Knight Nostalgia: A Knights of the Board Room Anthology(69)

Jon had opened the album at a random page. “Tell me about this picture,” he said.

Kyle, around thirteen years old, stood by a boat tied off to a dock. The photo was somewhat washed out because of the brightness of the sun, Kyle’s hazel eyes like hers squinted against it. He had a huge grin on his face. He was standing with his arm thrown around another boy, overweight, with curly hair and matching grin.

“That’s him with his best friend in middle school. Deadhead.” She chuckled at his look. “They all called him that. His real name was Lawrence. He liked zombies. Notice the Night of the Living Dead T-shirt. I’d make them pizza snacks after school, listen to them talk about their day. They’d try to gross me out the way boys do, until I’d run them out of the kitchen and they’d go play basketball in the driveway. Sometimes I’d do bills or paperwork at the table, so I could watch them through the window.”

She realized she was rubbing her thumb over Kyle’s face, his sandy brown hair. In this picture, it had been lighter than Cole’s, but it had darkened to match his father’s by the time he enlisted in the military. “One fall day, I had the window cracked, and I heard Lawrence say, ‘Dude, your mom has an awesome rack.’”

Jon’s eyes lit with amusement. “Well, she does.”

She shook her head at him. “Kyle bounced the ball off his forehead and made this gagging noise before he said, ‘Deadhead, that’s my freaking mom. She’s…Mom.’”

“Do you feel like you’ve lost that identity?”

She pursed her lips. “Yes and no. No, because I’ll always be his mother. Always. But yes, because I lost it before he died, when I let his father turn him against me.”

Thinking about it, she realized that picture was the last one that had been taken before that change began to happen.

“I should have been stronger,” she said. “Should have stood up for myself instead of trying to placate and figure out what I was doing wrong.”

She didn’t need Jon’s affirmation or denial of that. It was an epiphany she’d reached, acknowledging her past mistakes, while understanding that she couldn’t change them. But she could do her best not to make the same ones again.

“There was a core to him that was so very gentle, so different from Cole. Yet he wanted his father to love and approve of him so much. Kyle already had my love, unconditionally, and he knew it. It sounds odd to say, but I think it made him value it less. Maybe because I realized too late that unconditional love doesn’t mean accepting unconditionally whatever your child says or does to you. It also meant teaching him to treat me with respect, because I deserved it.”

She sighed. “But it is what it was. Kyle did well in the military. I'm not sure if he wanted to be in the military as much as Cole wanted to have a son who was a soldier. He was a good soldier, but I noticed from his letters what Kyle liked most was the infrastructure stuff, helping villages rebuild, getting aid to people, that kind of thing.”

Jon stroked her hair, winding it around his fingers. “What happened to Lawrence? Did they stay friends?”

“Yes. Though he never became much taller, Lawrence lost a lot of weight and became more athletic. They entered the service together, but different areas. In one of Kyle’s letters, he said Lawrence had gone into a special forces branch, like Rangers or SEALs.”

She looked down at another picture and couldn’t help smiling. “This one was the day I taught Kyle to ride a bike. He was six. No training wheels. I was just thinking about that the other day, when one of my therapy patients came in and said he and his wife had been helping his daughter to ride her bike without training wheels.”

She traced her hand over that picture. It didn’t matter she’d just done it to the other one. It was Kyle, at different ages, different memories, and she liked connecting to those moments through touch. “We were both laughing when he figured it out. After a while, he stopped the bike, threw his arms around me and asked me to spin him. He liked that. He was almost too big for me to do it at that point, but I managed it. I’m glad to be getting those memories back, spontaneously like this.”

At Jon’s quizzical brow, she explained, a shadow crossing her heart. “For a long time, the ones that came to mind the most were those near the end. When he treated me like Cole did. Then, the coffin coming back…the funeral. The way Cole acted.”

Jon moved his stroking touch to her shoulder, her upper arm, holding her closer to his side. She could feel his desire to protect. Help. It was a reminder of how a woman could rediscover her strength, when a good man supported and loved her.

“Thanks to you, I started getting those other memories back,” she said. “I realized I made mistakes, but I didn’t deserve contempt. Cole made me believe that I did. I let him do that to me. I would have figured it out eventually…and Kyle would have figured it out, too. I knew his heart. He was a loving boy. Time. We just ran out of time, but there was never a moment he wasn’t loved. He might not have been at a place to appreciate it, but…”

She wiped away tears, smiling when Jon helped with his long, gentle fingers. “I was meditating not too long ago and…I felt it. Felt him. Felt his love, like he was reaching across that space, and I knew he was okay. We were okay. I suspect that’s been there waiting for me, waiting for me to lift the walls I’d put up around myself, sealing in all that grief and guilt. The guilt drained out, the past let go, and there he was.”