Skin and Bones

Prologue

As I stared into the face of the woman before me, I knew more than ever my choice was solidified. Those big blue eyes staring wide into my face. Her hands trembled as I reached out. Kim stood idly by, twiddling with some fabric on her skirt as she watched the tv without watching it.

Quiet blanketed the room like cold snow chilling my body. The soft yellow on the walls didn't help my mind to ease up on its racing. The gentle way the chairs held me wasn't enough to keep me from crying. In fact, those chairs probably helped me sink into the reality of the situation.

My mother was dying, slowly losing bits and pieces of herself. I could do nothing to change it or stop it. It drove me mad that she didn't remember me. It broke my heart to see her fear me. It crushed my soul to see her suffer so harshly. I prayed God would have mercy on her in some way.

But little did I know, she wasn't like this because of something she did, or something someone did to her. She was like this for my sake. For a lesson I would have to learn.

And little did I know how far I would go to keep from facing that lesson.

I took my mother's feeble hand and she gripped my fingers without looking at me. Her eyes met mine and she saw me for a split second as our hearts beat like only a mother's and daughter's could. I gently set clasped both my hands around hers and felt my face sting with sick tears. Tears that make a person want to puke in the bathtub and squall in the bathroom floor.

"Mom?" I usually gave a strong, unphased tone while in there. Mainly for my sister because I didn't want her thinking this got to me. But at that moment, a sob fought in my throat against my usual voice. My sister turned her gaze onto us, and I looked her dead in the eye as tears streamed in rivers.

Years of growing and I still never became as strong or as good as my mother. I would have to live ten thousand life times to be as gentle and kind as her. I realized I didn't have ten thousand life times. The thought occurred to me that I could never ever be like my mother.

"Did you pick up the ice-cream?" Mom asked.

"No." I smiled through my tears.

"Well, if you want sundays you'll have to." She glanced at my sister and took her hand out of mine to point. "Grace, get me that hankie in the cabinet. I need to blow my nose. Ice-cream makes me stuffy."

There were no cabinets. And my sister's name is not Grace.

"Mom? Hey, sweetie, can you look at me a second?" I whispered as loud as my closing throat would let me.

She glanced at me and waved her hand in the air. "Get chocolate and that banana and the hundred flavors."

"Momma, I can't – "

"Tesha, shut up." Kim scowled, now shaking her head furiously with distain. "Don't."

I looked at my hand resting on the arm of the chair and then I stared up at my sister. She knew my choice. She knew what I was going to do. Her nose grew red and hopeless anger flustered her face. My eyes met my mother's once more when I silently conveyed to Kim that I was not changing my mind.

I had been offered an opportunity in my career. One that would take me far away.

"Momma, I can't...do this." I said.

I meant it with every fiber of my being. She was leaving me and I couldn't stand to sit there and watch while she dwindled away into a fragment of her whole.

The atmosphere changed and my mother smiled. She wheezed out a sigh with that understanding motherly look and set her hand atop mine. "I know." She paused for a long moment while staring at a picture of Jesus washing the disciple - Peter's - feet. She pursed her lips at me and then drew them in a line while turning back into her dwindling self. "It's okay. Someone else can get the ice cream."

I stared in a daze as felt like the last little bit of my mother disappeared. She stood up and waddled over to the window absently. My hand lay empty, palm up on the armrest and I squeezed my fingers in a fist until my knuckles turned white. That was it.

I walked out of the room with Kim trudging after me in a fury. She shouted at me in a whisper yell.

"Tesha Valerie Dupont, you look at me right now!"

I swilled around. My hand still in the fist, determined to hold onto that last recognition in my mother's eyes. Kim almost bumped into me, thinking I wasn't going to stop. Her eyes bore into me and I felt my blood boil as if the fire in them burned me from the inside. In my silent anger, I locked my mouth shut despite my wobbling lips and whimpering lungs.

"You can't do this? Can't do what? Be with the woman who birthed you?! The woman who took care of you your entire life?! You can't be with her and let her know you love her?! Can't do what? Can't do what, Tesha!!!" Her voice sobs. Fists clench at her sides because she's angry at being so hopeless. She knew she'd lost. "Answer me!"

That woman in that room scared me. While she was my mother, she...wasn't. I wasn't strong enough. I couldn't stay. I couldn't face that fear of losing my mother to an opaque sheet of terror and unfamiliarity. Kim could; she was strong. I was weak.

That's more evident than anything now.

The tears stung my face even more as I wrapped my heavy arms around my sister's shoulders. She cried into my neck and I drug her over to a chair, letting her sob more. Of course, people were looking at us. Of course, we were making a scene. But I didn't really care what people thought. My mother was dying. My sister was angry and bitter. And me?

"I love you, Kim." I kissed her head in muttered the sentence in her hair as I held her close. The words had such a finality to them, such an unwavering determination. Kim sunk deeper into the reality of my betrayal.

I was leaving them and running far, far away.

In my car, I let the tears fall until I could cry no more as I started looking like Peter in his lowest moment, when he denied his Rabbi, his Father, his Friend.

The difference between meand him? I ran a lot further and a lot longer than he did.