The Words Long Left Unsaid

Like it had taken its cue from an invisible director that the mood needed to be set before an impending battle, the sun disappeared beneath a wall of charcoal black storm clouds. The light that had imbued the surrounding residences with a sense of life and happiness was now smothered and replaced by an endless spectrum of shades of black and gray. Parked among the lines of cars that hugged the curbs of their respective houses and plots of land was a silver van, the color of which was made a dark platinum by the paucity of light. Inside the vehicle sat two men: one in the passenger seat and the other in the driver’s seat, a weird armature rose from the floor of the vehicle to the climate controls before bending ninety degrees towards the driver, creating an L-shaped structure, filling the void that separated the two. At the end of the armature, which hovered over the driver’s lap, was a tiny steering wheel reminiscent of the ones used in go-carts, a small circle with a rectangle that housed several buttons inscribed within it. Parked behind the passenger seat such that the front of it was perpendicular to the driver’s side of the vehicle was a rust-colored manual wheelchair

The occupant of the passenger seat wore a dark, coffee-colored shirt and black sweat pants, the clothed parts of him to blending into the leather upholstery of the seat, giving the appearance that all that was occupying the space was a disembodied set of nearly ghost-white hands and a head. The occupant of the driver’s seat, however, was clothed in an orange sherbet-colored button down shirt and cream-colored pants. His hands and face were of an olive complexion offset by inch long, jet black hair, his eyes pools of dark chocolate.

“You sure about this James?” asked the occupant of the passenger seat. “I mean, you could… we could just delete all of her contact information, change all of ours, and just drive off. You sure you don’t want to just do that?”

“I’m sure,” replied James, tuning his head towards the passenger side of the vehicle, meeting the gaze of the occupant of the passenger seat. “This is something I have to do face-to-face. For once she is going to have to listen to me.” The occupant of the passenger seat nodded before a shroud of silence befell the two. “Hey Charlie,” spoke James, breaking the silence, “thank you.”

“No problem,” said Charlie, nodding his head, his shirt moving in concordance with the nod. “So, when do you want ta do this?”

James sighed, bowing his head to look at the steering wheel hovering above his lap before turning to meet Charlie’s gaze, replying, “I think I’m ready.” He then reclined the back of the driver’s seat and began to transfer into the wheelchair behind the passenger’s seat. Once seated in the wheelchair, he twisted around and pressed a button embedded into the side of the vehicle, causing the passenger’s side sliding door to open. Once open, a black, metal ramp deployed from underneath the floor of the vehicle. James then unlocked the brakes keeping the wheelchair stationary and cautiously wheeled himself in reverse down the ramp. Once outside, he turned himself around to face the house the van was parked in front of, looked back at the van for a moment before returning his gaze towards the house, and began to wheel himself towards the house, leaving the meter wide strip of concrete that comprised the sidewalk only to be greeted by another strip of concrete running perpendicular to the sidewalk, which led him to the front door of the house.

The silent, nearly dead air was suddenly disturbed by the sound of him knocking on the sloppily painted visage of the front door. Nothing. No muffled voice rang from the inside. Come on, thought James as he waited for a reply. A minute passed with no sign of life beyond the door. James knocked again, thinking to himself, I’ll wait as long as I have to mom. Eventually, you’ll have to open this door. He knocked again and again until he was continuously knocking on the visage of the door. After what seemed like an hour of unrelenting knocking, James relented, hearing muffled footsteps from behind the door. The door opened to reveal a tall, unhealthily thin woman wearing a white T-shirt and blue sweatpants with muted gold and gray hair. Her eyes were tiny dots of green surrounded by an ocean of yellow. Her skin hung loosely and unevenly from her face. “James?” she uttered.

“Hi, mom,” said James. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” replied the woman, stepping out of the doorway, disappearing from view. James entered the house, wheeling himself over the series of thresholds and sub-thresholds that lined the bottom of the doorway. The front door then closed.

James, familiar with the layout of the house, wheeled himself out of the entryway and to the living area, a small, cubicle like room adjacent to the entryway. The air was thick and musty, as though it were a vaporized oil concoction continuously dispersed into the empty spaces and voids of the house. The walls and ceiling, which had once been a pure, primer white, were now an off-color brown. As James wheeled into the living area, he was greeted by a large, black recliner. In front of the recliner was a small, mahogany coffee table sat in the center of the room. James wheeled past the table, turned himself so that he faced the recliner, and sat the brakes on the wheelchair. “You want some coffee?” rang the voice of his mother from the other side of the house.

“No thank you,” he replied. As he waited for his mother, he began to fiddle with his hands, wrapping one over the other. He felt tense, clenching his jaw while he continued to fiddle with his hands. What am I doing? he thought to himself. She is my mother. What self-respecting son does this to his mother? The resolve he had previously expressed to Charlie about carrying out what he had come to do began to evaporate.

Suddenly, the train of thought he had wrapped himself in was disrupted by the arrival of his mother carrying two cups of coffee. “Here you go,” she said in a high-pitched, motherly tone, placing one of the cups on the coffee table next to him.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he expressed. “I didn’t want any.”

“Oh nonsense,” said his mother, sitting down in the recliner, “I know what you like, and I definitely know that you want what you like.”

Not wanting to offend her, he picked up the cup of coffee from the table and lifted it up to his mouth. The liquid it contained was a muddy mixture more reminiscent of an oil slick than coffee. He feigned a drink from the cup and then sat it back down on the table. “So, what brings you here?” asked his mother, her voice happy and joyous.

“Well, mom,” began James, unsure of where or how to start, “Charlie and I were talking－”

“Oh Charlie,” began his mother. “You know, he’s been dating three women at the same time－”

“No, he has not, mom,” countered James, the apprehension in his voice turning to annoyance.

“How do you know?”

“Because he lives with me, mom.”

“Well, that don’t mean shit.”

“Mom!” exclaimed James, a slight wave of anger washing over him.

“I’m just saying. It’s not like you two are with each other every waking moment of the day, and your brother has always been one of those crafty man whores.”

“What?”

“Well, when he was a teenager, he would try and trick me seven ways to Sunday every time he brought over a girl.”

“Mom stop,” barked James sternly. “Let’s put that to the side and－”

“Well okay then. Just thought you would want to know about your brother’s disconcerting beh－” mumbled his mother like a defiant teenager before being interrupted by James.

“Mom,” bellowed James, stopping momentarily to regain his composure, “Charlie and I were talking and he and I came to an agreement－”

“That you need to lose weight!” interrupted his mother, the excitement she felt from completing James’s thought filled her body, and she twitched ebulliently in the recliner, spilling some of the sludge in her coffee cup on her shirt. “You know, I agree. Since you went off to college, you’ve gotten a little muffin top,” she said with the manic energy of a lottery winner.

“No, ma,” he said. “You know what, let’s leave Charlie out of this. Okay?”

“If you want to,” she retorted, taking a drink from her coffee cup.

“Remember－” said James leaning forward in his wheelchair, taking a brief moment to search for what he was going to say next, “remember last week－”

“Yeah.”

“－when you called my apartment and then came over－”

“Oh yeah,” breathed his mother.

“－and yelled at my girlfriend?”

“Well, honey,” began his mother as though she were explaining a fact of life to a child, leaning forward in her recliner, setting her coffee cup on the coffee table, “I called you and you didn’t answer. I was worried that something happened to you. So I decided to see if you were okay.”

“Mom, I didn’t answer your call because I was busy with my girlfriend.”

“Oh honey,” she cooed, “I know. And if I hadn’t gone over there and chased her away, she would have killed you.”

“What?” exclaimed James, confused and taken aback by the utterance.

“Well, James, I mean she was on top of you and trying to smother, choke you and－”

“But mom. You－ I mean she was－But I–I was－” choked James, blindsided by her justification.

“Well, Jamesy,” began James’s mother inquisitively, “if she wasn’t trying to kill you, then what was she doing?”

James, even more taken aback, paused briefly before managing a confused and embarrassed, “Mom, we were having sex.”

Silence filled the room before being broken by a concerned, “Oh God,” from James’s mother.

“Exactly mom,” began James, thinking that he had finally made some headway with his mother. “And that’s why I want to cut－”

“That bitch,” grimaced his mother.

“What?” questioned James, unsure of where his mother was going to take the conversation.

“She raped you. My baby－” she exploded.

“Mom. No. No. No,” pleaded James, realizing that he had not made any headway with her; however, his interjections and pleas were unheeded. “Mom, I was not raped!” he yelled.

“But you were Jamesy. You’re in a wheelchair. You can’t consent. You can’t have sex Jamesy. You know that. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” howled his mother, now manic to the point of incoherence. She continued, repeating, “You know you can’t… Jamesy. Jamesy, she raped you!”

Unable to interject and interrupt his mother, James began to clench his jaw again. His face felt hot. He could feel a rage beginning to boil in his stomach. Powerlessness overtook him; he yelled, “I’m done with you!” The room fell silent.

Leaning even further forward in her recliner, his mother quietly and collectedly inquired, “What?”

“I’m done with you! I’m cutting you from my life!” yelled James. His mother remained silent. Her silence a response in of itself. James continued, elucidating what he had come to say at the loudest volume he could muster, “I’m done with you! This– this– whatever the fuck it is, I can’t do it. I’ve stood by for twenty-four years, and every day, you find some way to fuck with me. I’m not fat. Charlie is not a crafty man whore. And I was not raped. No matter where I go, what I do, you find me and fuck with me, you take my life and destroy it, and I am done.” Feeling as though he made his point, James then slumped back in his wheelchair.

Silence once again befell the room only to be broken by James’s mother. “Okay,” she said calmly. “Setting the rape aside for－”

“No, ma, we’re not setting the rape aside for now because I was not raped. Why do you do this? You threw a rolling pin at the first girl I kissed. You started a rumor that I had syphilis in high school when you heard about a girl and I.”

“Okay. We won’t talk about those situations until you’re ready,” said his mother. Before James could retort, she continued, “Well, tell me then, if I abuse you so much and make your life such a Hell, why didn’t you have a bad childhood?”

“I did ma,” said James, his voice shaking and cracking, his face flushed with blood, hot, and covered in a thin film of sweat. “I did.”

“When? When was it so bad?”

“Every holiday, ma, you would lock me in the basement. I spent every Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July alone, in a dark basement.”

“No, Jamesy, see? You’re mistaken. You said you wanted to be down there, rem－”

“No, ma, you would ask me if I wanted to go down there and tell me everybody else would be down there, and then when I was down there you would close the door, lock it, and just leave me there.”

After a brief pause, James’s mother replied, “Okay, well I guess we’ll talk about that when you’re ready too.”

“No,－”

“What else, Jamesy? If I am such a she bitch, there must be others?”

“What about all of my jobs? You got me fired from every job I had. Remember Jones Street Cafe, they fired me because you would spend my entire shift driving around the block, poking your head in the door, and asking for me to see if I was okay? Or how about Taco La Carte? Hmmm? You told the shift manager to fire me because I was stealing from the till but it was really because you didn’t want me ther－”

“Jamesy, we talked about this. You couldn’t work there because you can’t handle the rushes. Oh Jamesy, the world has really messed with your head.” His mother then stood up from her recliner and proceeded to walk towards James to give him a hug.

James put his hand up, preventing his mother from closing the distance she had left to hug him. His eyes met her’s. “No, mom. No hugs. No,” he said, maintaining his gaze. “I came here to tell you myself, face-to-face, like a mature adult, that you are no longer welcome in my life. I came here hoping that maybe there was some explanation, some sense of closure that I could get: maybe perhaps an apology, something to put me to rest, that somewhere buried deep inside your corpse was an iota of genuine love for your boy, but no. I guess I’m dumber than I thought for hoping for that.” He then released the brakes on his wheelchair and began to wheel himself out of the living area.

His mother, defeated and confused, turned to face the back of his wheelchair and inquired, “Can I tell you something, Jamesy?”

James stopped. “What?” he quavered, his wheelchair aimed towards the entryway, his back to his mother.

“I am sorry. I’m sorry that your dad convinced me not to abort you,” sniped his mother

James did not respond; however, he did pause for a moment before exiting the house and making his way to the van. Once seated in the driver’s seat he turned to face Charlie. “How’d it go over with mom?” asked Charlie.

Silence took a hold of the space between the two. Then, the floodgates that had kept back all of his emotion, pain, and sadness burdened by the ordeal burst all at once, James began to cry. A lone tear drop was quickly joined by a deluge of tears, through which James managed a labored, “What mom?”

THE END