The petals kept falling. In that sterile and cold room, some nurse had thought to bring some color by adding a bouquet of flowers next to the cheap magazine table to my left. But, in their mortality the petals fell. Wilted, twisted, they kept falling. They were spread on the table, tooth stained yellow petals covering copies of outdated celebrity information. I wanted to reach for them, gather every fallen leaf and glue them back on with a precision of a surgeon so that no one would ever know they had taken that shameful descent down. But I couldn't, and as I sat there in the waiting room in my polyester covered chair, crossing and re-crossing my legs, waiting for news I wasn't sure I wanted to hear, feeling ashamed of either reaction I would be left with, I withdrew to another moment of waiting.
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I sat outside my window waiting for Holden to come back from the hospital mother and father had stuck him in since his breakdown last Christmas. I kept waiting for him to come home. Mother would scold me telling me he wasn't just going to show up outside the window. That he needed to get better and then mother and father would go pick him up and bring him home for the holidays. But I knew they where wrong. Holden would leave when he was ready, not when anyone else thought so, not those silly doctors, mama or even me. And then one day he was here. Tapping on my window just like I knew he would be, just like he promised he would be.
"Holden, what are you doing here?!" I asked him despite the fact I knew exactly why he was here. He climbed in through the paint chipped window bathed in yellow streetlight casting a phony glow over him.
"Well, you told me to come didn't ya?" he responded shaking out the rain from a storm he'd gotten caught in a couple of hours ago. His hands trembled but he somehow managed to light up a cigarette. I rolled my eyes at his bad habit which they had obviously not curbed during his time away, but I was secretly smiling inside. I was Holden's first person. He told me so himself and I took the position of number one confidante seriously.
"Holden what are you gonna do? I mean, Mama and Papa don't think you're gonna come home for a couple more months now…, do you think you could stay with Mr. Antolini while the time passes?" I asked. A sharp look came over his features at the mention of his old prep teacher puzzling me.
"Naw Pheeb's, anyway, I gotta place to stay and all, a real swell place by the Park. It's filled with a crazy bunch of people though, goddamn craziest people, but it will do me right for now." He looked like we was gonna keep talking but I interrupted him before he could say anything more. Ya had to do that with Holden, interrupt him and all. Otherwise my dear brother just wouldn't stop talking, and it wouldn't even stay in the same place, Holden could bounce a subject from elephants to how to change a car tire like they were two and one in the same things.
"Well, I wanna go with you this time!" I said. Last time he tried to leave me but I was having none of that. I would go with my brother this time or I was gonna pout and be mad permanently. And, I wasn't going to forget either.
"No Phoebe, you can't come this time either," he said with a twinkle in his eye and a smirk on his lips.
"Why not? Holden, I swear if you don't take me this time I am going to stay mad at you until I turn a hundred."
"I know Pheeb's, but not this time. Then Holden did the strangest thing. My brother had kissed me on the cheek plenty of times before, but I guess this was the kind of kiss your crush on the playground gave you, not your brother.
"I love you Pheeb's. I'll see you soon." And then he was gone. I didn't see him for six years but I waited by that window for the day that Holden would come back to me.
###########
The sunbeams seeped through the window to my left casting a shadow across the right side of the yellowed comforter and the sounds of various animals burrowing under the house.
"Mama?" The sound of a small boy from my doorway woke me from my sedated recline.
"Yes, darling?" I responded. Zachery stood outside my door, draped in the cowboy and Indian covers he had pulled from his bed. His hair hung from the top of his head as if tied together by yarn and the rest lay like a flop of a hat on top of his head. He cocked his head to the side in his usual expression of inquisitiveness as if he was unsure of why I was here and he stood there.
"Zachery darling, why don't you come over here where Mama is?" I motioned to the bed. He scrambled on top of the bed then slowly settled himself in front of me curling into a spoon. I could feel every curve of his little body pressed into mine, wrapping myself tighter around him, and reached over to plant a raspberries on his stomach. He giggled and began to kick his feet widely in the air. Squirming out of my arms he yelled out, "Catch me mama! Catch me!" I felt my stomach drop, recalling another moment a boy had told me he wanted to catch the world.
"Mama, could we go see Uncle Holden today?" he asked in a smaller voice than before. I flinched inside and held my son a little closer. The boy's growing obsession with his uncle disturbed me. My love for my brother and my son was in conflict with each other, but it wasn't healthy for Zachery and that priority took precedent over my guilt.
"No, darling. Not today. Mama has a lot of work and you have a lot of fun planned for today." I tried to respond in my best, kind voice. As a parent I learned the best way to soothe a disgruntled child was to divert him with sugar or other distractions. But, Zachery had slowly begun to catch on.
"No, mama, it's ok." Then he tumbled from the bed, taking his covers with him. I shivered a little at the loss of contact. He dragged the blankets behind him like a cape of disappointment. The sun was shining again through the window casting a shadow on the cowboys on the blanket cape. They looked awful for a moment, distorted in the darkness they were bathed in but then he took another step and they were back in the light and I shook my head at morning grogginess.
"Ok darling, but please get dressed soon. I'll have breakfast down in a jiff."
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Drizzle was falling and the sun was hot while I stomped through the dewy grass. My heels kept sinking into the mud holes that the torrent of rain from the night before had turned up, casting aside the grounds protective layer of grass and leaving it bare with fresh dirt left to be marched over. My black dress clung to the front of my chest and the nylons my legs were trapped in had sweat running down the back, collecting in a small puddle at the crevice between the back of my knee and calf. The coffin was brown not black and the sun didn't reflect off of it the same way I suspect it might have with a black one. It soaked up the rays of the light, hording it within the polished wood and giving the impression the light was illuminated from inside the dark interior. The sound of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" played from a distance. I had requested it, recalling that moment with my brother; a shift in our relationship happened that day but I still liked to think that was the Holden I would always have too.
The Father holding the sermon was talking in front of the casket but I wasn't hearing a word. Holden never even liked the church, but I suspected my mother had insisted. How they had even gotten the church to ordain this, with the way he went and all I am not sure, but I had a feeling my father had some words with the Father and everything had worked out. It felt strange watching the six feet deep ground eat up everything that was left of my older brother and I wanted to sink to the ground and bury myself with him. He was leaving me behind again, the goddamn bastard. He promised he wasn't going to do that anymore but Holden was always a liar, even to himself.
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I waited in his room after receiving a phone call from his teacher about reclusive behavior and class absences, a panic in my chest I couldn't place but I wasn't ready to dismiss. I sat down at the desk I bought him when he turned fifteen though I could scarcely see the dark brown wood beneath the pile of school papers and books. Glancing down, I saw pieces of newspaper scattered around an old copy of Siddhartha that had possibly belonged to my father. I inherited my father's collection after my parents passing. I opened Zackary's left drawer trying to tidy my forever-messy child's room when I noticed the drawer was full of course. It was stuffed with an old copy of the New York Times, with a front page article of the murderer and cult leader, Charles Manson. I recalled seeing the news of the deaths a few months back but hadn't given it much thought.
"Mom! I'm home!" Zackary's voice vibrated from the front door as I heard it slam close behind him.
"I am in the your room," I called back hoping the boy would take off his shoes before trekking through the house. I shut the door to his desk deciding to clean it later. He emerged at the door, the mud caking his shoes and staining the wood floors a different brown. His hair still hung from his head but it was covered with a red Yankee's hat he had somehow picked up and started wearing when we was ten.
"Zachery, I have asked you a million times to please remove your shoes at the door!"
"Sorry, Ma, I forgot."
"Where were you? Don't lie Zachery Caulfield, I received a call from your English teacher and the one place you were not was school." He had the self-preservation to look down and scuffle his boots against the floor.
"Well, ya see, Ma, I really do hate that school. I mean the kids are all so fake and the teachers don't give a damn about learning, and I just can't stand that constant…"
"Enough Zackary. This isn't ok anymore. I can't keep putting you in a new school every time you decide it's not entertaining enough for you." I felt bad for my sharp words but I didn't know how to reach my son any more than I knew how to reach my brother back then.
"Were you with your Uncle Holden again, Zack?" I asked. I prayed he would say no, please be anywhere else. The grocery store, smoking a cigarette, meeting a girl under the bleachers, but don't tell me you went back to that goddamn place again with its infectious air leeching into his pores.
"Yeah…sorry, Ma, I know you don't like it." He stood pacing back and forth on his feet, half his body covered in the shadow the door cast from the odd angle. All I wanted to do was put him back in his cowboy and Indian covers, rip off the ridiculously familiar red hat and demand he be my inquisitive child again.
"Sorry, Ma, I'll go to school tomorrow, I promise." He slunk back down the hallway towards the kitchen dragging the mud behind him like his covers from a different year.
#########
The policemen took me into custody at the same time I received the call from the hospital. I had been placing the phone back into its holder praying to any deity that would hear me when I opened the door to the house at the same time an officer with donut and stale coffee breath was about to beat his meaty fist against my house door.
"Mrs. Caulfield?"
"Yes…I don't mean to be short, sir, but I need to leave, can this wait?" I responded not even noticing the barrage of cop cars parked outside my walkway.
"I'm afraid not, Ma'am, I need to take you into our care and ask you a couple of questions about your son."
They asked me questions about the kind of boy he was. Happy? Sad? Had he ever displayed signs of psychotic behavior in the past? Who was Holden? What was the connection between the two? Did he have a lenience to carry guns? All these questions I answered to the best of my ability but the real one that no one asked was, could I have prevented this? Was this my responsibility? The answer was, yes. I saw the signs in my son the same way I saw them in my brother before he hung himself in the hospital room he had been in and out his entire life. And in the end it was still my fault now as much as it was then. The petals had fallen too fast for my liking and I fought and coerced them to stay on longer and in the end, the flower's petals turned dark in their desperation to fall.
Two girls, seven boys and a cafeteria worker had fallen to the guns my son bought with my credit card. Ten people whose last face they had seen was my 17-year-old son. The world raged at me, the parent of a minor who had obviously been steered wrong in life.
Finally, the officers let me go to the hospital, though I was certain my persecution would not be over soon. I drove toward the cinder block building; the name of the hospital radiating a flickering neon in the dark. My car smelled of old popcorn and used shoes. I tapped my fingers against the door handle and made a sharp left into the ER's valet parking.
I walked into the waiting room. Cold and sterile and as unwelcoming as hospital rooms always felt. Like you were an unsolicited guest it had been forced to put up until it could kindly get rid of you. I sat down with my emotions on a cheaply furnished hospital chair and waited for news of my son. I felt my love drown my guilt and I couldn't swallow back my fear any more than my horror.
Stale coffee breath, who later had the courtesy to reveal his name as Officer Bush, led the interrogations, "What did your son mean Mrs. Caulfield?" Officer Bush's voice cut like gravel through my shot nerves, and I think for the first time in my life I truly wanted to cause bodily harm to another human, and then I flinched at the irony. The question replayed in my mind, like an endless alarm clock with no snooze button.
"The words he kept shouting as he gunned down those innocent kids, Mrs. Caulfield!"
"I need to catch them! I need to catch them. Jenny needs to die."