by Chad Zunker
“Yeah, I was curious if you thought the Fed was going to drop the rates again. I’ve been thinking of purchasing a condo, my first mortgage. Not sure about the timing.”
And that’s all it took, really. The newspaper was quickly folded, stuffed in the seatback, and away we went, as the banker began rattling off every bit of information and advice that he had stuffed up in his boring old brain. I kept him blabbing on for the next thirty minutes. It was painful, but I could do this for the next two hours, if necessary. Fortunately, he eventually needed to use the bathroom.
I let him out, watched him amble up the aisle, then quickly reached for the newspaper in the seatback. I took a glance to my left, at the two men sitting across from us. One man had his eyes closed. The other had on reading glasses and was lost in his Kindle. Rather than ditch the newspaper altogether, which could open myself up for questioning in some way, I simply took a little bit of my coffee, and let it drip across the photo of me on the Statesman’s front page. Within seconds, I was blurred out as the small puddle soaked into the thin paper material. When I was certain there was no chance of recognition, I folded the paper and returned it to the seatback in front of the banker’s seat.
And then I exhaled deeply for the first time in thirty minutes.
How many other newspapers were currently on the airplane? How many pictures of me? I would have to avoid all eye contact and all conversations, basically any interaction with anyone for the next two hours. I pretended to be asleep again, thought about my mom. I felt the weight of our journey together in that moment —the ups, the downs, the cancer — and it only made me want to get to her quicker.
SAM CALLAHAN
Age Twenty-Four
Washington, DC
The argument started at dinner and then carried over to her place afterward. Natalie had found an email I’d printed out from Billy Dixon, the private investigator from back in Denver who had found my mother two years ago. I’d carelessly left it out with my stack of schoolwork on top of her kitchen table. After burning the file and starting my new life in DC, I thought the desire to know my mom would fade and eventually die. I was wrong. The deep longing to be connected to her in some way continued to haunt me. So I’d finally contacted Billy and simply asked him to keep me posted every few months or so about my mother’s whereabouts and how she was doing. Natalie was pissed that I’d lied to her. She finally let it go after I apologized profusely, but she couldn’t understand why I’d go through all the effort to find her and then not go to at least meet with her. What was the point? And around and around we went on it. I tossed my jacket over the chair in the living room, dropped onto the sofa in frustration.
“You don’t understand, Natalie,” I said. “You can never understand.”
“You’re right. I can’t, not fully. My parents didn’t abandon me, but I understand loss, Sam. I understand the pain and anger. Don’t forget that my mom died when I was twelve years old. Unlike you, I can never go see her again. So, don’t lecture me, okay?”
I rubbed my face with both hands. “I know, I’m sorry.”
She sat close to me, calmed down. “Look, I’m not saying you have to go build a relationship with your mom. Not at all. I understand that’s really hard. But I just think it could do you a lot of good to meet her. Maybe hear what she has to say. It might put some things in better perspective for you. There are two sides to every story. Maybe you don’t know everything.”
“I don’t care about her side. In my mind, there is nothing that she could say to me that would justify what she did. Don’t you get that?”
Natalie grabbed my hand. I hated it when she touched me during an argument. It always dropped my defenses and left me powerless. “Yes, I get that’s how you feel. That’s how I felt for a long time after my mom died. Angry at her for leaving me, even if it was a car wreck. Angry at God for taking her away. Angry at my dad for letting her drive during an ice storm. Angry at everyone. But eventually I had to deal with it to move on. I’m not saying it’s easy. In fact, it may be the hardest thing you ever have to do in your life. I wasted a lot of teenage years being angry. It impacts everything. The hate will never go away on its own. It will stay there forever like a heavy anchor holding you back.”
“Thanks, Dr. Phil.”
“Don’t make me slug you.”
“I think I’m doing okay.”
“Yeah, sure. Is that all you want for your life? To just do okay? I want more for you. I want more for us. I know you used that pain and hate for a lot of years to survive on the streets. It was the fuel that you needed. I can’t blame you for that. But you’re not on the streets anymore. You’re set to graduate from one of the most prestigious law schools in the country. You’re doing really well, making a new life for yourself, and you’ve even got this super hot girlfriend.”
She smiled. I shook my head at her.
She continued. “I’m just saying that you’re not a survivor anymore. You’ve survived and moved on. Staying angry just seems pointless to me. And honestly, really stupid.”
“I wish you’d tell me how you really feel. Stop holding back.”
She gave me a small smile, shrugged. “I’m a straight shooter.”
“Yes, one of many things I like about you.” I stood, paced around the room. I hated that she was right. Finally, I stopped and turned to Natalie. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”
“Never.” She smelled victory. “I’ll go with you, Sam, okay?”
For some reason, that was all it took. “Okay.”
Billy said my mom was currently residing in a state-run rehab center. She was dealing with a variety of drug addictions, but she was actually twenty-nine days sober when we decided to fly down to Houston. I gave no warning to anyone at the rehab center, and I did not contact my mom in advance. I still didn’t know if I would actually go through with it. Natalie had been convincing enough to get me to take this next monstrous step. She stayed back at the hotel while I took a cab over to the rehab center on a Saturday morning. It was a ghetto government-looking building in the middle of a seedy neighborhood.
I did not want to officially check in through front security, like everyone else, and establish any identification just yet. So I instead followed a nurse in through a back entrance, just caught the automatic door with the toe of my shoe before it shut behind her. I cruised through a small kitchen like I belonged there and entered a sterile hallway with private rooms on both sides. At the first isolated nurses station with a computer, I stopped and told the nurse that Doctor Scoggins was asking for nursing assistance around the corner. The nurse quickly jumped up and headed in that direction. I’d spotted the doctor’s name on a marker board behind her station. He was currently listed on the rotation schedule. I slid into the chair behind the computer, quickly typed in the name Nancy Weber. According to the investigator, my mom had gone from Nancy Callahan to Nancy Pederson to Nancy Weber over the years. Her digital file filled the computer screen. I found the print button and then snagged the pages from a printer beside the desk.
I hid with the paperwork inside a janitor’s closet, with the lights off and the door wedged shut with a rolling cart. I sat on a chair and used my phone as a flashlight to read about my mom for the very first time. After so many years, it felt surreal. The front-facing photo of my mom on the first page matched the images that the investigator had given me recently. Brunette with gray strands. Pale skin. No make-up. Hollow cheeks. Not much life in her face. She looked very sad. The file said she was forty-one but she looked older than fifty. I did some quick math. That meant she’d been pregnant with me when she was fifteen. She was just a kid. She’d been in this same rehab center three times but had never lasted more than two weeks, so I gave her some credit for making it almost a month this time around. The file said she was addicted to a mix of prescription drugs that included pain killers, stimulants, and depressants. But according to the notes, they were very encouraged with her progress.
I turned a p
age, shifted to her counseling notes. Started to read with a lump in my throat. My mother was raised without a father by a drug addicted mother who’d abandoned her in her early teens and moved to California. She never heard from her mother again. She’d never met her father. There were no siblings that she knew about. She’d lived on and off the streets in Sun Valley, the poorest neighborhood in Denver. She hooked up with a drug dealer when she was fourteen, who took care of her for a little while, provided food and shelter in exchange for sex. When she got pregnant, he threatened her at gunpoint, demanding she have an abortion. She promised him she would and then changed her mind and hid from him for the rest of the pregnancy. While there was no likely way she could care for a baby by herself, she sure as hell was going to try. She felt this was her one chance to do something worthwhile in life. She wanted someone who would love her back unconditionally.
My name was finally mentioned in the file. Samuel Weldon Callahan. I was apparently named after my grandfather.
I shook my head, forced back my first tear.
The file said I was born in a bathtub at the home of a midwife who had taken an interest in my mother at some point during her pregnancy. We lived with the midwife for the first nine months of my life, until the midwife got really sick and had to move to Chicago to live with one of her kids. At that point, we were on our own again. My mother found an abandoned dry cleaner’s van on a lot near Mile High Stadium and we slept there most nights. The file said she begged for work, begged for help, sold her body for money, but she was determined. With no family support, it was very difficult. We barely made it most days. I would get some baby formula while she starved herself to near death. Then winter hit again and the bottom fell out. It got to minus ten at night for seven consecutive days. And with no heat in the van, blankets alone would not protect a baby who was not even a year old yet. My mom told the counselor she dropped me at the steps of St. Luke’s Medical Center on my birthday, begged for help for her child, who she thought might die that night. When they took me away, she cried her eyes out. She decided that it was not right for her to care for me anymore. I was better off without her. She’d almost killed me that night.
So she walked away and never looked back.
I continued to skim the file. She had not had much opportunity to look back. She immediately hitchhiked to Fort Worth and tried to start her life over. She met a truck driver when she was seventeen, a man twenty years older, someone who seemed kind and said the right things. They got married. Then he began beating her regularly. She took it for three years before leaving in the middle of the night, changing her name, and settling in Baton Rouge. There had been more tumultuous relationships, more drugs, more abuse, more running. New Orleans. Biloxi. Birmingham. Pensacola. Tampa. Shreveport. Beaumont. Houston.
I was bawling like a child when I finished the file.
I folded the paperwork, stuffed it in my back pocket, and left the closet.
I found her in a rec room a few minutes later. She was watching TV by herself in the corner. Some old game show. I stared at her through a window for ten minutes, still wondering if I wanted to open up this wound. It was painful, as Natalie suggested. She compared it to having to break my own arm again, after it had been shattered and healed incorrectly, so that it could be reset properly by a real doctor and heal the right way. I knew Natalie was right. I had to break my own heart wide open if I ever wanted full use of it. The thought scared the hell out of me. She wore pale green scrubs like all of the other patients, but she looked much better than the photo in her file. She had put on some much-needed weight the past month and there was more color in her cheeks.
I sucked it up, pushed through the rec room door. I decided to walk right over before I lost my nerve and it all slipped away again. She looked up at me without any recognition. The first thing I noticed up close was her eyes. They were my eyes. As blue as the sky. Then I noticed the simple small tattoo on the back of her left wrist. SAMUEL. The name facing up to her.
She didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. She seemed confused.
“Ma’am, my name is Sam Callahan. I’m your son.”
She cried for nearly ten minutes. In between breaths, she just kept quietly repeating, “My Samuel, I can’t believe it.” There were no hugs, but she took my hand in hers, just held it for a second. It took every fiber of my strength to not join her in crying. I wouldn’t let her have that yet. Maybe ever. She asked if we could go for a walk, that she needed a cigarette. We went out the back to an enclosed garden area. Several other patients were out there smoking. She asked how I found her, so I told her, but I left out a lot of details. She recounted our story — the same story I’d read in the file. I gave her bits and pieces of my life up to that point. She kept saying how sorry she was at every lull in the conversation, of which there were many. I resisted the urge to ask her why she had never come to look for me. I held a lot back. I didn’t trust her. She promised she was done with the drugs. They had taken decades from her life. I knew every drug addict says that and usually falls back into that life eventually.
I drifted in and out of acting soft and then hard, depending on the moment. I just couldn’t help myself. The emotions were overwhelming. One moment, I wanted to cry and wrap my arms around her. The next moment, I wanted to curse her out, run away, and never look back, like she did. She kept grabbing my hand and wanting to hold it. I kept politely pulling it away from her. A nurse came out looking for her, said it was time for her group session.
I wasn’t sure what was next. I felt numb.
“Will you come see me again, Samuel?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I’m supposed to fly back to DC tomorrow.”
She nodded. “Can we keep in touch?”
My moment of truth. I could say no and it would be okay. I would have fulfilled what Natalie wanted me to do. I could bury this and not have to deal with it anymore. But my heart wouldn’t let me.
“I’ll leave my phone number and email.”
She grabbed my hand again. This time, I let her hold it for a few seconds.
Thirty minutes later, I was back in my hotel room with Natalie.
I didn’t have to say much. The tears came quickly. I couldn’t help it. I’d been holding them back. They were thick and filled with such deep and conflicting emotions. Natalie didn’t say anything. She just let me cry, wrapped in her arms. She cried along with me. We held each other without a word for a really long time.
SAM CALLAHAN
Age Twenty-Four
Washington, DC
The call came on a Tuesday, right before my Constitutional Law class.
In the past two months, my mom exited the rehab program and managed to stay sober while finding some steady work as an administrative assistant at a small construction company. Natalie and I had visited her a second time while we were still in Houston. My mother even took the Greyhound up to see me this past weekend — she was scared of flying. It was really rocky at different points. Natalie was a tremendous buffer to have around. She knew how to say the right things, keep conversation moving, and just play nice. I did not. I was still so angry, so I said some things at times that I shouldn’t have said. My mom always took it in stride. Like it or not, we were each other’s only family. So we were desperately trying to persevere through these early days of our new relationship.
She called me several times a week. I returned most of the calls.
I don’t know why I answered this one. I was already really late for class. My mom had not been feeling well the past month. She couldn’t shake it, so she’d gotten some tests done. I think that thought was stuck in the back of my head and compelled me to answer.
“Hey, Mom,” I said. I’d started calling her that this past weekend. It was a breakthrough for me. For us. “Listen, I’m already late for class. Can I call you back later?”
“It’s cancer, Samuel.”
Her words struck me like a strong fist to the gut.
“What…? What do
you mean?”
“The tests came back today. Just met with the doctor. He called it Stage three CLL, chronic lymphocytic leukemia.”
I slowly sat on the sofa in my apartment, my legs weak. Cancer?
“You there?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Now, I don’t want you to worry about me, okay?” she continued. “I’m going to be just fine. I can handle this. I just thought you should know, that’s all.”
“Okay…thanks.” It’s all I could say. The wind had been sucked out of me.
“Get to your class now. I’ll call you later.”
She hung up. I didn’t move. I was numb.
Three weeks later, I was packing up a small U-Haul right outside her apartment in Houston. After her diagnosis, I had wrestled with what to do for a week. I hadn’t asked for this. I was so pissed at God again. Give me back my mom only to take her away again? Really? It felt like too much on top of everything else. I so desperately wanted to cut the cord, walk away, put the wall back up, and just move on with my life. But I couldn’t do it. And Natalie wouldn’t let me, either. So I finally asked my mom to move to DC to get her treatment near me, so I could better help care for her. She stubbornly refused for more than a week. She said she could take care of her own damn self, that she didn’t need a handout, or for me or anyone else to feel sorry for her. I swear I could hear my own voice in hers. We were both stubborn as hell.
When her health worsened suddenly, I told her I was coming down to drag her back to DC with me, and she finally relented.
I shut the back of the U-Haul, sealed the door tight.
“That everything?” I asked her.
She nodded. “That’s it. Let’s get on with this.”
She wore a blue handkerchief over her head, coveralls, and she was sweating profusely. I kept telling her to take it easy, to rest, but she kept pushing back. It was a constant wrestling match. We’d given away most of her cheap old furniture to her neighbors. We were only taking a bed, a dresser, her favorite recliner, and boxes of her personal belongings. That’s all that could fit into her room at the new medical facility. She said goodbye to an old neighbor lady, and then we climbed into the U-Haul together. I started up the engine, my mom in the passenger seat next to me. I did not have Natalie in between us as my buffer. She was on a deadline for a big story, plus she thought it might do me some good to have one-on-one time with my mother.