A mother's love

Chapter 5

Brenda had been living in the same apartment and driving the same second hand Camry since she'd first arrived in New Mexico from California two years earlier. She had made none of the progress that she had imagined she would have made after two years. Possessing the information about Brian's residence caused her endless anxiety. She returned home from school and did nothing but sit at her kitchen table and think about what to do with it; she didn't change out of her clothes or release her hair from the clasp in which she had secured it. She remained seated at the table fretting about what to do about Brian until evening, when hunger forced her to leave the chair. Not possessing the energy to prepare something for herself she grabbed her car keys and drove to the nearest convenience store to buy something for herself. She pulled into one of the parking spaces in front of the store that was a few blocks away from her apartment and there, sitting on the sidewalk, was Brian, eating what looked like either a hamburger or a sandwich. Like earlier when she had seen him leaving school in her rear-view mirror the sight of him looking so alone and pitiful quashed the anxiety that she was feeling. She adjusted her rear-view mirror and she sat and watched him as he took painfully small bites of whatever it was he was eating. She decided against going to talk to him like she had in the library; the state of mind that she was in she didn't trust herself not to say something that might scare him and push him away from her.

When he finished what he was eating Brian got up from the sidewalk, put the plastic bag that had held what he'd been eating into his jacket pocket, pulled a bottle out of his other jacket pocket and started drinking from it as he walked off. Brenda found that she couldn't move after he had gone; she remained in her car and waited to calm down before she went into the store to get her dinner. The convenience store that she'd gone to was operated by an Indian family and offered customers a variety of instant meals to choose from. Brenda entered the store and purchased a lasagne.

"Would you like me to heat your lasagne for you?" The young clerk behind the counter asked her.

"No thanks, I'll do it at home," Brenda answered.

She heated up her lasagne for three minutes in her microwave and sat in the same chair at her kitchen table eating it. Her apartment was quiet; the only sounds in it were those of her utensils making contact with the plastic food container she was eating out of and her chewing. After a few bites the creeping silence of her surrounds caused Brenda to stop eating. The emptiness and desolation of her life enveloped her. She set down the spoon with which she had been eating and she started crying. The love and warmth that she wanted to give to Brian was causing her to break apart; she cried until she could cry no longer. She couldn't go on feeling this way; she had to do something. She grabbed her car keys, got in her car and at 10 p.m. she drove to Brian's house. She parked her car a little down the road from his house and sat in her car and looked at it. The house he lived in looked terrible, as did all the other houses on the street. It pained her to think that Brian was living in such a place. She sat in her car looking at his house for almost an hour until she realized the pointlessness of what she was doing and drove home.

Brian was right, the old Gulliver's Travels adaptation starring Ted Danson was hard to find. Upon returning home Brenda had opened up her laptop and started looking for a website where she could download the series, Gulliver's Travels being the only thing that she could think of that she could use to get closer to him. Annoyingly, after failing to find the series on dozens of file hosting sites, she found it on YouTube. She burned the videos onto a DVD and, at 2.am, went into her bedroom and collapsed on her bed wearing the clothes she'd gone to school in that day and her hair clasp.