Disclaimer: S.E. Hinton owns The Outsiders. I am making no profit from this story.
Cyclic
She lies on the bed, and she waits.
Again, for the millionth time at least, she sees in her mind the little girl who always knew what kind of mom she intended to be: the kind who spoke only gentle words to her babies. The kind who laughed with them and hugged them and never made them hurt.
He's in her mind now, clear as day, not even one year old. He slaps the coffee table with chubby hands as he shuffles along next to it. She looks across her magazine at him and makes a silly face. He lets out an exuberant squeal, but her heart nearly stops when his clumsy fingers wrap around that stupid trinket. That goddamned stupid religious glass trinket that The Bastard's grandmother, his evil witchy grandmother, insisted they needed in their house. As if God ever paid any mind to them.
"No!" she cries out, but when she reaches across the table to snatch it away from him, he tightens his grip and scrunches his face. It's a battle now - he wants that thing, that forbidden object, with every part of his being.
"Give it to me," she tells him, panicked, but he won't let go, so she begins to uncurl his fingers, one-at-a-time, magazine forgotten in a wrinkled heap on the floor. "Give . . . it . . . ."
He jerks away, unexpected, out of her grasp, and throws the thing. With a sickening crash, it shatters against the table lamp.
Fury and panic boil up inside of her. "No! What is wrong with you?" Even now, she can still see the expression on his face, the look of shock and hurt, when her hand reaches out and slaps him, once across the face, and then twice on the arm. "Look what you did! Look at this!"
But he's crying now, crumpled on the floor sobbing at this betrayal, and she has to use her legs to keep him away from the mess so she can clean it up before he crawls across the shards of glass. "He will kill you," she hisses, even as her chest compresses at the thought of what she's just done.
He won't remember, she tells herself later. He's too young to remember what I did to him. There's still time for me to be the mom I'm supposed to be.
And when The Bastard comes home from work and asks about the stupid goddamned trinket that she always hated anyway, she looks him in the eye and says, "I broke it."
She doesn't bother ducking when he swings.
Then he's six, and he just doesn't listen when she tells him to be quiet and keep his crap out of the way. Doesn't he see how angry The Bastard gets when there's crap all over the floor? And now he's gone and scattered Tinker toys all over the damn place, right before his father comes home.
"What is this?" she yells. "What did you do here?"
He gives her that look, that slow and stupid look, like they haven't gone through this a hundred times before. She clenches her teeth, anticipating the tension, knowing this will ruin any possible good mood The Bastard might have been in and sink the entire house into a dark, hold-your-breath minefield. Don't breathe, don't move, don't look at him wrong, or everything will explode.
How can this child possibly not remember this from one day to the next? "Clean it up!" she says, dropping to her hands and knees to scramble across the floor, picking up the pieces. God, he'll be home soon, and they're just everywhere . . . .
She glances over and watches the boy pick several pieces up, but instead of putting them in the box, he sees something interesting about them; with brow furrowed, he stops and sits back on his heels to begin hooking the pieces together.
With a drawn-out "No!", she reaches out and grabs a handful of his hair, then snatches the sticks from his hand and rips them apart. "Clean them up! Are you stupid? Clean them up!" The anger bubbles over - why doesn't he see that she's protecting him? - and she gives his head a slap that knocks him to the floor.
Even then, he doesn't move, just stares up at her like he doesn't know what to do.
Urgency alone drives her; she's lived with this her whole life. With clenched teeth, she slaps him on the arm and on the back. "Just move, will you? Just pick this stuff up now, or I'll put it all in the trash! Is that what you want? You want your toys in the trash? Why don't you listen to me?"
His nostrils flare and his lips purse as he crawls forward to gather up the Tinker toys. "I was making you a car," he says in halting words, "so we can drive away from here."
With a scream, she throws the box on the floor, jumps up, runs through the kitchen, and slams out the back door. The cigarette trembles in her hand as she picks it out of the pack and lights it. Get away from here. Wouldn't she love to. Hell, wouldn't she just love to.
Fifteen ain't no age to be carrying a child, but when the man tells you stuff you never heard about yourself - he thinks you're beautiful, and he needs what you do for him! - you finally see the door, your ticket out of the screaming hurtful place you call home.
Take that, Daddy, this man loves me and he ain't never gonna hurt me or let me go without.
But the love ain't no different than what it was before, and now you're miles and miles from home, and The Ticket turned into another goddamned bastard who tells you you're the reason his life's a living hell.
Well, good riddance. The two of us don't need you. But the day after she pulled apart his Tinker toy car, she scans the newspaper classifieds, and her heart sinks lower than it's ever been before. The two of us do need you. I ain't worth shit on my own.
And the cruel irony of it, she realizes with a laugh as she raises the glass to her lips, is that the only reason she can't take the boy and walk out, get herself a job and fend for herself, is the boy. Without the boy to hold her down, she'd do just fine taking care of the boy on her own. Hah!
Before she knows it, he's twelve and spends every living minute with those thieving hoods. He was never a bad boy, never got himself into trouble, but she sees the way they all look. Her kid ain't supposed to be like that, dammit. He's supposed to be smarter than that, he's supposed to get himself the hell out of this place.
Just like she was supposed to do, years ago.
She's giving up her life, her soul, to try and make him see that he's got to get away from this place. But no, he never wants to go goddamned anywhere except wandering the streets with those hoods.
By the time he's fifteen, every time he's out, she knows in her heart that when he comes home, she won't get pissed about anything, and he'll laugh at her silly faces again. She rehearses it even, the words they'll say, and the way they'll laugh and joke, and he'll tell her about the movie he just saw.
But then he walks through the door, and it starts all over again - he forgets to wipe his shoes, and she reminds him that his father will be home any minute, and he knocks over a lamp in his scramble for the dust pan, and now she's got not only dirt on the floor, but a broken lamp to clean up with her shitty vacuum.
Why does he do this kind of stuff when he knows how The Bastard is? When he knows it'll ruin the night for all of them?
And God help her, even as she screams it out - you goddamned stupid waste of space, you will never amount to anything - she hears it all, word-for-word, in her daddy's voice: a bullet tearing through time to lodge in her own child's heart.
Tears well up after he leaves, and she tells herself again: there's still time. Just because he remembers all of this, don't mean I can't change it all for next time. Hugs and laughs and no pain. But until then, she reaches for the bottle, because it helps her stop looking inside of herself to where all the ugliness grows like a weed - a weed with roots so deep, she can't ever seem to find the end of it.
If she could just go back, if she could just start over, maybe look harder for a way to leave with him, maybe teach him better how to pull away and stay away, maybe things would be different. Maybe she could be the mom she was supposed to be.
Don't matter now, though, because he's gone. She could be the best mom on the planet starting this second, do everything right and let go of the pain and squash down the anger, but he'll never see it now. He was her hope, her reason to be better, but now that he's gone and she failed, she ain't staying here no more. Thirty-two years old, and her life's been over since the day she was born anyway. So she lies on the bed, and she waits.
Maybe I'll see you there, Johnny, she thinks, but I guess probably not. I don't belong where you went.
As her eyelids droop, their last view locking on the empty pill bottle, she imagines beyond it a shadowy figure, dark bangs hung across a cautious, smiling face. He reaches out to her.
She smiles as the ugly weed inside of her withers and dies, lost without the soil of life to keep it growing. Let's start over, she tells the shadowy boy in her mind. Let's start over, baby. You can visit me, and I'll be happy. No more yelling. No more hurt.
'Cause if there's one thing she knows without a doubt, it's that hell can't be so much worse than what she's leaving behind.