I Never Thought I'd See You Again: A Novelists Inc. Anthology (15 page)

“Piece of cake, Mags. And you know I’ll be with you for every one of them.”

Yes, she did know that maybe more than anything else she knew coming out of this. David would be there with her. But so would the fear. Because cancer is always someone else’s disease, until you get it. It’s the disease that won’t touch you, until it does. Until it slams you to the ground, then grinds you in, physically and emotionally.

“So, do you want to take that vacation we talked about a while ago? You know, a celebration. Maybe in a few weeks, when you’re up to it? Your choice. Pick out wherever you want to go, and I’ll make the arrangements. I think you’ve earned it.”

Earned it? She wasn’t sure about that. Wasn’t sure she was ready to leave home for a while. These days, it was better here. She loved the familiarity. The safety. Most of all she loved knowing she wouldn’t be shutting her eyes some night and maybe never seeing it again. “Later,” she told him. “Right now, though, I think I want to stay where I am.” And be glad for what she had, and especially for where she was. “Maybe paint my office . . . ”

David groaned. “What color now?”

“Remember the ocean blue it used to be?” Maggie stood, took one more look at the mother deer, who was looking back at her, too afraid to move. She did understand how the deer felt, needing to move, but not knowing which way. Too frightened to take that first step for fear that what lay ahead was worse than where she was.

“Well, it’s a good thing you want ocean blue because I went to the hardware store the other day, saw they were having a paint sale. In case you might want to paint again, I bought a couple of gallons.” He smils gooded. “Welcome back, Magg as new.ȁ

Kelly McClymer is a mom, a writer, and a reading tutor for children with dyslexia. She has written in several different genres (historical romance, science fiction, fantasy, and mystery), and is always willing to try another. You can find out more about Kelly on her website
http://kellymcclymer.com
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We stood in a always wondered if ther6P concentrathuddle around him. Two mothers, two doctors, two court-appointed counselors circling one boy. He lay still and pale, as if he were asleep.

The female doctor touched a few dials on the machine behind her and said in a clinical tone, “Ready.”

The male doctor did not take his eyes away from the screen of pulsing wave patterns as he nodded sharply.

Neither doctor consulted us. It didn’t matter if we were ready.

Both counselors raised their hands in unison as the female doctor turned the final dial. The younger counselor’s hand landed on Nancy’s shoulder as the older one’s hand hovered by my elbow, as if she knew even a gentle touch would shatter my heart.

We all held our breath. Nothing happened.

And then, just before the demands of life would require the weakest of us to draw first breath, the boy opened his eyes. Brown.

He looked around, blinking like a newborn kitten.

The huddle broke as the doctors moved closer, now focusing on the boy in his flesh, instead of the machines. We mothers stepped back, to give the doctors room, or perhaps to distance ourselves from the corrupted miracle to which we were witness.

Our counselors moved back as we did, shadowing our actions, monitoring our reactions.

The doctors paid no more attention to us or our movement than if we had been ghosts. The female leaned close, “Do you know your name?”

The boy nodded slowly. “Jake.”

The doctors made room for me, their gazes simultaneously beckoning and warning me as I stepped forward.

The boy in the bed smiled. “Hi, Mom.”

His voice was wrong, like a child lost in the mall calling some other mother, not me. I thought I had prepared myself well for this moment, but my voice faltered at first when I asked the question that I had to ask. The one even his best friend didn’t know the answer to. “What was your father’s middle name?”

He looked hurt, like a puppy who had expected praise and received a scolding. But he sighed, and answered my question. “Salvatore.”

The thinnest thread of civilization prevented me from letting loose the keening wail inside me. I kept my voice clipped. “He is my son.” I looked up to meet Nancy’s eyes. “Mine.” If I do not claim him, she will. I cannot allow that.

Nancy could not quite stifle her wail before she clapped her hands across her mouth. Her counselor led her from the room.

I felt a hand tentatively brush my elbow and I flinched away. I had to be here. I had to do this. But I didn’t have to like it, and I didn’t indulge the court appointed flunky who was supposed to make the transition smooth.

“Mom?”

I looked at the cleanly shaven face with the slightly squared chin, avoiding his eyes. He didn’t hesitate with his father’s middle name. He was my son. He was Jake, but in a body that was so much more muscular than Jake’s had been. I looked at my counselor, though it was the doctors who hung on my words. “Can I take him home now?”

The counselor had seemed worried as she followed us outside, her gaze flicking from him to me and back again, the hungry gaze of a robin looking for worms. But she had squeezed his shoulder once in reassurance and closed the car door, leaving us alone in the coffin-like stillness.

The boy who would be Jake for a year flinched when the engine of the Explorer growled to life. He reached to turn on the music, his hand mashing the knob without grace. They’d said it would take a few weeks for him to get used to his borrowed body. They hadn’t bothered to indicate how long it might take me.

At the first angry strains of the song, he looked at me. “Since when did you start listening to heavy metal?”

My hand, efficient, graceful, my own, reached out and switched the music off.

He stared out the front windshield for a while, and then asked, “Would you rather I didn’t come home?”

“Where else would you stay?”

He didn’t say anything, but somehow I knew. “With her? With Nancy?” They hadn’t mentioned that in all the pre-procedure interviews. They’d said she’d agreed with the procedure. Not that either of us had any choice. Eighteen was old enough. No mother needed to sign off on this madness.

His fingers quietly, clumsily, wrapped around the door release. A flicker of atavistic glee filled me. He was afraid. Good. He should be.

I thought about all the times I had warned him not to touch the door release. That he could accidentally open the door and fall out. I took the familiar turns more sharply than usual, and stomped the brake harder at every stop.

I didn’t swerve or speed. The counselor followed behind in her small white beater, observing. I guess there’s not a lot of money in transition counseling.

Yet.

“How does it feel?”

He shrugged. “Weird. Okay.” He turned his head toward me. “As long as I don’t look at my reflection.”

After a pause, and a sharp turn on my part, he asked, “How does it feel to you?”

Like a birthday party with a cardboard cake. “Weird. Like a lab rat.” Jake was the first successful atonement case, and everyone was pinning high hopes on this experiment to pave the way for a better future. For everyone but me, and Jake, I guess.

He laughed, as if I’d told a joke.

I glanced into the rear view mirror and saw our keeper following close behind. “I don’t think it’s funny. Being a lab rat.”

He turned around, looked behind us. His smile faded. “Why did you agree?”

“You didn’t leave me a choice.” I turned the question around on him. “Why did you agree?” He’d been a neuron-enriched ghost on their infernal machine when he’d agreed. But that had been enough.

His answer had the easy confidence of an eighteen year old. “Ben won’t have to go to jail, now. He wouldn’t last a day there.”

Of course. with the d fasAlways looking out for his best friend. But this wasn’t like taking the blame for a broken lamp or a dented fender. “I always wondered if there was anything you wouldn’t do for him. I guess now I know.”

“Be fair,” he protested. “Now you know there isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for me, either.”

“True.” Be fair. Fair to whom? Not me. I guess that hadn’t occurred to them, while they were both agreeing to trap us in this maze with only one way out, unless I found a better exit.

I wondered what the counselor following behind us would do if I rammed the SUV into a grove of solid oaks like the one by the old cemetery where Jake had loved to do gravestone rubbings when he was five.

It would be too quick for her to do anything but stop before she added to the pile up. The oaks were solid; the SUV was fast. I could take us both out. Maybe. With our luck, the airbags and seat belts would leave us broken but alive instead of properly dead. Still trapped in the maze.

Besides, that kind of quick ending would be too easy for Nancy. She needed to feel every day, every hour, of the next year. She needed to wake up every morning and know that she couldn’t say hello to her son, couldn’t hug him. Couldn’t . . .anything.

She needed to feel what I’d felt when Jake had been crushed by an engine block because his best friend had been texting and driving on the most dangerous road in our town. What I’d always feel, despite all the counselor’s soothing words about transitions and adjustments, and closure. Atonement. Some things can never be atoned.

I pulled into the garage and closed the door, shutting out the counselor and her beater pulling up the driveway behind me. We got out of the car and headed into the house as if it were just another day.

He stepped up and over the broken step in the garage without pause, just like my Jake had done the last four years.

I stopped. Should I bother to tell him? He is mine for a year, so they say. If everything works like it should. “I had that fixed while you were . . .gone.”

He looked at me. “That’s the weirdest part of all. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been gone.” He stepped down and bounced on the no longer broken step, harder, testing it. “They told me what’s happened since the accident. But it’s like I read it in a book. It doesn’t feel real.”

For a blinding moment, I could almost see Jake, as he had been. I shook my head, clearing the vision. “What’s real to a boy living in a science fiction scenario?” I quipped, with a bitter edge to the humor. It is up to me to remember what is real. This boy is not Jake. Not really.

He climbed the stairs one at a time to his room. That’s different. My Jake would have taken them two at a time, like a graceful gazelle.

He opened the door and stopped without crossing the threshold. He looked over the banister. “You redecorated.”

“I always wanted a place to paint.” I had given up all thoughts of painting when Rod died and it was just Jake and me left. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to paint any longer. But I had created the studio because it seemed like the thing to do with a room that no shrugged. “">
“ma longer had a use.

“Why are the canvases all blank?”

I shrugged. “Change takes time.” Unless it comes like a hammer and shatters you. But I didn’t say that, because he was only eighteen and I wasn’t sure he truly understood how the hammer would come down on him again in a year. Maybe sooner.

I pointed down the opposite hallway. “I made up the guest room for you.”

The counselor was at the door. I let her in. She glanced between me and Jake several times as she smiled and chattered about how nice it must be to have my son home at last and how important it was to set up comforting routines to help us both adjust.

I wondered what Nancy’s counselor was telling her, and whether she found it in the least bit comforting.

The first morning almost felt normal, with just a hint of dream fuzziness around the edges. Alarm clock. Knock on Jake’s door. Make breakfast and pack lunch for us both.

He came down the stairs slowly, carefully, just in time to let the counselor in the front door.

He sat patiently eating his toast and eggs while she took his temperature, his blood pressure, pulled a wire cap over his head and plugged it into a little remote control device.

“Everything looks good to me,” she told us, as if we wanted to know. “But the doctors will see if we need to adjust the amount of Gateway at any point.”