Waiting

They used to joke about how out of their three children it was Josh who would be the one they’d really have to watch when he became a teenager.  We’d better start saving now for his bail, they’d chuckle.  Yet, as she paced the cold wooden floors of their house that night, (actually that morning if you wanted to get technical), it no longer seemed so funny.  It seemed, in fact, quite horrifying that somehow they had seen his rebellion coming and done absolutely nothing to stop it.

There had been people along the way that had tried to warn them, but of course they hadn’t listened, at least not until it was too late.   She well remembered his second grade teacher. That woman had certainly had him pegged, hadn’t she? She’d hated Josh, and in turn she and Steve had hated her, both of them dutifully going to bat for their overly active son in conference after conference.  What they really should have done was thanked her, gifted her with Starbucks cards, or maybe even a bottle of wine, and jumped right on all the suggestions she’d made to help him be more successful.

“Do you remember Mrs. Aldridge?”

Heather’s pacing had led her back to the bedroom where Steve lay, awakened from a deep sleep over an hour ago and now waiting for their prodigal son to return.

“Second grade?” he asked without bothering to open his eyes, “Of course I do. I remember when we were explaining to her how he used to hide every morning before school because he hated her class so much, that she interrupted us and said in that prissy voice of hers Well, how do you think I feel having to teach him?  She was a cold, unfeeling, b***h.”

He was right, of course.  How many tears had Josh cried that year?  And who could forget that time she’d written him an office referral just because he’d said yeah instead of yes ma’am.  The woman had been a beast dressed up like a prim, soft-spoken, southern belle.  

“But still...”
“Just stop.  She treated him like s**t just because he wasn’t the perfect little rule following girl that she wanted all her students to be.  Listening to Mrs. Aldridge would not have saved us from this.”

Then what would have?  

Heather resumed her path of despair, stopping briefly in the laundry room to slip on a pair of fuzzy socks before looping her way back through the front room.  She’d kept the shutters drawn on all the windows but one, so she could peer out hopefully with each pass.

No sign of him.

With each minute that ticked by she became more and more convinced that he’d been arrested again.  He knew how high the stakes were if he didn’t come back on time. They’d told him what would happen if he broke curfew or didn’t respond to a text right away.  Something was preventing him from responding and that something was in all likelihood another arrest. It had to be. Either that, or it was the unthinkable, which was a possibility she was going to continue to ignore unless forced to do otherwise.

She checked her phone for the umpteenth time.  Scrolling back she counted forty two sent texts without a single reply.  She stared intently at the photo she had assigned to his number, silently pleading for him to call.  The face that stared back at her was not the irritable and morose teenager that had completely overtaken her sweet boy.  It was instead a picture of the son she still longed for, taken right after his team won the U10 soccer championship game at the YMCA.  He was sweaty, dirty, and completely happy, grinning into the camera with such pure joy that her heart ached every time she saw it. He hadn’t been that happy in a long time.  Neither had she. What was that saying? You’re only as happy as your least happy child.  

No statement had ever been more true.

She made her way back to the bedroom.

“Steve?”  She couldn’t tell if he was awake or asleep now.  He always did this; completely shut down whenever something tragic happened, leaving her to try to put back together the pieces.

“Steve!  Are you going to just lay there?”  He shifted slightly, just enough for her to know he wasn’t asleep, not yet anyway.

“What am I supposed to do?”  He didn’t bother to lift the side of his face off the pillow when he spoke, “You won’t let me do the one thing we should do, which is call the police.  Let them find him, if they haven’t already.  That’s what his probation officer said to do.  Turn him in while he’s still seventeen because if he keeps it up, and they get him at eighteen, he’s going to be in some very deep and terrible s**t.”  

He sat up abruptly.

“Will you let me do it?”

“No!  I’m not turning my own son in!  A relationship can’t come back from that!”

“Fine. Then I’m done. Good luck with him,” and with that he flopped back down, pulling the blankets over his head.

She knew better than to try to argue with that. God forbid he actually get up and wait with her.  God forbid he actually be a source of comfort at this, the hardest time in her adult life.  Why should he change now, though? He was mean and he always had been. How had it taken her so many years to notice?  

She made her way to her side of the bed and grabbed her speaker before heading back out and slamming the door.  Their bedroom was now officially off the pacing path.

She checked her phone.  

Nothing.  

She sent another text.  

Nothing.

She looked at the clock as she proceeded through the kitchen.

1:43 A.M.  

Dear God where is he?

She stopped long enough in the kitchen to pull up some music to play on the new bluetooth speaker that she had just learned how to use.  It was Josh who had set it up for her. Patiently, he had shown her how to search for the device and connect it. He was never disrespectful the way other teens were, the way her own daughter was, in fact.  (She would rather walk across hot coals than try to have a conversation with that one).  He was almost always pleasant to talk to, and interesting as well.  She had taken such pride in that.  My son is fifteen now, but he still loves to talk to me, and we talk about the most fascinating topics.  It’s really like talking to another adult; a friend. She had often bragged about this to her friends.  She wasn’t bragging now.

The eye rolling, the condescending tone, the sarcasm, and the firm belief that their parents know nothing, were all things that Heather had expected to face when her babies hit their teenage years.  The drug use, the sneaking out, the running away, (to another state, mind you, for two long weeks), and the cutting were all things she had definitely not expected.  Those kinds of problems played themselves out in other people’s homes, or on the sixty inch glossy flat screen of the family television.  She sometimes felt like she’d been cast in a very special episode of an otherwise funny sitcom. Tune in next week when Josh battles a drug problem, and it would surely get solved in under thirty minutes, or maybe sixty, since those very special episodes always seemed to be longer than the regular ones.

She hadn’t been a perfect teenager herself.  There had been some underage drinking, but only when her older brother would come home from college, which wasn’t all that often, and really, who could blame her?  Even then she never got wasted like her younger sister would. As for drugs, well, they simply hadn’t appealed to her much, but she had been around them an awful lot.  Her brother and his friends were all potheads and since she and Ben were so close in age, and lived in such a tiny town, they had all become her friends, too, even though she never partook of their drug of choice more than a handful of times.  Thinking back on it from a mother’s point of view, though, she would no doubt be horrified if any of her children started hanging out with the very people she had spent most of her time with back in the day.
Her friends had been so much more than their bad choices, though.  Philosophical, was how she had thought of them at the time; free spirits and deep thinkers, which was, coincidentally, exactly how she would also describe her son.  (They had called him their little Socrates ever since he was five years old, and had started questioning the meaning of life with a thoughtfulness that belied his tender years). Those were certainly admirable qualities, and for a moment, as she stopped pacing long enough to engage in the futile task of wiping fingerprints off the front of the stainless steel fridge, she tried to convince herself that if Josh was just like her own friends then maybe she didn’t have anything to worry about after all.

Even as that hopeful thought crossed her mind, she knew it was only wishful thinking.  The boy she had walked in on that horrible night almost a year ago, when she’d first become aware there was a problem, was a troubled kid, not some thoughtful spiritualist who smoked weed occasionally to open his mind.

She had already gone to bed that night, back when she still had the blissful freedom to go to bed before making sure he was too sound asleep to sneak out and get into trouble.  She hadn’t been able to sleep, though, and as she lay there, she became aware of Josh’s bedroom door, right beneath her own, opening and shutting repeatedly. It annoyed her, and so after some time spent in an internal debate as to whether she should expend the energy to go down and tell him to stop, she finally got up, threw on her robe, and headed downstairs, prepared to give him a piece of her mind for making it even harder to sleep than it already was.  She’d tried the doorknob instead of knocking because she’d half expected it to be locked, as it was more and more these days, and quite frankly, she wasn’t all that worried about violating his privacy, after he had been inconsiderate enough to be as loud as he’d been. In hindsight, though, she should have knocked.

The scene that greeted her was so far removed from her expected reality that it took her several minutes to process it, much like the witnesses who were interviewed on the news after being present at a shooting, or a terrorist bombing.  Those people were always saying It took me a few minutes to realize what was going on, and now she could relate.  Some things are so traumatically dreadful that your own mind can’t conceive of them until it is forced to. She was forced to.

It was the smell that hit her first.  Memories of cloudy college dorm rooms came forth unbidden as the unmistakable scent of marijuana flooded her senses, eyes stinging almost on command, lungs breathing in the skunky herbaceous smoke.  Before her neurons had time to make the connection that this was not an odor she should be subjected to in her son’s room, the horror of what she was seeing smacked her full on, with all the force of an oncoming truck.  He had placed towels on the carpet in the corner of his room, right in front of the record player they had gotten for his birthday last year, and he sat on them, the razor blade still in his hand, dripping blood.  His shirt was off, and the blood that streamed down his arms was so plenteous that it would not be clear to her for some time where he had actually done the cutting.

She responded in the worst way possible.  She hit him. She hit him over and over, and as she hit, she screamed, What are you doing! What are you doing! What are you doing! not as an actual question, but more as a keening wail of sorrow that held in those four simple words all the agony of a mother’s failure.  

Where did I go wrong?   

How could I not know?  

What’s happened to my precious boy?  

How could I not protect you?  

Where did I fail you?  

Where did I fail you?  

WHERE DID I FAIL YOU?

A year later, and she still did not know.

2:06 A.M.  
She pulled the old rocker next to the window so she could watch for his arrival, and settled herself in it, rocking methodically, phone in hand, resending the same text endlessly, with no pause between.  Where are you? Where are you?

There had been none of this anxiety the night he’d been arrested.  No, she’d been blissfully asleep for that one, having waited up for him to come home from work, surrender his key, and tell her goodnight.  She had then let herself drift off into slumber, confident that now that he was home he would be safe. She hadn’t counted on him stealing back the key, sneaking out, and racing off into the night only to be found hours later, by a less than understanding policeman.  The sole comfort she took from the whole wretched experience was believing that surely this would be a turning point for him; a wake up call. Wasn’t that a thing back in the seventies or eighties? Scared Straight? Heather had vague memories of the juvenile delinquent program being quite popular back then. However, the threat of jail was a weak deterrent for her son, who fell back into trouble less than a month after his arrest.  A Google search later revealed that the Scared Straight program had proven largely ineffective at keeping kids out of prison over time. So much for that.

She had begged his parole officer to provide services to help him, but when they did a risk assessment Josh had scored shockingly low.  Shocking to her, anyway. What more could it possibly take for a kid to be considered a risk? Suicidal ideations, drug use, cutting, chronic depression...were those all considered normal these days?

“Your son has a wonderful support structure.  You’ve gotten him into therapy, he’s on medication, he comes from an intact, supportive family with a religious belief system, he’s intelligent, he’s on the debate team...he’s going to be fine!”

Only he wasn’t.  He was so incredibly far from fine that the very real fear that she would lose him consumed her every waking moment.  To her it was not so much a matter of if, but when, and how. Would she lose him to suicide or drugs? Would he run away for good this time or end up in jail?  Suicide seemed more and more likely, especially after the two anonymous tips that she had been contacted about. The police had shown up at their house both times, telling her in amazingly disinterested voices that friends of Josh’s, (at least, she assumed that’s who it had been), had contacted them with the concern that he would take his own life.

“So, what would you like us to do, ma’am?”

“You’re asking me? What can you do?”

“We can recommend you take him to a doctor.”

“He already sees one.”

“Well, maybe you should take him in.”

One of them had even had the audacity to say Have a good day.  Have a good day?  Really?  She could hardly remember what that was like, to have a good day.  And yet part of her did remember, and yearned for the days when her babies were actually babies, safe in her arms and protected from the world with all its bleak hopelessness and despair.  Ironically, it was Josh who had been the happiest of all her children. After their perpetually grumpy first born daughter, she and Steve had marveled at the fact that every time they made eye contact with their tiny son he would break out into the most beautiful smile, regardless of what unhappiness may have been happening beforehand.  All it had taken back then was a look from Mommy or Daddy and their boy would become the very picture of jubilation. If only it were that easy now.

Heather left her rocking chair and again began to walk the house, through the kitchen, around the den, down a step to the living room, up a step to the hall, avoid Steve in the bedroom, down the hall again, back to the den and check the clock.
2:36 A.M.
She had just reached for her phone again, to skip a song which was proving too mournful for even her current mood, when she saw it; the flash of headlights pulling into the drive.  Her heart stopped briefly, or so it seemed, and then began to pump so fiercely that if she were to glance down she would surely have seen her nightgown rise and fall with the power of it.  She dropped her phone on the counter and started to race to the window, to see if it was his car or that of another policemen come to call, when she stopped herself.
Did she even want to know?  If she looked out that window and saw a black and white instead of her son’s shabby green VW bug, it could only mean one thing; the unthinkable had finally happened.  She knew that an arrest would have been a phone call, as it had been before. A home visit at this time of night, well, that would be something far more serious; something gut wrenching and life altering.  It could be the news that she dreaded daily. They could have found him somewhere, dead by his own hand, putting an end to his suffering in the most final of ways. She began to shake as she contemplated the reality of her fear, and felt as though she could no longer stand.  A loud knock at the locked front door broke the silence. She froze in place, knowing the truth would reveal itself in a moment, but not wanting to hurry it up by even a minute.
For now, she was content not knowing.