And then, two simple herons, birds of majesty and delicacy. A winged picture of fidelity and forbearance that flew away, away, into the spring rain that was not rain exactly, but tears of exquisite emotion, to the empress’s iris garden, where the ghosts of other herons lived.
* * *
Empty Vessels
by David B. Silva
First off, I guess I should let you know right up front that my mother was not a woman you’d consider for sainthood. When I was a boy, she referred to herself as a lady of the evening. It wasn’t until the fifth grade, when Paul Whittaker called her a whore, that I first began to understand the true meaning of her self-reference. I had always assumed that the night was her playground, that she liked the full moon and the darkness and the dim streetlights, that she was like a cat, nocturnal in her nature, sleeping during the day, out prowling at night. And all that was true, I suppose. Just not in the way that I understood it.
But Paul Whittaker straightened me out.
Whore.
My mother the whore.
I never could bring myself to use that word—whore. It was not the way I would have described her. Though looking back now, I doubt I would have described her as a lady of the evening, either. She was neither of those, and she was both of them.
Beyond the semantics, though, was this: there wasn’t an eleven-year-old alive who wanted to hear that his mother was a whore. Or that his father was a stranger, a man who had driven out of the night in an old pickup, done his business, then disappeared again, never to return. Or that as much as his mother loved him, he had been a surprise to her. Given the choice, she would have preferred not to have been a mother at all.
My mother did love me, though, as much as she could, and I confess I would have liked to have had more time with her.
I was eleven—going on thirty-three, as she liked to say—the night my mother’s soul was taken. It was a school night. I had gone to bed around nine, after finishing my homework and watching an hour or so of television. Mom had been “out”—something else she liked to say. Exactly when she had returned, I’m not sure, but it was a little after eleven when something stirred me out of my sleep. I sat up, listening intently, feeling the cool night air against my skin. Outside, there was the soft whistle of wind through the branches of the walnut tree in the backyard. Inside, it was as if the house were holding its breath; everything had fallen under the spell of a hush.
“Mom?”
It had been raining on and off for several days. Through the curtains, I saw the sky above the tenement across the way light up with a flash of lightning. The darkness in my bedroom scurried back under the bed and into the corners, and I found myself counting out the seconds—almost five—before the thunder hit. It hit with the crack of a whip, followed closely by a long, low grumbling noise that sounded a little like Grandpa Edmonds when he was fussing about a salesclerk or a waitress.
And then I heard a cry.
It was like nothing I had ever heard before. Not a shriek or a scream, but a whimper that sounded oddly submissive. And it had come from my mother’s room.
I had heard noises from that end of the house before, strange sounds that I had mostly chosen to ignore. I guess I’d always had a general idea of what was going on when she brought men home, though maybe not the specifics. Maybe not the reasons why. But I knew it was something to be kept behind closed doors, away from a young boy’s curiosity. My mother might have brought home lots of guys, but she had never been ugly about it. She had always been discreet. She had always tried to shield me.
But this was different.
“Mom?”
It came again—softer this time—as I made my way down the hall. Outside her door, I pressed my ear against the cool surface and held my breath. It was quiet on the other side, so quiet I could hear my heart pounding in my chest. It was something I had never done before, but finally I reached out and tried the knob. My hands were shaking. The latch slipped. The door swung silently open an inch, maybe two, and suddenly there was just enough of an opening that I could see into the darkness.
There was a soft glow pouring in through the window from a streetlight. I could see the blocklike silhouette of my mother’s bed, the sheets rumpled, the pillows out of place. For a moment, I thought she hadn’t come home yet. Everything was dark and perfectly still. Then a flash of lightning exploded outside. The room brightened, and I saw the pale gray form of a man rise up off the bed. He arched his back, threw back his head, and drew in a huge uninterrupted breath.
I shrank back.
“Jesus, Blaine.”
That was my mother, talking to the stranger. There was a mix of anger and unease in her voice, something I had heard only once before, after she had come home all swollen and bleeding from a beating some John had given her. She had kept the curtains drawn, the house dark, for nearly a week after that. And for a while longer, she had even insisted that she’d finally had enough, that she was ready to make some major changes in her life. She had said that before and, like all the other times, there had been no change, things had continued merrily on their way. And now, as I listened, it sounded faintly as if they had brought her back full circle.
The stranger whispered something in response, something I couldn’t quite hear, then he lowered himself back into the shadows of the bed. My mother moaned, not unpleasantly. I sat back, toying with the idea of going back to bed. It wasn’t the first time she had brought someone home, and I was sure it wouldn’t be the last. Maybe I had been wrong. Maybe what I had heard in her voice hadn’t been unease at all. Though something did seem different.
If I had gone back to bed, I suppose it wouldn’t have made any difference. Nothing would have changed. Except that I wouldn’t have been a witness then, and maybe it would have been easier to put it all away without the nightmares.
But I didn’t go back to bed.
I stayed and watched and eventually saw the outline of my mother in the Picasso of shadows and light. She was lying on her back, a soft glow of outside light falling across her breasts. I had seen her naked once before, when I was five or six and had walked in while she was bathing. To be honest, I didn’t remember the occasion. But my mother liked to tease me about it when she got together with her sisters. “He started to unbutton his shirt,” she would say. “And I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ‘You look lonely, mommy.’ He was all set to climb right in with me.” She had always thought that was hilarious, though I had never been able to find the humor in it myself.
Now, she was lying perfectly still, her eyes closed, her mouth slightly open.
The stranger, who was lying on top of her, gazed darkly into her eyes as if he were trying to catch a glimpse of her soul. “What makes you happy?” he asked suddenly. His voice was low and smooth, and I thought how easy it would be to believe in the words spoken by a voice like his. “You do,” my mother said disingenuously. “You make me happy.”
“No. The truth.”
“Honest,” she whispered, running her hand across his chest.
“No, you don’t understand, Eve. I’m not looking for a compliment. I’m looking for the truth. I want you to tell me what makes you happy. Truly happy.”
My mother’s hand fell away from his chest, and though I couldn’t read her expression, I imagined by the tone of her voice that she had been surprised by his question. “Me?”
“Yes, you.”
She turned her head away from me, staring thoughtfully out the window. “My boy, Marshall. He makes me happy.”
The stranger nodded with apparent satisfaction. Then he took in another deep, uninterrupted breath, as if he thought he could inhale her happiness. “Ah… yes,” he said, lowering himself again. I could see the glisten of sweat on his bare back, and I heard my mother let out a soft, muffled cry.
There’s no pleasure in that sound, I remember thinking. I glanced back down the hall at my open bedroom door. I had left the light on. My pillow was rumpled. The sheets on the bed we
re pulled back. That room seemed a thousand miles away now. I had left it in innocence, but I would go back…
There was another cry from my mother.
They had begun to work themselves into an uneasy rhythm now, two strangers trying to get to know one another. Their movements became oddly choreographed, as if they were both mechanically rehearsing a dance they had learned a long time ago and were waiting for it to overtake them.
Another flash of lightning swept into the room. I saw the man run the tip of his tongue across her belly. He licked his lips, savoring the taste, then continued up her body, between her breasts and along her neckline.
“Easy,” he said.
A thrust, deeper.
She moaned.
The stranger’s face twisted into an ugly grin, and then I witnessed something, something that I still don’t fully understand. He opened his mouth as if he were going to yawn, his jaw nearly coming unhinged, and he began to draw the breath from my mother’s mouth. It came from her in the form of a long, greenish gold stream of light that lifted her several inches off the bed. What it was… to be honest, I didn’t know what it was. Her spirit. Her love. Whatever it is that makes a person real and alive. He took it all in, like a man taking a hit from some fine Jamaican weed, and when he was done, my mother fell emptily back into the mattress.
The stranger shuddered, and caught his breath.
I think I might have shuddered, too. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was that I had witnessed. Something horrible, it seemed. Though at eleven, the world was still full of mysteries, and for all I knew, this was just one more of those things that would someday make perfect sense to me. I wanted to believe that, but I think I shuddered anyway.
I don’t know what happened in the room after that. I had seen enough. I had seen more than enough. So I left the door slightly ajar and scrambled back to my bedroom, where I turned off the light and buried myself under the covers. When you’re eleven, you’re supposed to be too old to believe in hiding under the covers. But that didn’t matter, and in the end who really knows anyway? Maybe those covers were the only thing that kept me alive.
I stayed under them until my muscles ached from not moving. By then, a couple of hours had passed, maybe more. The house had long since fallen quiet.
It was still dark out. The rain had stopped. The night temperatures had left the room unseasonably cold. I didn’t want to get up, but eventually I was able to scoot out from beneath the covers and cross the floor. I peered down the hallway. At the far end, there was a faint pattern of light forming a misshapen rectangle across the floor.
It was a while longer before I ventured down the hall again. I stopped and listened at my mother’s door, heard nothing, then pushed it open until I was certain the stranger was no longer in the room. Unless, of course, he was hiding in the shadows, a possibility I thought unlikely. He was not a man who hid from anything, I imagined. Still, I fumbled quickly for the light switch.
I’m not sure exactly what I expected to find. That the stranger was gone, certainly. That my mother was sleeping peacefully and everything was all right, that was my hope. That she was dead… well, as much as I hate to admit it, that was the single worst thought I had allowed myself to consider.
And the stranger was gone.
And my mother was not dead. But she looked as if she had come back from the dead. She looked like one of those wax figures you see in museums, pasty and glassy-eyed and not quite right. Her cheeks, which had lost their fullness, resembled loose skin stretched across a crudely made drum. There was drool running down her chin, and her Adam’s apple bobbed horridly as she tried to swallow.
The stranger had left the sheets pulled back. I could see her breathing was shallow, and embarrassed more than I should have been, I used a blanket to cover her breasts.
No, she wasn’t dead.
But she wasn’t alive, either.
It’s been nearly thirty-five years since that night. My mother lives in a convalescent home on the south side. Physically, she functions just fine, though she doesn’t get around as easily as she once did and her doctor told me last week that she’s developing a cataract in one eye. Nothing out of the ordinary for a woman in her mid-sixties.
But it had never been her physical state that had troubled me.
After her encounter with Mr. Jeffries—that was his name, as I was eventually able to discover: Blaine Jeffries. Sounds a bit aristocratic, doesn’t it? A man of royalty, maybe?—anyway, after her encounter, my mother had never been the same. He had left her alive and breathing and with a hole in her heart the size of the Grand Canyon. He had left her an autistic child, emotionally vacant, a woman who could only look past you, never directly at you.
The morning after was a strange timeless dream. I don’t know exactly when I became aware of the fact that I was alone with my mother and that things had changed, that in the darkness of the night my world had been turned upside down like an hourglass and presently I was the parent and my mother was the child. Eventually, when I finally did make that realization, I called my aunt.
She called an ambulance.
The doctors at County General kept my mother for a couple of weeks. Her room was on the third floor at the end of the hall, with a window that overlooked the parking lot. I spent a good many hours standing at that window, peering down at the people climbing out of their cars. Even then, I had started looking for him, I guess.
There was a battery of tests, I remember. Mostly neurological and psychological, according to my aunt, who tried to explain things to me as they were happening. Neither one of us really understood, though. I’m not sure the doctors understood, either.
“Apoplexy,” the doctor said, at the end of a long day of testing. “That’s the best we can come up with.”
My aunt stared at him, obviously not catching what he was saying.
“A stroke,” he tried to clarify. “Apparently a blood vessel in the brain broke. When that happens, there’s a sudden paralysis, a loss of consciousness, and sometimes a loss of feeling.”
“A loss of feeling,” my aunt repeated numbly.
“Yes.”
I think it was then that she began to understand more than the doctors. It wasn’t a loss of feeling my mother had experienced, like when you wake up in the middle of the night and your toes are all tingly and you realize your foot’s asleep. It was more like waking up in the middle of the night and realizing that the world was an empty place and you didn’t give a damn one way or the other, because you couldn’t feel anything.
No love. No hate.
No joy. No sorrow.
Nothing.
That was my mother.
My aunt made the arrangements for the convalescent home. It was a nice place, run by an Italian couple who tried to keep things comfortable and homey. When I went to visit, usually on Sundays, there was always the fragrance of oregano and parmesan in the air. Nothing like the hospital mouthwashy odor I had come to hate so much after her stay at County General. I was grateful for that. I think my mother would have been grateful, too, if she were capable of being grateful.
Things never did return to what you might call normal.
I lived with my aunt, and I guess you could say gradually we worked ourselves into a comfortable routine together. It was a better life for a young boy. Someone always around. No late-night visitors with a few extra bucks and a long list of fantasies.
After I graduated from high school, I moved out and found myself a studio apartment in a neighboring town. I worked at a print shop during the day and attended community college at night, taking one class at a time until I was eventually able to earn an architectural engineering degree through the state university. At the Eleventh Annual Greenhaven Arts & Crafts Faire, I met Elizabeth Banner, a beautiful, joyful young woman who I eventually fell in love with and married. We had two children: Ben, who is now thirteen, bright, and plays a wicked game of tennis; and Julie, who is eleven and loves horses and just about any movie starrin
g Corey Haim.
It’s a long, long way from the world where I grew up.
But there isn’t a day that goes by when my thoughts aren’t drawn back to that dreadful night when Mr. Blaine Jeffries stole my mother’s soul.
When I hit my mid-forties, I went through what a pop psychologist might call a hidden-trauma crisis. Over a period of several weeks, I was haunted by a recurring nightmare that took me back to that night outside my mother’s bedroom. I was kneeling, trying to catch a glimpse through the crack in the door, when the door suddenly swung wide open. Jeffries, who was startled nearly as much as I, turned in my direction, his lips curled back, fangs exposed. He growled at me.
“Too late,” he said, the words coming from deep in his throat.
I fell back against the wall, the impact sending a sharp pain through my shoulder blades, a pain I hardly noticed at the time.
“There’s nothing left for little boys.”
He laughed, his voice gruff and irritating, and gradually I became aware of another voice, a soft soprano, joining in. It was my mother.
She sat up, using her sticklike arms as leverage against the bed. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes distended, and she looked not just malnourished but like a flower, dry and near death. It was almost as if I could see her wilting right before my eyes.
“Nothing left,” she said weakly. “Not even for you, Marshall.”
And then I would wake up. I’d be drenched from a night sweat, and the dream would still be lingering in the fore of my mind. Sometimes I’d be able to close my eyes and fall back to sleep again, but most of the time I’d end up downstairs at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and trying to forget.
I knew what she meant when she said there was nothing left.
She meant she had no love left.
And that, I suppose, had been true enough.
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