Her Motive
Chapter Three – He Saw, She Saw
My mother is always running.
She's been running since she could walk. Looking for a way out, a new beginning, a better life.
She always has hope that it's out there. That something is out there, just waiting for her.
These days however, something in her has changed. A light was flicked on, a candle lit and suddenly she's lost that undeniable urge to leave everything behind and start all over again in a place that has never heard tell of Samantha Spade.
Perhaps this means the days of running are over. She knows just as well as anyone that you can't run forever. Eventually the past catches up with everyone and you are forced to face that which you would do anything to avoid meeting again.
My mother knows this well.
She knows she can't ever really outrun the past. But at the moment she won't confront it either. It's a monster too terrifying to face just yet. A monster that haunts her dreams and tugs at her heart constantly. For now she's content having run as far as she has, living in her little world of blissful denial.
New York really is a city made just for her. A city with a foundation of infinite dreams, a million possibilities, a thousand tomorrows and plenty of people that need saving.
Every person that comes, like my mother, has run from somewhere, from something with optimistism that New York will remake them into someone they always dreamed they would be. My mother has not changed nearly as much as she likes to think she has. She's still the same little girl always running scared inside while trying to prove to the world just how tough she is.
Tonight, my mother opts to walk home, the day playing over in her mind as so many have before. The night air makes her feel alive when her thoughts both past and present consume her. And sometimes she needs that sense to remind her that 'alive' is a state of being, not a feeling at all.
It's hard to feel alive when you allow the pain of others to seep into your heart and add to your own. Being alone is like that. The worst thoughts, the stuff that nightmares are made of, plague the silence of loneliness. So she fills her life with noise whenever she can. At work there's banter. Danny, Viv, Jack, Martin. Someone is always talking. At home there's music usually or sometimes the echo of the television playing unobtrusively in the background.
Somehow that settles her.
Like someone is there with her.
I wish she could know that I am.
I'm always with her, no matter how much of a disbeliever she is in that sort of thing. I know the finest details of her life, and I understand her, so much deeper than I ever did when I was alive.
Tonight the post-work ritual is different than usual. Tonight it's not about letting go of a victim she can identify far too closely with although that may be the case.
Emily Muller lost a daughter. So did Samantha Spade.
But that similarity doesn't faze her. It's about letting go of something else tonight. Or maybe it's about holding on. She doesn't quite know. Whatever it is, it's about Jack Malone.
The red wine, the cleansing shower, the same routine that I've seen so many times before is an attempt to wash him away again. To remind herself that part of her life is well and truly over. That loving him always was a mistake, and his promises always were empty.
"Maria and I separated," he had told her earlier when she questioned the undoubted pain-filled expression he wore. She acts as if she never saw it coming.
I want to scream at her for a second, make her hear my warning although I know the impossibility of it all. I want a tantrum, an outburst loud enough to cross the barriers between our worlds and stop what I already know is happening.
She's falling again.
There's a tiny hope that he'll catch her and everything will be perfect.
She wears a mask of compassion, one of many she owns, and pretends this news upsets her, but inside, in a place only the two of us truly have access to, she's secretly happy.
She's always kept Jack Malone on a pedestal. Always wondered if he is the man who will eventually rescue her from herself. Always trusted that if it was meant to be there would be a sign.
And a separation from his wife seems to my mother like a pretty good one.
Will he be the first to know the deep buried secrets of Samantha Spade that no man has yet to uncover? And will he be the first man in a life of broken promises to make my mother believe in love? Who knows? That's what time is for. It tells all. Eventually.
She's caught in indecision now. She wants to just fall and let Jack catch her and love her but there's a seed in her heart, planted by me and her own distrust of men who play with vulnerable hearts, that grows with long held fear that more hours of hurt are just around the corner if she allows him into her heart again.
She downs another glass of wine and I watch her tentatively reach for the phone. The number she's ready to dial at the front of her mind, the words that need to be spoken nothing more than an incoherent mess it will take her days to unravel.
She won't do it. Tonight her strength has already ebbed and she won't risk sharing the fears written on her heart without it.
I think of Martin, riding in on his white horse and saving the day. A man whose promises I have no doubt are worth there weight in gold, who's smile promises more than a million words spoken by any other man . But at the moment the hopes for Martin and my mother are nothing more than the intense imagination of a six year old stuck forever in time, asking questions of the stars, wondering if this is the man who will be my mother's hero?
I know she doesn't really need a hero. That what she really needs is far simpler and much less exciting. All she needs is a hand. To pull her from that hole that she's been living in for so long. I fear Jack may be pushing her further into the darkness while I'm desperately rooting for her to pull herself out.
Tonight it will be my hand that she holds onto. Anything to save her from the hurt that is inevitable when Jack Malone is playing games with her heart. I lend her my own strength when her own gets too weak and throw her love from afar to reassure her when there's nothing more for me to do.
It's nothing like it should be. There shouldn't be worlds between us.
But there are.
Sometimes nothing is as it should be.
But then again, who's to say what 'should be' should be?