“So full of artless jealousy is guilt, it spills itself in fearing to be spilt.”
-Hamlet, William Shakespeare
It wasn't that he didn't want to go see his mother. Of course, he did. She was his mother, and it had been a while since he visited. She was all alone in the old family house. Alone and wondering why her son didn’t call her. It hurt his heart to think of it, and so he didn't think about it if he could help it.
He had his own life, commitments and responsibilities. He was a busy man. Maybe he wasn't as busy as Brian or Teddy. They each had six-figure jobs, growing families, and large houses in gated communities. Both of them had the requisite spare room, or in Ted's case, a guest house. Mom seemed to appreciate that, although she refused to actually visit them. When he did call her, the same set of questions and comments invariably popped up. How is your work? Are you up for a promotion? Your brother Teddy just bought a new _________. Have you heard that Brian is now VP of sales? He bought his family a new _________.
Collin Sullivan wasn't as successful as his older brothers. Yes, he had a law degree from a great school, a fact that she mentioned all the time, but it didn't do him any good. His mother stubbornly refused to remember what pro bono meant or that he was helping people who couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer. The job didn't pay well enough for her approval. Collin couldn’t get her to see that he wasn’t doing this to rake in the money like his older brothers. She seemed to think that was just an excuse. If he was taking his adulthood seriously, it would mean having a big house and a room for her to stay in case she ever deigned to visit. It also meant having an impossibly pretty wife and at least three children. How could he be happy if he wasn’t wealthy, married, and a parent? Collin believed that even if he had all those things, his mother would find something to be critical about.
He struggled with his mother's opinions his whole life. Mrs. Mary Margaret Kean-Sullivan, widowed mother to three boys, active member of the Rotary Club, the Women's Winter Coat Brigade, soup kitchen volunteer, Sunday school teacher, beloved by her neighbors and her community for her service and devoted help of the poor and needy (as she put it) thought Collin's job wasn't a real career even though he had emulated her and tried to demonstrably help the same people. Nothing he could do or say ever budged her on the topic. That was work for a housewife or a widow, not a lawyer.
He could still remember the day that he had finally understood. Nothing he ever did was enough for her to be happy with him. Nothing he ever could do would be enough for her. On that day, he felt truly alone.
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It had been a while since he had called. Several weeks or even a month had passed since he had visited, and his anxiety about it was growing. She would scold him for not calling or coming by. She would tell him that she had asked his brothers about him. She would never call him, though. It was a one-way street. And the fact was, he had not called his brothers either. Brian and Teddy didn’t think Collin’s work or life was worth much attention. They were always busy. The only time they ever reached out was to get him to donate toward a Mother’s Day or birthday gift for their mother.
She would call them and pester them about whether they had heard from him. Eventually, one of them would get tired of hearing her complain and call Collin and tell him to go see her. The last time, it had been Teddy. He called and barked. Collin still lived “at home”, which meant the town they had grown up in. Teddy and Brian lived in other cities in other states. The last time Collin caved and called her, he had to listen to how unhappy she was, that it took Teddy to get him to check in on her. Teddy who lived in another state and had a family. That phone call lasted for over an hour, and Collin found himself completely drained after he hit the end call button.
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At lunch, he took his meager tuna sandwich across the street from his office to the small park and sat on a bench. He was debating calling her. He dreaded calling his mother, but he also dreaded not reaching out to her. If he did call, it would be a lecture about something. If he didn’t call, it would only make the next call worse. Either way, the call would go the same way as they always did. She would invite him for dinner, and he would cave and go, but then she would try to get him to stay for the whole evening, and it would be difficult to get away. She would seem to count each minute, reveling in having him there, and he would be counting them, hoping to make first nine, then ten, then eleven a good opportunity to get away. She would tell him to sell his “apartment” (he owned a condo) and move back in with her so he could save some money and get a nicer car. It would go on and on like that until he was frantic.
As he munched, he waffled between calling her now and waiting until after work. A sneaking part of him knew that if he waited until later, he would talk himself out of doing it at all. Then it will be the same debate tomorrow. If he made plans with her now, at least he wouldn’t be able to back out. Better to rip off the duct tape, the thought. A sullen, throbbing pain grew in his chest.
As Collin was screwing himself up to the point of calling, his mobile phone rang. The display said “Mom”. I waited too long, he thought with despair. Now he was in for it. He took a deep breath, swallowed the rest of his last bite of tuna sandwich, and slid the green phone button across the bottom of the screen.
△
Collin could remember his father. Those memories were still strong. Theodore Sullivan had been tall and fair with clear blue eyes like sunlight on the water. He had a generous face always on the point of bursting into a smile.
He could sometimes still feel his father’s strong arms and catch the scent of his aftershave mingled with the cigarettes he always smoked. It was a woodsy, warm scent mixed with Old Spice, and it brought his father back to him when he caught a whiff of someone smoking.
He was not quite three when his father died. He had sporadic memories of it. An ambulance on the street on a rainy night, Teddy pinning him to keep him from running out into the dark. Their mother was not crying, and Brian calling the men to bring their daddy back because they needed him. After that, the memories turned darker.
He had clearer memories of Teddy and Brian trying to boss him around as if they were in charge now that their father was gone. He had memories of his mother sitting on the porch, smoking her cigarettes and not answering him when he asked what was for dinner. He remembered Sister Margaret coming for lunch during the week and talking to his mother about God’s Plan. He remembered his mother’s face. Her eyes cold and hard, sardonic, caustic as they gazed at him.
There were many good memories, too. Birthday parties, holidays, celebrations, moments of love between them. They always seemed to be tinged with regret or something else, intangible from his mother. Like a cold breeze on a spring day, her eyes would change, and then she would step away or disappear into her room.
Once he got to middle school, he became more aware of her stinging disappointment with him. His grades weren’t as good as Teddy’s. He wasn’t as athletic and admired as Brian. He was clumsy and awkward and had pimples, which she pointed out regularly. It continued into high school. His grades were terrible compared to Teddy, who was valedictorian. Brian had been Prom King.
When he was accepted to law school, he felt as though she might finally find something to appreciate, but both Teddy and Brian had already accomplished things in other professions that he would never be able to achieve and so, once again he was faced with the fact that his mother would never be happy with him.
The harder she was toward him, the more he desired to be accepted and loved the way that his brothers were. It made him work harder to please her than they did. He cooked her breakfast on the weekends and cleaned and did yard work and painted and helped in her garden.
It never helped.
Once, when he had been sick with the flu, he had been unable to make her breakfast as he always did on Saturdays and though she understood that he was sick, she told him that she would remember that day because she had to make food for herself on the one day that she rested and looked forward to his cooking. It was on that day, slick with his breaking fever, weak, aching in every joint that he had finally accepted that she would never really love him and that nothing he could do would ever please her.
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Collin put the phone up to his ear. He heard static.
‘Mom,’ he asked. ‘Are you okay?’
The static rippled and snarled into his ear. He listened hard. ‘It’s a bad connection, I should call you back.’
‘Collin.’ The voice was flat in the digital snow. It was his mother’s voice, but it sounded distant, disrupted by the poor connection.
‘Mom?’
‘It’s your mother, Collin.’ Her usual greeting. As though he had forgotten. As though he could ever forget.
‘Mom, this is a bad connection. Let me call you back.’ The static continued to blur into his ear.
‘Collin, I need your help.’
‘Are you okay? What’s wrong?’
‘Collin, please come home.’
He felt a pang. She was sick. Then, he felt a flush of anger. It would be just like her to hide a sickness until it was too far gone to make him feel bad for not visiting.
‘Collin!’ The voice was sharp, metallic. Her face flashed before his mind and he saw her unsmiling, wintry eyes.
‘Yes, Mom, I’m still here. Do I need to call an ambulance?’
More static, but then he heard her say something but it was unclear, broken in the background noise.
‘Please come over now. Door bother is near’
He still didn’t understand. ‘Mom, say that again, please. What did you say?’ A coppery taste filled his mouth. His sandwich had slipped off his knee and onto the ground by his foot.
Her voice came clear across the harsh rasping background distortion. ‘Your father is here.’ Then the line went dead.
△
Ellie Hempstead was his high school sweetheart. A pretty girl with dark red hair and cool grey eyes, Collin first developed a crush on her when he was in grade school. When it was time to pick a date for the junior prom, though, there was only one girl to ask. Ellie agreed to be his date and they started going out almost immediately. They spent the last year of school as an ‘item’, but through all of that, his mother became more and more distant whenever Collin mentioned Ellie.
When he invited her over, his mother was polite to Ellie, even sweet. But after she left, his mother would become stoney. ‘You’re going to leave me for that girl or one like her,’ she said. ‘Then, I’ll never see you anymore.’
Collin tried to argue this point, but her mind was made up on the subject. Her mind was always made up on everything they spoke about. When his senior year was looming, Collin hoped to go to Eastern State where Ellie had been accepted, but it was three hours away. His mother didn’t like that. ‘What if something happens? Teddy and Brian are so far away. I would be here in town alone.’ So he spent a final summer with Ellie and waved goodbye to her as she headed off to orientation that August. He intended to go to West Bend College part-time. It was two towns over, and he could study and work to save toward a law degree, but his mother wore him down, and he eventually decided to go to Central State instead. The campus was only fifteen minutes away from home, and he did save a lot on room and board commuting, but he was still living at home, going to school and working, and doing all the same chores he normally did. It left him no time to spend a weekend at East State, visiting Ellie. By the middle of the second semester, she had started dating another man, and Collin’s hopes were dashed.
His mother had used that as a warning foretold. ‘It’s better to find out now that she was a cheater than to learn it after you were married and could do nothing to get away.’
△
He tried to call her again several times, but her phone just rang. He flew through the city streets, trying not to speed, but also afraid that she was having a stroke or that she was emaciated and hallucinating from not eating. It wouldn’t have been a shock to find that she had stopped eating because he hadn’t called or visited her recently.
He turned onto Greenbriar Street and pulled his car into the driveway. The red brick pile stood looming in the midday light, hugged on all sides by large oak trees. He raced up the front steps, pulling his house key out as he ran. Opening the storm door, he tried the main door and found that it wasn’t locked. He pushed in.
‘Mom! Mom?’ The house was quiet. He dashed around looking for her but didn’t see or hear anything. ‘Mom!’ His voice fell flat in the air before him. Bars of sunlight shone through the windows at the back of the house and spread fat, warm blotches on the oriental carpets of her sitting room. He checked the kitchen. He looked in the main bathroom, the den, and the living room. He went out into the garage, which she had made into her sewing room. Then he ran up the stairs and went back into the corridor where his room used to be. Brian and Teddy had the two biggest rooms, and Collin had the smallest, but he opened each door as he went. His mother’s bedroom was at the very back of the house, the last door on the right. He knocked and then went in.
He hadn’t been here for many years. This space was hers alone, and even when he had brought her breakfast, she always came out of there and moved to the den to be served. He felt very unwilling to go in, but he had to make sure she wasn’t there. ‘Mom, ’ he called, but she did not answer.
Where else could she be? In the cellar? He ran back down the steps and then swung through the door nestled under them and pounded down into the cellar. It was dark, musty, full of the smell of earth and the botanical fragrance of her detergent. As he reached the bottom of the steps, he turned and looked down into the long part of the cellar where the washer and dryer were. Sunlight lit two windows high up near the ceiling, and against that light, he saw the silhouette of his mother, standing, not moving. He couldn’t see her eyes, but he could feel them on him. He went to her, moving fast, thinking about how he would let the ambulance know they were down here, when she spoke and stopped him dead.
△
When he was fifteen, Collin found a box of pictures in the attic. They were from before he was born and, in some, before his brothers came along, too. One picture, a black and white mugshot, like what might be used by the yearbook committee for the senior class, was of his father. Collin was amazed at how much he looked like his father. His eyes were the same, but no one had ever mentioned it. In fact, no one ever mentioned their dad. Even his mother never spoke about him.
He took the picture and kept it in a safe place in his room and took it out to look at it occasionally. This was never more the case than when his mother was running him down. He would run to his room, pull out the picture and stare at it and fantasize about his father sticking up for him.
He once tried to ask his mother how her husband had died, but even that she would gloss over, carefully massaging the conversation in a different direction. One day, just before he moved out permanently, he had pulled her aside to ask about how his father had died, and she closed herself in that room of hers and didn’t come out for days. When she finally did come out, Collin was packed and ready to leave. She hugged him, then gave him money and spoke lovingly to him. It almost seemed that she wanted him to stay. He resisted. Just as he was getting into his Volkswagen Beetle, she went cold and only stared as he pulled away. She didn’t wave or say anything. She just stood there, blank-eyed and harsh. He had been so hamstrung by her callous reaction that he resolved to never visit her again, but his heart did not stay hardened for long.
△
‘Your father is here.’
Mary Margaret Kean-Sullivan stood rock still in the middle of the cellar, illuminated by golden sunlight from the cellar windows behind her. Her hands were clenched into white fists at her sides. As he neared her, Collin could see that she was staring straight ahead, but that every muscle in her frame was locked. She was rigid. At first, he thought she was having a grand mal seizure, but her eyes were moving, like she was watching something flit around the space and trying not to lose sight of it.
‘Mom, what’s happening.’
Her voice swept up from its regular, crisp, papery tone to something like a wail. ‘He’s here. He’s here. He’s here. He’s here. He’s ... here.’ The last word was a whisper.
Colling turned to pull his phone from his pocket and raced upstairs to call 911, but as he moved, she started to wail again, her body, thin and pale, teetering like some mad toy. Her mouth drew back in a rictus grin, showing her perfect but yellowing teeth. Her eyes, wide with apparent horror, grew wider, and Collin found himself wondering if they would explode out of her head. In the next moment, a cloud hid the sun, and the cellar grew dark. Almost in response, his mother’s body relaxed, and she swayed. Collin stepped toward her to catch her but stopped when her posture changed again.
Her head cocked to one side in an affable, almost jocular position and when she spoke the sound that came out was not her voice at all.
‘Hello, son,’ it said.
△
Collin dated sporadically over the years. Mainly, though, he stayed to himself. He found that dinner and a movie were about all he could muster. The moment things got more familiar, he started thinking about what his mother would say. With Laura Brandt, a fellow law student and an absolute supermodel, he thought to just let the relationship take its course and damn what his mother thought. But that had been around the time that Brian came back to town for a visit and surprised Collin on a dinner date with Laura. Brian asked if Laura had met their mother, and Collin lied and said yes, hoping to forgo the embarrassment of introductions. Laura had not understood and was put off by his actions. She broke it off with him and he avoided the dating scene completely after that.
A year later, when he passed the bar exam and was being head-hunted by local firms, he met Ellie Hempstead in passing at a garden party held by a mutual friend. She was more beautiful than ever. They went out for dinner, just to catch up, and over drinks, she confessed that she made a mistake not staying with him. It was a tearful moment, and Collin was caught momentarily between asking if she was seeing anyone just then and the fear of what his mother would say, but he let the evening end without ever asking. Ellie kissed him and it was the best kiss of his life. In that moment, he could feel that he might be able to be really happy, but then his mother’s face loomed up in his mind, and he turned away from Ellie Hempstead and happiness.
△
The voice was not muffled, but it sounded as if it was coming from a thousand yards away. ‘Do you know my voice?’
Collin stood there, staring at the shadowy form of his mother. He could not get his brain wrapped around what was happening.
‘I know that I left you too soon,’ the voice said. ‘I’m sorry. You and your brothers needed me with you.’
Collin took a shuddering breath. ‘Dad?’
‘Yes, son. It’s me.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘This was the only way I could speak to you, my youngest boy.’
‘What is happening?’
‘I don’t have time to explain much. I just want you to know that I love you and that I’m proud of you. You have to know that because what comes next will be hard for you to hear.’
Collin swooned against a support pillar. His hands were wet and his mouth was dry. The room smelled vaguely like sulfur and something else, sweet but noxious.
‘Did your mother ever tell you how I died?’
‘No,’ Collin said, and his voice fell in a husky whisper in the dull light.
△
The night of his death, Theodore Collin Sullivan was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper. He was in a good mood. He received a promotion at his job and though it meant that he would have to travel more, it also meant more money. More money meant a better car and the capital to repair the house.
Mary, nonplussed by his news, asked him to get down the apple masher from above the pantry, and he got the stepstool out and reached up to the high cabinets to get it. As he stretched for the apple masher, he felt something shove him and turned to look at his wife. The smile on his face faded as he registered that he was falling back into nothingness.
△
Collin’s face was wet with tears. He said the words as his father spoke them.
‘She pushed you.’
△
Theodore Sullivant fell hard. It was a crash big enough to shake the house. Brian and Teddy came running downstairs to see what the problem was. Little Collin was still in his playpen. All their mother would say was that Daddy had gone up to get the apple masher and that he lost his balance and fell, hitting his head on the counter. Daddy was trying to speak as he lay on the floor in a widening puddle of his own blood. Someone called for an ambulance, but by the time it arrived, Daddy was not talking anymore.
△
‘This is the truth,’ the voice of his father said. ‘Your mother couldn’t stand to have me not there, so she pushed me, and I died.’
Collin Sullivan gasped and covered his face with his hands.
‘She is sick, son. I tried to ignore the things that she did. I knew her when she was young. Her mother was a terrible person. Used to beat Mary—your mother—just for not wearing the right color hair ribbon. There were other things, too. Things too horrible to talk about. It broke her. She became a half-person, unable to feel the joys of life. I thought that she would get better if I could take her away, and for a short time, she seemed to come out of the fog of her childhood. I thought she would fully heal when you boys were born, and for each of you, she had a moment of real happiness, but then it faded, and she would be too rough, too mean. She could say and do hurtful things when you were small and not understand that she was being hurtful.’
Collin sobbed. Visions appeared in his mind of his mother hitting him and his brothers, pulling their hair, screaming at them, and locking them in the closet that she had made into a prayer room in her bedroom. He remembered one night when she had fed them uncooked rice and made them eat every bit of it. There was more. Too much to absorb. He saw snippets of other events in his life where pain was a direct result of his mother’s actions. Things that were buried and shut away came to the surface of his mind. He saw her cold, hard eyes. He heard her caustic words, felt the seeming lifelessness, the unavailability, and he heard the deep, frozen swirl of guilt that flowed in every word she said.
The realization of these things was made more painful because he knew better than anyone how she really was. His heart hurt that she had suffered as a child, but the pain stopped and turned to anger when it came to how she had hurt him.
‘It should have been my job to protect you, to help you and comfort you, but she stole me from you. She stole me from myself.’
‘Oh, Daddy,’ Collin said, sobbing. His knees crumpled under him, and he sat down hard on the rug that covered the basement floor.
‘Now, I can undo it. I have been granted a little time for your sake, and I have come to help you. But only you can bring things to an end.’
‘What must I do?’
‘Listen carefully.’
△
Collin did exactly as the voice told him.
△
Mary Margaret Kean-Sullivan was found in the cellar of her house. She was already dead, according to the statement her youngest son Collin gave to the police. She called him, he answered but there was a bad connection. He raced over to check on her, only to find that it was too late. Her death was chalked up to natural causes.
That was the official story that Collin Sullivan had given to the police, to the medical examiner, to his brothers, even to Ellie Hempstead.
Only Collin knew what had happened. That was part of the deal he had made with his father’s ghost. Mary Sullivan, a widowed mother of three, had killed her husband one night when he told her that he would be traveling more. She was exonerated when it was proven that he fell off the step stool and hit his head. None of their children had seen her push him.
Accidents happened.
Other things happened, too.
Mary Sullivan died of an apparent stroke in her cellar while doing the washing.
△
The spirit of Theodore Sullivan came back and took over the body of his late wife, somehow. He forced her to call their youngest son, the son who had taken the full brunt of her abuse. Collin had watched as the ghost forced her to see all that she had done to hurt her son, even as the boy relived it all, too. But in the reliving, he had felt true catharsis that ultimately broke her hold on him for good. In her final moments, tears swam in her eyes. In those once hard and unfeeling eyes, he saw true remorse, but he also saw love. For a brief moment, her face shone with the youth he remembered from when he was a small child, and in that moment, he forgave her. She reached for him, then, but it was too late. Mary Margaret Kean-Sullivan was gone forever.
△
The house on Greenbriar Street still stood, the bricks painted white, the front yard well-manicured. Children played in the grass under the oak trees. A woman and a man sat on the deep porch, watching the game their little ones played. A bright car sat in the driveway, and another rested in the shadow of the garage.
Collin ran a hand through his hair and stood to breathe the warm afternoon air. He looked at the neighborhood, the house, the trees. The street had no fear for him now. The house was just a house now. A voice in the car spoke to him, and he leaned down to see a beautiful woman with dark red hair looking at him expectantly with stunning grey eyes.
‘We can still make it on time,’ he said. ‘We have an hour before the flight leaves. I just wanted one last look.’