goodbye, mom

by Jennifer Hurst

THE MAN BENDS OVER in the driver’s seat of my 2008 Lexus with the door swung wide open, letting the winter chill blast into the stuffy car. His feet are on the pavement beside the convenience-store dumpster. He finishes putting on brand-new socks and shoes with his back to me and says, “Don’t you just love new socks? Like the kind you get at Christmas?”

From behind, he looks like a menacing schoolboy taking too long to fix his shoelaces. I have still not looked directly at his face, but he seems about six feet tall, a brawny twenty-something with a thick-tongued baritone. When he finally finishes lacing up the sneakers, he stands, adjusts the new T-shirt and hoodie, picks up his pile of still-wet, torn clothes from the ground and chucks them onto the soft, tan leather backseat of my four-year-old car.

His wet boots and clothes stew in a scent of cigarette fumes and sweat with a strong undertone of fear mixed in. Before this evening, I hadn’t had a chance to appreciate the Lexus’s passenger seat views because I’m usually the driver of my own car. But in these last three and a half hours, I have been slinking further down into the leather bucket seat. At least I’m not tied up, gagged, and locked in the trunk.

He drives to his mother’s house. That’s where he said we’d be going after he made me buy him new clothes at Walmart, and after he withdrew enough money from my checking account to hit my daily ATM cash limit.

Suddenly, I recognize where I am. This is Ashland, not some entirely unfamiliar Ohio burg. Several years ago, my son, Mike, dated a young woman who had an internship at Ashland University. I recognize the turn into that girlfriend’s old apartment.

We pass into the outskirts of Ashland, continuing on the dark road of the unknown and into an area of small, un-landscaped apartment buildings and duplexes. He drives around the same few housing-development blocks a few times, swiveling his head up and down the gravel lanes. I wonder if he’s lost. Does this man know where his own mother lives? Then I realize he’s watching for surveillance, because successful kidnappers need to be paranoid. Finally, he glides down an open gravel lane lit by security lights from several widely spaced two-story buildings, past garbage cans, dumpsters, and fenced dogs kept outside even in winter, before he backs the Lexus into a flat spot near a dumpster. I hear dogs barking from at least two directions.

I think of the quiet woods and acres of meadow that surround my home and the peaceful walk I was taking with Black Dog hours ago, when this man first came upon me. Several other compact cars are nestled into spaces near the small duplexes and apartment blocks, maybe four units in each one. The two-lane road in front of the nondescript, soviet-style grey fourplex has ditches on each side. There are no shrubs, trees, or any trace of greenery to be found.

“Get out of the car and come with me,” he says. He sighs and his now-familiar foot-dragging gait rolls the pea-sized rocks.

He doesn’t need to use his gun to emphasize his authority. He believes I’m reliably compliant, and maybe I believe it, too.

I wonder what he’s going to say to his mother about me. At his drug dealer April’s house, he ordered me to pretend that I was his aunt—a role I played convincingly enough—but that won’t work with family. His feet drag like a pouty child’s along the soulless path toward a nondescript doorway. I try to breathe deeply in preparation for the next stranger. The flash of his new white and red sneakers and the tan cargo pants is so much more impressive than the dark, torn things he was wearing before our Walmart stop.

He opens a flimsy aluminum door, scuffed and dirty at the bottom from boot kicks, and motions me into the dimness. Inside is a phone-booth-sized mudroom at the bottom of a short stairway leading up into more darkness.

“Stand right here,” he says. He makes no effort to keep his voice down. We’re in the middle of a tumbled pile of boots.

The cramped entryway smells like generations of cigarettes. He climbs up several steps to another landing. I imagine what would happen if I made a run for it out the entry door. The barking dogs and security lights would compromise any cover the night might offer. I picture myself shot, bleeding out, cowering in one of the ditches or behind a trash can. I should run, I think. It’s possible that his addict mother would be an accomplice to help him rob me further. Would she also have a gun? Would she want to go with him to an ATM? They didn’t need me for that. Unlike him, she would be smart enough to look at the savings balance. But if he and his mother were going to steal the $90,000, they needed me alive, wouldn’t they? What is the smartest thing I can do right now?

The toes of my arthritic right foot go numb again, so I shift from one booted foot to the other, to try to revive some feeling. I teeter mentally and physically. I’ve already run through the “shot in the ditch” scenario in my mind, so I keep opting for staying put and alive, remaining in captivity, even with the temptation of an unlocked door behind me. Obedience doesn’t make me a good girl but a wimpy failure instead, because I am acting the way I saw my mother act and the way I acted all the times I retreated from his anger in cowardice, saying “yes, sir” and “no, sir” to his liquor-fueled rants.

At the top of the stairs, I hear a television laugh track in the apartment beyond and someone moving around, still awake. The door swings open and dim light from inside illuminates my captor’s solid frame. I have still not looked directly at his face, but from the side I can see his close-cropped, Bruce-Willis-shaped head.

“Nathan, what are you doing here?” a woman’s voice says.

And this is when I first learn his name: Nathan.

“I came to say good-bye,” he says. “I’m leaving town. I love you, Mom.” He steps on to the threshold with the door open, but he seems blocked from going all the way in.

“What happened this time?” his mother asks. There’s no hug or “I love you” in response. Her voice is weary and skeptical. I keep still to listen and learn.

“I got kicked out of my apartment a couple days ago. My truck got repossessed.”

“You been using again?” she asks.

“Listen, the police will probably be calling you or coming by. I did some bad things.” His voice is cut-to-the chase with a dash of apologetic.

“What’d you do this time?” his mother asks.

“I stole some money and a car. I have to leave town now. I won’t see you for a long time. I could really use a phone.”

“I’m not giving you a phone,” his mother says.

“If you have a phone I could borrow, I could at least call you when I get to where I’m going,” Nathan says. “I’ll send it back when I get my own.” I think of what Nathan’s told me: that his plan is to say goodbye to his mother, then check us into a hotel and kill himself. How’s he supposed to send a phone back once he’s dead?

“I’m not giving you anything. Go on, get out of here. I don’t want the police here,” his mother says.

“I’m better off far away. I took a lady’s car and I have her hostage downstairs.”

“Well, why doesn’t she run away?” his mother asks.

Nathan has lied to her before. This woman doesn’t sound like an addict who would join her son. She’s weary of his drama. She knows the scam.

I say, “Because I’m scared.”

I’m not sure she hears me, and I don’t know what Nathan will do next. My drunk father would have yelled Shut up. But I can tell Nathan’s mother has no sympathy for her son’s middle-of-the-night announcement that the police are after him. It doesn’t seem that she’s going to try to rob me, and she doesn’t seem to want to help him. But will she help me? A thin woman clad in sweat pants and a T-shirt with a halo of short hair steps out of the doorway. She peers down the staircase at me while her son, a head taller, peeks out the doorway beside her, like a pair of crows inspecting a potentially tasty roadkill snack that wasn’t dead yet.

“Nathan,” she says. “What have you done?” One hand covers her mouth; the other is open-palmed and shaking. “Ma’am, I am so sorry,” she says.

She remains at the top of the stairs not speaking for a few seconds, and I feel like I’m dangling over a cliff.

“Nathan,” she says. “You have to let her go. This is terrible. What should we do?”

Suddenly, I hear another woman’s voice in the apartment. Then a whispering argument inside. I figure they’re worried that this stop at their place will involve them in Nathan’s trouble. Why am I not running away while they argue? The dogs outside are barking again, and the noise would alert every person in earshot of my path. If I ran outside and tried to hide, I am afraid any trigger-happy gun-toting neighbors would go all vigilante and shoot me as soon as I moved. I could call out for help, ask them to call the police, but Nathan—I know to call him Nathan now—could easily grab me and I would be his human shield. I could get shot by Nathan or by a neighbor or the police.

So I remain still beside the snow boots. Maybe Nathan’s mother will let me stay with her.

“No, Mom,” he says. “I can’t let her go. The car has OnStar and it will get lit up if it gets reported,” he says. Again with the OnStar—which I don’t have. The voices in the apartment get louder. Would a neighbor bang on a wall? Would they overhear something and call 911?

“I need the car to get away,” Nathan says. “We have to get away from here now. The police might be on their way. Sis,” Nathan says, “give me your phone. We’re going. I love you, Mom. Thanks for the phone, Sis. I love you.”

He loves his mother. He loves his sister. And they love him enough—or are intimidated enough—to give him a phone.

I act the way my own mother acted when my father was drunk. Those Al-Anon meetings helped me realize I could not save the drunks or addicts, that I should let them “feel the consequences of their actions,” but there were no lessons on what to do if one of them kidnapped me. Mom’s strategy: do what my father says, for years if necessary, and hope the problem will go away. “No, Jack, I haven’t been unfaithful to you,” she would say. Her voice would be weary but non-combative—the same tone I hear from Nathan’s mother—because my mother had repeated herself so often and she knew that it would happen again the next evening. My mother didn’t know what to do, so she did nothing but bear insult, placate him, and despair for decades.

I stare down at the melted, muddy puddles around the snow boots and close my eyes and feel the pinch between my shoulder blades from the weight of my hanging head. I despair that I haven’t taken a chance to run. Even Nathan’s mother thought it was an obvious thing to do. At least he said he loved his family, and he went to the trouble to stop and tell his mother and sister he loved them before he fled. And to get a phone.

I won’t find out until months later that Nathan’s mother and sister will call 911 soon after he and I leave their apartment. But they don’t have a description of my car or the license plate number.

Nathan comes downstairs and points me back outside. I trudge on the dry, cold gravel back to my Lexus where, like a gentleman, Nathan opens the passenger door for me again, and I fall into the leather prison of the shotgun seat and buckle up.

About the author:

Jennifer Hurst is a 2021 graduate of Pacific University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. Reader extraordinaire, one of 98 first cousins, knitter and cross-stitcher, inept but avid birder, beekeeper, oh, and a retired lawyer/estate administrator.