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She stands in the hall, peering into the doorway. His room should be empty. There should not be a boy lying peacefully asleep in the bed. The boy who that bed belongs to is dead, grey, cold to the touch, no breath in his lungs, roots making plans to grow into him. The boy, the one who lies in the bed, he looks like that boy, identical in most every way, but his eyelids flutter in dreams, his chest rises and falls.
Her son is dead. He's dead, just as she knew he would die, as she knew he would from the day of his birth. This boy is not her son, and she knows this because her son is dead.
She stands in the doorway watching this boy in her son's bed. How can she mourn with him lying there like that? She shakes her head of that particular thought. She knows that she is not truly mourning her son. She'd done all of her mourning in the first year of his life, a constant flow of tears unnoticed by many, and dismissed as postpartum depression to others. She was beyond finished mourning the boy. With a baby who is as good as dead, it's much better to get the mourning out of the way early on, so that you don't attach yourself to something that will cleave itself away from you later. That child, dead to her even as he was living and breathing before her, was doomed to die, murdered, in front of a mirror. She had foreseen it, and so, it must be true. The fact that she'd covered all mirrors in mourning at his birth would not protect him. Eventually, it would happen. That's how prophecies work, after all.
What a curious child he was, named Cecil by his father, as she couldn't be bothered to name a child who was already as good as dead to her. He was curious in both senses of the word, a boy who craves knowledge of the world in which he lived, and a boy who was strange in the way he behaved. Everything was fantastic and interesting to him, even creepy things, or sad things, or gross things. He asked too many questions. He craved knowledge in an unnatural volume. He saw the good in everything, always.
Her other child, a daughter who she intended to keep for a very long time, shared her distance with her son. For her, it was out of jealousy for the attention he received, especially from their father, who loved the boy dearly, the spitting image of himself as he was. Each time she brushed her daughter's hair, she could see a bright and happy future dancing along ahead of her, a marriage, a child, a job she would enjoy and excel at.
She didn't like to touch the boy. She didn't like to see him sprawled upon the bathroom floor, eyes empty and mouth agape. She didn't like to, and so she didn't, if she could help it. Against her better judgment, when she struggled particularly hard to keep her distance from the boy, she'd sometimes tell him so; that he was going to die, that she'd seen it. She pretended to tell him these things in caution, but it had always been for her own comfort, in truth. He knew this was why she never hugged him goodnight, why she never sat on the foot of his bed to read him bedtime stories like she did for Abby, why daddy always tied his shoe strings, and because he knew this, he resigned himself to the reality that love, for him, was a distant thing, a thing at arms length.
The day he died, just yesterday, had been a very strange and unsettling experience for her, and that was because he hadn't died in the way she had seen in her vision of prophecy. No, instead of the death she knew was for meant for him, he'd left for a walk and never returned, and as she stood on the front porch, wondering where he'd gone, she felt drawn to an empty and dusty field to the side of their home. As she approached, her body froze, eyes clouding over. A new vision overtook her, one of her son, burrowing beneath the earth and remaining there for ages, decades, and a tree growing where he stood, only to be eventually cut down after years standing alone in the countryside. She knew that at the moment that he was not dead, but was as good as dead, and would never return home. In many ways, nothing had changed. In many ways, everything had.
She did not know why, but this news, this sudden death of her son ached terribly. Perhaps it was the death of all her planning, fruitless after years of waiting for the foreseen outcome. Perhaps he was younger than she expected him to be when he left her, only just learning to read and write, and part of her knew that such a thing should feel tragic. Perhaps it was the fact that somehow, for the first time in her life, her prophecy had been fully wrong. In the past, she'd seen some visions that didn't make perfect sense relating to her son (for instance, the prophecy she received when he turned five years old that told her some day he'd become the Voice of Night Vale, despite the fact that, in her vision, he died long before he was old enough) but she always knew that prophecy is final, is correct, despite occasionally seeming contradictory. Now, it seemed she'd been incorrect at least twice, since death is the end for humans, and that was non-negotiable. This troubled her much worse than the actual loss of her son.
Nevertheless, she steeled herself, gave the news to her husband, and later to her daughter. She told them the time had come, that their son, their brother, was gone. She did not elaborate on how. She explained that he was gone, and now he was buried in the yard. This was not technically a lie.
That night, they cried together, her family, all except her son, who might as well have been dead all along as far as she was concerned. To her, a loose end, six and a half years loose, was being tied up. To her, things with her family could now begin in earnest. The imperfect end to an imperfect beginning.
So why then, this morning, is this boy in Cecil's bed, asleep and snoring, full of life, and not buried outside in the yard? How could he be here? How could he live after what she had seen?
Instead of going to the boy in the bed, she goes to the yard, to the place she knows her son should be. And as she stands above where he should be, she can still feel him there, beneath the ground, unmoved from where she knows he should be. She can sense that his lungs are full of soil, that insects creep across him even now. She knows that he is here, that he is alive, that he is dead. She knows that the boy in Cecil's bed does not exist.
She comes back to his doorway, and she watches the boy for a long while. The longer she looks at him, the more convinced that this isn't her son she becomes. Her son was platinum blonde and always had been since birth. His hair matched Abby's hair, and even her own hair. This boys hair is... well, it's also platinum blonde, but she swears that in the glints of morning sunlight drifting in the windows, she can detect a subtle dull pink hue, like long discarded and greying bubble gum. He snores, and he sounds like her son, but he isn't, and these breaths to her now sound like the deep grumbling of some horrible creature that you might find lurking in the mouth of a cave. He has long, soft eyelashes like her son, but they dont seem real, synthetic, maybe. She is only disturbed from her thoughts as Abby walks by, patting her mother on the shoulder as she peers into the room. "Good morning, Mother. Good morning, Cecil." She says. The boy stirs, rubs his eyes, and opens them. He waves at Abby. Abby waves back.
She finds herself in disbelief. Something had clearly gone terribly wrong. Yesterday, they all had mourned. Why, then, today, did Abby act as though nothing had changed? Why did she acknowledge this person, this false version of her brother? "Good morning, Mother," He says to her. She does not respond to him.
When the boy, who is not her son, rises, clambering down the hall for breakfast as her son always had, she does not look at him. She does not sit a plate at his spot at the table. "Mother?" He asks her, eyes wide with confusion. She does not look his way. He comes to her side to tug on the hem of her shirt, and she sidesteps him, eyes sharp and cold. He sits back at the table, resigned and sad. Her daughter passes the plate from her spot at the table to the boy and fetches another for herself from the cabinet, giving her mother a disdainful look before returning to flipping pancakes. The boy seems contented. He counts the flowers painted along the outside rim of the plate.
Her husband comes to the table, and as he approaches the table, he ruffles the boy's hair. She struggles not to let her jaw fall open at the sight. He sees her, and as he unfolds his newspaper and sits in his spot, he asks her, "Everything alright, dear?"
"Why," She looks at her husband, then her daughter, then the boy, then back to her husband. "Why did you touch it?"
"What are you talking about?" He doesn't seem to understand what's she's talking about, but she's unsure if that's the case or if he's testing her somehow.
To make it perfectly plain for him, she points to the boy. "Why. Did. You. Touch. It?" She enunciates, punctuating each word with a point of her finger. The boy brings his hands up to his chest, a look of panic in his eyes. He looks to his father. His father looks angry.
"What are you even saying about our son?" He asks his wife, gesturing to the boy. Abby's eyes jump from one to the other, like a ping pong ball caught between two paddles.
"That boy, that thing, that is not our son!" She finds herself escalating in volume.
"Cecil, go to your room, son," Her husband commands, and the boy hops up and scurries off towards her son's bedroom.
The fight that ensues is loud and messy, and it becomes evident that the entire course of the day before seems to live in her memory alone, and neither her husband, nor her daughter recalls mourning Cecil's death. At first, she believes it's a cruel and elaborate joke, and she wonders where they found such a similar looking child, but as tempers flare, she realizes that, no, they not only aren't pulling her leg, but they genuinely believe that this strange child, this child who does not, cannot exist, is their son. The argument only stops when she stops responding after he starts to question her sanity. At the end of the argument, her husband calls for her son, and the boy, who is not her son, returns. They eat pancakes in silence. The matter is not resolved. The matter is only stalled, momentarily stifled at best.
As he eats the pancakes, she watches the boy, imagining his teeth sharper than they are and his fingernails dirtier than they are. She can see that he is nervous and she does not care. She wants him to leave.
She understands that this boy, who is not her son, does not know that he is not her son, but that makes no difference. She would not be a finch for this cowbird. She would not blindly accept the role of parent over this child, this thing, simply because nobody around her could tell the difference.
Only a month of daily fights and daily efforts to convince her husband that their son is buried in the yard passes before her husband decides that enough is enough, that these delusions have to stop, that a change of scenery might do his wife's fracturing mental health some good. And so, by his demand, they pack their things and move from their farm in the country to a suburb closer to town. Her only protest is that they please dont bring the boy who doesn't exist, and of course, this is not obliged. Her husband and her daughter do their best to comfort the boy who does not exist as each day, he tries to apologize to her for things he isn't sure of. Her husband tells him he's real, he's a good boy, his mother loves him, but she's having a hard time right now. Her daughter covers all of the mirrors in their new home to ease the anxiety that springs from the warnings she gave him so long ago. Once a month, she sneaks away, bringing flowers to the place where her son is still buried, now the base of a small tree. She tells the new owners of their old home that she is mourning her son when she comes. She does not come to mourn, of course, but to remind herself that she is right. Eventually, the house stands empty. Eventually, the house falls to ruin. Eventually, other trees begin to sprout around the one that was once her son.
Not once does she let her guard down. Not once does she drop an ounce of hostility towards the thing that wears her son's face, this parasite, this creature. It is only right, she tells herself. Why should she even attempt to find mercy for something that doesn't exist?
She awakes one morning next to a folder in her bed and, half expecting divorce papers, is shocked at the news that during the night, her husband has been drafted to the blood space war. She knows in an instant that never in her lifetime will he return. She knows that now she is a single mother. For him, she actually mourns, her love, her dearest, unparted since they began dating as teenagers. She steels herself, and she wakes her daughter and tells her. She feels anger curdle her stomach when Abby stops holding her in her time of loss to go and tell the boy who is not her son what happened to the man who isn't his father.
Despite every bit of hostility she sends the boy who doesn't exist's way, he remains as upbeat as ever, and despite her repeated hisses that he stop, he calls her his mother. His hair is definitely pink now, no denying it, she tells herself, and he knows things that he shouldn't. He speaks languages he should not understand. He tells stories he wasn't told, and oftentimes, those stories are correct. Sometimes, she can tell that he is afraid of her. And he should be. If it weren't for the fact that her beloved daughter, all she has left, decided that this was her pet, she'd have left him at the grocery store, or at the shopping mall, or driven him out into the desert and left him there. She loves her daughter, her own flesh and blood. She can't bear the thought of losing her, too. This alone is why she manages to look past the boy who is not her son. Each night, the boy tells her he loves her before he goes to bed. She never, ever acknowledges this. She wouldn't want to accidentally feel pity for a young, parent-less, nonexistent monster.
And so, life goes on, for her, for Abby, and for the boy, who Abby always brings along, despite her pleas that she stops. He stands with them in family photos, and it sickens her with anger. They appear to be a family, from the view of outsiders, but to anyone who asks, she sets them straight.
"He doesn't exist," She tells these onlookers. "It seems like he exists, and he's always just right there when you look at him, and he stands right where my son once stood, so it would make more sense if he did exist. But he doesn't."
She starts drinking more and more often, at first, to take the edge off, and later, just to cope with anything. She is vaguely aware that the neighbors look at her funny, that they whisper about her when she's in the grocery store, but she doesn't care. This is how she's learned to manage, and in her eyes, she's more than justified. She feels no need to justify it to anyone who can't even tell that she's being forced to live with a monster.
An unmanaged pre-teenage boy, existent or not, is bound to eventually get into trouble. When she receives phone call after phone call from his school, who expects her to meet with his principal when the boy starts stealing from classmates, she sends each to voice-mail. One day, the boy's teacher shows up on her doorstep. She insists that they need to talk about her son's behavior.
She is fed up with this boy who does not exist. She is fed up with not being understood or believed. She is two glasses away from finishing a whole bottle of wine in an afternoon. At that moment, she shows her teeth for the first time to someone outside of her family. She grabs the woman by the arm and pulls her into her home to show her the boy, kicking his feet as he whistles a song to her house plant in the windowsill.
"He is not!" Her voice is dark and vicious, her fingernails hurting the teacher's arm in her grasp. "My son! Just look at him! My son is dead! He's dead! Do you understand me??" The boy looks up. He sees his teacher and his mom, and he is afraid. The teacher is afraid.
Outside, the teacher stumbles into Abby in her haste to leave the home. Abby apologizes for her mother's behavior. From then on, Abby agrees to answer for her brother's behavior.
That night, she and Abby argue. Abby calls her cruel and wicked, and though she knows that she's responded properly to an imposter in her home, the words hurt her. She calls her daughter ungrateful and stupid for defending someone who is not someone. The boy hides under his bed and shakes as he listens through the wall. This is the first of many, many similar fights. Abby never budges on the fact that her brother is real, despite her mother's frustration and malice.
About a week later, the boy wonders if it would be possible to swing himself fast enough on the neighborhood playground's swing-set to swing himself in a full loop. He pumps his legs and increases his speed. While at its highest height, the apex, he falls, and with a snap, he finds his leg in agonizing pain. He hobbles all the way home alone, and when he sits himself on his front porch, his face soaked fully with tears, she comes out from the door behind him. She reeks of liquor, and she looks down at him. She leans down over him.
"Why are you crying when you don't even exist?" She taunts. She leaves him there to sob.
Eventually, he makes his way inside, and he sits by himself inside his own closet, unable to stop weeping in pain. Eventually, his sister comes home from her part-time job at the movie theater. Abby scoops him up and carries him, piggyback, down the street to a neighbor, Teddy Williams, who sends him home in a cast and on crutches.
That night, she is distracted from her book by her bedroom door opening. He stands there with a marker and a purple bandage and plaster cast up past his knee. He asks her if she wants to sign it. She ignores him. Eventually, he leaves. "He is lucky I've had enough to drink," She thinks to herself. She doesn't think she could be so civil to the boy while sober, this beast who ruins everything and leaves her feeling alone in her own home.
The arguing becomes the constant, and each time, she wonders what she could do to convince her daughter that her son is dead, that the boy in their home is a fake. On a rainy afternoon, she finds Abby frozen in the doorway to the backyard. Her eyes are unfocused. She calls her daughter's name, and she snaps her head around as if startled. A realization about her daughter sets upon her.
"Abby, what did you just see?" She asks.
When Abby explains that she had just had a vivid dream while awake, about someone with a bouquet of flowers coming in through this door and handing them to her, an older her, she wastes not a second. She doesn't congratulate her daughter on developing a gift of prophecy. She doesn't explain what is happening to her. Instead, she immediately grabs her daughter by the wrist and jerks her into the car, leaving the boy napping alone in his room. She ignores her daughter's protests, and before Abby even knows what to think, the car is stopped at the edge of a forest.
She makes her daughter get out of the car, and she refuses to answer even one of her daughter's many questions. She guides her by the wrist through the rainy forest so quickly that her daughter nearly twists her ankles several times. After what feels like a very long time, she leads Abby to the tree, now growing close to twenty feet tall, a forest of overgrowth sprouting up around it, and she forces Abby to touch its leaves. She watches as her daughter's eyes become vacant, as her own eyes once did, and she knows that Abby sees the things she once saw herself. And when Abby returns to herself, she drops to her knees next to the tree. She mourns.
"You see? Do you understand now?" She repeats until her daughter tells her to shut up. They drive home in near silence, and she thinks that finally, finally, finally, someone will believe her.
Her daughter hurries into the house as soon as the car is parked, and when she herself enters, she finds Abby on her knees, cradling the boy who is not her son in her arms.
"What?" The first time she says this, she is quiet, barely above a whisper. The second time, it's angry. The third time she's nearly screaming the word. When her daughter doesn't answer, but hugs him even closer, she grips at her hair in her anger."I don't understand! You've seen! You've felt his bark and touched his leaves! You can't possibly believe in this boy who does not exist!"
Abby's eyes narrow, her arms tightening around the boy, plugging his ears to the cruel things she says about him. "Mother, that was Cecil, but this is also Cecil! He lives! He breathes! He thinks! He is not the same Cecil, and yet he is!"
A rage burns in her eyes as she stares across the chasm that she put between herself and the boy who is not her son. She had never wanted to stand on this cliffside alone, without her daughter or her husband, and yet, that is precisely where she stands. This has gone far enough. This has to stop. This HAS to stop. She storms forward, grabbing her daughter by the wrist once more, but this time, her daughter yanks her hands away, and in the process, her hand brushes against the boy's. For the first time in years and years, her head is full of the image of her son, eyes wide, mouth agape, lying on the bathroom floor. She falls back onto the hardwood. She takes a few moments to catch her breath. When she can get her feet beneath her, she scrambles to her room and locks herself in.
Why, after all this time, was she still seeing this old prophecy of her dead son? She feels sick, and she paces around her bedroom to distract herself from her desire to throw up. What could this possibly mean, she wonders. Her thoughts are loud, swarming like a hornets nest. She wonders if a person can die twice, but she knows that's impossible. She wonders if her son had never really burrowed into the earth, but a tree had really grown there, and she senses him when she goes there even now. She wonders if she misinterpreted something along the way, but her pride refuses to let her believe that. Sweat drips from her forehead. Her eyes are wide and frantic as they search for an answer that can't be found. She doesn't even begin to give thought to the fact that perhaps that boy Does exist, that perhaps he Is her son. She couldn't. No amount of nice words or apologies could ever make it right, if that were the truth, so she doesn't even allow herself to think about it. She paces for hours.
At four in the morning, it comes to her. She gasps aloud at her revelation. If her son is burrowed into the ground, and she knows he is, and she sees a boy, eyes wide, mouth agape on the bathroom floor as well, then clearly that vision was the death of the boy who doesn't exist. The vision, she now knew, was to protect her from the boy who doesn't exist, and to end this neverending torment. This was not something to be avoided. This was a hint for how to be done with it.
When she leaves her room, the house is dark and quiet. She peeks in her daughter's door. Her daughter is asleep in her bed, her bedside lamp still on. She peeks in the boy's door. The boy snores peacefully, a book open across his chest.
She stands in the doorway of the bathroom for a long time, her heart thudding hard in her chest. She can scarcely breathe, and she isn't sure if she's feeling nervous or excited.
She knows the boy's routines well. She knows the boy will wake up first. She knows this boy will wander, half asleep, into the bathroom to brush his teeth. She knows that it will be at least another thirty minutes after that before her daughter wakes. And so, she pulls the blanket from the surface of the bathroom mirror. She stands for a moment, looking at herself in the mirror. She barely recognizes herself. It's been years and years. She thinks, for a moment, that if she can't recognize herself, that maybe she's wrong to think she knows about the boy. She shakes this from her mind immediately. She leaves the bathroom light on. She sits in the dark of the house alone, awake all through the night, staring at the light from the bathroom that lays like spilled milk along the hardwood floor.
She stands in the darkened doorway, listening as she hears the first sign of footsteps from the direction of his room. She stands, unmoving, watching. She knows where he is going. She knows what should come next.
Her eyes open. She stands in the doorway of the bathroom, upon the threshold, the divide between hardwood and tile. The house behind her is silent and dark. On the floor ahead of her, sprawled, eyes open, mouth agape, lays the boy. His lungs pull no breath. His neck is bruised, as though every drop of life has just been squeezed out, wrung dry like a washcloth. She had seen him like this many times before he was even born. She feels relieved. Then, she notices something else. Her hands are outstretched. Her fingers grasp ahead of her in the air. When she sees her own hands there, she gasps, putting them down by her side, then lifting them up again to examine them, as if to interrogate them about what horrid deed they seemed to have committed. She feels her eyes blur with moisture. She didn't do this. She couldn't have done this. She hated this boy, yes, but enough to kill?
From behind her, she hears Abby's alarm clock ring. Instinctively, she retreats to her room, lies down in her bed and covers herself with her blanket. She shakes terribly. She waits. The house is choking her with its silence. Then, a sound meets her ears that will remain with her for the rest of her life: the most earsplitting and anguished cry of horror that anyone could imagine. She manages to force herself back upright, to rush towards the sound. She feigns surprise and drowsiness as she approaches. Her daughter sits collapsed in the doorway, her wails of sorrow and terror echoing off the tile. She holds the boy's hand in hers. It is pale and limp. She crouches down next to her daughter and finds herself in tears as well, her horror coming from the knowledge that she was capable of something so unbelievably final. She feels guilt, but not for the murder. She feels guilt that her daughter is upset because of it. She reasons, in her mind, that it is for Abby's own good, the same way putting down the rabid childhood pet is.
The police are called, and the boy is pronounced dead on the scene. She watches as the put her son in a body bag and take him away. The day is spent in tears on the sofa. She is unsettled with herself. Her view of herself is fractured, despite her repeated attempts to patch it with reasoning. Her daughter is angry with her for her treatment of the boy, and she accepts this, even offers a shallow apology for being occasionally harsh. This sort of lie would be a good bandaid. This will pass, she tells herself. This will pass, and someday, they can be the family they were meant to be.
And yet.
She stands in the doorway of his bedroom the next morning, and she cannot catch her breath. There, in the bed where the boy who was not her son had slept, the one she'd killed with her own hands only the day before, sleeps a boy. He is the size of that boy. He is the length of that boy. He wears that boy's clothes. And yet, it can't be the boy, because yesterday, she killed him with her own two hands. She drops her mug of coffee, and it shatters on the hardwood. The boy, who is not the boy, who is not her son, jolts awake, and above his two eyes opens a third, staring at her along with the other two. She staggers back into the hallway in horror, in shock, in fury.
Her daughter runs into the room and flips on the light.
"What's going on?" She asks, checking first on her mother and then on the stranger who wears the face of her son and of the boy.
She grips at her chest as she fights the urge to scream. What sort of cruel prank is being played upon her? What sort of evil joke? What sort of malicious god or goddess keeps plucking this, this thing, this creature from the palm of death and returning it to her hand like a curse she can't break? What has she done to deserve this torment? She leaves the room immediately, and she walks out of her house, her neighborhood. She walks all day long.
She returns that night. Her daughter doesn't acknowledge her. She doesn't acknowledge her daughter or the boy, whose extra eye follows her even when his others don't. From that day forward, she doesn't speak another word. She has said all she can say. She has fought all she can fight.
She spends the next several years so intoxicated that the world around her is a blur. She says nothing when the boy starts an internship at the local radio station. She doesn't say a word to her daughter as she packs, late the next year, to go to college. She doesn't say a word when she receives voice-mails indicating that the school believes her permission slips for trips to the museum of forbidden knowledge were forged. She says nothing at all when, each night, the creature she shares a home with tells her he loves her.
One morning, when she finds herself out of liquor to numb herself with, she puts her shoes on. As she attempts to ready herself for a walk down the street towards the Ralph's to buy some more to drink, she notices a large, bright, and beautiful bouquet on the kitchen counter in an ornate glass vase. It is the most beautiful thing she can recall seeing in a very long time. She approaches it, admiring it's pinks, yellows, and purples. Tied around the neck of the vase is a card. She flips it open.
Happy Mother's Day
Love, Cecil.
She stares at it for several moments before she picks it up, raises it above her head, and smashes it onto the kitchen floor. She can't stand any of this for even one more second. She crosses to the front door and flings it open. She starts forward, just walking. She walks and walks. She needs a new start. She's going to leave this town and never look back, she decides. She crosses through yards as she exits her neighborhood. She walks until the last house is behind her. She walks out into the scrublands and the sand wastes. And then, right as she is about to cross the border and leave her hometown forever, she freezes. Her eyes gloss over.
She finds herself somewhere dark and hot. The floor is hard and sounds like glass beneath her feet. Suddenly, her surroundings are flooded with a vision. It is her son, at three months old. He has died sometime during the night. The vision is gone as fast as it began, and in its place, a vision of her son, looking like a grown man, being squeezed until he's squished inside of some sort of cave, and she hears him scream in agony. Then it's gone, and in it's place is her son, a young man, and this time, there's been a car accident, and he and a man she doesn't recognize are both dead. Another, and another, and another vision of the death of Cecil flashed before her over and over and over. She can't close her eyes to it. She can't drown it out. It doesn't stop. It won't stop. She cannot hear her own voice pleading that it stop. A voice begins to rise over the noise, subtle whispers at first, unrecognizable as words, but it escalates in volume, and soon she understands that it repeats Cecil is Cecil is Cecil is Cecil. It continues endlessly, growing louder and louder, and the visions pass by, and each time she thinks they can't get worse or that it can't get louder, it does.
Her son comes home from his internship and finds the front door open and his mother's day gift shattered on the floor. She is not there.
She is not there when her son approaches the smashed mother's day vase on the floor, when he picks up each flower, places it into a new vase, and sweeps up the mess. She is not there three days later when her son lays in bed, wondering if his mother will be home the next morning. She is not there when her son discovers a forgotten stash of liquor under her bed, and, at only age fourteen, he has his first taste of scotch.
She is not there when a month passes by, and her son shows up to his interning work with a fever so high that his brain is near boiling inside his skull, when he collapses while bringing his boss a sandwich, when he refuses to talk about why he came in to work sick, or why he refuses to give his mother's phone number to come pick him up. She is not there when her daughter comes to collect him and, on the car ride home, forces out of him that he's been living on his own for a month.
She is not there when her daughter drops out of college to keep Child Protective Services from taking her son into foster care after his boss reports that he doesn't seem to be getting the care he needs at home. She isn't there to see her daughter taking flowers monthly to a tree that stands alone in a forest, spending a few hours there, reading a book, talking aloud, and eating it's fruit.
She isn't there to see her daughter's face when her son's voice drops overnight, and suddenly he sounds like a man, and suddenly he needs to shave, and suddenly he's growing leg hair. She isn't there when he measures himself at six feet and four inches tall. She isn't there when her son gets his first pair of glasses or when her daughter sees him in them for the first time and tells him he looks like a dork. She isn't there when he splurges the next week and buys his first box of contact lenses.
She isn't there to give him "the talk," and so he learns all he knows from books that he steals from the bookstore. She isn't there the first time her son is arrested and grins a guilty grin in his mugshots, charming the police.
She isn't there when her son gets his driver's license, when her daughter teaches him to drive, or when the two of them scrape together enough money to buy him a little red beater car. She isn't there the first time he drives alone, windows rolled down, wind in his pale grey-pink hair, blaring "You’re The One" by the Vogues as loud as his speakers will go. She isn't there for his first speeding ticket.
She isn't there when her son goes to a house party at age sixteen and has his first kiss with his classmate Earl Harlan, but comes home so drunk that he can't remember it, let alone how he even arrived there. She isn't there when her daughter scolds him for this, and her son shouts, "You're not my mom!" She isn't there for any of several hundred plays of her son's Cat Ballou recording, many of them occurring while he heavily drinks, still drastically underage, and not once does she see how he refuses to put his feet up on the coffee table, remembering that his mother doesn't like that.
She is not there when her daughter tells her son he has a problem, that it's okay for him to be depressed, but not to drink himself to death. She is not there when she pressures him into joining a bowling league to get him out of the house a bit. She isn't there when her son meets a woman named Josefina Ortiz, who treats him more like a mother should than She ever did.
She isn't there when her son graduates high school, or for any of his nineteenth birthdays, so many that he loses track of when his birthday is, other than a vague sense that he should be older in February.
She isn't there when a tragic accident places her son as the Voice of their town, just the way the prophecy had said he would when he was only 5. She isn't there when her son has a panic attack while home alone after he sees a glimpse of his own reflection in the floor length hallway mirror after a government mandated earthquake shakes the covering loose, his mind swimming with flickers of something he shouldn't logically be able to remember. She isn't there when he comes back to himself, both hands cut and badly bleeding in a house full of broken glass, nor is she there to comfort her daughter, whose shoulder has been dislocated by her panic stricken younger brother. She isn't there when her son apologizes over and over or when her daughter repeats as often thay she isn't mad.
She isn't there when her son moves out on his own or when he sends checks in the mail to his sister with notes that read "tuition money." She is not there when her daughter graduates magna cum laude and three months pregnant, nor is she there for the birth of her grandchild. She isn't there when her son is five months sober, but has a single glass of champagne to celebrate his sister's hard work when she gets the job of her dreams. She isn't there to hear how her son speaks fondly of his childhood and kindly of his mother, his gift given at birth of rose colored glasses still unfractured despite every red flag.
She isnt there. And then, one day, she is.
She finds herself standing on the outskirts of town as though she'd never left, but with the knowledge that she hadn't been anywhere, hadn't existed, for years, ages, decades. She finds that she is not the woman she once was. She finds her hands wrinkled and sun burned, her hair frazzled and grayed. There are three things that she is now certain about. The first? The prophecies never lie, and everything she saw is real, was real, or would be real, if not for her son, then for another version of her son. The second? There were many Cecils, and each was different, and each was the same. Each was linked to the others, and each was her son. The boy she'd given life to was a universal constant. The world needed him in it. Though she'd never taken the time to see it, he was very, very special. The third? She had severely mistreated an innocent child for his entire life largely based on her own pride. She feels cruel and wicked. She can scarcely stop herself from dropping to her knees in the hot desert sand and crying out in some sort of repentance, to whom she isn't sure. Her mind is buzzing with the remembrance of each and every death she had seen for her son, each and every iteration. She finds the strength inside herself to start, one wobbling step at a time, across the desert towards her home, the one that so long ago she'd abandoned, with no concept of exactly how long it has been. She arrives on the street, and some of the houses are different, and some of the houses are the same, and some of the Joshua trees are taller and thicker, and some Joshua trees have been cut down. Finally, she stands in the street out front of the house. It isn't the color she remembers it being, but all the same, she's sure it's the right one. The mailbox still reads "Palmer", and some of her own house plants still persist in an upstairs window. She staggers up the front steps. She raises her sun scorched hand to knock. She hesitates. She hesitates there. She's not certain that she's ready for this. The fact that she hasn't knocked doesn't matter. The door opens anyway.
The woman who stands in the doorway now has her daughter's serious eyes, but has frown lines, and her forehead wrinkles when she raises her eyebrows in shock. "Mother?"
She sees, cradled in her daughter's arms, a toddler, held close to her chest. Her knees drop out from under her, partially from exhaustion, partially in mourning, real mourning. She mourns the loss of something she didn't know could be lost, and in many ways, she never knew she had to start with, and that is family. Her daughter stoops down next to her, speaks to her, but she hears none of what she says.
She opens her eyes the next morning and finds herself in a sterile room, with an iv in her arm and her daughter by her side. Her daughter stops reading a book to talk to her, and asks her how she is feeling, then asks her where the hell she has been all these years, then demands an answer. Her lips are chapped, and her voice is hoarse and dry, but she utters a single sentence.
"Where's Cecil?"
Abby's glare is sharp enough to slice her open. "I haven't told him you're here yet." Her voice is sharp, the years between them serving as the whetstone that sharpened it against her over time. "Why should I, after everything?"
"I need to see him," She says, and then repeats, over and over. She listens as, outside the door to her hospital room, she hears one half of a conversation.
"Hey. ... Hey, Gersh. ... Yeah, I'm... well, no. I'm not alright. ... No, I'm not sick. ... No," She chuckles dryly, "no, Janice is fine. ... Gersh-... Cecil, listen. I need to tell you something, and it's gonna be really hard to hear, okay?...Cecil, Mother came home."
She waits for three hours for her son to get off of work. She tells her daughter that's she doesn't know where she's been, but that she knows she's made a huge mistake. She adjusts her statement to several mistakes. She adjusts it again to innumerable mistakes. She says she is so sorry for everything. Her daughter gives no indication whether or not she is forgiven. To her, it doesn't matter. She just needs her daughter to know it, that she is terribly sorry for everything. The sun is beginning to set in the sky when her daughter receives a phone call and leaves the room again. Another six or seven minutes pass, and then she hears her daughter talking with someone outside the door. She isn't sure what she expects to see. She isn't sure that she's ready.
The door opens, and in steps a man. Even if he she hadn't seen a million flickering faces of his death, she would have recognized him instantly, as he is the spitting image of his father, of her husband, except for his hair, that soft, greyed bubblegum pink. The eye in the center of his forehead fixes on her, unblinking.
"Mother?"
Her mouth falls open, and for the first time in her life, she feels a sense of awe when she looks at him, a sense that she'd created something beautiful when he was conceived. He is alive, and he is here, before her. Finally, she sees the miracle that she was given twice for what it is, not a curse. Her eyes blur with tears, and she is lost for words.
"Mother, it's me. It's, it's Cecil." His voice is deep and smooth as honey. She can see the way his eyes, aside the extra one, struggle to make contact with hers. She knows this is what she deserves. She knows that she has no right to even look upon him, this man, this boy, who all along was her child, even if not the child she had expected him to be. She starts to sob there, in her hospital bed. Before she knows it, his soft and warm hands clasp one of hers, and he peers worriedly down at her. She feels her chest tighten as she is again flooded with images of her son, this time, not images of his many deaths, but of him on his wedding day, to a man he hadn't even met yet, of the lights above the Arby's, of him bouncing a baby boy on his knee, of him kissing his husband, his baby, and his dog goodnight. He looks into her daughter's eyes as she stands watching protectively at the foot of the bed. "I think I need to leave. I'm upsetting her." He tells Abby. She grips his hands between her old and wrinkled ones as tight as her hands can manage. He stands still. He lets her hold his hands. A gentle smile graces his face. God, he turned out so handsome, just like his father. She cries and cries, unable to form even single words. Eventually, the nurses come. They tell her children that she's too upset, that they need to leave. Her daughter leaves first, and then her son, releasing his hands from hers. Before he leaves, he tells her he loves her from the doorway. She is crying too loudly to reciprocate.
The doctors tell Abby the next morning that their mother's mental state is deteriorating dramatically, and in about a week, she is moved to a care facility. They bring her medicine each morning and night that dulls her senses in many ways. She can only detect the slightest glimpses of prophecy anymore, and she doesn't mind this at all. Her daughter visits her three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The chasm between the two slowly lessens. Her daughter goes from arms crossed and rigidly sat away from her side to leaning against the bedrails as she shows her pictures of her grandaughter, Janice. Abby tells her that she's just started dating a man who treats her daughter well. She tells her how, about a week ago, he surprised her by coming in through the back door with a bouquet of flowers for her. It seems, to her, that her daughter forgives everything in time, except the things she did to Cecil. Abby never wants to talk to her about that. Every time she tries, she says "That's for him to forgive, not me."
Her son always visits on Tuesdays. His job keeps him very busy, after all. She doesn't complain. She's just glad to see him at all. Sometimes they talk, but often they watch old reruns of TV shows, or he rubs lotion onto her hands, or they read together in silence, side by side. The silence is not harsh, or unkind, or awkward. It's a peaceful silence. It's contented. Every night, before he leaves, he tells her he loves her. She never says it back, not because he doesn't deserve to hear someone say it, but convinced that that someone doesn't need to be her, and she knows, for certain, that someday, someone will.
They only get to keep her for a little more than four more years before she begins to unravel, slowly losing her ability to stay awake, to eat, to make coherent sentences. It is a Friday when her daughter holds her hand, listening as her breathing becomes more ragged. She opens her eyes, and they are glossy and dark, full of vast dark oceans and mountains somewhere far away.
"I love you," She tells her daughter.
"I love you," Her daughter tells her.
"Could you..." She looks straight through he daughter. "Could you please tell Cecil-" Abby shakes her head.
"Nope." She looks down at her mother, stroking her hand. "That's not for me to tell him."
She hears her. She nods a bit. She goes quiet, drifting off to sleep. Abby stays with her another three hours, until finally, she is gone. Abby calls her brother during his lunch break to tell him. After the weather, he ends the broadcast early.
Cecil and Abby sit together on the front porch of Abby's house, their childhood home. They share a bottle of whiskey as they sit together, reminiscing on every positive memory of their childhoods thay they can think of. The mood is decidedly somber, despite both of their better efforts. They end up sitting there until the sun begins to rise. Both have work the next day. Abby offers Cecil the pull-out couch for the night, and as he relaxes back into the couch cushions, his older sister leans over the backrest.
"I want you to know that Mother really did love you, at the end." She says.
"I know." His voice is level and quiet.
"She asked me to tell you so, and I told her I wouldn't."
"I know." Cecil had always known things he shouldn't. Abby never needed to understand how.
"I love you, Gershy," She tells him.
"I love you, Abs." He offers her a half smile.
They both lie awake, in separate rooms. She is gone, and now their lives begin in earnest, despite the fact that they'd never think of it that way. An imperfect ending to an imperfect beginning.