Drawn Into Darkness(22)
Big whoop, because now how much time did I have left?
Like unbleached muslin, time started pleating for me, moments stretching far too long yet passing far too soon.
After what seemed forever and was probably a couple of hours, Justin came into my room on his own, looking like a sleepwalker, as if his feet had brought him there involuntarily. He struggled to look at me and could not quite manage. He struggled to speak and hauled the words out, low and wretched. “Um, do you want some lunch?”
I considered carefully before responding. “I guess not. I’m hungry yet I don’t think I could eat. Does that make any sense?”
“Oh, yeah. Been there.”
“It’s not a good place, but I’m from Missouri, you know?”
“Huh? I thought you were from Pennsylvania.”
“Nope. Missouri, because Missouri loves company.” Giving up on my weird sense of humor, I softened my voice. “Please stay awhile, Justin, if you can stand the smell of pee.”
“Does it bother you? I could bring the spray from the bathroom.”
“No. Don’t go away.”
He sat on a dry edge of the mattress near my head, looking not at me but at his hands lying curled and dormant on his cutoffs. His classically perfect hands had long oval fingernails; my fingernails grew wider than they were long, shaped like muffins, ridged like cupcake cups, crumby. To hell with Freud and penis envy; I had a lifelong case of fingernail envy, seeing so many men with absolutely perfect ones that nobody except me seemed to notice.
Justin had great fingernails. Justin had long, strong, capable hands and I should not, could not, must not suggest any action he might take with them.
He blurted, “Are you scared?”
“Hell, no. I’m too terrified to be scared. But Stoat’s not going to mess around with me, is he?”
“Probably not. He’s not into torture unless he’s in a really bad mood. What I meant was, are you scared of maybe going to hell?”
Hell? Didn’t Justin know he was already being tortured and living in hell? I very nearly laughed. A kind of snort escaped me, and Justin turned to see what was funny.
“There’s more than enough hell in life,” I explained, or tried to explain. “No, I don’t believe in heaven or hell or any kind of an afterlife.”
“You think there’s nothing after we die?”
“Just the same poetry we share with any animal. We disintegrate—we mix back into the earth and nurture plants and trees, which drink sunlight and make air for our great-grandchildren. Somewhere down the line the earth, too, will die and disintegrate and maybe in zillions of years some of it will find another life. Someday some of my atoms might brighten the petal of a zinnia or the core of a nova. Everything’s recycled as energy or matter. You’re made of stardust, Justin.”
His eyes had widened. “I never heard anything like that.”
“Haven’t you? To me it makes a lot more sense than resurrection or reincarnation.” The rain pouring on the roof and slithering on the windowpanes sounded wondrous to me for a moment, cosmic. Heraclitus said that no one ever stepped into the same river twice. New rain nourished the soil or ran in rivers to the sea, returned to the sky by evaporation, gathered into clouds, and rained again, a vast symbol of—so much. Symbols by their nature cannot be fully named.
Justin had relaxed into fascination. “Did you make all that up, or do you really believe it?”
“I don’t just believe it. I know it. Empirically.”
“Right, like I understand what that means.”
“It means from actual experience of physical fact. And here’s another thing I know empirically, Justin. I know that your mother loves you.”
That blindsided him. He stiffened but kept staring at me.
“Your mother loves you and she always will love you and she will never forget you and she will never stop searching for you.”
He responded with anger to save him from tears. “Yeah, like you can prove that.”
“I know it, because I’m a mom and I know what the love of a mother is like. It’s a passion for the person who came out of your own body. Nobody male can imagine the strength of it. I have two sons. I love them with all my heart and I always will. Nothing they could ever do or say could make me not love them.”
“Stop it.” His voice husky, Justin slid off my bed to stand up, to flee.
“Okay, I’ll stop. There’s just one more thing, Justin.”
He faced me narrow-eyed, on guard.
“Does Stoat ever tell you he loves you?”
His face hardened. “A few times. In bed.”
“He’s a liar. What he does to you in bed is not love.”