The Drive

The traffic on the freeway was caused by a three car collision. With traffic control’s swift response, four out of six lanes were cleared of any obstructions and the cars were invited to move along by white-gloved men wearing neon jackets that glimmered with the reflection of countless headlights in front of them. Despite such efficient and painstaking efforts, the traffic lingered. Every car slowed down to inspect the remnants of the disaster that they missed by only thirty minutes. Squinting through the window to see any signs of mortality. Splatters of blood, dismembered limbs, a victim trapped in the truck that the paramedics missed. As long as there was half an inch of industrial glass and compressed steel plates in between them and death, death was fascinating. The boy spent no time looking and sped past the congestion with such speed that the gloved men leapt out of the lane that was safe to stand only a few milliseconds ago. The boy had multiple reasons to be in such a hurry. For one, he had to arrive at the hospital for the appointment. For another, death was sitting next to him on the passenger seat.

The boy’s mother held a rosary worn with age and her delicate fingers periodically caressed the beads with care and experience. The boy knew better than to interrupt her. It was her time with God. This could very well be the last hours she spends with her son but she chose God instead.

“You can just say it, you know.”

“Say what?”

“The prayers. Out loud.”

“Are you going to pray with me?”

“What?”

“Are you going to pray with me?”

“No.”

“Then why would I say it out loud?”

“Because then I at least know that you’re doing something other than not

talking to me.”

“Why would I do that now? Of all places and time to do it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just unsettled by the silence.”

“That’s true, we never were the ones to be silent. You were always there for me

to listen. You have no idea how much of a help you were.”

The boy caught his mother trying to hang herself at the age of fourteen. She didn’t know that school would be over earlier. She must have heard his footsteps seconds before he opened the front door. But she had too little time to hide everything. The rope that she had hidden behind her, the kitchen chair oddly out of place and under the ceiling fan, and the faint rashes around her delicate neck that did not respond well to cheap hay. His duty as the unofficial therapist began that day.

Every therapist has their own therapist, but the boy didn’t know that until it was too late, much too late. The boy was twenty-one when he mustered the courage to ask his mother for help. He knew his mother heard him weep during the phone call. But it made no difference to her. In her eyes, the boy had to be hardened. Metals only harden through fire and hammering.

“Yes, mother. You were there for me too. I’m grateful.”

He felt the chill that he was all too familiar with the moment those words slipped out of his mouth. The chill from his shoulders that slid down to his lowest vertebrae. White, numbing. He learned from a young age that a good lie is often better than a bad truth. But this one didn’t feel good. He might have denied his mother her last chance at absolution. Maybe this time, she would have been different. But he didn’t even give her the chance.

The car entered the parking lot for the hospital. The lot was much bigger than the building but the boy struggled finding an empty spot. Both of them were noticeably more tense as it became increasingly more difficult for them to ignore the reckoning ahead of them. Tapping the wheel, whites showing in knuckles. The mother had put away the rosary and asked her son the question she wanted to ask for months, if not years.

“Why do you never pray with me?”

Because three hundred infants die every five seconds around the world due to famine, disease, war, and other unspeakable terrors that prey upon the innocent. Because more people were killed in his name than any other name in the entirety of humanity’s existence. Because the boy prayed for his father’s happiness but he was still beaten anyway. Because the light that he thought was coming from heaven at church was just a seventy-two dollar spotlight from Walmart.

“Because I feel embarrassed.”

“I love your voice when you pray with me.”

“We have some time, let’s do it before we head in.”

They stayed in the car among endless lines of cars in united prayer. The mother had her head down with her eyes closed but the boy kept staring up at the sky. There were no stars visible in the sky despite there being no source of light around them except the hospital building looming in the distance. He wondered how many of those lit windows had a patient with their loved one praying for a miracle. Could it be one, two, or hundreds? He could have never known the exact count but he knew one thing for sure. That was the closest he would ever get to feeling the presence of God.