The Last Word

Content warning: Includes medical settings (NICU, surgery), palliative/end-of-life themes, and a brief, non-graphic mention of restraint.

Today

“Yeah, I know it’s impossible, Jake,” I grumble into my phone. “That’s why I’m calling you instead of trying to hug him.” I fiddle with the paper sleeve on my coffee cup and keep my head down.

“Did you say anything to him?” Jake asks.

“Of course not,” I hiss and immediately regret it. “Sorry. I’m not—I was taken by surprise. I called you so I could, you know, process or whatever. It’s just...I mean, you should see this guy, Jake. He looks exactly like Ben. When he put in his order, I heard his voice and—” Something is caught in my throat. It makes my voice crack. It hurts.

“Okay, okay,” Jake soothes. As my best friend, he has the privilege of being my emergency contact for any and all of my freak outs, but right now he speaks to me in a voice so patient and kind that I want to slap him in the face. “It’s okay, Jess. I get it. This would mess anyone up. You lost Ben ten years ago—”

“I didn’t ‘lose’ Ben, Jake,” I snap. “I held him as he died and then I buried him. I know exactly where he is.”

Jake sighs. “Right. Of course. I’m sorry.” He clears his throat. “But you just said it yourself. You know it’s not Ben, no matter how much this guy looks and sounds like him.” He pauses. “Maybe you should leave that cafe. Want me to pick you up?”

I watch the man who isn’t my son walk past my table. His eyes land on me for an instant. The vise around my lungs sprouts thorns.

I start to stand and knock my coffee over, spilling it on the table and in my lap. The burn makes me look down and scoot back in my chair. When I glance back up, he’s gone.

“Jess? You okay? Hello?”

The phone is still in my hand. I press it to my ear absently.

“Jess?” Jake asks again.

I get up and grab my purse. “Yeah, sorry. I spaced out. I’m going to go.”

“Good. Call me later?”

“Uh-huh.” I hang up.

His eyes were brown, I think. It’s such a common color.

But it was Ben’s brown.

12 Years Ago

“This is absurd,” I say as I pull out of the parking lot. “They barely did any testing.”

Ben snorts from the passenger seat.

“Okay, fine,” I relent sourly. “They did a passable amount of testing. Thumbs up to them on their testing. We’re still getting a second opinion.” I rummage in my purse until I find my notepad and toss it in Ben’s lap. “Can you call your dad and read him those notes?”

When he doesn’t respond, I glance at him. Ben’s twenty-two and tall like his dad. He was on the varsity swim team in high school. Got a scholarship for that and his academic achievements when he went to college. He eats the awful casserole that I keep trying to replicate from my childhood. He lets me tease him endlessly. He came back to live at home when I told him about the divorce. Ben is a good person. A wonderful person.

He does not have cancer.

“Are you going to call him?” I ask to distract myself from doing something idiotic, like trying to memorize his profile. Then I do it anyway. Just in case.

He’s frowning at my scribbles. He doesn’t comment on my angry underlining and excessive exclamation points. He sets the notebook down on the dash. “I don’t want to talk to him right now,” he says.

Today

I’m following a stranger. I’m crazy, and I’m following a stranger.

When I see him get in his car, I sprint to my own and scramble to start the engine.

It isn’t Ben, I tell myself. It isn’t.

But…he has the same eyes as Ben. The same haircut. He has the same patch of freckles on the left side of his face. He looks just like he did before the treatments, strong and bright and young.

And it isn’t Ben.

So, trying to keep a car between us like I’ve seen in movies, I follow the man who is not my dead son.

11 Years Ago

“Not bad, huh?” I say proudly, patting the railing I installed in the bathroom. “And before you pick on me, I checked. It’s not crooked.” I squint at it. “It’s mostly not crooked.”

Ben snorts at me. He stands in the doorway of the bathroom, leaning in over his walker to get a closer look. He smiles. “It’s great, Mom.”

“I know it is. Didn’t I just say that?” I haphazardly gather up tools that I didn’t know the names of until today. “I’ll work on putting a rail on the stairs tomorrow.”

In our split-level, there are six stairs that separate the main living area from the two bedrooms. When he was eight, Ben accidentally pulled the wooden railing off the wall while pretending he was scaling a mountain. We never replaced it.

“Aw,” Ben says, shaking his head. “You don’t have to do that, Mom.”

I scoff. “Of course, I do. You’ve got nothing to hold on to and you said I’m—how did you phrase it?—'too squishy to be a crutch’?”

Something flickers over his face, dark and heavy. “Stop making changes to the house, Mom. I mean it.”

I bring it up again a couple of times. I even get my ex to take my side, and he shows up later that week to help me put up not one, but two railings. “Because I’m double-right,” I tease Ben once we’re done.

He doesn’t comment.

A month later, the palliative care team is in our living room, installing an oxygen concentrator and nebulizer for Ben’s ruined lungs. They set up next to the new, neatly made hospital bed.

I stand next to him in his wheelchair, and we watch them in silence. After a while, he reaches out and squeezes my hand. His face has changed in ways that burn my eyes, but when he smiles at me, it’s still Ben.

“Told you so,” he says.

Today

The apartment building he walks up to is a low-rise with open-air access to the units. From where I’m parked, I see him go up one flight of stairs and pause at a door before going through it.

I leave my purse in the car as I jog to the building and up the stairs. I ignore the snarky voice in the back of my head that mocks me for being out of breath.

I bang on the door in time with my pulse. Please, I think, please, please, please. Then, the door swings open, and there he is.

Ben.

He looks me up and down. “Can I help you?” he asks. His tone is frosty. It jars me for a moment.

“I—” I start before clearing my throat and trying again. “Yes, I saw you in the coffee shop and…”

Something twitches in his face and then it’s gone. “Oh, right. You spilled your drink.”

I nod, and I’m smiling like a maniac, and there are tears crowding my vision because he’s here he’s here he’s here.

He frowns harder and tilts his head. The movement is so unlike my son that I take a step back. “Do I know you?” he demands.

32 Years Ago

When the nurse holds Ben up to me, my body is already going into shock. My shoulders and arms rattle the operating table. Beyond the blue curtain, I can hear the doctor and nurses talking quietly as they close me up.

The nurse moves him a little closer because I can’t turn my head. He’s small in her hands, wrapped up in a duckling-print blanket and a striped hat. His face is perfect and china-doll smooth.

I don’t see him again for two days.

It was a scary birth. He was too early. My blood pressure was too high. Afterwards, I felt bloated with fatigue, and there was a constant hum of pain under my skin. I needed rest, fluids, and monitoring. They gave me pills and checked my vitals several times a day. They cared for me, fussed over me.

But they wouldn’t let me see my baby.

The nurses roll me into his room after I begged them to let me see him, my body still too broken to find him myself. I was incomprehensible as I cried and heaved around the wrongness of me. I had no words to give them that explained the awful emptiness of my arms.

It takes a long time to get to the NICU. The nurses have to maneuver me and all my trappings down the crowded halls and into the elevator. But then I’m there, with him, staring at the parts of his face that aren’t covered with wires and medical tape. I marvel at his knobby knees, the impossibly small fingers and toes, each tipped with tissue paper nails. I have never done anything as incredible as Ben fighting to simply exist.

“Don’t you worry, kiddo,” I whisper. I press my fingertips against the glass that separates us. “I’ve got you.”

Today

I don’t say anything for several seconds. I’m just staring, my mouth agape. He turns his face away and starts to close the door.

The hope in me stutters. He doesn’t know me. It’s not him. I’m a stupid, desperate—

My thoughts freeze as all my attention snags on the map of freckles on his cheek.

“Wait!” I shout and shove at the door. He stumbles back, and I barrel my way inside.

“What’re you—” he starts but reels back when I whirl on him.

“You’re Ben—”

“Lady, you need to leave before I call the cops.”

I keep going. “You’re Ben Casick. You were born August 14th, 1993—”

“My name’s not—

“You had to get tubes in your ears when you were a year old because you kept getting ear infections. You have a scar on your knee from when—”

He tries to grab my arm but I back away.

“—from when you fell off your bike to avoid a group of little kids. You used salt instead of sugar the first time you made me chocolate chip cookies, and when you got upset and tried to throw them away, I ate. Every. Single. One.” I point my finger at him like it’s a weapon. “You’re Ben. You’re my Ben.”

His face looks pained for a split second before he scowls. He starts toward me again.

I look around wildly for anything nearby to keep him from dragging me back outside. There’s a small bowl on the coffee table and I snatch it, flinging out the coins and receipts that it held. I brandish it in front of me like a sword and refuse to feel ridiculous. “Benjamin Rhoades Casick, I swear if you try to grab me again, you will regret it.”

His eyebrows kick up at that. “Calm down, lady, okay?” He holds his hands up, palms out. “There’s obviously some kind of misunderstanding. You’ve got me confused with this Ben guy—”

“I’m not confused.”

“Okay. But I’m not Ben.” He hunches his shoulders up by his ears. “So...?”

“You are Ben,” I accuse again. “You’re my kid, my only kid, and you died ten years ago.” That awful pain is in my throat again, and it creeps into my chest and twists. I shake my head against the memories erupting behind my vision.

Ben finally sleeping in his crib after six weeks in the NICU.

Ben opening a prank Christmas gift of an avocado and surprising me with a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

Ben yelling at me for asking too many questions when he came home from school in tears.

Ben breathing too hard in the hospital bed.

Ben not breathing at all.

“You died,” I whisper. “And now you’re here. It’s like you never got sick at all.”

He shifts uncomfortably on his feet. “I’m sorry you lost your son,” he mumbles. “But you can’t just force your way into my home. I don’t know you. I’m not Ben.”

I hear a buzzing and see his cell ringing on the entryway table. I tense, raising the bowl again. You are not crazy, I tell myself. Just hold your bowl and keep threatening the man you say is your deceased son.

Ben starts to inch his hand toward the table. “I have to get that, okay?” he says gently. “It’s for work. If I don’t answer, there’ll be consequences.”

“Don’t,” I snap. “Don’t you do anything until you tell me how this is possible.” I wave the bowl at him. “I mean it.”

He frowns again and then clenches his fists when the phone stops buzzing. “Listen to me very carefully. My boss is going to call again. I will talk to you about whatever you want afterwards, but when that phone rings, I. Cannot. Miss. It.”

It rings. He starts to reach for the phone, and I throw the bowl at him. It bounces off his forehead, and his head snaps back. He stumbles into the still-open front door, and it slams shut.

I spring forward and snatch the phone off the table just as he regains his balance.

“No!” he shouts as I turn around and hurl it as hard as I can into the wall. “No, no, no!”

He runs past me and crouches to the floor, picking up the cracked phone. Small shards of glass drop from it as he squints at the screen. “What have you done?” he whispers.

I freeze. I know that voice. I know the torn pitch and deep, wrenching sadness in the syllables.

It’s the sound of my son’s heart breaking.

“Ben?” I ask hesitantly. I make it two steps toward him before the front door flies open. I don’t have enough time to turn around before pain explodes from the back of my head, and I’m falling straight through the floor into darkness.

10 Years Ago

“Mom?”

“I’m here, Ben. What can I do? What do you need?”

“It hurts.”

“I know, kiddo. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ve got you. Stay with me.”

Today

I wake up with a splitting headache and pins and needles in my hands.

“I told you to leave,” I hear Ben say raggedly. “Why didn’t you listen?”

I have to blink the blurriness from my eyes before I can actually see anything. I’m still in his living room, but now I’m seated. Ben’s hunched over with his back to me as he kneels on the floor. I try to go to him, but my wrists, I realize, are tied to the chair. I tug, then tug harder. I start to kick my legs, but they’re strapped to the chair too. Alarm pushes back the throbbing in my skull just enough for me to register that we’re in real danger. “Ben,” I whisper. “Get out of here. Run!”

But he doesn’t run. Instead, he rises to his feet and turns to face me. I’m relieved that he’s not bound. The door is so close. Maybe I could distract whoever did this while Ben escapes.

“I told you,” Ben says again.

There is movement just beyond my peripheral vision, and I flinch back. A moment later, a man I’ve never seen before goes to Ben’s side. He hands Ben something small and metal. I don’t recognize it, but the resigned way Ben curls his fingers around it makes my neck prickle in warning. “Take care of it,” the man growls before walking out.

“Ben?” I ask when he doesn’t move for several moments.

“I have to answer the phone when it rings,” Ben says numbly, staring at the thing in his hand. “If I don’t answer, they come and check for violations. If anyone’s caught tampering with their time stream, they only get one chance to make it right.” He presses his free hand against his eyes. “This is the only way, Mom. Or else they’ll put me back right before the diagnosis. And I can’t—” He chokes on the words. “I can’t do it again.”

Mom, I think. He called me Mom.

“I knew coming back here was a bad idea. But it’s...it’s really difficult working for them, you know? Something about the jumps—it messes me up.” He shakes his head angrily. “I thought being here would help ground me.”

I realize as he starts to pace that the only person in danger here is me. I feel around my mind for the panic that should come with that thought, but I can only focus on the vibrant emotions on his face, the energetic distress in his limbs.

“What do I do? You were never supposed to find me. I can only fix this if I—do you understand, Mom? Are you listening?”

His entire face is twisted with regret, and I’m delirious at the possibility that he will have the chance to get wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead.

“It’s you,” I say, and the wonder of fills up my lungs.

He closes his eyes again, and his throat bobs. His hand clutches the thing the man gave him. Heartbeats pass before he finally says, “Yeah, Mom. It’s me.”

As Ben lifts the weapon and points it at me, my face splits open in a smile. “Told you so.”