Healed

Fiction by Krista Kenny of Cerro Coso Community College
2014 Met Awards - Honorable Mention for College Fiction

“I’m healed,” she says. She sits in front of me smiling a smile I have never before seen on her lips. This is the first time I’ve seen my mom in a week. The plan had been for her to stay in rehab for much longer, but after several unexplainable days of neither pain nor withdrawal symptoms, the doctors had no reason to keep her. When she had told me on the phone that she wasn’t in pain anymore, I cried. I have been praying for this day since I was old enough to understand the concept, but I had never imagined that such a surreal event would have such a mundane setting: sitting in our house—in a chair I had sat in before on so many dull days—hearing that everything had changed. It didn’t seem real. But sitting in front of her today, in the same chair, it is impossibly real. I can hardly get a word in edgewise with all her stories of rehab: the friends she made, the food she ate, the bafflement of the doctors when she never entered withdrawal for the Oxycontin, and then stopped feeling the pain of the fibromyalgia altogether. She’s catching up really, for all the words that through the years the pain had wrested from her mind and strangled in her throat. My mom likes to talk, I realize for the first time in my nineteen years with her. My mom likes to laugh. Her laugh sounds alien to my ears though, which have so often heard her cry. Her smile is foreign to my eyes, which have become so used to her grimace. The sense of dissimilarity is overpowering. She starts to talk about all of the things we can do together now that she’s healed, all of the things she has to make up for as a mother. Her pretty words fall on me like half-unwanted caresses. My memories persist in dragging me back to all the other words I’ve heard from her, words so often filled with the venom of her pain, and all the hate and anger that had no other convenient target. I don’t blame her for those words. I’d long since gotten in the habit of ignoring the pain when it decided to speak through her. But this mother—the one that isn’t fighting the pain for words—she doesn’t seem like mine. Her arms, so strong and sure when she embraced me, aren’t the wary, trembling arms that have gingerly hugged me so many times before. The manner of her every minute gesture is strange to me without the weight of the pain dragging at her limbs. The adult in me is happy of course and reminds me over and over that this is my real mother; all the years before this were the façade. But there is a child in me screaming, screaming that the smiling, laughing person in front of me is an imposter, a mimic come to live the life my mom had wanted. Her strange laughter seems a mockery of all the years my mother had lived with the pain. It had become no more bearable but all the more familiar. In being given the thing I had begged God for my entire life, I feel somehow robbed of my mommy. But I cannot let it show. My feelings would hurt her, and I have been too thoroughly conditioned to never do anything that would hurt her. So I talk with her, and laugh with her, and put on a smile that I have never before worn on my lips. My mind tells me that God is present in this, but my heart tells me that he—and my mother—are further from me.