“Look, I didn’t come here to attack you,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. “Not really. Nor did I want to make you feel bad. I… I don’t know. I just want you to see Vince the way I see him. I just don’t want you to have any regrets. And I certainly don’t want him not to know how his own mother feels before he won’t be able to find out anymore. It wouldn’t be fair to either of you.”
She looked away, and I wondered if I’d gone too far. I wondered if I even should have been in this hospital room. The more I thought about it, the more duplicitous it seemed, like I was going behind Vince’s back, meddling in affairs that weren’t mine. I tried to justify it to myself by saying I was doing this for Vince, and that if he really felt about me the way he did, then he’d understand, or he’d have brought up his parents already, consequences be damned. But this felt like transference, and it didn’t feel right.
I took a step back, sure that the conversation was over, sure that if she did speak again, it’d be to tell me to get the hell out of her hospital room, to never come back here again, and that she’d make sure Vince knew what I’d done and how I’d gone about it. Wildly, I thought that maybe I’d never even make it out the door, because the Secret Service would barge in and I’d be arrested and thrown into Guantanamo with terrorists, never to see the light of day again except for a window the size of a book ten feet above my cot in the prison cell where I’d spend the rest of my life. The First Lady of Tucson would have her revenge because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut or my face out of someone else’s business.
And she did speak. But what she said was not what I expected.
I was about to turn and make a run for it when she said, “Vince died when he was nine. Did you know that?”
“No. I didn’t.” I looked up at her. She was staring at the flowers, the sun encroaching on them further.
“We lived in a house over on the west side of town. It was a nice house. A big house, with a garden and a pool. Andrew hadn’t yet considered running for any kind of office, but he made good money with his construction business. I was a teacher, but we wanted to get pregnant again and were talking about having me stay home permanently. Vince was always an independent child, but it’d seemed lately that he’d become even more so, and I missed having a baby in the house. I missed the way they sounded, the way they smelled. I missed the little laughter and holding them in my arms.”
She sighed and looked down at her hands. “So we decided to have another baby, decided to try before we were too old to have another, and everything was going to be perfect and wonderful. I wanted a little girl. Andrew wanted another boy. Vince couldn’t care less either way as long as it didn’t interfere with his life. He was very blunt as a child. Very straightforward. No-nonsense. He was never the smartest kid, and he’s not the smartest adult, but you’d always hear the truth from him, no matter how abrasive it could be.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I’ve noticed that.”
She smiled to herself. “I figured you would. That’s the difference between Vince and most people. He doesn’t beat around the bush about things, but only because I don’t think he knows how. He’s singularly driven at times, if there is something he wants. Oh, he doesn’t step on others to get it; no, I think that would hurt him if he tried. He… he just knows what he wants, and he goes for it, and the only consequences he doesn’t worry about are those that could happen to his own self.
“One day, when he was nine and we were trying to have another baby, Andrew and I were upstairs and… well, you know. We were trying. Vince had been playing outside with his friends all morning and wasn’t expected back in until lunch, which would have still been an hour away.” Her voice was getting quieter, rougher. I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to say anymore, but I couldn’t find the strength to speak.
“After Andrew and I had finished, I went downstairs to make a cup of tea. I’d decided that I wanted the mug I’d used that morning instead of getting a new one. Had I not done that, I would not have walked over to the dishwasher. I would have not looked out the window. I would not have seen Vince floating facedown in the middle of the pool, the water around him red.”
She said she remembered screaming for her husband, the tea mug falling to the floor and shattering. She would find out later from Vince’s friends that he’d gone out back to get his squirt gun he’d left by the pool the previous day. He wouldn’t be able to tell her exactly what happened, but from the size of the bump on his head, it seemed he’d slipped on the wet surface around the pool and hit his skull on the edge of the pool before falling in. She’d jumped into the pool and flipped him over. Andrew had followed her in, and they’d dragged him to the edge, then lifted him out of the water.
“He was blue,” she said. “He was blue, his little lips and little face. I was screaming and Andrew was yelling at me to go call for help, but I was just screaming. I couldn’t stop because it seemed that every single part of him was blue and he wasn’t breathing. I knew then, I knew he was dead and that I’d never see him again. So I just screamed.”
But eventually she had stopped and run inside, only after Andrew had started CPR, pressing on his chest so hard she was afraid he was going to break Vince’s ribs. She’d babbled into the phone and then dropped it back onto the counter. She couldn’t imagine, she said, staying on the phone and listening to the irritatingly calm operator. She thought she’d go insane if she had to, so she dropped the phone and ran out to her husband, who was slamming his fists onto Vince’s chest. She tried to stop him, she tried to hold his arm back, but he knocked her down and hit Vince again.
“Do you know what happened then, Paul?” she asked me.
I shook my head, though I had an idea.
“Vince took in this great, gasping breath. His back arched off the ground like he was seizing, but he was breathing. He vomited up so much water at that point that I thought he was going to drown all over again, but one thing I learned as a mother is that if your child is crying, your child can breathe, and he was crying. I never thought that sound could mean happiness, that it could fill me with joy, but it could. It did. He cried and I cried, but only because I knew how close it’d been. Only because I knew how much I could have lost.” She fell silent and watched the sunlit flowers.
“Why did you tell me this?” I asked her.
“Because,” she said. “Because I needed you to know that I love my son. Regardless of my actions or the actions of my husband, we love our son. We almost went insane that day when we thought we'd lost him. I don’t know that we would’ve survived had he died. No parent should ever have to outlive their child. So I need you to know that we love him in our hearts more than we could ever show.”
“It’s not good enough,” I said, flinching at my own words.
“Oh?” She looked up at me, but there was no recrimination in her eyes. “And how do you figure that?”
“Because I doubt you’ve ever said to him what you’re saying to me.”
And this time, she
did react. I could see it in her eyes, could see it in the way her skeletal-like hands made skeletal-like fists. “You don’t have any idea how hard it is, do you? Being a parent? Especially when you’re in the public eye, such as Andrew and I are. Politics tend to govern your lives when it’s your job.”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. That’s not an excuse. As a matter of fact, that should have prevented both of you from ever acting as you did. If you’re responsible enough to become a parent, then you should be responsible enough to accept your kid no matter how they turn out. It doesn’t matter if they’re disabled or gay or not as smart as others or green or black or blue or whatever the hell they turn out to be. You have them, you love them. Always. Being a parent isn’t about getting to pick and choose what you want your kid to be. Being a parent means protecting your kid from anything that could ever harm him. Being a parent means you shelter, but you also make them stronger so one day they can stand on their own. How old was Vince when he came out to you? To his dad?”
“Sixteen,” she whispered.
“And what was your reaction?”
“Anger. Indifference. We didn’t understand. We didn’t….”
“That’s right. You didn’t.”