Please let mom be okay.
Please let mom be okay.
God, please let my mom be okay.
I wouldn’t call it a prayer, really. It was something like a command at the universe to course-correct. This point in time was in flux, a coin still in the air; if I could convince the universe by wishing hard enough, it would land the way I needed it to. Whatever it was, it had begun to loop over and over in my head as I wrenched open the door to my 1980 Volkswagen Rabbit and thrust myself behind the wheel, and looked up to see dad’s pick-up already peeling out of the parking lot of the mall.
“Please let mom be okay.”
“Please let mom be okay.”
It was out loud now, as I maneuvered out of the parking lot and into the street.
I knew something was wrong. I had known for hours.
I was at what would have been a closing shift at my job in a department store at the local mall, about a 20-minute drive from home. It wasn’t uncommon for me to call my mom from work on occasion, but this particular evening I felt the overwhelming urge to get her on the phone as soon as I could.
I made the trek across the back of the store and to the break room on the second floor, where there was a landline you could use to dial out. It was around 5:30 which meant my mom should have been on her way home from her school and thus had her cell phone on. But she wasn’t answering.
Okay, I thought. She’s just running late. She’s talking to another teacher.
She had a hard time saying no to helping people, so it was plausible. But I wanted my mom on the damn phone and every second I wasn’t getting her to answer, I grew more concerned. I went back to my corner of the store for 30 minutes, then ducked back to the store room again, tried to call, and again got nothing. I tried at home, and got the answering machine.
I often worried that my mom wouldn’t make it home one day. Any time she would leave for an Al-Anon retreat for the weekend or was out late for a school function, I would act like a puppy who was waiting for their owner to come home. I would stare out my bedroom window scanning for her car’s headlights to show up, listening for the Toyota engine.
I was always anticipating the worst, expecting it, even. I would picture her never coming home, having died in some horrific accident. I had been down these panicked halls before. My dad had figured this out about me and sometimes when I was younger he would tell me mom was home and I’d run outside and she wouldn’t be there. He thought it was funny.
My dad was a troll who didn’t use the internet. He would get off on being hurtful and claiming to not understand why you are so mad at his “jokes”. My mother always described it as “he likes to push buttons,” which was a cutesy way of saying he liked to trigger negative emotional responses in his wife and daughter to manipulate them and cause them pain. Which is not cute at all. It’s actually Emotional Abuse 101.
I never really got to wish my dad would never come home because he never went anywhere. By the time I was old enough to want him dead, he had stopped hunting as much, so there was much less of a risk he would end up shot. He was always home, always around, always demanding attention by starting fights.
I was certain there was only one way to get rid of him, and that was for me and my mom to run. I had just outgrown my teenage phase where I was either angry at or embarrassed by my mom, and we were spending more time together. It felt like maybe she was waiting for me to be old enough to be out of the house to get rid of him, and I was trying to nudge her to do it sooner.
Maybe another 30 minutes had passed, and I did the same dance again, trying to not seem out of place hauling myself up to the break room yet again. I tried both numbers multiple times and then meandered back across the store to my department, trying to look like I was doing something work-related.
As I turned a corner, I spotted my dad a few yards away and he didn’t look okay. He was standing in the back aisle of the store clearly searching for me. He was what I could probably describe as “high as a fucking kite.” He was also visibly upset, his glassy gaze only partially from the drugs.
“Dad, what are you doing here?” I rushed over, anxious to get him the hell away from other humans as quickly as possible before he said or did something embarrassing while also shocked and scared that my panicking could have been for a real reason.
His voice cracked and he inhaled sharply.
“Honey, Mom died.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What?”
“She died, you need to come home,” he blubbered.
All of my panic about not being able to get my mom on the phone evaporated and I dove head-first into denial. My first thought was that this was some Vicodin-induced blunder, and now my idiot, drugged-out dad was standing in the middle of my workplace in stark fluorescent light for all to see, having a meltdown.
My boyfriend Bradley’s grandmother had just died, and his mother and my mother were friendly. It was plausible that my boyfriend’s mother had called my house trying to reach my mom and left a message on the answering machine mentioning her mother. My dad could have misheard it during his excessive pill-popping and got it in his head that the wrong person was dead. He had done weirder things.
The only thing I could discern was that my dad believed what he was saying. So I calmly but firmly told him to go home and that I would meet him there. I ran back to a coworker and asked them to relay to my manager that there was a family emergency and that I needed to leave right away.
“Please let my mom be okay.”
“Please let my mom be okay.”
I drove faster and it got louder. At some point I had started crying.
“Please let my mom be okay. Please, God, let my mommy be okay.”
I was yelling through sobs while speeding down narrow streets at twilight.
“PLEASE LET MY MOMMY BE OKAY. GOD PLEASE LET HER BE OKAY.”
At some point I cranked my driver’s side window down to dry the tears as I was driving. The headlights of other cars became more and more blurry. I gave maybe a glance to oncoming traffic as I powered through the last stop sign. My car hopped down the hills of the narrowing street as the woods closed in and everything darkened.
Suddenly, there was my dad’s truck in the street. It was partially in the ditch, and there was another person with a truck pulled over behind him. I came to a quick stop, pulling up behind the unknown second truck.
My dad hurried over to my car as I noticed blood on the street, pooling in front of his truck.
I manually cranked my window and shouted.
“What the fuck?” (Note: I do not actually remember saying “what the fuck” exactly, I’m sure it was something much less edgy like “what happened?” or even more probably just kind of a “WHAUFG?” sound, but the tone was definitely there.)
“I just hit a deer, it’s fine, go home.” He wiped some sweat from his forehead and waved me off.
“What?”
None of this made any sense. The tears that had been rolling down my cheeks were drying in the cold October air.
“I hit a deer. I have to take care of this, just go home.”
Then he just walked back to the front of his truck.
I took a beat and then rolled up my window and backed my car back out onto the street.
At this point I was having trouble processing information. Why would my dad stop to help with a dead deer if his wife just died? Wouldn’t he just… come home? His truck seemed fine. Someone else was there. It wasn’t far from the house. Why wouldn’t he come home? Was he so high that he had forgotten his wife died? I barely glanced at the mangled corpse of the doe laying in front of the truck as I sped past the last mile home.
In a minute I was down the last stretch of road; the prayer was back and had gotten more specific.
Please let her car be in the driveway. Please just let her car be in the driveway.
She could have gotten home since the last time I tried to call. She could be at home wondering what’s going on, or not even knowing anything is wrong. This is going to be just a crazy thing my drugged-up dad did. This will be the final straw. This will finally get her to leave him. Look at what he put me through!
I had just turned 17 two weeks ago. I had gotten our eighth cat (we lived out in the woods and they went outside in our huge backyard and woods, it was not a cat hoarding situation), a cute little black and white long-haired kitten from the SPCA, as a present at the beginning of the month. I didn’t want a party, but I did always insist on Dairy Queen ice cream cake. I allowed my mother the fanfare of putting a single candle in it and having me blow it out before my boyfriend and I grabbed our slices and retreated to my room upstairs. I didn’t believe in wishes the same way I didn’t really believe in praying. Wishing my dad would never come home was hard when he rarely left the house. But any hopeful view I had of a future was devoid of him, and I wished him gone any way possible.
I would often daydream about my mother leaving my father. There were even a few times I brought it up to my mom and she would let me try to convince her. I tried every tactic a teenager had in their arsenal. Guilt, anger, crying, logic. It obviously didn’t work, but there was always that hope that the next time would be the last time. The next fight, the next fuck-up. I would tell her we could escape. I talked about the kinds of places we could live and how we’d be free.
We had taken a few out of state drives, but I hadn’t really been anywhere. I’m sure my talk of whisking ourselves away to a new life, trying to make moving a township over sound like a jail break or a romantic grand gesture to womanhood, didn’t have much scope or imagination. But I like to think it made my mom feel like I cared, and that my wanting to leave wasn’t just because it would be better for me.
Mom had only ever lived in Pennsylvania. She grew up 30 minutes from where she bought the house we lived in. Our home was at the bottom of a hill on a winding, no lane road surrounded by acres of woodland. There were no sidewalks or street lamps, and many of the roads were still dirt. A small creek wound its way through our property, which bordered park land wilderness. I always felt this to be odd: my mother had a severe phobia of snakes, yet she made the conscious choice to buy a house in the woods next to a creek that caused a plethora of snakes, including venomous copperheads, to come very close to our door. If one was spotted, my mother would not venture outside for the rest of the day. I suspect the choice of house had to do more with her pleasing my father’s hunting hobby than anything else.
It was only a 40-something-minute drive during weekday rush hour from her school to our house. And so by the time I was careening down my street in the dark, she should have been home.
Just let the Rav4 be in the driveway.
Mom, just be home.
I approached the driveway, the headlights of my VW Rabbit illuminating the yard, the house, and the rest of the driveway as I pulled in.
Her car wasn’t there.
I pulled into my spot in the yard and ran inside.
The house was dark.
I don’t know if I went looking around the house. But I remember screaming. I screamed for her.
There was no answer.
Mom had only ever been a teacher. She explained to me once that she was really only given two options for a career: nurse or teacher. She grew up reading Nancy Drew novels and dreamed of being a private detective, but she went with teacher and settled for watching a lot of detective shows. I grew up watching a lot of Colombo and Murder, She Wrote as a result.
This is not to say that she did not love and respect teaching. She was by all accounts a good teacher who people genuinely liked. She ended up getting a job teaching special education and early elementary school (U.S. 9 to 11-year-olds, 2nd grade mostly) in the same school district she was born in.
I spent a lot of time with her at her school because she didn’t want to/couldn’t leave me at home alone with my father. I was always around helping to clean and decorate for holidays. Sometimes I would help grade tests. I remember many nights spent entertaining myself with a book or some markers and paper while my mom held her parent-teacher nights.
Every August we would drive over an hour to the “teacher store,” which was not a store where you purchase teachers but a supply store where you got things like decorative banners with ABCs on them and bulk sets of stickers and markers. (All of this was paid for out of pocket, of course. Most U.S. classroom supplies are paid for by the teachers with little reimbursement.) Mom liked having company and I was happy due to the aforementioned stickers.
Mom and a few of her fellow teachers had their picture taken for the local paper one year when their union went on strike. Mom was so excited about it and put the clipping in one of her photo books. I was too young to understand what unions were or indeed how dysfunctional the U.S. school system was and still is; only as I got older did I really understand her passion for teaching and her relationship with her students and community.
Mom dropped dead in the parking lot of her school as she was leaving to go home that afternoon.