Look Again - Lisa Scottoline [114]
To Susan Sulaman, losing a child feels like emptiness. A profound vacancy in her heart and her life. Because her children are alive with their father, or so she assumes, she looks for them everywhere she goes. At night, she drives around neighborhoods where they might live, hoping for a chance sighting. In the daytime, she scans the small faces on school buses that speed past.
Susan Sulaman is haunted by her loss.
I asked her if she felt better knowing that at least the children were in their father’s hands. Her answer?
“No. I’m their mother. They need me.”
I know just how she feels, and Laticia, too. I’m angry, I feel haunted, and it’s still fresh. It’s so new, a wound still bleeding, the flesh torn apart, the gash swollen and puffy, yet to be sewn together or grafted, years from scar tissue, bumpy and hard.
Losing Will feels like a death.
My mother died recently, and it feels a lot like that. Suddenly, someone who was at the center of your life is gone, excised as quickly as an apple is cored, a sharp spike driven down the center of your world, then a cruel flick of the wrist and the almost surgical extraction of your very heart.
And like a death, it does not end the relationship.
I am still the daughter of my mother, though she is gone. And I am still the mother of Will Gleeson, though he is gone, too.
I have learned that the love a mother has for her child is unique among human emotions. Every mother knows this instinctively, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need articulating.
And it remains true, whether the child is adopted or not. That, I didn’t know before, but I’ve learned it now. Just as it doesn’t matter how you lose your child, it doesn’t matter how you find him, either. There’s a certain symmetry in that, but it’s no comfort now.
I didn’t give birth to Will, but I am tied to him as surely as if we shared blood. I am his real mother.
It’s the love, that binds.
I fell in love with Will the moment I saw him in a hospital ward, with tubes taped under his nose to hold them in place, fighting for his life. From that day forward, he was mine.
And though, as his mother, I certainly felt tired at times, I never tired of looking at him. I never tired of watching him eat. I never tired of hearing the sound of his voice or the words he made up, like the name of our cat. I never tired of seeing him play with Legos.
I did tire of stepping on them in bare feet.
It’s hard to compare loves, and it may be silly to try, but I have learned something from my experience in losing Will. Because I have loved before, certainly. I have loved men before, and I might even be falling in love with a man now.
Here is how a mother’s love is different:
You may fall out of love with a man.
But you will never fall out of love with your child.
Even after he is gone.
Ellen sat back and read the last line again, but it began to blur, and she knew why.
“Ellen?” Marcelo asked softly, coming down the stairs.
“I finished my piece.” She wiped her eyes with her hand, but Marcelo crossed to her through the darkness, his mouth a concerned shadow in the glow of the screen. He reached for her hand.
“Let’s go lie down,” he whispered, pulling her gently to her feet.
Chapter Eighty-six
The next morning dawned clear, and Ellen rode in the passenger seat of Marcelo’s car, looking out the window, squinting against the brightness of the sun on the newfallen snow. Its top layer had hardened in the cold, and the crust took on a smooth sheen. The streets on the way to her house had been plowed, leaving waist-high wedges beside the parked cars.
They turned a corner, and a trio of kids in snowsuits and scarves played on the mounds. One child, a girl named Jenny Waters, was from Will’s class, and Ellen looked away, pained. They left Montgomery Avenue, and she noticed how the landscape had changed with the snow. It made unrecognizable blobs of shrubs, lay like a mattress on the roofs of parked cars, and lined the length of barren