Sam

“Sam. I was never. The same. Your Sam. I was never.”

No matter how many times I say it, no matter how many ways, she refuses to understand me. Is it willful ignorance? Does she know the truth, at heart? I suspect so, but I also don’t blame her. Under my heavy covers, inside my shell of crackled, glassy skin, I shudder as I imagine what she feels.

The September light paints her in ethereal hues, this woman, seated at my bedside. She smiles sadly. Crow’s feet. Her eyes—what color?—not honey, exactly, not hazel. Shafts of wheat in late afternoon sun. But they are not my eyes.

“He was on a mission trip, to Honduras,” she explains to our guests, a reporter and photographer from the paper. “Nearly three years ago now.”

The reporter nods her sweet compassion; the photographer has his camera half-cocked. I’m sure the shot would be compelling, but maybe he thinks it would be rude.

“Not Sam,” I manage, though it pains me. “Never the Sam. I was never.”

I have no lips. Barely a tongue left. My noises must be horrible, but I know I can be understood. Still, she refuses to hear.

“Does he speak much?” the reporter asks. She is careful to knit her brow, to show her concern, but her disgust registers just beneath the surface as she glances my way. Sludge in a placid river.

“Some,” the woman says, and she turns to consider me. God, that look; more painful than the burns, the grafts, the amputations. Love that lies to itself. “But the doctors say he doesn’t really understand what happened to him. He was without oxygen for several minutes. They say he may not even know who he is anymore.”

I moan at that. She lays her hand lightly on mine.

My memories of my own mother—my real mother—are disjointed at best, splintered reflections in funhouse mirrors. She would show up now and then, tell my father she was going to take me away, and he’d send her running with the kind of violence he normally reserved for me. She was a drug addict and a whore, or so he’d tell me afterward. She wanted money, not me—welfare kickbacks to put straight in her veins.

“The FBI says it wasn’t terrorism,” the woman continues. “They say a cartel, something called the Sinaloa, thought the house was owned by a rival gang. So they burned it down.”

The reporter leans forward.

“And your boy was the only … ?”

The woman looks at me and smiles. So grateful. So relieved.

“He was the only one who made it back.”

So wrong.

I knew her son. He was a straight-laced kid; a little naïve, but goodhearted. He and I got along better than anyone else, maybe exactly because we were so different. He with his loving family … his privilege, his future. Me with my traumas and resentments and worldly grit.

He’d often talked about his mom. How overprotective she was. How fragile. How they’d lost his father to the Gulf War. He spoke kindly, but he wasn’t nearly grateful enough. I would have praised her with my every word, this woman. For three years she’s come to my bedside; I would’ve smothered me with a pillow after a week.

“I didn’t want to believe it,” she says, so softly her voice has almost disappeared. “The first few months I would look in his eyes, watch them watching me. I wanted so badly to see him in there. The boy that he was. I would beg him—isn’t that foolish?—I would beg him just to come back. To be my boy again. To let me be his mother.”

I want to scream. I want to tear out of my skin, sit up and scream it: I saw him burn! I saw his hands split from the heat, just before mine did the same! I saw him dying in glass and cinders under impossible smoke. Your son is dead, and I came out!

A vicious trade. Her son for me. The rawest deal God ever made, and he’d foisted it on a saint.

“Not,” I lurch, exasperated. Exhausted. I’m in a prison of mangled words, a prison of nothing at all, but it’s strong enough to hold me. “Sam. I was never. I wasn’t.”

Still, no matter how many times I say it, she refuses to understand. She swallows her tears and lets loose a sigh that may as well be carrying the last of her soul.

“But Sam was never the same again.”

I never intend for these stories to get so heavy, but then they take on a life of their own. My apologies!

This one is my entry for this week’s Speakeasy prompt. A good group of writers take part, so I highly suggest you click the link and see what the rest have come up with this week.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments below! And if you’re hungry for more (how could you not be … ?) give some of my other stories a try.