Nothing Sacred

THE NUMBER FOR THE nursing home showed up on David’s caller ID at home. It was the last Tuesday in February. That he should get a call now, when he hadn’t been contacted in more than a year, wasn’t as much of a shock as it might have been. He’d been half expecting something like this to happen. Some reappearance of his mother in his life. He figured there was a reason he’d been chosen as the one Ellen ran to. It was five days since her attack, and he’d had a sense of anticipation—or was it dread?—ever since.

“Pastor Marks,” he said, picking up on the fourth ring. If his hands hadn’t been sweating, his heart beating so roughly, he might have smiled at the uncharacteristic greeting. Irrational as it was, he still felt a pressure to prove that he was worthy.

It was the administrator of Higley Lakes calling. David had had a total of two conversations with the woman in the ten years his mother had lived there. Once he’d started making enough money to pay the fees, he’d moved her from a state-funded home to this private facility. He spoke to floor staff when he called in once a month. And it was floor staff who called him on those occasions when a decision had to be made. They were probably raising the fees again. What was his mother insisting on this time? She already had a private room, her own phone and a double bed. Well, whatever she wanted, David wo

uld see that she got it.

“I regret to inform you that your mother is gravely ill.”

Every vein in his body chilled. He stood at the desk he barely used in a study he seldom entered, except to check messages, and tried to remember all the things he’d learned over the past twenty years. Or any of them.

“What’s wrong?” Other than the usual mental aberrations that kept Elizabeth Cole locked away in a barred unit of the upscale Phoenix care facility.

“She’s in the last stages of brain cancer,” the voice said.

Deep. Dark. Frozen. David digested the words. “How long have you known?”

“The final report came in this morning. With her…detached…mental state, it was impossible to catch the symptoms.” Detached in that Elizabeth only told people what she wanted them to know. And was amazingly capable of ignoring the rest.

“She appeared to go blind a couple of days ago, which called for tests that revealed a tumor….”

Appeared to go blind. The woman was so far removed from life that appearing to go blind was unusual enough to call for precautionary tests, but not call her family. Elizabeth had also appeared to be deaf once, for two years.

And she’d had—or appeared to have—any number of other symptoms and conditions since her hospitalization more than twenty years before.

“I want to see her.”

“I’ll ask.”

He clenched the hand in the pocket of his jeans. “I’ll wait.”

“It would be better if I called you back,” the woman informed him. “They’ve given her something for pain, and when I left the ward a few moments ago, she seemed to be relaxed and falling asleep.”

“Fine,” he said, although of course it wasn’t.

She could die in her sleep.

And he’d been waiting twenty-three years to see her again.

True to her word, Helen Carr, administrator of Higley Lakes, called back when he returned to his house for lunch that day. He’d spent the intervening hours in his church office, reminding himself of what his life was about.

And praying that his mother would let him come.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Marks, but your mother cannot see you at this time.”

Pastor Marks. I’m Pastor Marks.

“At this time?” he asked, forgetting everything he’d just spent the past couple of hours telling himself. “She can’t see me at this time? You’ve just told me she’s dying. What other time is there?”

“I’m sorry, sir. Your mother’s doctors say that she’s capable of making decisions such as these and that her desires must be honored.”

He’d heard that more often than he could count. “I understand.”

He didn’t. Not at all. How could a woman be so incapacitated that she’d been locked up for twenty years and still be considered lucid enough to rob her son of his last chance to see her?

Not that it mattered. If she didn’t want to see him, David wouldn’t go. It was that simple. And that hard. It always had been.

“Please call me if she changes her mind,” he said, and dropped the phone back in its cradle.