No, the sight of him had terrified me.
And I had stood there frozen—a teenager again.
A sudden clattering noise behind me now made me start. But the sound brought a familiar echo of memory from my childhood. It was just the mail slot. I turned around to see the day’s mail had arrived.
I walked down the hall and picked up the spread of letters. More bills and flyers. I placed them on the side with the others, but then thought better of it. They were obviously trivial and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but they’d have to be gone through at some point, and a mundane distraction might help right now. Something to ground me in the real world again. So I gathered up the whole pile, took it through to the front room, and sat down on the couch.
My mother was resolutely old school and was still getting paper copies of everything. There were the standard utility bills, which I tore open and scanned without interest, along with a bank statement that I decided to leave alone for the moment. There were take-out menus, and flyers for local gardening and guttering firms.
And then there was a phone bill.
I stared at that for a few seconds after I opened it. It was a quarterly bill for the landline, and it was three sheets thick. My gaze moved down the itemized list of numbers—all of them calls my mother had made—and then moved to the next sheet, and then the last.
Going back close to two months, I found my cell phone number. The date seemed like such a long time ago. What had we talked about? I realized I couldn’t remember. Nothing, probably—just a standard catch-up, which I’d doubtless hurried to the end of without thinking. It had always been my mother who phoned me, and time seemed to pass between those infrequent calls without me ever feeling a need to make contact myself.
A wave of sadness washed over me at that.
I don’t care if you ever think about me at all.
I’ll think about you instead.
Because that was what parents did, wasn’t it? They wanted to protect their children. They wanted the best lives possible for them. And they expected nothing in return for that. But it was clear from the volume of numbers listed here that my mother had felt the need to talk to someone, and I felt guilty now that it had not been me. That I had not thought about her more than I had.
Who had she spoken to instead?
I turned back to the first sheet. There were several calls over the last month to what I recognized as Sally’s phone, along with a few other numbers that meant nothing to me. One in particular stood out from the amount of contact. It was a cell phone number, and while my mother hadn’t called it every day, it had been close enough. The conversations varied in length and had taken place at irregular times, often in the middle of the night. I had no idea who it was, but then, why would I? I knew so little about my mother’s life.
Perhaps it wasn’t quite too late to change that.
I took out my own cell phone and dialed the number. It rang for an age before cutting to an anonymous, robotic voice mail that invited me to leave a message. I didn’t. Instead, I killed the call and then tried again a minute later. Maybe whoever the number belonged to just hadn’t been able to get to the phone.
This time, it didn’t ring at all. It just bleeped emptily.
I ended the call and then frowned at my phone. Whoever was on the other end of the line had decided they didn’t want to answer and had turned their phone off. There didn’t seem to be any other way of interpreting the situation, but I also couldn’t think what to make of it.
I sat there for a moment, confused.
And then my phone rang—a sudden shock of noise and vibration in my hand. I looked down at the screen, expecting to see the same number there, but the call was from Sally.
“Hello?”
“It’s your mother,” she told me. “She’s awake. She’s asking for you.”
* * *
I drove too quickly to the hospice. There had been no obvious urgency in what Sally had told me—no sense that I needed to get here before it was too late—but even so. My mother was awake and asking for me, and I was familiar enough with her sleeping patterns that I didn’t want to miss this window to talk. After years of mostly silence between us, it felt like there was so much I wanted to ask.
After parking, I went inside and found Sally waiting for me at the desk. I signed in, and then we walked quickly.
“Is she still awake?” I said.
“She was a minute ago.”
“What did she want to talk to me about?”
“I don’t know.” Sally looked at me sympathetically. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up. She was asking for you, but she still seemed confused to me.”
When we reached the room, Sally waited in the corridor. I pushed the door open slowly and saw my mother lying in the bed. She seemed smaller and weaker than yesterday, her body fading by the hour now, but her eyes were open. She looked at me as I gently closed the door, and then her gaze followed me across the room as I moved to the seat by the bed.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hello, Paul.”
“Sally said there was something you wanted to tell me?”
She frowned. “Who’s Sally?”
The woman who’s been your care worker for months, I thought.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Is she your girlfriend?”
“Absolutely not.”
“The one you won’t let me meet yet?”
My mother smiled and looked at the ceiling. I said nothing. It was Jenny she was talking about—that was when and where she was right now.
“You’ll have to ask your father.”
My father, who had been dead for six years. Even in life, I wouldn’t have wanted to ask him anything, and for a moment I couldn’t work out what my mother meant.
She looked at me and smiled encouragingly, willing me on to understand.
“For the envelopes, Paul. You know he’s the one who keeps things like that. You’ll need two, won’t you? And stamps, of course.”
Then I understood where she was. It was the day I’d shown her the magazine that Jenny gave me, with the details of the short story competition on the back. It might have been free to enter, but that didn’t mean I had everything I needed. Envelopes and stamps. I still remembered the sick feeling in my stomach at the prospect of asking my father for help, along with the dismissive look on his face when I had, after he’d made me explain what I wanted them for.
“Not that they’ll be sending your story back.” My mother tutted to herself. “Not if they know what’s good for them, at any rate.”
“I don’t think it was very good, Mom.”
“Rubbish. I snuck into your room, you see, and read it when you were at school. The one about the man walking around the streets where he grew up? I thought it was brilliant.”
Then she frowned to herself.
“I mean, I know I shouldn’t have done that. But you never show me anything, Paul. I’m sorry.”
I swallowed. At the time, it would have mortified me to know she’d done that, but it all felt so distant now that it scarcely seemed to matter.
“That’s okay, Mom.”
She looked back at the ceiling again and closed her eyes. I waited, unsure what to do or say. I’d sped here because she was awake and there had been something she wanted to tell me. Maybe it was foolish, but after what had happened at the house today, I’d imagined it might be connected to that: the knocks at the door; the man I’d seen in the woods.