Fourteen
Carter
10 years old
“I ’m sorry I ruined your guitar,” she said to me, tearfully.
I swallowed back the lump in my throat and looked up at her standing in front of me. “It’s okay, Mom.”
She sat down next to me on the bed, and I gripped Dad’s guitar with all my strength. It was old and dusty, but it worked nonetheless, and I didn’t want her to take it off me.
She eyed the way my body tensed as I cradled the guitar to me.
“I won’t touch it,” she reassured me, calmly. I stared at her for a while, assessing her. Was she the mom I loved? Or was she the mean one that wanted to destroy everything around her?
“Then why are you here?” She wasn’t around often. She’d been at the hospital for a couple weeks, and Dad said they were making her feel better. She seemed to be better now, but I knew how fast her moods could change.
“Daddy says you have a beautiful voice,” she said, quietly, running her hand down my back in an affectionate manner that had me cringing. She never touched me anymore. Not for a few years. I wasn’t used to it, especially after witnessing all the destruction that had come out of those very same hands.
“So?” I replied on a shrug.
“So, I want to teach you how to sing.”
“You can sing?”
She nodded with a smile. “Yeah, darling, I can. It’s why…It’s the reason I got upset, and…Well, that’s how I met your father. I used to sing at a bar, and he approached me after I finished one day.”
“She was beautiful,” Dad suddenly cut her off to say. I looked over her shoulder and saw him standing in the doorway, staring at her with love pouring out of his eyes. “I couldn’t resist. I knew if I didn’t ask her to dance with me, I might never get the courage again.”
Mom looked back at him, her eyes glistening as they lost themselves in each other. It was moments like these I realized they loved each other. That all the ugly fights meant nothing if we could have days like today.
So, was that love then?
When you stared at each other like that?
When you handled the ugly and waited for the beautiful?
She sat with me the entire day and we sang together. I never bonded with Mom before, but we’d found something to do together. The first song she ever sang to me was “Thank You” by Led Zeppelin, and I’d never forget the chills I felt as the words came pouring out of her mouth, like they were made to be sung by her. I loved every second of it. I felt like I belonged by her side in that moment, singing with her.
By the evening, she grew a little unsettled, and sudden teas fell from her eyes. She excused herself and disappeared inside her room.
“It’s nothing you did,” Dad reassured me when he later came by to see how we were. “Mom’s just a little sick, okay?”
I frowned. “Will she ever get better?”
He nodded, a hopeful look on his face as he answered, “If she keeps taking her meds, she’ll be on the right track.”
There was a strict regime when it came to taking her meds. He had the key to the cabinet in the bathroom filled with all of her prescribed medications. On occasion, when he knew he was staying back at work, he’d give me the spare key and tell me to use it only for emergencies. That if she lost a pill, I could be the one to replace it for her.
“ Never give her the key,” he told me every time he did this. “You hide it somewhere she’ll never find it.”
“Okay,” I told him.
I’d usually hide the key in my sneakers, or under a rug somewhere in the house. Other times, I’d have it in my pocket just to be sure it was with me. She never, ever found it, but then again, she never, ever asked for it anyway.
I grew close to her when she was on her meds. She was vibrant and funny. She was affectionate and warm. She was everything a mother should have been to her little boy, and I loved her. Vastly. She meant so much to me.
“I love you, Mom,” I’d say on more than one occasion.
“I love you, Carter,” she’d say back, holding me to her; I’d bury my face in her clothes, breathe her in. She was everything to me.
But there were still dark days.
There would always be dark days, my father said.