Where There is Injury, Pardon

     by William Cass

 

“Princess,” Joyce said to herself.  That was how her ex-husband had always described the way her father treated what he referred to as his “girls”:  Joyce, her sister, Diane, and her mother.  She studied her mother now leaning against the kitchen island across from her sipping from a tumbler with one hand while the other held a cigarette dangling long ash.  “That’s not far off,” she thought.  “Ice Princess might be more accurate.”

 

Joyce had driven up from Seattle to Mukilteo to take over from Diane for a couple of days looking after their mother during her recovery from heart surgery.  Her mother shook the ice with two drenched limes in her glass and squinted at Joyce through the smoke.  “Your sister told me about that…man...emailing the two of you out of the blue.  You’re to have nothing whatsoever to do with him.  Do you hear me?”  She sucked at the dregs of her drink.  “He’s a charlatan, an opportunist, a fraud.”

 

Afternoon light from the balcony slider beside them backlit her mother’s wrinkled face.  Her thinning hair was still perfectly coifed, though her makeup had become smudged.  She cinched her robe tighter, exhaled smoke, and grimaced.  “Let me be perfectly clear.  If you have any sort of contact with him, any at all, I’ll cut you out of my will.  Entirely.  Do you understand me?”

 

Joyce returned her mother’s steely glare with a tempered one of her own.  The old woman was still as rail-thin as she’d been when she’d been as a fashion model in her early twenties and had met her father while he was in med school.  And though her skin had grown weathered from all the years of smoke and drink, she still retained a hint of her former, haughty beauty.  Her mother scowled, then barked, “Answer me!”

 

In not much more than a whisper, Joyce said, “I heard you, Mom.”

 

She watched her mother refill her tumbler half-way with vodka from the bottle on the counter, add a splash of cranberry juice and another lime wedge, then stub out her cigarette: habits that, in spite of her daughters’ protestations, had resumed immediately after returning home from the surgery.  The old woman lifted the glass and began shuffling across the plush carpet toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms.  “Going to lie down for a damn nap,” she mumbled without turning around.  “Diane put leftover lasagna she made last night in the fridge for dinner.  Sixish would be good for that.”

 

Joyce let out a long, slow breath while her mother disappeared in her satin slippers soundlessly around the corner, then stared out the slider at the blue, sparkling water of Puget Sound and the emerald-green shoreline of Whidbey Island in the near distance.  She took her tote, slid open the slider leaving it ajar behind her, and settled with her back to it into the nearest faux-bamboo outdoor chair.  A ferry belched its horn at the terminal a few streets below and began its crawl across the sound to the island.  Seagulls called after its wake, and a soft breeze ruffled a pine bough edging the balcony’s deck.

 

Joyce pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed.  When they’d spoken on the phone earlier that day about their caretaking exchange, Diane told her she had received an equivalent dictum from their mother.  Unlike Joyce, however, Diane had decided on her own to completely ignore the man’s queries; she’d told their mother she’d already deleted his email.  “Our long-lost half-brother,” she’d grumbled sarcastically to Joyce.  “Who for fifty years we never knew existed.  Please.”

 

The email had arrived as a complete shock a month earlier when their mother was still in the hospital.  His name was Carl, and he’d gotten their email addresses from a cousin after contacting her via the summary findings from an ancestry-tracing company.  His message explained that he’d been the result of a brief affair between their father and his mother while she was a nurse at the Seattle hospital where their father was doing his residency.  His mother had only revealed vague snippets of the circumstances over the years: the affair had occurred when their father had been recently married, his mother had moved back to Michigan to be close to family once she discovered her pregnancy, and they’d had no communication afterwards of which he was aware.  Carl had grown up in Michigan as an only child, had remained there and got married, and had operated his own H-Vac repair business in the area for many years.  He and his wife had been unable to have children, so when she’d died suddenly, his curiosity about his past led him to send away for the DNA testing.  He was delighted to discover that he had two half-sisters, wanted nothing special from either of them except to, hopefully, become acquainted and perhaps even develop something of a relationship.  He’d attached a black-and-white photo to the message, and the facial resemblance was so striking that it left no doubt that they shared the same father.

 

When Diane called her about revealing the email to their mother, Joyce asked, “Did Mom know anything about the affair or the pregnancy?”

 

“She didn’t exactly say,” her sister replied.  “But the intensity of her reaction sure seemed to suggest she did.”

 

“Good Lord,” Joyce said.

 

“Yeah, I know.”

 

That had been the extent of the conversation.  In spite of them only being two years apart in age, they’d never been close.  That emotional distance had only increased over the years, especially after their father’s death and the increasing amount of attention their mother began requiring which, because of her proximity in the next town, Diane largely absorbed.  When Joyce’s own marriage had ended several years earlier after her ex-husband’s affair, she’d felt no support from Diane, only increasing resentment over their uneven responsibilities with their mother.  Aside from their father’s over-indulgence towards them, their upbringing had not been warm or comforting.  Joyce had never developed deep and lasting bonds or intimacies, which she blamed in part for her marriage’s failure.  Something permanent had broken off and collapsed inside her when that happened; she felt very much alone.

 

She reached into her tote, took out her iPad, powered it up, and propped it on her knees.  She opened her email and re-read Carl’s message for perhaps the twentieth time, struck again by its sincere and unassuming tone.  Suddenly, a FaceTime call announced itself, and without considering further, she tapped the green icon to receive it.  Carl’s face blinked onto the screen, and although she’d grown accustomed to seeing it there over the past few weeks, she was astounded anew by the identical pale-blue eyes, cleft chin, and wide forehead of their father’s.

 

“Hey, there,” he said in his now familiar, self-effacing voice.  “Just wanted to check in quick to see if we’re still on for this weekend.”

 

Joyce nodded.

“I can Uber to you from the airport if it's too much trouble for you to pick me up."

 

“No need.”  She felt a flush; even the cadence of his speech somehow resembled their father’s.  “Not a problem.”

 

“And you’re sure you have enough room for me.”

 

“Plenty.”

 

Joyce watched his eyes raise over her shoulder and his brows knit.  When she turned, she saw her mother standing in the opening of the slider, clutching the empty tumbler to her chest, her face a mask of disbelief and horror staring at Carl’s on the screen less than a yard away.

 

“Is that…” Carl’s voice asked.

 

“Mom,” Joyce said.

 

The old woman’s bottom lip began to quiver, and her eyes welled.  Very slowly, she set the tumbler on the edge of the island counter, licked her lips, and made several tiny shakes of her head.  Dimly across the water, the ferry’s horn signaled its approach to the island as the cast of her mother’s face seemed in an instant to crumble and age.  When Joyce reached for her, she shook her head hard, retreated, and began shuffling again across the carpet towards the bedroom hallway.

 

“Mom, wait.”

 

Joyce dropped the iPad to the deck and moved into the slider’s opening.  She remained frozen there, a numbness overwhelming her, as her mother disappeared again into the hallway.  The only sound was the pine bough rustling the balcony railing until Carl’s voice said, “Joyce…are you there?”

 

“No,” Joyce thought to herself.  “I’m not here at all.”

 

A dog barked nearby, and another answered it.  The ferry’s horn sounded again, further off in the distance.

 

Bio: William Cass has had over 400 short stories accepted for publication in a variety of literary magazines such as Pangyrus, december, and Zone 3.  Winner of writing contests at Terrain.org, Cardinal Sins, and The Examined Life Journal, he’s also been nominated once for Best of the Net, twice for Best Small Fictions, and six times for the Pushcart Prize.  His three short story collections were all published by Wising Up Press.