A Mother's Love (11 page)

M
ARK FROWNED AT THE
Mariners game on TV. He held a beer in one hand and the telephone, loosely, in the other. Truth was, he couldn't have said who'd just gotten the base hit. Instead he bounced the phone in his hand and thought,
Okay, big guy. At the sound of a gunshot and a woman's scream, you'll break down a door and go in without hesitation, but you don't have the guts to ask your own mother a straight question.

He'd asked before. She wouldn't be any more open this time.

Yeah, but had he ever said,
Mom, this is important to me
?

Crap. He set down the beer, grabbed the TV remote control and muted the game, then dialed.

“Mark!” she exclaimed in pleasure. “How nice to hear your voice!”

Now he felt guilty to have an agenda. He couldn't call his own mother just to chat? Maybe he should put off asking about Dad….

Coward.

Yeah, so?

She chatted about the cruise she was thinking of taking that winter with a group of other women from work. He made appropriate noises and waited for his chance.

When it came, he said bluntly, “Mom, I actually called to ask you about Dad's depression.”

“Oh, Mark! Let's not talk about ancient history. For goodness' sake, what difference does it make now?” It was as if he'd asked a question about whether Jimmy had really pushed him down the time he skinned his knee in second grade. As if the subject of his father's life and death was also trivial.

Mark thought about the fear curled tight in his belly, like a tumor that could swell silently at any time, and said, “Mental illness can be hereditary. Rachel and I should know what kind of problem we might be carrying.”

“
She's
never worried.”

“Yeah? You ever ask her?”

“Why would I? You're the one who's obsessed with your father. I doubt she's thought of him in years.”

“She and I talk about him. We know you don't like to and usually we respect that.”

Her wounded silence was one of her principal weapons. He'd never been able to take it. Damn it, she was a fellow victim of the tragedy, not a perpetrator. He invariably felt cruel dredging up the painful times. This time, although it was hard, he sat silent, too.

She spoke at last in a brittle voice. “What is it that you want to know?”

So easy?
he marveled. Had he simply never asked firmly enough? Did that place the onus for the not knowing on his own shoulders, not hers?

He swallowed. “I keep wondering when depression might hit me. When did he start having trouble?”

“How would I know? He certainly wasn't honest with me!”

Wasn't honest with her?

“You mean, it started before you met?”

She made a sound he identified after a startled moment as a laugh—the angriest one he'd ever heard. “At the funeral… Can you believe it? I'm burying my husband, and one of his best friends from back home tells me that he'd tried to kill himself in high school.”

“Dad tried to commit suicide when he was a teenager?”

“Isn't that what I just said?”

“I thought…maybe the friend…” Mark swore and shoved his fingers through his hair. “How…?”

“He drove his car into a tree at high speed. Apparently it was pure luck that he survived. Either he panicked and tried to turn the wheel at the last second or just misaimed, because he caught a fender and spun.” She stopped. “They thought it was an accident—teenagers so often don't wear seat belts—but while he was in the hospital, your grandma found a note he'd left on his desk.”

“My God.” Mark took it in. If his father had succeeded then, he'd never have met Mark's mother and neither Mark nor Rachel would have been born. “And you had no idea.”

“I was so furious I was shaking. Everyone thought it was grief. Right at that moment, I hated him so passionately…. Him and your grandparents. They never told me.”

The floodgates were open. She told Mark more—about what she'd thought of as her husband's moodiness, which came and went, about the times it became darker, more frightening. She'd left him once but come back in fear that he'd kill himself if she truly did leave him.

“Didn't you ever worry about the fact that he carried a gun?” Mark asked.

“Never. He took such pride in wearing that uniform,” she said, sounding sad, and because Mark, too, remembered
that pride, he knew what she was really saying. The job had sustained his father in a way neither his wife nor children had been able to do.

She talked some more, filling in the years when Mark had been too young to understand his dad's problems.

“Why didn't I know how depressed he was?” Mark asked. “I remember Dad withdrawing but not crying or threatening suicide.”

There was a little silence that felt different from the earlier one. Mark sensed his mother was gathering herself. When she did speak, her voice had softened, grief and a terrible sadness taking the place of anger.

“He was so ashamed of his weakness. He never wanted you to know.”

So Leila was right. All these years his mother had continued to protect the man who'd abandoned her in the most horrific of all possible ways. How odd, he marveled, for that to be a comfort.

So, there
had
been love.

“Thank you for talking to me,” he said. “I really did worry.”

“I had no idea.” She sniffled, and Mark realized belatedly that she was crying. “If I'd known…”

“It's okay,” he said helplessly.

They talked longer, healing some wounds, easing at the end into trivial subjects that served as first layers of new skin over the raw emotions they'd bared. By the time he hit End on the phone, Mark felt closer to his mother than he had in years.

And he wanted, badly, to talk to Leila. To tell her everything his mother had said, everything he'd remembered and felt. He'd never had this need before. Several years back,
when he'd become involved enough with Christina that marriage did enter his mind, he'd realized that he hadn't warned her about the depression that ran in his family. That's how he'd thought about it:
Gee, maybe I should red-flag this piece of my medical history.
They'd been mostly living together for eight or ten months at that point—she kept her apartment but was at his more often than not—and all the while he'd let her assume his father had died on the job. That was his mother's favorite excuse, although she never outright lied. She just vaguely alluded. Which is what she'd done when Christina and she chatted over the Thanksgiving dinner table that year. He'd let it go and only grunted in acknowledgment when later Christina made some admiring reference to his father's sacrifice.

What he didn't ever recall thinking was,
If I love this woman, I should
want
to bare my darkest secrets to her.
Thank God he'd had the sense before going down on one knee to realize he didn't love her. Mark had known something was missing. She'd finally come straight out and asked if he saw them having a future, and when he admitted he didn't, she moved out.

With Leila, it had been different from the beginning. Or at least from that night at the Green Lantern. On the job, he was used to dealing with people who blinded themselves to their own motivations and responsibilities. He'd been stunned by Leila's determination to seek the emotional truths that made her who she was. He'd never have confronted his mother if he hadn't been galvanized by Leila. He was a typical guy who rarely examined his most private fears.

Call her. Why not?
he asked himself.

He dialed without letting himself reconsider.

“Mark,” she said immediately, her voice concerned. “Are you all right? You sound odd.”

“I just talked to my mother.”

“You did it? Was she willing to answer your questions?”

“Not happy about it, but she did. You were right. Dad was ashamed of himself. He didn't want us kids to know about his illness. Plus, he'd have lost his job if anyone at the department had known how depressed he was. Some of the secrecy came from that.”

“And I suppose it gets to be habit.”

“Yeah.” He breathed out, his chest easing. “Here's the kicker—Dad didn't tell Mom before he married her that he'd already tried to commit suicide once. Maybe he thought he'd conquered the depression. I don't know. She found out at his funeral. She's been furious ever since.”

“Oh, no! Oh, Mark. How awful for her.”

He kept talking, she kept listening. At first it seemed easier to open up over the telephone, as if he sat in the dim, private confines of a confessional booth, but he began to wish she were here. He wanted to see the emotions animating her face, not have to listen hungrily for them in the timbre of her voice.

“Can we do something Friday?” he asked finally. “If I don't get hung up with something new coming in?” What he meant was, if somebody didn't get murdered and if he wasn't assigned the case. At least Leila knew what he was really saying.

“I'd love to do something Friday,” she said with reassuring firmness. “Do you have pictures of your family? After we've talked about them, I'd love to see what they look like.”

“Uh…sure.” His head turned. He kept a single framed
photo of them all—his mother, father, sister and himself—on a bookshelf. It had been taken at a good moment, when they all looked happy. He could never decide if it held its own truth or was pure fiction. He avoided looking at it for weeks on end but for dusting it. Once in a while he picked it up and searched those faces for answers that weren't coming.

Tonight he'd come as close as he ever would.

“Friday,” he repeated and they signed off. After a minute he turned the television sound back on, although he didn't give a damn about the score of the ball game.

He was too busy wondering when he'd started needing Leila in his life, not just in his bed. Thinking back, he'd been involved with Christina, first date to the bitter end, for over a year and he hadn't felt a fraction of this hunger for her voice, her opinion, her smile, her dreams, that he did for Leila's already.

How the hell had he gotten in so far over his head without noticing? Mark wondered in shock. And was he ready for where these feelings seemed to be taking him?

 

O
N
F
RIDAY NIGHT THEY
had pizza and saw a movie, a ridiculous comedy that made Leila giggle. Mark hadn't brought photos of his family, and she understood that he didn't want to talk about them anymore, at least not now. She was glad in a way. It was fun for both of them to laugh and flirt and not delve deeper into their pasts. On her doorstep Mark kissed her good-night, neither asking for an invitation nor waiting for one.

On Saturday, with the temperature reaching eighty degrees, they took a picnic up to Camano Island State Park, walking on the beach overhung with red-barked madrone,
looking across the water toward the long bulk of Whidbey Island. Gulls swooped and cried overhead; kids splashed in the shallows and squealed when they found small, scuttling crabs. Mark and Leila went far enough to find solitude, sitting at last on the pebbly beach with their backs to a tree trunk bleached pale by salt water and tossed up by some winter storm.

After they'd eaten, he pulled her close against his side, and she inhaled his scent. Leila had worn shorts today, baring her pale legs, but Mark wore old, faded jeans. When she chided him, he said, “Shorts are undignified for a homicide cop. What do I go for? Hawaiian shorts? Plaid ones? That's why I won't take up golf, by the way. Imagine what I'd have to wear.”

She smothered a giggle. “You could golf in black. I'm sure that would be okay.”

“Now, I like seeing
your
legs. Have I mentioned how much I like your legs?”

He hadn't, but he proceeded to tell her at length. After which he talked about her hair and the curves of her cheekbones and the nape of her neck, which he kissed so softly she shivered.

Their mouths met, and they slid down to lie facing each other, their legs tangled. There was a certain safety in making out with a man in a place where it could go no further, thanks to the occasional beachcomber strolling by at water's edge. Although she ended up aroused and unsatisfied, she was also happy. Happier than she could remember being in a long time.

Eventually they ambled back and climbed the paved switchback trail up the steep bluff. Mark drove her home, and the whole way Leila thought,
Should I ask him in?

But the fact that she had to ask herself, she decided at last,
meant the answer was no. She was too confused still, too caught up in her fear that she no longer knew what a happy marriage
looked
like if her parents' hadn't really been one. And she didn't want to delude herself this time, not the way she had with Gary. Him, she'd gotten over. Mark…Mark was different. If she made love with him, she'd be giving herself in a way she never had before. She didn't dare, not if it would mean she could never be able to love another man wholeheartedly.

“I have to work tomorrow,” Mark said, pulling up in front of her house.

“I remember.” She unfastened her seat belt, kissed him, then pulled back before he could wrap his arms around her. “I'll see you Monday,” she said and hopped out of the car. She hurried up to the porch, not looking back. Just as she let herself, alone, into the house, she heard his car pulling away.

I am such a coward,
she thought, but she knew her emotions were tangled for a good reason.

Didn't everyone use as a model for love and marriage what they knew best: their parents? Leila desperately wanted to understand why her own parents' marriage hadn't been as ideal as she'd always believed it before she made a huge mistake herself. Was Mark her Robert, the man she'd regret for the rest of her life if she let him go? Or had she been right when she had always believed that she would be happiest with a man like her father?