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Maybe it wasn’t lack of sleep, though. It certainly wasn’t just lack of sleep. I’d pulled all-nighters before — in fact, I’d done that the first night Sloane and I got together — but I’d never felt this bad before. Maybe I was tearing myself up from within. Whatever it was, my mother spotted it immediately.
"You look terrible," she said. For a moment, I could see in her expression that she considered taking the comment back or perhaps rephrasing it or maybe coming up with an excuse for why she said it, but then she just sat up straight and kept her mouth closed, leaning into it with confidence. Whether or not it was kind, it was what she was thinking. She'd ended the sentence with a period and that was where she left it.
As such, she didn’t begin by asking if I wanted to play a game with her. Instead, she let me wheel her into her room and close the door, as I did the last time that we had a serious discussion. But this time, she had much less patience with me.
"I'm old," she said. "Cut to the chase, what are you doing here?"
I hadn't even bothered to bring her the magazines like I usually did. The polite thing to do would have been to bring a gift, but I guess I didn't want anybody seeing me anywhere. Not like this, when I was completely torn up inside.
"It's that girl," I said. "Sloane."
"Well, of course it is," my mom said. She was in a snippy mood, and I considered that maybe I'd interrupted a nap or something. "What about her?”
How could I explain it? The situation was complicated or maybe it was simple. It was difficult to tell because it didn't make a lot of sense to me. One minute, we were happy as could be. The next, she refused to even talk to me. Yes, a pregnancy could make a huge difference in anybody’s life, but it didn’t warrant putting up the stone wall between us like she did.
"She disappeared," I said. I gave my mother as brief an overview of the events of the past twenty-four hours as I could. And she barely even flinched.
"Let me tell you something," she said. "You are and always have been your worst enemy."
Sloane said something similar in her email. She said I needed to love myself the way I loved her. I wish I could, but I didn’t know how. Still, it sounded like a kind and sound piece of advice.
"When we left your father, I was 43 years old," my mom said. "I managed to get the small job at the supermarket and brought in enough to make ends meet so I could pay the rent on the small apartment that we had."
She was telling me this like I didn't remember. Like I wasn't a preteen when it happened.
"You might remember that I didn't do a whole lot of dating at the time."
That was a huge understatement. In my recollection, she never went on a single date. At all. And that, so far as I knew, continued to this day.
“That was partially my choice by not putting myself out there. I assumed it was because men didn't want me. After all, I was a woman in her 40s with a kid, a bad job, and a whole lot of baggage. So, I never tried. Sure, I got asked out a few times, but I politely turned them down because it seemed like a waste of time. I thought they were just being kind. It was only in retrospect that I even realized what those men’s intentions were.
“But now that I'm here at the retirement home, I’ve learned that I certainly wasn't too old to be getting dates back then…”
I tilted my head at her saying that. I wasn't sure what she meant, though I wasn't sure I wanted to know. It didn't matter, she told me anyway.
“…because I’m not too old to be getting dates now, some thirty years later!”
I put out my hands to stop her from continuing, but she kept going.
"The boys in this place are wild!" she said. "They love me. They can't get enough of me. I have to turn them down."
"Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m very happy for your success in, err, that department, but I'm not sure what your point is.”
"My point is that you're turning yourself down before other people get a chance to. And you’ve been doing it for years.”
“Sloane specifically said she didn’t want to talk to me,” I said. “Her email was very clear.”
“And you’re going to give up without a fight?”
“I tried, Mom,” I said.
“You knocked on her door and she didn't answer? So what? She ran away? Have you even tried to find her?"
"I wouldn't even know where to start. But, again, that doesn’t matter she doesn’t want to talk to me.”
My mom shrugged. "That's what she said, sure, but she was probably still in shock from the initial shock of discovering she was pregnant. It's a very scary thing, you know that?"
Not firsthand, I didn't. Or at least I didn’t think I did. With all the excitement surrounding Sloane running away and disappearing, I didn't even consider the fact that there would be a young child out there before too long that had half of my DNA. I would be a father, whether or not I found Sloane. And the idea hit me like a series of fireworks all going off at once.
