The Good Son by Carolyn Mills (free e reader txt) 📗

But I felt a tiny bit guilty, too, for not sharing my alarm with Jason, for not telling him about the anxiety that had been eating me up for days. It didn’t matter though, because it had all been for nothing. And if I had told him, it would only have served to upset him for no good reason.

Now my mind is playing the same trick on me, trying to block out the implications of Amy’s case being re-opened, but I can’t escape from the pulsing fear that mom’s heart might not be strong enough for what’s coming. Both figuratively and literally.

A FEW WEEKS AFTER AMY’S murder, Mom was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce while I was setting the table. I don’t know where Ricky was — probably out with Darius or Jeremy. What I do know is that ever since Amy’s body had been found, there was a nervous tension running through our house, like the air was humming with a high, thin note of fear.

“Can you please put a hot plate on the table?” Mom asked me.

She lifted the pot of sauce from the stove, but as she turned toward the table with it, she seemed to stumble and the pot fell from her hands. She fell, too. I watched, helpless, as the boiling sauce sloshed over Mom’s arm. The pot landed with a crash, sending a thick, red spray across the floor, where Mom had collapsed into a half-sitting position. She let out a startled cry of pain. I rushed over to her, side-stepping the worst of the spilled sauce.

“A dish towel, quick,” she croaked, and I ran to grab one. She blew out a breath as she held the towel against her arm, gently wiping away the splashes of sauce on her skin.

I couldn’t take it all in — the surprisingly loud crash of the pot hitting the floor; Mom’s slow slide to the ground and her yelp of pain; the kitchen floor, the cupboards, even part of the ceiling, splattered with spaghetti sauce. I glanced around me in shocked silence, unsure what to think, what to do.

“Are you okay?” I finally managed. My question came out as a squeak and Mom must have picked up on the fear in my voice.

She scooted from the spot on the floor where she had landed until she was leaning against the cupboards. “I just … I lost my footing for a second.” She was hugging her right arm to her chest and breathing hard.

I could feel the tears, hot and insistent, that wanted to spill over, but I fought them off. “What do I do?” I whispered.

“See if Mrs. Tisdale is home.”

I ran to our next-door neighbour’s house, heart pounding, and stammered out what had happened. Mrs. Tisdale followed me across the front lawn and took in the scene in our kitchen. Mom was sitting at the table now, cradling her arm against her body.

“I need to get this looked at,” Mom told Mr. Tisdale, indicating her arm. “Could you watch Zoe for a bit? I’m going to ask my friend Linda to take me to emerge.”

I didn’t want to go back with Mrs. Tisdale — she was old and her house smelled funny, like rotting flowers and strong perfume — but I wasn’t given a choice in the matter. Mrs. Tisdale was a widow who had lived alone for as long I could remember; her large, empty house felt alien to me and when her pet bird squawked at me from the corner of the living room, I jumped.

“Don’t mind Clover,” she told me. “He’s just saying hello.”

I’d only glimpsed her bird before, but now that I looked at him up close I was surprised by his bright orange feathers. He cocked his head at me. I moved away, unsettled by the round, black eye he fixed on me. Mrs. Tisdale fed me a peanut butter sandwich and let me watch TV until I fell asleep on her couch, the bird thankfully hidden from sight under a blanket Mrs. Tisdale had draped over his cage to keep him quiet. When Mom came to get me, she nudged me gently and as soon as I opened my eyes, I saw that her arm was wrapped in white gauze all the way from her elbow to the tips of her fingers. When we got back to our house, Linda was on her knees in the kitchen, scrubbing our sauce-stained floor.

“Your mom had quite the scare today,” Linda said, looking up as Mom guided me toward my room. “When your brother gets home, make sure you tell him to be good to her. She needs you two to be on your best behaviour.”

“Linda,” Mom said, in a warning voice.

Linda gave her a look, a kind of don’t-blame-me look, then went back to her scrubbing. “You’ll have to use some bleach on this later. But I’ll get the worst of it now.”

“Thank you,” Mom said.

MOM SAT BOTH ME AND Ricky down a few days later. We were on the couch, facing Mom, who was sitting very straight in her reading chair. “There’s something wrong with my heart,” she told us. “It’s nothing too serious, but I have to be careful not to get over-excited or worried because that can make it act up.”

“Your heart?” Ricky said. “I thought you just burned your arm.”

“Well, the reason I dropped the pot in the first place was because I got light-headed and that’s been happening a lot lately. I’ve had a few other problems, too. Pains in my chest. The doctor wanted to run some tests. It turns out I have something called angina. It means my heart doesn’t always get enough blood to do its job properly and that’s what makes me dizzy.”

I pictured Mom’s heart, somehow broken, and my own heart squeezed with panic. I couldn’t erase the image of her collapsing to the floor amidst an explosion of hot, thick sauce.

Ricky made a sound somewhere between