Saying Goodbye To Andrew

Chapter One- Pain

July 2006

As I peek out my bedroom door, I see my mother, tired and innocent, standing in front of our worn birch cabinets, scrubbing away at last night's dishes. It's Sunday, so I can tell that she's hurrying in order to make herself and I presentable for church, and then make the tiring mile walk into town. I slip past her in my nightgown, and silently make my way to our small pantry. I have to stand on my tiptoes to reach a can of dried fruit, but the rustling of boxes as I move my breakfast closer to me startles my mother, and she instinctively turns towards me, letting out a breath of relief. "Oh, Lisa dear, it's just you."

I look at my mother with a sense of worry. At 37, she isn't considered old for our community, and she doesn't look it either. Despite her almost depressed appearance, barely a few gray strands have made their way into her blonde locks and her bright blue eyes still look as alive as ever. But she lives a frightened life, and her reactions to most things make her appear as a small, scared child, caused by my father, I presume.

When I was three, my father claimed to have seen the devil in the form of a young woman outside our neighbor's ranch, and since has been, well not quite right in the mind. Regretfully, because of this experience, he seems to think that woman looked a little too much like his own wife, and well the bruises strewn across my mother's body tell the rest of the story...

"Yeah momma it's just me." I reply. My father hasn't been home for days, but still every time my mother hears a sound, she fears he's come back for her. And divorces are unheard of here. Orson is very traditional town, but it's what my family knows. And what we love. "Andrew's just getting honey from Mrs. Dahn. He said that he would meet us at church." I add

But my father never did come home. He was found dead a few months later on the side of the road, head smashed in by what was believed to me a pickup truck. And Andrew never met us at church. After a week of waiting for her son, my mother finally gave up her traditional ways, and called the police. I watched day after day as she sat by the window in her rocking chair, face blank. She wouldn't do anything. Though I was just 9, I became pretty responsible for our scarred little family then, cooking, cleaning, I even took over my mother's job in the fields planting seeds. Girls don't go to school here; just the boys. Honestly, I didn't have a problem with it. Anything to help my mother, I would gladly take care of.

A year later, we were still pretty much in that same state, but we finally got a phone call from the police, reporting Andrew as a kidnapping victim. That didn't help momma a bit, replacing her silence with cries and screams for her lost son. I wanted so badly to just run away; I'd go to the city, start over. I'd never been to the city, and it was a new hope for me, but I never really had the courage to do that to my mother. She was already a broken woman.

Paranoia soon overtook her, and I was more scared of her than I was of my father. She didn't sleep; she just sat stationed on the side of our creaky porch with a dusty old hunting gun, guarding her remaining child. She wasn't going to let anyone take me.

I remember one night I walked outside to her and tapped her shoulder. She turned to me slowly, eyes bloodshot from fright and exhaustion. "Momma," I had said. "Please come inside." She continued staring. "Please!" I begged, tears beginning to spring from my eyes. It was then that I felt a sharp, burning sensation on my cheek, and I quickly ran inside. I didn't try speaking to her again for a while...