I sort of retreated deep within some dark shadow inside my skull, hid in the dusty seldom-accessed attic of my mind, and I thought about Mom. How she is no longer here with me. Where she might be—what heaven might really be like.
I miss her.
I really miss her.
And even though I realize it’s selfish, I wished she were with me watching the movie, scratching the top of my head even, instead of Wendy and Father McNamee. I wished nothing had changed. I wished life were fair. These thoughts made the angry man in my stomach dizzy and nauseated.
“Bartholomew?” Father McNamee said and nudged my arm.
I looked at him; he looked concerned.
“Are you okay?”
I nodded.
I glanced over my shoulder at Wendy, and her head was still buried under the pillows.
“I’m tired,” I said.
“Maybe you should go to bed?”
I wanted to ask Father McNamee if we should be doing something more to help Wendy, if it was wrong to wish my mother were still here with me and not in heaven, what we were going to do next, and how I was going to move on with the rest of my life, but I knew he would say it would all be revealed in God’s time and not our time—that we should simply wait for God to speak to me, for me to start hearing His voice, that we had to be patient. Or worse yet, he’d say he was no longer a priest and God no longer spoke to him. Since I already knew the gist of what my spiritual adviser would say either way, I decided that asking the questions was pointless.
So I went up to my room, turned off the lights, let go of consciousness, and drifted off quickly into the other world.
I dreamed about my mother again, and she came to sit on the edge of my bed.
“Mom!” I said in my dream, and immediately tried to hug her, but she was ghostlike and my arms went right through her body.
“Can we talk?”
She smiled and nodded.
Mom looked as she had at the end, although she had hair and no surgery scars.
She was herself—as she was before the squid cancer altered her.
“What should I do with the rest of my life?”
Mom shrugged.
“I don’t even know what I want. I’ve never known. Let alone how to get it. I don’t know anything at all, really!”
We looked at each other for a few moments.
When it was clear she wouldn’t answer, I said, “I liked living with you, Mom. A lot. I miss you. I’m so lost.”
But then she started to fade.
“Where are you going?” I yelled. “Don’t leave me!”
She smiled once more before she blinked out of existence, and I woke up, sweating, to someone making a shhhhhh sound in my ear.
My heart began to pound, because I thought maybe Mom had come back for real, or that I had dreamed her death by cancer and was now waking up to live in the time before she died, but I couldn’t see anything because the lights were out and the shades were drawn.
“Who’s there?” I said finally.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” a woman said through the darkness, paraphrasing your most memorable line in An Officer and a Gentleman, one of Mom’s absolute favorites. But it wasn’t Mom, I could tell by the woman’s smell—just a hint of apricot, lemon, and ginger wafting from her clothes.
After a few moments, I said, “Wendy?”
I could hear her breathing in the darkness.
“Do you think I’m a failure?” she said.
I tried to make out Wendy’s face, but my eyes wouldn’t focus. Finally, I said, “What?”
“Do—you—think—I—am—a—failure?”
“No.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Why would I?”
“Because I’m supposed to help people live healthy lives, and yet I let a man physically and psychologically abuse me because he has money, power, and influence.”
“You were just trying to find your flock maybe,” I said, remembering how much she liked talking about that. “Maybe you just fell in with a bad bird.”
“A bad bird,” she repeated, and then laughed. “Why did I do that—even accidentally—Bartholomew? Think about it.”
“I don’t know. Maybe because he’s handsome and rich and persuasive? Maybe you were pretending, hiding things from yourself?”
She laughed in this very tiny way through the darkness—which made me feel uneasy.
“I’d have to drop out of school if I left Adam. That’s the hard simple truth. And if I dropped out of school, my future would dim dramatically. It’s statistically proven.”
“Why would you have to drop out of school?”
“He pays my tuition. And provides food and a home and . . . everything I need.”
“Maybe someone else will provide?” I said.
“I don’t think so.”
“You could get a job.”
She laughed again in a way that made me feel I was simultaneously right and wrong.
“We don’t want you to be abused by him,” I said.
“You don’t want anyone to be abused, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“And yet people will go on being abused forever and ever. Abuse has always existed since the beginning of time—and it always will exist, whether you care or not. You stay locked up in your mother’s house and the library, so you won’t have to care about everyone or anyone. You don’t even play the game. It must be so easy for you.”
Wendy’s voice was cold now.
“I try to help everyone I know,” I said. “I can’t know everyone. You’re right. I have limitations. But I know you. And I want to help you. I really do.”