Edgy Mama

Forgive me not

A soft tapping at my front door . . . I am alone. I know before I open it who is standing there. My shotgun is loaded and ready to fire. I feel calm.

He steps into my carpeted foyer, stops beneath the hand-carved chestnut archway, crafted right before the blight destroyed those lovely trees. Each detail of the entranceway is seared into my mind. Except for him.

The room is silent as we stare at each other–his eyes filled with remorse, mine with cold vengeance. Ashes, the gray housecat,leaps up to catch a fly on the wall. The munching of his prey breaks the silence.

He removes his cap and lowers his head.

“Maam, won’t you please forgive me this time? I can’t go on living without it.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t.” My voice is flat, emotionless.

He slumps to the floor, as I recoil from the impact of the weapon.

I awake in a sweat. Calmness replaced by rage. It tears through my body like a thing alive. The dream is always the same.

This drunk–this loser– took my sweet Noelle’s life, severing her spinal cord with his pickup truck. The impact sent her flying 20 feet into the air, smashing facedown on a country lane. The stain of her blood never washes away.

It was a brilliant August afternoon. Noelle, fourteen-years-old had just fallen in love for the first time–puppy love. She was radiant. Fate screwed up; placing her on the roadside as a drunk driver swerved into her–leaving this woman-child with her life before her, semicomatose for the ten longest days of my life. I would not disconnect her, nor watch her exist in a prison of hopelessness. With heavy heart, I summoned the courage to tell her it was okay to go toward the light.

The drunkard will come again and knock upon my door. I would prefer to break his neck,letting him suffer her loss, nothing left but eyes not quite seeing, distant, a mirror to a perfect, sound mind. Shooting him is too easy, too merciful, and one he might prefer.

Awake, I forgive him, for there is no room in my heart for hatred or anger–grief and sorrow saturate my soul.

His teenage years were troubled, I hear. A stretch in Vietnam pushed him into a life of alcohol and drugs. I contemplate the irony. My husband, brothers, sons and relatives were all spared from serving in Vietnam. Yet this senseless ”police action” takes the life of my daughter twenty years later. A stranger, so affected by that conflict, destroys my daughter and himself as well.

Yes, I forgive him, except in my dreams and as long as I never see his face in the light of day. This killer comes again and again, knocking at my door. I shoot him again and again, until one night in my dreams, anger gives way to true forgiveness, setting us both free.