I say, “I didn’t think you were driving at all. That’s why you’ve been needing me to help take you places.”
“I don’t do it often,” she says. “Hardly ever. I needed something from the grocery store, Nina. You were working. It couldn’t wait.”
“What did you need so badly that it couldn’t wait?” I ask, because every weekend I’ve been taking her to the store and helping her with her groceries.
She changes tack. “It’s not that it couldn’t wait. That’s not what I meant. It’s that I didn’t want to bother you. The last thing you need to do after work is to be bringing me a gallon of milk.”
“Milk. That’s what you needed so badly? A gallon of milk?”
“I was in the middle of baking. I didn’t want it all to go to waste.”
“But all this time you’ve been telling me that you can’t see well enough to drive.”
“What are you suggesting, Nina?” she asks. When I just stare at her, saying nothing, she comes back with, “Do you think that I’m lying? That I’ve been making it up? You’ve been to the doctor with me, Nina. He did tests. He diagnosed me.” He did. She’s right. He dilated her eyes and injected a dye into her arm, which traveled through blood vessels to her eye to look for leakage under the macula, which it found. But as for her actual ability to see, he used a vision test, an Amsler grid, that relied only on what she said she saw, so that I start to wonder if her vision is not as bad as she makes me think it is. My mother was mostly independent until the day the doctor diagnosed her with macular degeneration and then, almost overnight, it was as if she was completely dependent on me. We used to go weeks without seeing one another, mostly because of the way Jake felt when I spent my free time with her and not him. But after the diagnosis, we hardly ever went two days without seeing each other, and every time I was away from her for too long, there would be something she needed that would bring me back to her.
“Truth be told,” she goes on, “I shouldn’t have been driving at all. See? I couldn’t even see that the light was red,” she says.
“You have to be more careful. You could have hurt yourself, Mom. You could have hurt someone else.”
As I walk away from her, moving down the darkened hall where the sun doesn’t reach, I can’t stop thinking about how the date of the violation is the same day that Jake was killed.
In my room, I pull up a map on my phone. I enter the intersection where my mother got her traffic violation. I enlarge the map. The grocery store where my mother buys her milk is at best a mile from her house. On a good day, she could walk there.
The traffic violation she received was at an intersection over fifteen miles from her house.
When I see where the intersection is, I go absolutely still. Rigid. Silent. I practically stop breathing. I stop thinking about breathing. I can’t feel my body all of a sudden. I feel physically and emotionally numb.
The red light my mother ran through is two blocks from where Jake works. I look back at the images on the ticket, specifically the one taken just before my mother turned left through that red light.
There is just enough shown of the car in front of hers, for me to know that it’s Jake’s.
Wherever he went that day, she followed him there.
She never liked Jake. She was never coy about it either.
I would say it’s impossible. My mother could never kill or even hurt someone.
But then again, I didn’t think Lily could either.
My mother knows everything about me, including the code to our safe.
I told her once because I thought it was prudent that someone should know how to get into the safe, in case of an emergency or if something happened to both Jake and me. We keep cash in there. It’s where we keep the social security cards, financial documents, passports and our wills. It’s where we keep our gun.
She knew the passcode to the garage. She knew my work schedule.
She knew when I’d be gone and she could come over, let herself into my house and help herself to the gun.
That night, after she’s asleep, I search what I can of the house looking for Jake’s gun. I don’t find it. She’s in the shower the next day when I search her bedroom.
I still hear the water running when I take her car keys from the hook on the wall and go quickly out to the garage.
I open the garage door. I unlock the car and sink into the driver’s seat. I rummage around in the glove box and the center console first, and then I slide my hand under the seats, as far as I can reach. I move quickly, not knowing how much time I have until my mother gets out of the shower and comes looking for me.
From inside the car, I pop the trunk. I leave the car and go around to the back end to search the trunk, which is mostly empty other than a few odds and ends, like an ice scraper and jumper cables.
I lift the trunk’s floor panel to reveal the spare tire. I shudder when I see it, falling back from the car.
A second later, my breakfast comes back up. It’s spontaneous. There is little warning. I throw my hands to my mouth to try and stop the flow, but end up bending at the waist and vomiting onto the garage floor, because there, in the spare tire well, is the gun.
I force myself to stand upright. I go back to the car. I reach for the gun. I turn it over in my hands, pointing it up toward my own face.
This isn’t the first time in my life that I’ve ever held a gun, but it is the first time I’ve found myself looking down the barrel of a gun.
I wonder if this is what Jake saw before he died.
I think how somewhere inside that barrel is a cartridge and the firing pin, which is held back by spring tension. All it would take is for the trigger to be pressed, for the firing pin to release. For gunpowder to ignite. For the cartridge to expand, releasing the bullet, spinning it straight toward my face.
What would that have felt like for Jake, I wonder, when the bullet tore through his face?
In the distance, a door creaks open. My range of vision slowly expands. My mother has come outside. I look up just as she lets go of the storm door and it slams closed. I watch as she walks down the small concrete walkway, watching me, her hair still wet, her head cocked and curious as I stand behind her open trunk in the open garage.
“It’s getting cool, Nina,” she calls out, pulling her cardigan tighter around her body, “and you don’t have your jacket on, honey. Why don’t you come inside and we’ll make some hot cocoa to warm us both up.”
I hold the gun in my shaking hand. I reveal it to her. My mother looks unshaken, unmoved, as if she isn’t surprised that I’ve found the gun.
My voice quivers. “What did you do, Mom?”
My mother looks around to make sure her neighbors aren’t witness to this, and then she says, “Come inside, Nina, and we’ll talk about it.”
I still taste vomit in my mouth as I follow her down the walkway and back into the house. I leave the trunk open and my vomit on the garage floor. I carry the gun with me.
In the kitchen, I watch, my stomach curdling, while my mother fills the kettle with water and puts it on the stove, lighting the burner. She reaches into the cabinet for two mugs. With her back to me, she says, “He was cheating on you, honey.” She goes to the pantry and pulls out the Swiss Miss and a bag of marshmallows as if a mug of hot cocoa will make this all better.