Goodbye

I watched him walk away, a laundry bag draped across his back like a cross. His shuffle, inexorably slowed by defeat, made the 30 feet from car to corner seem like 100. He’d exited the car after mumbling the first coherent sentences of the day, the first not delivered through a haze of angry tears.

“Tell the doctor I am sorry I couldn’t come to Thanksgiving dinner,” he had said as he pulled his possessions -- the laundry, a knapsack, old boots -- from the car. “Have a good day. We’ll talk, soon, Mom."

I had no response. For the first time in how long, a life time? I could not speak for fear of years’ worth of screams replacing words. I hated. The day, the life, the relationship. I could still smell the stench of alcohol mixed with vomit and defeat, and it made me crazy with anger. Even when he’d  closed the back door of the car, even after I’d rolled down the passenger-side window as if willing myself to speak, I could not. Not even when he leaned in through from the chill and said, “Goodbye, Mom."

Then he walked away, down the driveway toward the back of the Sober House. It was where he said he wanted to be. “I just want to go home,” he cried over and over before planting himself in the passenger seat more than an hour earlier. “I never wanted to do this. I just want to go home.”

Moments before, he’d come into the kitchen. We were minutes away from leaving for Thankgiving dinner with friends, my doctor and his lovely family. I’d been touched by the invitation, all the more so because I’d been told it included Josh. My friend knew how tortured I was by the thought of spending a fourth straight Thanksgiving away from my son, a real possibility since we two had had yet another fight and parting just a week before. My friend has so much wisdom. He’d said if I chose not to talk to my son about the Thanksgiving we’d been longing for, it could be bad. Then, he cautioned, it could be worse if we did meet and it went wrong.

It went wrong.

The moment he joined me, at a bit before midnight Tuesday, I was overwhelmed by the smell of liquor, and the sight of surrender. He was zombie-like, then soon asleep, leaving me to my desperate thoughts as I made the hour-long drive to my home. The radio, cranked high, did not disturb him. I needed life, I needed beauty, so I listened to Alfie, his booming voice speaking to love, to responsibility, to the life every vibrant note represented.

By the time we reached Ellington, my son had awakened. He poked at the trunk latch, again, and again, before asking me to unlock it. I said “it’s already open,” my voice fighting hard against the anger and shock. For he could not even see that the trunk lid was rising up to meet him even as he poked at the lock, again and again and again.

Eyes that can’t see, a mind that cannot register, those were signs I ‘d never wanted to witnesss in him, again. The same signs he said he’d never wanted to see in himself, either. He’d learned so much in three years of forced sobriety, he swore. He didn’t like the old self, the old demons, the DTs, the hangovers and gutwrenching illnesses. He did not like the degredation that was his life, a pitiful portrait he could only see when sober. Yet it was that shattered soul who once again stood before me, back in my home, back in the cracks of my shattered heart.  Back where I swore that person would never be able to return, again.

By Wednesday, we were socked in, by a snowstorm and disquieting silences. Small talk did not exist. He took to the loft, I sought peace in my bedroom. He never ate, even though we shopped for a nice dinner. When it came time to cook -- his pastime -- he could not pretend. Instead, he just neatened the kitchen and returned to his solitude.

By midnight, the storm had pretty much paralyzed the area, yet I found him in the kitchen with coat and hat on. Where was he going, what was he thinking?

“I need a cigarette,” he said.

It’s snowing. Bad.

“I need to walk.”

Nothing’s open.

He went, anyway.

Moments later, I heard him, again. He said he’d changed his mind. He said there was no place to go, other than to bed. I was exhausted, and I agreed with him. No place to go but bed.

The next morning, I called to him to get ready to go. I readied a thank-you gift for my friend and his family, waiting for my son. When he came down the stairs I was stunned. He had on a faded tee shirt and washed out old jeans, and, of course, the signature of 20-somethings going on 15 - a backwards knit cap pulled low around his ears.

I was flabberghasted! I had told him to bring appropriate clothes, the ones he wears to job interviews.

“I forgot.”

I had asked him Wednesday, during the day, before the storm chased us home if he was set with clothing. He said he was.

Now he stood there, despondant, knowing what he wore was not appropriate.

I told him to get himself together. We will go to K-Mart. Shopping on Thanksgiving turned my stomach, but the idea of my son dressed like a hobo sickened me even more.

We were running late. I finally rummaged for a pullover that I thought could pass as a shirt. I told him to put it on and I would meet him at the car. I went into the garage, walked around the front of my car and stopped in my tracks. There, on the floor, was a piece of the car grill. There was new damage on the bumper.

Did you drive my car last night, I called to him.

“No.”

There are pieces of the grill on the garage floor.

“I took one of the bikes. Maybe I ran into the car. I’m sorry.” And he disappeared back up the stairs.

Moments later, he came back, his possessions in his hands, his tee-shirt still on.

Can you change your shirt so we can go, please?

“I don’t want to go. I just want to go home. I never wanted to do this.”

He started to cry, and get agitated. Then he went into the garage and put his stuff in the back seat.

I’m not going to Waterbury today, I told him. You said you needed to go back Friday, not today.

“I have things to do. I just want to go home. Please, I just want to go home.”

He was getting more and more agitated. I said, you know you’re ruining Thanksgiving for everyone, including me.

“I know. That’s why I just want to go home.”

I called my friends. An emergency will prevent us from attending, I said. Again, another large chunk of my heart fell to the ground, stomped to pieces.

We drove in silence. After pulling over once because he was sick, we made it “home.” His Sober House, nestled on a street with a handful of operable buildings surrounded by abandoned and burned out structures. We’ve talked of his moving, but, of course, he would have to make the first move by inquiring about other locales. He has yet to do so. At least he had not lied about that. That is one of the few things he has not lied about.

Home. It brought his voice back, at least.

"Tell the doctor I am sorry I couldn’t come to Thanksgiving dinner” ...  “Have a good day. We’ll talk, soon, Mom” ...  “Goodbye, Mom."

No one who is 27 should look that broken, that incapable of putting one foot in front of another with the purpose that comes with youth.

How could he let a demon continue to win? How could he, after so many years, still not know how to fight for just a day, a minute, a second? Back in Ellington, I would learn that the demon had, indeed, come in the night. I was missing an unopened bottle of wine. He had stolen more than just the last bit if naivity I had left. I suppose I got off easy. He didn’t wreck my car or, to my knowledge, hurt anyone. Except himself, and me.

He’d once told me, “Mom, I’m going to the Devil, you know.”

He was five.

He once told me he never deserved to be happy. He was not yet a teen.

He once said “Goodbye, Mom.”

I said to myself, Yes, it is. As he turned the corner, I screamed through my tears. Then I dried my eyes. And I drove home.