Chapter 73: Stave IV

I reappeared in Belle’s apartment bedroom and didn’t need to bother bending my knees. Somehow I knew Mother wouldn’t drop me from sixteen inches up this time. She stood beside me with her arms folded across her chest, staring straight ahead with a pensive look.

“No, no. He’s gone. Good riddance,” Belle said with a sigh, staring down at one of those small, handheld, TV screen devices in her lap. She reclined against her headboard and some pillows, dressed in fluffy pajamas, with her knees up at an angle to support the TV screen device. That meant her right hand was free to gently caress the cheek of the slumbering toddler in bed beside her. “I kicked him out. He packed his shit and hit the road.”

“I’m glad he’s gone,” a familiar voice replied through the device. I walked alongside the bed in order to see who would be on the screen, and my eyes went wide in surprise at the sight of my Mariangel, looking as stunningly beautiful as ever. Based on the background, the lovely Latina appeared to be seated on a couch in her own living room with her luxurious dark hair pinned up in a messy bun. “But while I know you just want to move on and never think about that asshole ever again, you need to seriously think about pressing charges.”

Belle shook her head. “With all the shit I’ve got going on right now, the absolute last thing I need is to deal with calling the cops and filing a police report and making all of this drag out even longer than it already has.”

“He fucking HIT you, B. You need to put his sorry ass in jail.”

“He’s hit me LOTS of times.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“I’m just saying I’ve always gotten through it. If I knew for sure that pressing charges would put him in jail, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but you know how these things go. He’d claim I hit him a bunch of times, which ... well ... I did. It would become this game of ‘he said, she said’. I’d have to get lawyers involved to defend myself, and like, there’s no fucking way I can afford a lawyer right now!”

“I’m sure Sam would get you hooked up pro bono if you asked.”

“Like I wanna go calling Sam for favors. And even if I could afford a lawyer, I don’t wanna deal with all that shit. I wanted him gone, and now he’s gone. Case closed.”

“You should’ve kicked him out months ago.”

“Yeah, I should’ve,” Belle muttered wearily. “I was just scared of being alone.”

“Better alone than shackled to a loser cannonball who was just dragging you down to the bottom of the ocean.”

“Easy for you to say Miss Happily Married to the Great Love of Her Life.”

“Well...” Mari blushed. “You’re not wrong.”

“But seriously, I AM alone now.”

“And you’re scared.”

Belle stared off to the side with a haunted look. “I’m terrified. No job. Rent’s due in three days. I’ve got enough to pay it, but if I don’t get another job soon, I won’t be able to feed Gizmo. And even IF I get another job, I’m not sure I’d be able to pay for her daycare.”

Mari sighed. “If it’s money you need--”

“I’m stopping you there right now.” Belle held up her index finger threateningly. “Nuh-uh. No way.”

“I wouldn’t be giving you money,” Mari insisted. “It would just be a loan. You’d pay me back.”

“I’m not that desperate.”

“Not that desperate yet.”

“Mari, seriously.”

“Fine, fine...” Mari held up her hands in surrender, shaking her head. She took a deep breath, glared at Belle through the screen, and then muttered, “You already know what I’m going to say.”

Belle scowled, shook her head, and looked down at Giselle, once again caressing her daughter’s cheek. “I’m not moving back to California.”

“Why NOT?” Mari held up her hands again. “No job. No boyfriend. There’s literally NOTHING tying you to New Jersey anymore. Come back. Come home.”

“I can’t.”

“You can,” Mari insisted.

“I can’t,” Belle repeated.

Mari pursed her lips, turned to look off-camera, and sighed. From her expression, I gathered that she was silently communicating with someone else in her living room, most likely that “Great Love of Her Life” Belle had mentioned, and I now realized that Mari had been wearing a fat diamond ring when she’d held up her hands.

“Come stay with us,” Mari insisted. “We’ve got plenty of room. It’s not giving you money. There would be no loan to pay back. Just move out and never make your rent payment. Keep that last paycheck instead of giving it to your evil slumlord. Buy two plane tickets, stay with us, spend some one-on-one quality time with Gizmo, give yourself a few months to find a really great job here that pays well enough to cover daycare, and then go back to work. It’s a foolproof plan.”

“It IS a foolproof plan, except for one problem and you know it.”

“It’s only a problem if you LET it be a problem.”

“I can’t see him again,” Belle insisted, shaking her head. “I can’t.”

Mari sighed wearily. “You can.”

“No I can’t. I just can’t.”

Mari glanced off-camera for a moment and then returned her attention to the screen. “Matty loves you. He will always love you. He misses his adorable Annabelle and wants nothing but to have you back in his life.”

“I can’t Mari. I just can’t.”

“Gawd-fucking-dammit, B! Why the fuck do you always have to be so fucking STUBBORN?!?” Mari suddenly exclaimed, loud enough to startle Giselle. The little girl whined, Belle swore and looked down to gently soothe her little girl back to sleep, and Mari grimaced with an apologetic look on-screen.

It took a minute, but Giselle calmed back down. Belle kept her gaze on her slumbering daughter for another minute after that, still stroking. But eventually, Giselle’s face went slack, Belle’s shoulders unknotted, and the worn-out young woman finally returned her attention to the screen.

“There’s no good reason why you can’t come back and see him again,” Mari muttered. “It’s been years, B. He wants you back. We both want you back. We ALL want you back.”

Belle shook her head. “I know you all do. But I can’t. I still don’t know how to apologize to him.”

“You don’t need to apologize to him.” Mari looked off-screen again, perhaps at her husband. “Matty forgave you a long, long time ago.”

“I never forgave myself.”

“I know.” Mari continued to stare off-screen, but then she returned her gaze to Belle and repeated, “I know. But maybe it’s time you did. Come home. Stay with us. Make a fresh start.”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t do it for you. Do it for Gizmo.”

Belle’s breathing suddenly hitched and her eyes went wide with fresh moisture forming in them.

“You know I’m right,” Mari pressed.

Belle took a deep breath, held it, and seemed to seriously consider what Mari was telling her. And when she exhaled and started nodding, I wanted to believe that for once in her life she would be reasonable.

But instead Belle pursed her lips, shook her head, and then muttered, “I can’t.”

Belle tapped the screen once.

She then tapped a red icon that had appeared at the bottom of the screen.

And the universe disappeared into infinite white.

I reappeared in the master bedroom of my house.

Not the rented Mammoth Mountain house.

Not the Berkeley house I shared with my girlfriends.

MY house.

The house I’d grown up in.

The house Mother had leased out to strangers while she was in New York and I was off to college.

“Why’d you bring me here?” I asked without looking up. I reached out to grasp the bedpost in front of me, so intimately familiar. The bedpost was my own. The bed was my own. The room was my own.

Mother did not respond. My question was met with dead silence, and I turned, expecting to find her staring out into the middle distance with her posture stiff and her arms folded across her chest.

But Mother wasn’t there.

I was alone in my room.

I was no longer barefoot, no longer dressed in pajama bottoms and a tank top. Instead I was back in the same sharp law firm suit I’d worn to FutureSam’s office: black jacket, black slacks, crisp white dress shirt, and a black tie. And my polished black leather shoes shined without blemish.

Muffled sounds of conversation floated in through my closed bedroom door. Letting go of the bed post, I turned and walked over to the door. Half-expecting to see a rectangular field of infinite white light with no beginning and no end, I opened it and relaxed at the familiar sight of the hallway just outside my room. The conversations were louder and plentiful, telling me that there were many people in the house. But the varying male and female voices themselves were unfamiliar, and so I found myself feeling a little tense as I walked to the stairs and started to descend.

The universe did not magically transform into somewhere else halfway down the staircase. I didn’t end up in FutureSam’s law office. I didn’t end up in FutureNaimh’s sterile, modern, beachfront mansion. I didn’t end up in little Gizmo’s chaotic daycare. I simply ended up in the living room of my childhood home, although I didn’t recognize any of the occupants at all.

It was a formal event; nearly everyone was dressed in black and white attire such as suits and modest dresses. The vast majority of those in attendance were middle-aged and older, although not all. And one woman in particular caught my eye.

Platinum-blonde hair. Voluptuous curves that no mere black dress could ever hide. There was something about the way she carried herself, something about her very presence that was intimately familiar to me. Even however many years into the future, even from across the room and with her back turned, I’d recognize Sam anywhere. So I quickly walked over and gently reached out to touch her arm.

She turned to face me, and I would have soiled myself - had ghostly, intangible, time-traveling figments of a fevered, super-pill-induced nightmare been capable of having shit to soil.

Because it wasn’t Sam who turned to face me.

It was the Phantom from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: a corporeal and photo-realistic version that would have given six-year-old me nightmares for the next several decades. Hell, I still had PTSD from Goofy’s Jacob Marley door-knocker in the Disney version. To find the Phantom come to life made me want to run screaming higgledy-piggledy around the room.

But the Phantom gripped my forearm tightly with bare-boned, skeletal fingers. It was shrouded in a deep black garment which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched skeleton hand. Tall and stately, its mysterious presence filled me with a solemn dread. But the Phantom otherwise neither spoke nor moved.

“Oh, shit,” I muttered with wide-eyed terror, completely frozen in vapor-lock.

The Phantom did not react.

“Please tell me you’re still Mother but just in a different form like when you became Sam’s cat.”

The Phantom slowly shook its ... head? ... in the negative. It was difficult to tell; the upper portion of the Phantom’s garment twisted to the left, the folds of its dark fabric shifting ever so slightly before returning back to their original positions. I felt a sudden chill go down my spine.

“Where is she?” I asked with sudden worry. Whether or not my companion through these mystical visits to witness the future lives of Sam, Naimh, and Belle had been my real mother, I’d developed something of an attachment to... her.

The Phantom released its bony grip on my forearm, extended its arm, and then pointed with a single skeletal digit across the room. I turned to look and realized that the dining table had been moved.

An open black casket stood in its place against the wall.

Another chill went down my spine.

“Wait, what?” I turned back to face the Phantom. “Is my mother ... dead?”

The upper portion of the Phantom’s garment contracted for an instant in its folds, as if the Phantom had inclined its head. That was the only answer I received, and its extended arm remained pointing directly at the casket, its instruction for me to go over there quite clear.

But I didn’t want to go to the casket. My mouth was dry. My legs trembled, and I found that I could hardly stand.

“N-no ... no ... I can’t...” I stammered, shaking my head.

The Phantom’s arm remained extended.

“I can’t. I won’t,” I insisted.

The Phantom did not change positions in the slightest, its arm remaining extended. So still was the ghostly apparition all clothed in black, it may as well have been a statue.

It may as well have been asking me to pick up my cell phone and call Mother, for all the good it would do me. Dead women don’t answer phone calls, and the futility of such a request kept me rooted to the floor.

“I don’t need to go over there. I don’t,” I maintained. “You’ve already made your point. There’s no need for me to go over there and see her face. This is my version of A Christmas Carol and It’s A Wonderful Life and this is merely a shadow of things that may be, not necessarily will be. I get it. I’m Ebenezer Scrooge. I’m the main character guy from It’s A Wonderful Life, whatever his name is. I get it. I get it!”

The arm remained extended.

“I’m not going over there! I don’t want to see her like that, alright! You can’t make me!”

The Phantom remained as immovable as ever.

“Take me home! Put me back in my bed! Or the rental house’s bed! I don’t care! This is just a dream, a shitty dream, a nightmare! None of it is REAL. I know who I am. I know how old I am. I know how old Sam and Neevie and Belle are. I know my real mother is alive and skiing and sipping wine with her friends in New York. This is all just some fucked up figment of my imagination brought on by a wicked cocktail of alcohol, stress, and Sam’s super-pills. The real me is still naked and tied to the bed with gift wrap ribbons, and it’s a little weird to think of that state of being as better than this one, but it is. I am DONE. Wake me up!”

The Phantom’s arm remained extended.

“Wake me up!”

“Wake me up!”

“WAKE ME UP!”

The Phantom did not wake me up.

I slapped my cheek, ordering myself, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

I did not wake up.

“FUCK!”

All around us, guests wearing formal suits and dresses mingled about the room before suddenly turning in perfect unison and presenting me with a wall of faceless stares. And when I say “faceless”, I really do mean faceless. None of them had faces, just blank spaces of skin without eyes, noses, mouths, etc. Everything about the situation was surreal, only serving to remind me that the rules of reality did not apply here, and that ending this nightmare would not be as easily accomplished as slapping myself on the cheek.

Still, the Phantom’s arm remained extended.

Fuck.

I started walking forward. One step. Two.

And then I stopped.

I looked back behind me. The Phantom’s arm remained extended.

Fuckity-fuck.

My jaw hung slack, my lower lip quivering. I was terrified to continue forward, and yet I found that my feet were still moving.

Another step.

Another.

I panted softly, out of breath as if I’d just finished running a marathon. My lungs felt heavy, my chest compressed as if I were six feet underwater in the pool out back.

I wanted to turn around and run screaming from the room. Still, my feet continued forward, the faceless gazes of the guests shadowing my passage.

Another step.

Another.

It was as if I’d lost control of my own body, a helpless passenger in my own mind.

Another step.

And then one more.

Approaching the open black casket, I saw that the body within had been veiled head-to-toe with a white gossamer fabric. I stopped when I was close enough to look down at what very much appeared to be Mother’s body, still in great shape at whatever age she must have been. But her face itself was hidden, so I couldn’t actually confirm her identity without pulling back the veil.

Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand WAS open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a woman’s. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see her good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!

I shook my head. “Wake me up,” I pleaded again. “I’ve learned my lesson. Please. I don’t want to do this anymore. I’ve learned my lesson!”

“Have you now?” Mother’s skeptical voice intoned quite seriously next to me.

I turned immediately, eyes open WIDE in astonishment to see that the Phantom was now gone and my mother stood beside me in its stead.

And I launched myself at her with a fierce hug, wrapping both arms around her and squeezing tight.

Mother went stiff in surprise, too caught off-guard to react. But after my hug went on and on for several more seconds with no sign of abatement, she finally raised her arms up to hug me back.

Hot tears splashed down onto my cheeks as I hugged her even harder. “You can’t abandon me AGAIN!”

“Matthew ... Oh, my little Matthew...” Mother murmured softly with unexpected emotion in her voice while stroking my spine.

She snapped her fingers, and the universe disappeared into infinite white.

I reappeared in my childhood home, standing next to the kitchen island.

Mother sat on a barstool with a half-empty glass of red wine and a hardcover book in front of her. She looked like she’d just come home from the office, her suit jacket hung across the barstool’s backrest. There was a weariness in her eyes and etched into the lines across her face. Her posture was uncharacteristically poor, and she slouched in her seat with her left elbow planted on the countertop and her chin planted onto her extended left thumb.

There were tears in her eyes. Fuck, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Mother crying. But she was crying now, and I didn’t know how to process that. We were no longer hugging, now physically separated from each other by the kitchen island. And while the little boy inside of me yearned to rush into my mommy’s arms and desperately try to scrub away the mental image of her lifeless body beneath that gossamer veil in the open casket, the grown man I was today simply stood where I was in silence trying to process all of my feelings.

We both stayed like that for a long, long time: silent and contemplative. But eventually, Mother spoke first.

“I owe you an apology, Matthew,” she began softly, as if the heavy weight accumulated from a lifetime of regrets compressed the air in her lungs and prevented louder speech. “I’m sorry for abandoning you.”

I sighed and shook my head. “We talked about this on the phone at Christmas. You didn’t abandon me.”

“I abandoned you,” Mother insisted.

“And I abandoned you. Sam told me to call you. I could’ve picked up the phone at any time, but I didn’t.”

Mother shook her head. “I’ve only reaped what I have sown. You were only protecting yourself, and that failure was mine alone. You didn’t pick up that phone because you feared making yet another futile attempt at reaching out to me, only to be left bitterly disappointed. How much would it have hurt your heart to call me, only to have your call get directed to voicemail? Perhaps you would have left me a message. Perhaps I wouldn’t call you back immediately. Perhaps I wouldn’t call you back for days, for weeks, or never at all. Or even worse yet, perhaps I would have taken your call only to cut the conversation short to take care of some work matter I considered to be more important than you? How much would that have crushed your soul? How badly would you have felt abandoned then?”

I closed my eyes, clenched my fists, and fought the urge to collapse to the ground in a sobbing heap. Fresh tears rolled down my cheeks as I found myself reliving the memory of watching my third-grade Mother’s Day card dropping into the trash can beneath the kitchen sink. And I suddenly gasped for oxygen, having not even realized I’d been holding my breath while Mother spoke aloud my terrible fear.

“Rather than face such epic failure, better not to try at all,” Mother intoned softly. And then she sighed.

“Better to try and fail than face that horror show of a scene I just witnessed.” I gestured vaguely behind myself while slowly shaking my head. “The Goofy door-knocker scared the hell out of me as a kid. One would think seeing that Phantom made real with its skeletal hand grabbing my arm would give me PTSD as an adult. But what’s gonna fucking haunt my nightmares for the rest of my fucking life is seeing you in a fucking casket.”

“Matthew...”

“I never want to see that vision become a reality. Ever.” I shivered, my lower lip quivering as I whispered, “Please don’t leave me.”

“We all die eventually, Matthew. No man or woman has ever defeated Time.”

“I know that.” I shivered again, bit my lip to stop it from quivering, and then said softly, “It wasn’t your death that bothered me, that made me want to collapse to the floor in a sobbing heap. It was the idea that you’d died before I had a chance to see you again. The idea that you’d died without the two of us having reconciled. I stood in front of that casket, unwilling to pull back the veil. To pull it back and see your face ... I just ... I couldn’t...”

Mother frowned and canted her head to the side. “I must admit: I am surprised by your depth of emotion. I hadn’t realized you were so ... attached ... to me.”

“You’re my mother. For years and years, your love was all I really wanted in life.” I sniffled and gave her a rueful sigh. “I would have settled for your approval. The girls aren’t wrong when they say I’ve been programmed to yearn for the approval of all the women in my life, especially the emotionally unavailable ones.”