The Good Luck of Right Now(34)

I sort of felt you and I were a lot alike at that point.

The little angry man in my stomach kicked and punched and yelled, Fool! You are nothing like movie star Richard Gere, nor are you like the character he is playing in the film, which is an entirely different (and fictional!) entity! And you are just a stupid man who pretends he is unable to tell the difference because he has done nothing with his life, nor will he ever, and therefore favors fiction over reality. Here is your reality: everyone is better than you! Everyone! You couldn’t even keep your mother alive, retard! and as the little tiny man in my stomach kicked and punched and yelled, I started to think of him as a miniature Louis Gossett Jr. of my own.

In the movie, you screamed, “No, sir! No, sir!” as you well remember, and I realized that I had screamed that right along with you in real life, in Mom’s living room, when Father McNamee looked at me and said, “You okay?”

I nodded. A few tears spilled down my cheek before I could wipe them away, and then we watched as angry Louis Gossett Jr. tried to get you to quit, made you do sit-ups, and finally got you to scream, “I got nowhere else to go! I got nothing else!”

I remember Mom always cried when you said those lines, and maybe it was because she’d had nothing but her house and me for so many years. She always wanted more. She wanted the fairy tale, but got brain cancer instead, even though she was a good woman who never did anything wrong, nor did she harm anyone, ever.

Father McNamee and I sat there until the film was over—only I just stared at the screen without allowing the pictures and sounds to enter into my mind.

I sort of retreated deep within some dark shadow inside my skull, hid in the dusty seldom-accessed attic of my mind, and I thought about Mom. How she is no longer here with me. Where she might be—what heaven might really be like.

I miss her.

I really miss her.

And even though I realize it’s selfish, I wished she were with me watching the movie, scratching the top of my head even, instead of Wendy and Father McNamee. I wished nothing had changed. I wished life were fair. These thoughts made the angry man in my stomach dizzy and nauseated.

“Bartholomew?” Father McNamee said and nudged my arm.

I looked at him; he looked concerned.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded.

I glanced over my shoulder at Wendy, and her head was still buried under the pillows.

“I’m tired,” I said.

“Maybe you should go to bed?”

I wanted to ask Father McNamee if we should be doing something more to help Wendy, if it was wrong to wish my mother were still here with me and not in heaven, what we were going to do next, and how I was going to move on with the rest of my life, but I knew he would say it would all be revealed in God’s time and not our time—that we should simply wait for God to speak to me, for me to start hearing His voice, that we had to be patient. Or worse yet, he’d say he was no longer a priest and God no longer spoke to him. Since I already knew the gist of what my spiritual adviser would say either way, I decided that asking the questions was pointless.

So I went up to my room, turned off the lights, let go of consciousness, and drifted off quickly into the other world.

I dreamed about my mother again, and she came to sit on the edge of my bed.

“Mom!” I said in my dream, and immediately tried to hug her, but she was ghostlike and my arms went right through her body.

“Can we talk?”

She smiled and nodded.

Mom looked as she had at the end, although she had hair and no surgery scars.

She was herself—as she was before the squid cancer altered her.

“What should I do with the rest of my life?”

Mom shrugged.

“I don’t even know what I want. I’ve never known. Let alone how to get it. I don’t know anything at all, really!”

We looked at each other for a few moments.

When it was clear she wouldn’t answer, I said, “I liked living with you, Mom. A lot. I miss you. I’m so lost.”

But then she started to fade.

“Where are you going?” I yelled. “Don’t leave me!”

She smiled once more before she blinked out of existence, and I woke up, sweating, to someone making a shhhhhh sound in my ear.

My heart began to pound, because I thought maybe Mom had come back for real, or that I had dreamed her death by cancer and was now waking up to live in the time before she died, but I couldn’t see anything because the lights were out and the shades were drawn.

“Who’s there?” I said finally.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” a woman said through the darkness, paraphrasing your most memorable line in An Officer and a Gentleman, one of Mom’s absolute favorites. But it wasn’t Mom, I could tell by the woman’s smell—just a hint of apricot, lemon, and ginger wafting from her clothes.

After a few moments, I said, “Wendy?”

I could hear her breathing in the darkness.

“Do you think I’m a failure?” she said.

I tried to make out Wendy’s face, but my eyes wouldn’t focus. Finally, I said, “What?”

“Do—you—think—I—am—a—failure?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Why would I?”