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I sat in the booth, where I sat every single time our circle of ladies wanted to brunch. Generally, I tried to keep up with the conversation, but today I was inextricably distracted. My son, the boy I have loved his whole life, was sitting just ten feet from me for the first time in over a decade. We had seen him at his college graduation, of course, but stayed well in the shadows so we didn’t ruin his special day. Not that you would have known it was special by watching him accepting his degree. He was like a machine that entire day, showing no excitement, no relief, no joy, just simply…existing. It tore at me that even after all the time that had passed, he still wasn’t living. I thought being away from Chicago might help, that’s why I didn’t really argue when he chose to go so far away for college. That was only reason I was able to stand him being gone from us again. In his sympathy for us, the dean of Ethan’s college sent us regular emails on his progress – both social and academic. Over the course of his time there, Ethan was an excellent student, quiet but extraordinarily bright – but had no social interaction with others. He spent all of his time alone.
Now, he was here on some conference, apparently having lunch with a couple of co-workers. At least he’s starting to interact socially with others. That’s a step in the right direction. I watched him and his two companions unashamedly, and was confused by their interactions. The girl, a pretty brunette, kept putting her hand on Ethan’s as she laughed. I felt a small stab of jealousy at this unknown girl because I had never been allowed to touch Ethan when he came back, not even to comfort him. I had to wait until he was completely under to stroke his hair while he was sleeping. So many times I sat watching, helpless, as he fought his demons while he dreamed.
I was thankful that I was sitting to his side and not his back so that I could at least see his profile. I don’t know what he would have done if he’d seen me, but this way I could at least see him. When he turned to his male companion, the blond whose back was to me, I nearly looked away so he wouldn’t catch me watching. Then, something caught my attention, and I just couldn’t look away.
There was a light in Ethan’s eyes.
As he laughed at his friend’s remark, I saw a shadow of the boy I had lost. It reminded me forcibly of the night we’d received the call that Ethan had been found.
I hadn’t slept in eight years. I couldn’t sleep. My body just shut down periodically because it must, but I wouldn’t have called it sleep. More often than not, I was closer to the waking dead. It was on one of those nights when I lay awake, Ethan snoring beside me, that I tried to picture EJ in his baseball uniform. The panic built when I couldn’t remember the finer details of the little red and white shirt that he wore. My panic had started to accelerate into hyperventilation when the phone rang. I looked over at the bedside table and saw that it was nearly two am.
Oh God. No. Please.
I reached for the phone, my hand shaking so badly that I nearly knocked it off the table. Ethan’s arm slid around my waist, as he asked if I wanted him to answer it. I brushed him off, and held the phone up to my ear.
“Hello?” I greeted, my voice trembling. Please, please don’t tell me that he’s dead, please. I can take anything but dead.
“Mrs. Charity Hughes?” the voice requested. He sounded young, and nervous. They wouldn’t have put a rookie on the phone for a notification if he were dead, would they?
“This is Charity Hughes,” I responded automatically, and then thought to add “is this about Ethan?” Please, let him be alive.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and then without hesitation, knowing that I didn’t want to drag it out of him, continued. “This is Officer Harris with the Chicago police, your son was found in Fleetwood, Colorado…“ I couldn’t stand it, so I interrupted him. He hadn’t said your son’s body, but I needed to hear him say it.
“Is he alright?” I asked softly, my voice cracking on the last word.
“Yes, ma’am, he appears to be uninjured. He landed at O’Hare about twenty minutes ago, and is on his way to police headquarters.”
“We will be there in fifteen minutes.” I told him after getting the address, and began to push Ethan out of bed. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind until I said the one thing he’d been waiting eight long years to hear – “Our son is coming home.” After I relayed the content of the conversation, he didn’t need any kind of prodding. We threw on the first things we could find, and raced down to the garage. Thankfully, Ethan knew exactly where the police station was, and we were there in less than fifteen minutes. I don’t think I’d ever seen Ethan drive so fast. Most of the time he buried his feelings deep, but it was clear, in this instant, that he was desperate to see his boy.
The steps to the station were full of reporters and cameramen as we nearly flew up them. They were throwing questions at me left and right as we tried to push through them. I just wanted them to get out of the way so I could see my son. Finally, one soft spoken woman told me quietly that Ethan wasn’t there yet. The police escort from O’Hare was still a few minutes away. Ignoring the rude men trying to question us, I made my way back down to the center of the stairs, and waited. When the vultures around me realized that I wasn’t going to speak, they quieted, until we saw the lights from the motorcade bringing Ethan. I waited, not very patiently, for it to stop in front of the steps, and for them to open the back door. He got out slowly, his eyes darting around him like a cornered animal. Once he’d stepped out, one of the officers closed the door with a slam, and Ethan jerked and looked back.
They led him up the stairs to me, and as he looked up I saw that my worst fears had been confirmed.
My son was dead.
The light in his eyes was gone, and he was merely just walking. I stifled a sob, ran down the few stairs still between us, throwing my arms around him. He stiffened, and tried to back away. All of the flashbulbs started going off, and that’s how they got their perfect image of a boy and his mother reunited. They had no idea he was trying to wrestle his way out of my arms. We were led into the station where they wanted to question him about his abduction, and talk about how he’d escaped. My son was sitting off in the corner, not wanting to be with the rest of us at the table. He had his knees pulled up to his chest, trying to make himself as small as possible.
After a while, an elderly policewoman took me off to the side. “We didn’t want to talk about this in front of your son, but we’re going to need to take him for medical attention.”
“They told us he was uninjured??” I asked, scared now.
“Your son was held by a sexual predator for nearly eight years. It is possible that he could have contracted something, or need other kinds of help…” she said knowingly.
And there it was.
My boy, my innocent eight year-old boy had been raped repeatedly for years.
Of course, I knew when I saw his eyes, but to have it laid out for me like that was unspeakably painful. And from there, the pain only got worse. They allowed Ethan to stay huddled in the corner as he spoke in a frighteningly detached monotone about his rescue of the small boy his abductor had tried to force him to take. Ethan wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say his name, but he said he couldn’t let it another boy’s life be ruined. When they asked Ethan about his own abuse he had refused to speak. No amount of coaxing, threatening, or even bargaining, would get him to talk about it in any way.
After two hours, I told them it was enough, that we wanted to get Ethan home. Just after five in the morning, we walked out of the police station under guard with our son by our side. Soon, we were home, and EJ looked around curiously as we went through the foyer. It was like our home, his home, was a place he had visited, but didn’t quite remember. As we wandered from room to room, just my son and me, Ethan went upstairs to find him something to sleep in. He was afraid that his presence might startle EJ – that anything was liable to startle him right now. When we walked into the sitting room, something, hope maybe, flickered across my son’s face as his eyes fell on his piano. In an instant, however, it was gone. He sat down at the bench and very tentatively, very delicately ran his fingers along the surface of each perfectly polished key. I made sure to keep this piano perfectly tuned and polished, waiting for this moment when my baby would come home. It almost looked as if we wanted to play, his fingers bent slightly, reflexively as he traced the lines of the keys.
I laid my hands on his shoulders, as I had done since he was old enough to sit at the piano. Tensing, he jerked forward away from me. He must have heard my quiet surprised gasp because without turning around he said very quietly, “I…I’m sorry. I just…I don’t like to be touched.”
It made me hate the bastard that took him that much more. What could he have done to my son that would cause him to flinch like that at his own mother’s embrace?
Ethan brought down an older pair of sleep pants and a T-shirt for EJ to sleep in and I brought them to his room. He was examining a model that he and little Gabriel from down the street had built the summer before he had disappeared. When he saw me, he dropped it back onto the desk and apologized.
“Ethan, honey, this is your room,” I told him quietly, patiently. “Everything in here is yours.” He nodded and took the pajamas into the bathroom to change. I went to the closet in the hall and grabbed an extra toothbrush and other toiletries and towels. When EJ opened the door in the too large clothes, he looked like a lost little boy, shell shocked, and terrified. I handed him the stuff I’d brought him from the closet, and he make quick work of cleaning up.
When he crawled into his bed, the sheets still covered in rocket ships and planets, I asked him if I could stay for a while. It looked like he wanted to argue, but finally just nodded and then rolled over with his back to me, pulling the covers almost over his head. As he sobbed and whimpered in his sleep, pleading for it to stop, it was the first time in my life that I wondered at just how much further my heart could break.
My Ethan, the man that I hardly knew, now swatted his companion’s hand away from the check with a laugh.
My Ethan had laughed.
I don’t even remember the last time I had seen, or heard, that. Then, as he turned to hand the check back to the server, our eyes locked. Recognition dawned in his eyes, the eyes that were alive with something again. As we continued to watch each other, I began to rise from the table. Then, one of the servers passed between us, and the connection was broken. He bolted for the door, as if he were terrified to be in the same room with me. Choking back tears, I ran after him and out of the corner of my eye saw his shocked friends follow. I didn’t care about them; I didn’t care about anything except the fact that I had caught up with him; my son was only feet from me.
Remembering that he didn’t like to be touched, but seeing that he let his companions touch him, I laid a tentative hand on his arm. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and then opening them again, looked at me. I tried not to feel rejected by his attitude, but it was hard.
“Ethan?” I asked softly, and he looked down into my face. I smiled at him, just as his friends came barreling through the door, putting themselves between us. In a way, I was gratified that he had found such caring friends, but I wasn’t going to let him leave without talking to me. So, when they began to pull him away, I put my foot down. I wasn’t going to let them take him away, not now.
“Ethan Hughes,” I said sternly, and he stopped, still looking at the ground. For a moment, in my heart, he was that scared little boy again. The blond haired man said that I was mistaken, that his name was Bryant and they were from out of state. That floored me, like I wouldn’t know my own son. I told him as much, and then I turned to Ethan and I wanted to ask him how he was, but the first question that popped out was how long he’d been here. How long had we been in the same city with no call, no visit? How much time had I lost with him?
“A while,” he said in an expressionless voice, like he was just trying to forestall the inevitable.
Oh my God, he’d been living here. He’d come back to Chicago, and probably never even thought about coming to visit us. What kind of horrible mother was I that my own son runs from me, avoids me? I tried to control myself by moving the subject to his friends. Noticing how close they were, I wanted to know more about them. How had they gotten through to him when no one else ever had? The blond boy was Jayden, and the girl was Lexi. They seemed very sweet, and the boy apologized for defending my Ethan. He needn’t have bothered. I took my son’s hand and asked him how long he was going to be in town. He hedged for a moment and then admitted that he wasn’t sure, that he was staying with his friends and that he had stopped being a doctor. There was something wrong, something terribly wrong, and I couldn’t let him leave without securing some kind of promise that I would see him again. My heart ached at the thought that this would be the last time we saw each other.
Searching, trying to find something, anything, to get him to come to, I recalled Sunday brunch, maybe seeing his friend Gabriel would help, they had always been close as children. I blurted the invitation out, almost begging him to come, even telling him to bring his friends since he felt so comfortable with them. If they were there, and we sat them near the alcove in the back, he might be more comfortable. I would have done anything just to know that I could see him again. Finally, he agreed, and he called me mom.
It was everything I could do not to burst into tears.
Not knowing if he would call and cancel, I thought this might be my one shot to tell him how I felt-I had to make sure that he knew, above all else that I loved him. I loved him more than anything or anyone else in the world. His face softened and I held my arms out, just like I used to when he was a boy. Then, to my surprise he stepped forward slowly and wrapped his arms around me. Kissing me lightly on the cheek, he whispered that he loved me too.
He loved me.
He hadn’t said that to me since before he was taken, and I had been waiting nearly twenty years to hear it.
I watched as he and his friends walked over to a little Volvo, and then I turned and found my car. I’d call later and explain to the ladies where I’d gone. Climbing into the driver’s seat, I made it just long enough for the door to close before I started to sob. My little boy had come home.
My Ethan, my EJ, had come home, finally, after all this time.
Even if he did not know it himself yet, for the first time since he was eight-years old, I had my son back.
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