What He Offered
Chapter 32: Compassion Night
Why, Bones thought crossly, was there never a tissue box near to hand when it was needed? She dashed away the bittersweet tears the consummation of Tim and Jay's love had prompted, and smiled at Booth's cleverness in including her off-beat proposal of marriage in the scene's ending. Well-done!
Surely, there couldn't be much more of the story left now. She continued reading.
A Tale of Twin Booths, cont'd
If, at any time in the eighteen months that followed the take-down of Jacob Brodsky, Vic or Tim had been asked what they needed to make their lives complete, they would have answered without hesitation: not a blessed thing. In addition to each other and worthwhile careers at which they excelled, they now had a new home in a leafy D. C. residential area which they shared with the two women they had long adored, and who, incredibly enough, loved them in equal measure, as well as with their precious baby daughters, Chris and Tina, about whom more anon. The old order had, indeed, changed, and yielded place to the new; the hope they had dared to nurse on that long ago Ash Wednesday evening had been realized, and they could not have been happier.
Ironically, it was only then, when they had outgrown all need for her, and no longer thought to look for her return, that their mother, Marianne Booth, reappeared. She was in Vic's office one day when Tim breezed in to drop some files on his brother's desk. He did not immediately see the attractive, older woman ensconced in the chair by the door, and when he did, he naturally assumed she was waiting for Vic, who had been called away to a crime scene. "I'm sorry, ma'am, but…" he began automatically, only to be brought up short when he recognized her. "Mom?"
She smiled with a hint of her old bravado, but her eyes betrayed uncertainty. "I wasn't sure you'd remember me. What's it been, twenty-five years?"
Tim perched on the edge of the desk, and drank in the sight of her. "Twenty-four."
"You always were the one to look on the bright side, Timothy," she said, fondly. Her gaze faltered. "I should start by apologizing…"
"You don't have to apologize to me, Mom," he broke in. "I know what you went through. I never blamed you for leaving."
"Didn't you? All these years, I've been thinking you probably hated me…."
"Mom," he interrupted again. "I never hated you. I… missed you." He dragged another of the arm chairs in front of his mother, and lowered himself into it, so they were knee to knee. She held her hands clasped tightly in her lap; he laid one of his over them. "I always knew you'd come back. Do I wish it could've been sooner? Of course, but the important thing is, you're here, now, and I've got so much to tell you. I'm with the most wonderful woman. Her name is Joy, which is a lot of name to live up to, but she does it. And we have a daughter, Tina. Vic has two children of his own. You're a grandmother, three times over!"
Tim had the satisfaction of seeing some of his mother's tension drain away, and a bit of sparkle return to her eyes. "I'm too young to be a grandmother," she joked, game as ever.
He rose reluctantly to his feet, and put the chair back in its place. "Listen, Mom, I've got to get back to work, and Vic's been delayed, so…" He tore a sheet off the notepad on the desk, wrote down their address and handed it to her. "I want you to come stay with us. No arguments." She stood up for their good-byes, and Tim drew her into arms, hugging her tight. When he stepped back, he smiled warmly at her. "See you tonight. Oh, and Mom," he said, pausing on his way out, "a word of warning: expect Vic to be a little grumpy at first."
His mother looked at him in consternation. "Is Victor very angry with me?"
"What? Oh, no, it's not that. I always told him you'd be back, and here you are. It drives him crazy when I'm right."
What began as a joke, soon proved prophetic, however. While initially welcoming, Vic had only to learn that Marianne had had a hand in raising another man's children for his old resentment and hostility to surface with a vengeance. "Can you believe the gall of that woman?" he steamed, when he and Tim were finishing their beers after dinner. As a result of Vic's harsh words earlier in the day, their mother had packed her bags and taken a room at a hotel. "She only came back to soothe her feelings of guilt so she can move on with her piano-player fiancé. She comes waltzing back into our lives, devil-may-care, and expects us to walk her down the aisle at her wedding? Well, far as I'm concerned, she can just forget it."
"Explain it to me again, why you're so mad at her. Because, to be honest with you, I don't get it."
"She left us, Tim, you and me. It wasn't that she couldn't handle being a mother, which is what I always wanted to believe; she couldn't handle being our mother."
"And, you know this… how? Did she tell you, in so many words, that you drove her away with your bratty ways? Or, that I was too needy, and smothered her with demands for attention? Did she say her step-kids were a lot easier to love? Did you even give her a chance to explain?"
"What's to explain?" Vic said, curt in his exasperation. "She left us when we needed her. How can you just let bygones be bygones after that?"
"Look, Vic, I don't know why she left, or why she stayed away so long, and I don't need to know to be able to forgive her. I grieved her loss for years, but then, I fell in love with Joy, and, after that, there wasn't any more than a small corner of my heart left for Mom. I let her go then, freely and without rancor. I have my heart's desire, Vic: Joy and Tina are my life, now. I'll always be glad to see Mom, but she's not essential to my happiness any more."
"And, I suppose you told her that," Vic sneered.
"I did, actually: yesterday, when I introduced her to Joy. I said something like, 'Mom, meet the woman who stole my heart away from you.' Mom's happy for me, Vic, and she's happy for you, too. She said it's what all mothers want: for their sons to find mature love with another woman, even if it means she gets left behind. She sees the life we've built here, the family we're creating, and it gives her great satisfaction."
"Yeah, well, if we have a good life, now, it's no thanks to her."
"Well, I'm not so sure about that. I'm speaking only for myself, here, but, in a way, her leaving was a gift. If I hadn't known the terrible pain of losing her, I wouldn't be able to empathize so strongly with the suffering of others. It's because I've known and learned to deal personally with heartache, that I can recognize it in other people, and offer them some degree of comfort. Her abandoning us shaped me, for good as well as ill."
Vic favored his twin with a mocking look. "You'll have to excuse me if I can't be as magnanimous as you, Saint Tim."
"You're a constant trial to me, my son," Tim said, in his best father-confessor tone. "Look, all I'm saying is, Mom must've had her reasons. They don't matter to me, but, obviously, they do to you. So, give her a chance, let her tell you her side of things. Women leave, we both know that, but it's more nuanced than that. Sometimes women leave, and they stay away, out of love. That's what I've learned from loving Joy: she ran off to Maluku not because she didn't love me, but because she loved me too much to risk hurting me. That's not how I took it at the time, but that's on me. And there's you and Brennan, too: she didn't want to leave you for a year, but she went because she loves her sister, and because she thought you were on board with it. You trusted, at first, that she loved you and would come back, but, then, when you didn't hear from her, you lost faith and decided, without any proof, that she didn't love you after all. By the time she did come back, you'd convinced yourself she'd betrayed you, when the truth of the matter was, you gave up too soon. Huh, I'm beginning to see a pattern…"
Vic yanked the empty bottle from his brother's hand, and pushed back from the table. "I hate you."
"So noted." Tim rose in his turn. "Anyway, you do what you have to do. Joy and I are planning to attend the wedding, and I don't have any problem giving Mom away. But then, maybe it's all for the best" he said, making his way toward his side of the residence. "I always was her favorite child."
As it was easier to be annoyed with Tim than to give his arguments serious consideration, Vic was still angry with their mother when she turned up at his office the next day. "I'm busy," he said, gruffly, when she walked in.
Unintimidated, Marianne stood her ground, and said her piece. "Children expect their parents to be God-like, Victor, invulnerable and all-powerful, but parents are only people, with weaknesses and flaws. I did the best I could for you and Timothy, but it was never enough, I wasn't strong enough, and you may despise me for that, but I am only human, and I have forgiven myself, even if you never can.
"It took real courage for me to come back into your life, Victor. I was certain you must hate me, and I can't blame you if you do. When I didn't come back and take you away from your father, you must have thought the worst: that I didn't want you, didn't care about you, when the truth was, I couldn't face the shame of what I'd done to you. After you went to live with Hank, I thought you'd be better off without me. How could I disrupt your lives when I had nothing to offer you but misery? If I've been so bold as to come back now, it's because I finally have something worthwhile to share with you, something positive to offer: a loving step-father, a step-brother and step-sister. The family I couldn't give you a quarter-century ago…
"I can see now that I left it too late, and you want nothing to do with me. Please know that, if I had a chance to do it all over, I'd do things very differently, but that is neither here not there. I will take the happy moments of these last two days with me, and hold them forever in my heart."
Vic had sat, stone-faced, through all of this speech, and, as he did not appear to have any response to it once delivered, Marianne gathered her dignity about her, and left. Alone again, with her words replaying in his ears, Vic was ashamed of his obduracy, both on general principles and because, as she had obliquely implied, he had behaved like a spoiled child: unreasonable in his expectations of her past self, sulky in his disappointment, and unappreciative of the effort it had cost her to make this overture. She had risked the pain and humiliation of rejection for the chance to reconnect with her sons, and he had given her short shrift.
"She was genuinely sorry, Temperance, but I couldn't soften toward her," he said bitterly when he and Brennan sat talking outside the Royal Diner. "I let her walk away unforgiven. How could I be so hard on her, my own mother?"
"Precisely because she's your mother, I expect," Brennan said. "The tie between mother and child is a sacred trust, and to breach that trust is unforgivable. It could mean the child's death. You must have felt, as a young boy, that she jeopardized your very life by leaving. But, here you are, Vic. You've survived. You've even flourished. I think you can afford to be the bigger person in this situation. Think of what Christ endured, and still managed to forgive. That's the real challenge of Christianity: not to retaliate when injured, but to turn the other cheek."
As Vic lay in bed that night, staring at the ceiling, he tried to wrestle the tumult of his feelings into some kind of order. Forgive others, that you may be forgiven, he reminded himself. Be the bigger person, Brennan's voice whispered in his mind. Let her go, Tim counseled. Grow a set, Gordon Gordon advised impatiently. He had his heart's desire, after all: Brennan and Chris were his life, now, and so much more than he deserved. Punishing his mother would not add to that happiness, and rejecting her merely tied him to a past he ought by now to have outgrown.
And yet… Vic had thought, upon finding love with Brennan, that the shell encasing his heart had shattered for good, but searching that organ, now, he discovered there was one small corner still calcified: the corner of his heart that belonged to his mother. The build-up there was particularly thick; it dated, after all, to his childhood, and held, petrified in its layers, the intolerable pain her leaving had caused. Anger is so much easier than grief, Brennan had once told him, and it humbled him now to realize how much braver his "weak" twin had been all those years ago, for Tim had not shut out the suffering, but had endured it and come out the other side, something he himself had never done.
Fearing his agitation would disturb Brennan's sleep, he slipped out of bed, and wandered about the house, until eventually he found himself in the girls' room, standing over Chris' crib. She was his little cherub, awake or dreaming, but she looked particularly angelic lying there, her gold curls a riotous halo, her chubby cheeks flushed pink, her tiny lips shaped like a perfect Cupid's bow. He tried to imagine leaving her, and every feeling immediately revolted. No, only a monster could abandon his own child. Was his mother a monster, then? A cold, unnatural woman? He knew she was not.
She had to save herself, Tim argued in his mind. Her husband had been capable of throwing her down the stairs; what other violence might he not have done? Vic looked down at his daughter, and asked himself, if he had to sacrifice his life to save hers, would he? There was really no question: he would give his own, and gladly. But, just imagine if, in a moment of cowardice, he balked, if he chose his own safety over hers… The very idea was unbearable: he would hate himself forever, he could never look in the mirror again. I couldn't face the shame of what I'd done to you, his mother had said. And parents are only people, with weaknesses and flaws. She had not had the strength to meet a parent's greatest challenge. How she must have loathed herself, and no wonder she had not returned until now.
"Vic?" He turned to see Brennan in the doorway. "Can't sleep?"
When she'd joined him by the crib, he put an arm around her shoulder, and drew her close. "Sorry if I woke you." Just then, Chris rolled onto her side, taking the blanket with her and uncovering a fuzzy green stuffed animal. "What's that?"
Brennan fetched the ugly thing out of the crib, and held it up for Vic's inspection. "A 'Phillies Phanatic,' I gather. Marianne gave it to Chris. She won't put it down."
Vic stared at it in wonder. "It's… mine. It used to be my favorite toy."
"Yes, she mentioned that. She's carried it with her all these years, and taken excellent care of it, to judge by its condition."
"But… why?"
Brennan leaned slightly away, the better to look at him squarely. "I think you know the answer to that."
The stony patch over Vic's heart cracked painfully, and his eyes filled with tears. Brennan replaced the toy by her daughter's side, and taking Vic by the hand, led him from the room.
Later, when he'd stopped grieving for the anguished seven-year-old he had been and the unhappy woman torn between love and self-preservation who had been his mother, he accepted the crisp linen handkerchief Brennan held out to him, and mopped away the tears. "Don't look at me," he grumbled.
His Brennan had never been the obedient type. She took his face between the palms of her hands, and said, in the most loving voice imaginable, "You numbskull. I have never seen you look more handsome."
The next day, Vic joined Tim in giving their mother away in marriage, freely and without rancor.