She pulled her hands away before I could reach them.
“You can’t do this,” she shouted. “You abandoned me. You didn’t want me. You can’t be my mother now. Go away.”
Susan went upstairs. Her door slammed so hard the frame shook, and Chris and I stood in the silence she left behind. Neither of us spoke for a long time.
The following days were the coldest of my life.
Susan stopped making eye contact with me at breakfast. She would reply with a note and disappear into her room as soon as dinner was over.
Chris was moving around the house on autopilot. Her thoughts were somewhere I couldn't reach them.
I didn't push back because I understood her pain. I just kept being there.
The following days were the coldest of my life.
The next morning, I made Susan's favorite lunch: chicken soup with little star-shaped pasta, and the cinnamon toast she'd once asked for when she was sick.
I left a note in her backpack:
“Have a great day. I'm proud of you. I'm not giving up. :)”
I showed up at her school's fall performance that week and sat in the back row. She pretended not to see me. But she didn't ask me to leave.
I wrote her a letter. Four pages, the whole truth, every detail of what happened when I was 17, and I slipped it under her door that night. I never knew if she read it. But she was gone by morning.
I left a note in her backpack.
It was last Saturday that everything changed.
Susan left for school in the middle of a tense silence, at the end of an argument that hadn't even really started before she grabbed her bag and left. The door slammed shut behind her.
Five minutes later, I found her lunch on the kitchen counter. I grabbed it and left after her without thinking, like mothers do. She was still halfway up the block, with her headphones on, not looking back.
I was crossing the driveway toward the sidewalk, calling her name over the morning noise, when a car came out of the side street too fast for us to see in time.
A car came out of the side street too fast.
I don't remember the impact. I remember the asphalt, and nothing after that.
I woke up briefly in the ambulance, then nothing for a while.
When I came to, I was in a hospital room, and the light had changed enough to indicate that a significant amount of time had passed.
A nurse told me I had lost a dangerous amount of blood. My blood type, AB negative, was rare enough that the hospital's supply was limited, and my situation was urgent. Fortunately, they found a donor.
