A mother's love

Chapter 48

Brian graduated high school as one of the top students at Mason Douglas High and was accepted at UCLA to study literature. Michaela moved with him to Los Angeles and formed a new band called Razor Thorns with her old band mate Amy. Brian was their most dedicated fan, travelling with them to all of their shows in the city. He worked part-time at the college bookstore and Michaela worked full-time at a guitar shop and with some financial aid from Taren they were able to rent an apartment and take care of their living expenses.

Michaela continuously expressed an interest in learning more about Brian's real past and, despite wanting to leave all of his business with his mother in the past, Brian eventually relented. He wrote his final exam of his second semester and they took a road trip to New Mexico in Michaela's Honda. Michaela promised him that she didn't want to meet his mother; she just wanted to see where he had grown up. Brian had always worried about how his mother had gotten on without him, and when confronted with the chance to find out for himself when they were parked across the road from his old house he decided that he had to know.

"No matter what, stay here," he said to Michaela before he got out of the car, crossed the street and walked up the steps to the front door.

He knocked on the door and nobody answered. He tried several more times and never got an answer.

"You looking for your mom?" Daniel, the small boy from next door, asked him from the porch.

"Hey Danny; yeah, do you know where she is?"

"She's dead, my dad said she killed herself, there are other people living there now."

"Okay."

Michaela heard everything that was said from the car.

"Are you okay?" She asked Brian when he was back in the passenger's seat.

"I'm fine; let's just go home."

They got back on the road in the direction of California. They had been on the road for thirty minutes when Brian started crying. Michaela had never seen Brian crying before; the sight of it was evidence of what a huge mistake the trip had been. She felt terrible for forcing Brian to revisit a part of his life that he had had no intention of revisiting. In the days that followed she didn't participate in any band activities so she could stay at the apartment with Brian and be there for him in whatever way he needed her to be, and she never brought up the topic of his mother ever again.

Brian's reaction had caught him by surprise. He had been expecting to receive bad news about his mother and had been prepared for the possibility that she was dead. News of her death and the nature of it suffused him with deep sadness. It was inevitable that her life would end as it had; the only way she could have survived would have been for him to have stayed with her and continued taking care of her for the remainder of her years, and had Brenda not saved him that's exactly what he would have done. The tears that he had shed in the car on the way home from New Mexico had mostly been for Brenda, his yearning to see her again had gone beyond what he could bear. He couldn't leave her behind in his past like he had done with his mother; his appreciation for all that she had done for him was too great and he loved her too much. As committed as he was to Michaela and as much as he loved her, Brenda held a place in his heart that Michaela never could. In the wake of learning of his mother's death Brenda was all he thought about. Taren had not been provided with any information by Brenda regarding her whereabouts or her contact information. Their phone conversations were strictly one-directional: Brenda called and asked Taren how Brian was doing and Taren told her. He thought endlessly about how he might find her and was giving serious thought to driving to her mother's house in San Diego to ask her where he might find her when his phone rang.