Baby darling, Peabody began, I wonder if you remember I called you that. I wonder if you remember me at all. A part of me hopes you don’t, that you’ve long ago forgotten me, all I did, all I didn’t do. Every part of me hopes you’ve had a happy life with a loving family, with caring friends.
I know you’re a scientist. A forensic chemist! You were always so smart, so full of questions, so insistent on answers. And there were so many answers I couldn’t give you. I understand now I was so very damaged, so lacking, such a selfish and reckless woman. No matter how much I loved you, and I did love you, loved only you, I wasn’t a good mother to you. You were so young, you couldn’t know how I craved the pills, and the craving made me only more lacking, selfish, reckless.
And so, so unhappy.
I would tell myself that the next town, the next stop, the next day, I would do better by you. I’d find a place, find a decent job, give up the pills, the life I led and made you lead. But I was too weak, and the next was always the same until I lost everything. Living in the car, you sleeping in the back seat while I traded my body for those pills or enough money to buy them. Again and again.
Still I clung to you. Instead of doing what I could to see you had a good life, I chained you to mine and, yes, lost everything. My health, my reason, my mind. But the most precious thing I lost was you.
The morning of the last day I had to try to clean you up in a filthy gas station bathroom. You were so angry you fought me, struck out at me. Bad Mommy, you called me, and you were right.
I bought you chips and candy, whatever I thought would keep you happy in that damn back seat while I drove and drove and drove. Nearly out of money, nearly out of pills, and completely out of my mind.
I was broken, my baby darling, and saw no way out but to end it. And God forgive me, for I cannot, I clung to you still and thought to take you with me. I see you now, in that back seat in the Spider-Man pj’s I stole to make you happy. I see you as I stopped because you were thirsty and very cranky, and my head really pounded. I went inside the mart—the air was extremely warm and thick—and bought you a soda pop, and slipped one of my last pills into it so you’d sleep. So you’d just sleep and somehow we’d wake up together in a better place.
As you slept and I drove—half-crazed—planning to take both our lives, I saw a light. A church. I stopped and, weeping, carried you to the door, left you sleeping there.
Someone would find you, and give you the good, happy life I never could.
I left you, my precious, under that single light in the dark. I drove and drove, and I saw the lake. I didn’t hesitate, but drove straight into it.
I don’t remember fighting to get out of the car—only vague terrors of water pouring over me, of swallowing it. I don’t remember clearly dragging myself out of the water, or the days—I think two, at least—of fever and chills and fear that I spent wandering the swamps.
I remembered nothing, not what happened to me, my own name, not you. It was gone, just gone. I was alone—I was no one—and sick, hurt, terrified.
Joe found me. He took me in. He’s a doctor, and he took care of me. He gave me my way when I begged him not to call the police or take me to a hospital. The fear was all I remembered from before.
He named me, and when we fell in love, gave me a life I now know I never deserved. We had three children together. You have a sister and two brothers, nieces and nephews. But I stole all of that, the life Joe would have given you, when I left you under that single light on the church steps.
I didn’t remember, and I’ve lived all these years in a beautiful home with a beautiful family.
Joe was killed, a drunk driver took him from us. And I think of all the times I drove with you in the back seat while I was high on pills. I might have taken some good man from a family who loved him with my recklessness.
And in my grief, my terrible grief, it all flooded back on me, like the water in the lake. All of it, all I’d done. The child I’d abandoned and forgotten.
Though I know now you were taken in, adopted by good people, had a good home, a good life, I can’t and won’t ask you to forgive me. I nearly decided to leave this world, one I can’t live in with these memories, without Joe beside me, never writing this letter. Never telling you.
But it feels, once again, like taking the coward’s way. You deserve to know.
And I know I can’t make up to you what I did, and the years between, but I need to give you something, some part of what Joe gave me. I’m enclosing the deed and all the paperwork to a house in your city, and have opened a bank account in your name. I do this to provide for you, my son, what I should have throughout your life.