Page 10 of Sweet Tooth
“I’m not leaving,” I told someone who said something to me.
As I sat there in the corner of the hospital room and watched as nurses flitted about, hooking up machines and a beeping alarm keeping time, it all became clear to me.
I wasn’t some knight in shining armor how I’d seen myself that first time I helped her out with her War of 1812 presentation. I was a chain around her ankle and I was pulling her down with me.
And now I’d almost killed her. I’d cost her enough.
I dialed the phone number, said the words, and then waited.
Only when the cycle of nurses and doctors had come and gone, one of them telling me “She’ll be okay”, and it was just me and Jess, did I get up and go to her.
Her bruised face was a blotchy red-blue, the kind of bruises you were supposed to fake for a zombie costume. My finger gingerly traced along their edges. All my fault…
Her lips were parted, her breath rhythmic. Her heart beat filling the room was the only thing keeping me from losing it.
I tried moving a hair from her face, before realizing it was caked to her cheek with blood. All my fault…
I leaned down and kissed her cracked and bloodied lips softly.
“I love you Jess. I’m so goddamn sorry. You deserve so much better than me. You’ll see that one day soon.”
And then, I walked out without another word.
4
Jessica – Seven Years Later
“Parker, no!” I yelled, gaping at the ceiling.
Even for my mischievous four-year-old, squirting toothpaste on the ceiling was a new low.
“I hate daycare!” he said merrily, running away as I turned to look at him.
“And Mommy hates saying goodbye to you,” I said steadily, approaching him calmly. “But she does it because she has to.”
As I scooped him up, he gave in with a sigh. “Why can’t I help at the chocolate place?”
“Because you don’t help, you just eat,” I said, kissing the tip of his nose as he giggled. “Anyway, you will help tonight; you’ll clean the toothpaste off the ceiling.”
I put him down but not before he laid a big toothpaste-ringed smacker on my cheek. He raced away gleefully as I rubbed at the spot.
“I hate daycare!”
“That’s it,” I said, shifting from Easygoing Mom to No-Bullshit Mom. “You’re going and that’s final.”
It had been a week of these morning battles to get Parker to daycare, and I wasn’t having it. He loved it as soon as he got there and had even fought me when I picked him up on a few occasions. It was just the getting him there in the morning part that was tricky.
Half-marching and half-tugging my son along, I picked up his fully packed Trolls backpack on the way. We got outside just in time to see the school bus zoom by without stopping.
“No!” I cried, at the same time Parker yelled, “Yay!”
“Oh no you don’t,” I said, picking him up now as he squirmed.
If I let Parker miss daycare, not only would an entire workday be ruined, but Parker would learn that all he had to do was dilly-dally extra in the morning and he could be let off.
Not on my watch, he wouldn’t.
He was still squirming as I strapped him into his car seat and pulled out onto the road.
“We’re getting you to daycare, and that’s final,” I said.
Parker said nothing. I sighed.
As much as Parker could drive me crazy, I loved him like crazy too. It wasn’t his fault that he’d been unplanned, or that his dad had skipped town a few months after he’d been born.
I glared at the red light that seemed to stretch on for forever. What had I been thinking?
The light changed, and I hit the gas. That was the thing; I hadn’t been thinking. After I’d woken up in the hospital alone all those years ago, I’d sworn off love.
One minute he’d been proposing to propose and talking about our future, and the next, he left me unconscious in the Emergency Room. I hadn’t seen him since. Even now, if I thought about it for too long, it made me angry. How could he do that to me? And how could I ever trust a man again?
So after two years of being lonely and horny, I’d jumped in bed with the first guy that flashed me a nice smile. Who’d also turned out to work part-time at a convenience store and sell pot on the side, but you can bet that didn’t come up on our first date.
I really had a knack for picking them.
As we pulled up to the brick-walled box that was his daycare, I wiped the bitterness out of my mind. None of that mattered anymore. All that did was that I be the best mom I could be to Parker. Even if Parker wasn’t exactly a little angel.
