to stop thinking about her son. Instead the driver took her back to the airport.

All of this for money. Money she did not need, money her daughter did not need, money her son did not need. No one she knew needed money. And yet, apparently, she would do anything for it. She would spend her days in Midland and her nights in San Francisco. She was crazy. She agreed to the Bensons’ price.

Walt invited her to the ranch again. They looked at each other a long time, here was her chance, she’d rejected him years earlier, he would not try again. Instead she went back to San Francisco, got a room at the Fairmont, and stayed two months helping Thomas clean out his condo, agonizing over Richard’s awful paintings. And Thomas had lived. He had gone on the drugs and they had saved him. He went back to calling her Mother; he called her Jeannie only when he was mad.

She knew that other people felt sorry for her. She knew that her life looked empty, but it was the opposite. You could not live for yourself while also living for others. Even lying here she was free. She was not in some hospital where they kept you alive when they shouldn’t, where you had no say over your own end.

She was back in the enormous room. The light was blinding now, the sun was shining directly through the roof, the furniture askew, everything in shambles, but she did not mind it.

There was a scent in the air, soothing and oversweet and she recognized it: balm of Gilead. Cottonwood buds. Were they blooming? She couldn’t remember. She could not remember the day or year. She and Hank had planted a row of saplings around the stock tank, they were now enormous, a grove of cottonwoods. She had left things better than she found them. She remembered the Colonel rubbing the sap into her fingers, she remembered how the smell lingered all day, every time you lifted your hands to your face, every sip of water, you drank in that smell. The Colonel had showed her and she had showed it to Hank. Now they were waiting for her. She could feel it.