bluedragonauthor

BTC 2.0: Chapter 73

Added 2025-01-26 02:44:39 +0000 UTC

-- CHAPTER 73: Stave IV --

****

I reappeared in Belle’s apartment bedroom and didn’t need to bother bending my knees. Somehow I knew Mother wouldn’t drop me from sixteen inches up this time. She stood beside me with her arms folded across her chest, staring straight ahead with a pensive look.

“No, no. He’s gone. Good riddance,” Belle said with a sigh, staring down at one of those small, handheld, TV screen devices in her lap. She reclined against her headboard and some pillows, dressed in fluffy pajamas, with her knees up at an angle to support the TV screen device. That meant her right hand was free to gently caress the cheek of the slumbering toddler in bed beside her. “I kicked him out. He packed his shit and hit the road.”

“I’m glad he’s gone,” a familiar voice replied through the device. I walked alongside the bed in order to see who would be on the screen, and my eyes went wide in surprise at the sight of my Mariangel, looking as stunningly beautiful as ever. Based on the background, the lovely Latina appeared to be seated on a couch in her own living room with her luxurious dark hair pinned up in a messy bun. “But while I know you just want to move on and never think about that asshole ever again, you need to seriously think about pressing charges.”

Belle shook her head. “With all the shit I’ve got going on right now, the absolute last thing I need is to deal with calling the cops and filing a police report and making all of this drag out even longer than it already has.”

“He fucking HIT you, B. You need to put his sorry ass in jail.”

“He’s hit me LOTS of times.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“I’m just saying I’ve always gotten through it. If I knew for sure that pressing charges would put him in jail, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but you know how these things go. He’d claim I hit him a bunch of times, which… well… I did. It would become this game of ‘he said, she said’. I’d have to get lawyers involved to defend myself, and like, there’s no fucking way I can afford a lawyer right now!”

“I’m sure Sam would get you hooked up pro bono if you asked.”

“Like I wanna go calling Sam for favors. And even if I could afford a lawyer, I don’t wanna deal with all that shit. I wanted him gone, and now he’s gone. Case closed.”

“You should’ve kicked him out months ago.”

“Yeah, I should’ve,” Belle muttered wearily. “I was just scared of being alone.”

“Better alone than shackled to a loser cannonball who was just dragging you down to the bottom of the ocean.”

“Easy for you to say Miss Happily Married to the Great Love of Her Life.”

“Well…” Mari blushed. “You’re not wrong.”

“But seriously, I AM alone now.”

“And you’re scared.”

Belle stared off to the side with a haunted look. “I’m terrified. No job. Rent’s due in three days. I’ve got enough to pay it, but if I don’t get another job soon, I won’t be able to feed Gizmo. And even IF I get another job, I’m not sure I’d be able to pay for her daycare.”

Mari sighed. “If it’s money you need--”

“I’m stopping you there right now.” Belle held up her index finger threateningly. “Nuh-uh. No way.”

“I wouldn’t be giving you money,” Mari insisted. “It would just be a loan. You’d pay me back.”

“I’m not that desperate.”

“Not that desperate yet.”

“Mari, seriously.”

“Fine, fine…” Mari held up her hands in surrender, shaking her head. She took a deep breath, glared at Belle through the screen, and then muttered, “You already know what I’m going to say.”

Belle scowled, shook her head, and looked down at Giselle, once again caressing her daughter’s cheek. “I’m not moving back to California.”

“Why NOT?” Mari held up her hands again. “No job. No boyfriend. There’s literally NOTHING tying you to New Jersey anymore. Come back. Come home.”

“I can’t.”

“You can,” Mari insisted.

“I can’t,” Belle repeated.

Mari pursed her lips, turned to look off-camera, and sighed. From her expression, I gathered that she was silently communicating with someone else in her living room, most likely that “Great Love of Her Life” Belle had mentioned, and I now realized that Mari had been wearing a fat diamond ring when she’d held up her hands.

“Come stay with us,” Mari insisted. “We’ve got plenty of room. It’s not giving you money. There would be no loan to pay back. Just move out and never make your rent payment. Keep that last paycheck instead of giving it to your evil slumlord. Buy two plane tickets, stay with us, spend some one-on-one quality time with Gizmo, give yourself a few months to find a really great job here that pays well enough to cover daycare, and then go back to work. It’s a foolproof plan.”

“It IS a foolproof plan, except for one problem and you know it.”

“It’s only a problem if you LET it be a problem.”

“I can’t see him again,” Belle insisted, shaking her head. “I can’t.”

Mari sighed wearily. “You can.”

“No I can’t. I just can’t.”

Mari glanced off-camera for a moment and then returned her attention to the screen. “Matty loves you. He will always love you. He misses his adorable Annabelle and wants nothing but to have you back in his life.”

“I can’t Mari. I just can’t.”

“Gawd-fucking-dammit, B! Why the fuck do you always have to be so fucking STUBBORN?!?” Mari suddenly exclaimed, loud enough to startle Giselle. The little girl whined, Belle swore and looked down to gently soothe her little girl back to sleep, and Mari grimaced with an apologetic look on-screen.

It took a minute, but Giselle calmed back down. Belle kept her gaze on her slumbering daughter for another minute after that, still stroking. But eventually, Giselle’s face went slack, Belle’s shoulders unknotted, and the worn-out young woman finally returned her attention to the screen.

“There’s no good reason why you can’t come back and see him again,” Mari muttered. “It’s been years, B. He wants you back. We both want you back. We ALL want you back.”

Belle shook her head. “I know you all do. But I can’t. I still don’t know how to apologize to him.”

“You don’t need to apologize to him.” Mari looked off-screen again, perhaps at her husband. “Matty forgave you a long, long time ago.”

“I never forgave myself.”

“I know.” Mari continued to stare off-screen, but then she returned her gaze to Belle and repeated, “I know. But maybe it’s time you did. Come home. Stay with us. Make a fresh start.”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t do it for you. Do it for Gizmo.”

Belle’s breathing suddenly hitched and her eyes went wide with fresh moisture forming in them.

“You know I’m right,” Mari pressed.

Belle took a deep breath, held it, and seemed to seriously consider what Mari was telling her. And when she exhaled and started nodding, I wanted to believe that for once in her life she would be reasonable.

But instead Belle pursed her lips, shook her head, and then muttered, “I can’t.”

Belle tapped the screen once.

She then tapped a red icon that had appeared at the bottom of the screen.

And the universe disappeared into infinite white.

****

I reappeared in the master bedroom of my house.

Not the rented Mammoth Mountain house.

Not the Berkeley house I shared with my girlfriends.

MY house.

The house I’d grown up in.

The house Mother had leased out to strangers while she was in New York and I was off to college.

“Why’d you bring me here?” I asked without looking up. I reached out to grasp the bedpost in front of me, so intimately familiar. The bedpost was my own. The bed was my own. The room was my own.

Mother did not respond. My question was met with dead silence, and I turned, expecting to find her staring out into the middle distance with her posture stiff and her arms folded across her chest.

But Mother wasn’t there.

I was alone in my room.

I was no longer barefoot, no longer dressed in pajama bottoms and a tank top. Instead I was back in the same sharp law firm suit I’d worn to FutureSam’s office: black jacket, black slacks, crisp white dress shirt, and a black tie. And my polished black leather shoes shined without blemish.

Muffled sounds of conversation floated in through my closed bedroom door. Letting go of the bed post, I turned and walked over to the door. Half-expecting to see a rectangular field of infinite white light with no beginning and no end, I opened it and relaxed at the familiar sight of the hallway just outside my room. The conversations were louder and plentiful, telling me that there were many people in the house. But the varying male and female voices themselves were unfamiliar, and so I found myself feeling a little tense as I walked to the stairs and started to descend.

The universe did not magically transform into somewhere else halfway down the staircase. I didn’t end up in FutureSam’s law office. I didn’t end up in FutureNaimh’s sterile, modern, beachfront mansion. I didn’t end up in little Gizmo’s chaotic daycare. I simply ended up in the living room of my childhood home, although I didn’t recognize any of the occupants at all.

It was a formal event; nearly everyone was dressed in black and white attire such as suits and modest dresses. The vast majority of those in attendance were middle-aged and older, although not all. And one woman in particular caught my eye.

Platinum-blonde hair. Voluptuous curves that no mere black dress could ever hide. There was something about the way she carried herself, something about her very presence that was intimately familiar to me. Even however many years into the future, even from across the room and with her back turned, I’d recognize Sam anywhere. So I quickly walked over and gently reached out to touch her arm.

She turned to face me, and I would have soiled myself - had ghostly, intangible, time-traveling figments of a fevered, super-pill-induced nightmare been capable of having shit to soil.

Because it wasn’t Sam who turned to face me.

It was the Phantom from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: a corporeal and photo-realistic version that would have given six-year-old me nightmares for the next several decades. Hell, I still had PTSD from Goofy’s Jacob Marley door-knocker in the Disney version. To find the Phantom come to life made me want to run screaming higgledy-piggledy around the room.

But the Phantom gripped my forearm tightly with bare-boned, skeletal fingers. It was shrouded in a deep black garment which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched skeleton hand. Tall and stately, its mysterious presence filled me with a solemn dread. But the Phantom otherwise neither spoke nor moved.

“Oh, shit,” I muttered with wide-eyed terror, completely frozen in vapor-lock.

The Phantom did not react.

“Please tell me you’re still Mother but just in a different form like when you became Sam’s cat.”

The Phantom slowly shook its… head?… in the negative. It was difficult to tell; the upper portion of the Phantom’s garment twisted to the left, the folds of its dark fabric shifting ever so slightly before returning back to their original positions. I felt a sudden chill go down my spine.

“Where is she?” I asked with sudden worry. Whether or not my companion through these mystical visits to witness the future lives of Sam, Naimh, and Belle had been my real mother, I’d developed something of an attachment to… her.

The Phantom released its bony grip on my forearm, extended its arm, and then pointed with a single skeletal digit across the room. I turned to look and realized that the dining table had been moved.

An open black casket stood in its place against the wall.

Another chill went down my spine.

“Wait, what?” I turned back to face the Phantom. “Is my mother… dead?”

The upper portion of the Phantom’s garment contracted for an instant in its folds, as if the Phantom had inclined its head. That was the only answer I received, and its extended arm remained pointing directly at the casket, its instruction for me to go over there quite clear.

But I didn’t want to go to the casket. My mouth was dry. My legs trembled, and I found that I could hardly stand.

“N-no… no… I can’t…” I stammered, shaking my head.

The Phantom’s arm remained extended.

“I can’t. I won’t,” I insisted.

The Phantom did not change positions in the slightest, its arm remaining extended. So still was the ghostly apparition all clothed in black, it may as well have been a statue.

It may as well have been asking me to pick up my cell phone and call Mother, for all the good it would do me. Dead women don’t answer phone calls, and the futility of such a request kept me rooted to the floor.

“I don’t need to go over there. I don’t,” I maintained. “You’ve already made your point. There’s no need for me to go over there and see her face. This is my version of A Christmas Carol and It’s A Wonderful Life and this is merely a shadow of things that may be, not necessarily will be. I get it. I’m Ebenezer Scrooge. I’m the main character guy from It’s A Wonderful Life, whatever his name is. I get it. I get it!”

The arm remained extended.

“I’m not going over there! I don’t want to see her like that, alright! You can’t make me!”

The Phantom remained as immovable as ever.

“Take me home! Put me back in my bed! Or the rental house’s bed! I don’t care! This is just a dream, a shitty dream, a nightmare! None of it is REAL. I know who I am. I know how old I am. I know how old Sam and Neevie and Belle are. I know my real mother is alive and skiing and sipping wine with her friends in New York. This is all just some fucked up figment of my imagination brought on by a wicked cocktail of alcohol, stress, and Sam’s super-pills. The real me is still naked and tied to the bed with gift wrap ribbons, and it’s a little weird to think of that state of being as better than this one, but it is. I am DONE. Wake me up!”

The Phantom’s arm remained extended.

“Wake me up!”

“WAKE ME UP!”

The Phantom did not wake me up.

I slapped my cheek, ordering myself, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

I did not wake up.

“FUCK!”

All around us, guests wearing formal suits and dresses mingled about the room before suddenly turning in perfect unison and presenting me with a wall of faceless stares. And when I say “faceless”, I really do mean faceless. None of them had faces, just blank spaces of skin without eyes, noses, mouths, etc. Everything about the situation was surreal, only serving to remind me that the rules of reality did not apply here, and that ending this nightmare would not be as easily accomplished as slapping myself on the cheek.

Still, the Phantom’s arm remained extended.

Fuck.

I started walking forward. One step. Two.

And then I stopped.

I looked back behind me. The Phantom’s arm remained extended.

Fuckity-fuck.

My jaw hung slack, my lower lip quivering. I was terrified to continue forward, and yet I found that my feet were still moving.

Another step.

Another.

I panted softly, out of breath as if I’d just finished running a marathon. My lungs felt heavy, my chest compressed as if I were six feet underwater in the pool out back.

I wanted to turn around and run screaming from the room. Still, my feet continued forward, the faceless gazes of the guests shadowing my passage.

Another step.

Another.

It was as if I’d lost control of my own body, a helpless passenger in my own mind.

Another step.

And then one more.

Approaching the open black casket, I saw that the body within had been veiled head-to-toe with a white gossamer fabric. I stopped when I was close enough to look down at what very much appeared to be Mother’s body, still in great shape at whatever age she must have been. But her face itself was hidden, so I couldn’t actually confirm her identity without pulling back the veil.

Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand WAS open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a woman’s. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see her good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!

I shook my head. “Wake me up,” I pleaded again. “I’ve learned my lesson. Please. I don’t want to do this anymore. I’ve learned my lesson!”

“Have you now?” Mother’s skeptical voice intoned quite seriously next to me.

I turned immediately, eyes open WIDE in astonishment to see that the Phantom was now gone and my mother stood beside me in its stead.

And I launched myself at her with a fierce hug, wrapping both arms around her and squeezing tight.

Mother went stiff in surprise, too caught off-guard to react. But after my hug went on and on for several more seconds with no sign of abatement, she finally raised her arms up to hug me back.

Hot tears splashed down onto my cheeks as I hugged her even harder. “You can’t abandon me AGAIN!”

“Matthew… Oh, my little Matthew…” Mother murmured softly with unexpected emotion in her voice while stroking my spine.

She snapped her fingers, and the universe disappeared into infinite white.

****

I reappeared in my childhood home, standing next to the kitchen island.

Mother sat on a barstool with a half-empty glass of red wine and a hardcover book in front of her. She looked like she’d just come home from the office, her suit jacket hung across the barstool’s backrest. There was a weariness in her eyes and etched into the lines across her face. Her posture was uncharacteristically poor, and she slouched in her seat with her left elbow planted on the countertop and her chin planted onto her extended left thumb.

There were tears in her eyes. Fuck, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Mother crying. But she was crying now, and I didn’t know how to process that. We were no longer hugging, now physically separated from each other by the kitchen island. And while the little boy inside of me yearned to rush into my mommy’s arms and desperately try to scrub away the mental image of her lifeless body beneath that gossamer veil in the open casket, the grown man I was today simply stood where I was in silence trying to process all of my feelings.

We both stayed like that for a long, long time: silent and contemplative. But eventually, Mother spoke first.

“I owe you an apology, Matthew,” she began softly, as if the heavy weight accumulated from a lifetime of regrets compressed the air in her lungs and prevented louder speech. “I’m sorry for abandoning you.”

I sighed and shook my head. “We talked about this on the phone at Christmas. You didn’t abandon me.”

“I abandoned you,” Mother insisted.

“And I abandoned you. Sam told me to call you. I could’ve picked up the phone at any time, but I didn’t.”

Mother shook her head. “I’ve only reaped what I have sown. You were only protecting yourself, and that failure was mine alone. You didn’t pick up that phone because you feared making yet another futile attempt at reaching out to me, only to be left bitterly disappointed. How much would it have hurt your heart to call me, only to have your call get directed to voicemail? Perhaps you would have left me a message. Perhaps I wouldn’t call you back immediately. Perhaps I wouldn’t call you back for days, for weeks, or never at all. Or even worse yet, perhaps I would have taken your call only to cut the conversation short to take care of some work matter I considered to be more important than you? How much would that have crushed your soul? How badly would you have felt abandoned then?”

I closed my eyes, clenched my fists, and fought the urge to collapse to the ground in a sobbing heap. Fresh tears rolled down my cheeks as I found myself reliving the memory of watching my third-grade Mother’s Day card dropping into the trash can beneath the kitchen sink. And I suddenly gasped for oxygen, having not even realized I’d been holding my breath while Mother spoke aloud my terrible fear.

“Rather than face such epic failure, better not to try at all,” Mother intoned softly. And then she sighed.

“Better to try and fail than face that horror show of a scene I just witnessed.” I gestured vaguely behind myself while slowly shaking my head. “The Goofy door-knocker scared the hell out of me as a kid. One would think seeing that Phantom made real with its skeletal hand grabbing my arm would give me PTSD as an adult. But what’s gonna fucking haunt my nightmares for the rest of my fucking life is seeing you in a fucking casket.”

“Matthew…”

“I never want to see that vision become a reality. Ever.” I shivered, my lower lip quivering as I whispered, “Please don’t leave me.”

“We all die eventually, Matthew. No man or woman has ever defeated Time.”

“I know that.” I shivered again, bit my lip to stop it from quivering, and then said softly, “It wasn’t your death that bothered me, that made me want to collapse to the floor in a sobbing heap. It was the idea that you’d died before I had a chance to see you again. The idea that you’d died without the two of us having reconciled. I stood in front of that casket, unwilling to pull back the veil. To pull it back and see your face… I just… I couldn’t…”

Mother frowned and canted her head to the side. “I must admit: I am surprised by your depth of emotion. I hadn’t realized you were so… attached… to me.”

“You’re my mother. For years and years, your love was all I really wanted in life.” I sniffled and gave her a rueful sigh. “I would have settled for your approval. The girls aren’t wrong when they say I’ve been programmed to yearn for the approval of all the women in my life, especially the emotionally unavailable ones.”

“Well that I can certainly believe.”

“But even though I’ve long struggled to believe I was… worthy… of your love, it always felt like I could afford to be complacent because of how young I am.” I shrugged and held my hands out, palms up. “I’m still a teenager. I mean yeah, I’m legally an adult now, but I thought I had all the time in the world. I thought I still had my whole life ahead of me to figure this shit out.”

“You do. You’re still young. How many times have I dismissed you over the years, minimized your suggestions and statements as the immature thoughts of a child? I never said those things to be mean; it’s just science. The brain of an adolescent is still forming. Logic, reason, and wisdom get clouded by hormones and chemical imbalances in your brain. You’re not supposed to have figured everything out yet.”

I shook my head, let out a shuddering breath, and felt fresh tears rolling down my cheeks. “That’s just an excuse. Just because I’m not supposed to have figured everything out yet doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. It doesn’t mean I should automatically dismiss my feelings, judgments, and conclusions as the immature thoughts of a child to be disregarded as inherently faulty. Accept that I don’t have all the answers yet? Sure. Accept that I may be wrong and will have to try again? Absolutely. But what scared me the most was the finality of seeing you in that casket. No more chances. No more opportunities to work things out. No more time. Only death.”

“It’s not your fault. You’re my child. I’m the parent. The burden is on ME to reach out and connect with you before it’s too late.”

Sniffing up the snot that tried to leak out from my nose, I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and stood erect. “I still could’ve tried. That’s the lesson I’m supposed to learn from all this, right? To take responsibility for my own inaction. You challenged me to no longer let events wash over me. Instead of passively going with the flow, I have to step up and take action to force a change. I didn’t do that. I didn’t reach out to you.”

“I didn’t reach out to you either,” she pointed out. “At least not until Christmas.”

“I’m sure you were just as scared as I was that I’d reject you completely if you called me up on a random Tuesday in October. Perhaps you would have left me a message. Perhaps I wouldn’t call you back immediately. How much would that have crushed your soul? How much DID that crush your soul when you called me on Christmas only to never get a response all day, believing I was deliberately ignoring you?”

Mother pursed her lips. “It hurt, yes,” she admitted.

“That one most definitely was on me.”

Mother gave me a kindly look. “You’re doing right now with me what you always do with the girls. You minimize their mistakes and try to take the lion’s share of responsibility.”

I shook my head. “It’s not about fault or blame.”

“Says the man who always tries to reduce the girl’s share of the blame down to zero. Have you ever considered acknowledging that your girls aren’t perfect, and the more you treat them as if they are, the less opportunity there is for them to learn from their own mistakes and grow because of them?”

I shook my head again. “I know they’re not perfect.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes! Of course!” I exclaimed as memories both fresh and years past flashed through my semi-corporeal head of tiffs, grievances, and transient episodes of madness we’d navigated.

And to my astonishment, a dim echo of those memories of the girls at their ugliest, worn with age and stripped of detail, appeared and played out their parts lashing out at their friends, or loosening a casually cruel line and then disappearing to be followed by other memories. Their temporary second life flickering within the kitchen and living room precisely where they were in the memory’s origin. Somehow, I knew that if I walked out to the backyard, or upstairs, I would find more of the same.

“In action and deed, how would one know the difference?” Mother asked and the tableau shifted to memories of Past Matty smoothing things over with the girls, making them feel loved despite their recent outburst. Sometimes accompanied with crying girls swearing their apologies, before they too misted into nothing.

“Have you ever truly demanded a change, or have you merely been content to let them set their own degree of contrition?”

“Well… Sometimes,” I admitted. Though for this, only one specific memory broke through.

And suddenly we were in my bedroom and my heart broke as I witnessed my little Anabelle crying. This vision more vivid than the other phantom memories by far, she searched through her purse before handing me a key with a red plastic loop encircling the head. I knew that she’d only been robed in that shirt for moments earlier based on an order from me after she’d attempted to betray her friends and seduce me behind their backs.

I turned to Mother as if to say, ‘See I can assert myself if I have to!’

Mother gave me a pitying look, “Yes, you can act on a gift. But life’s sliding doors rarely arrive with a warning.”

I looked at Mother in confusion, and she shifted her gaze over to a darkened corner where a sudden spitting “ROWWWL!” pierced the room, accompanied by a flash of movement as a green-eyed black cat chased five birds - one yellow, one red, one brown, one blue, and one purple - through my opened bedroom door only to scatter in five directions in their panic.

In disbelief I turned back to Mother, “Did you…?”

She ignored my astonishment and continued, “The question is whether you, my little frog, will ever learn to notice the water temperature is climbing and ask for someone else to take responsibility for lowering the temperature before someone reaches their boiling point? Or will you let it boil over and then blame yourself?”

“I told you,” I protested, “It’s not about fault or blame.”

“Noble words, but we both know you have it in you. I’ve heard the way you describe me to your girls.” Mother tilted her head to the side.

A smug version of myself manifested beside us, explaining to a shadowed confederate, “She was an absentee mother whose parenting style was to throw money at me and leave me on my own.” The ghostly apparition then slowly dissolved into the ether.

“And that was perhaps the kindest way of putting it.” Mother gave me a rueful grin. “‘Selfish bitch who never gave a shit about the unwanted accident she got saddled with’ was… less kind… but not necessarily inaccurate.”

“I’m sorry for saying that about you.”

Mother gave me a stern look. “This isn’t a time for apologies, especially to me. I am a selfish bitch who never gave you the love and attention that any young boy deserves to have while growing up. That was my fault, and mine alone, and I don’t want you to shoulder even an ounce of burden over it.”

Pieces of my childhood appeared. All variations on the theme of a young and growing boy, alone in a house much too big for two people waiting for his mommy to come home until only one remained. I approached the young boy who might have been nine and put a hand on his shoulder. The apparition shuddered in his loneliness and continued his watch.

A tear spilled down my cheek, “I won’t lie, it hurts. It will always hurt. But I can face this past. What I can’t face is that casket again. I need to accept that ounce of responsibility or there’s nothing I can do to alter that path. For me to NOT acknowledge that responsibility – however slim – would be to surrender. It would be saying, ‘Well, it’s more her fault than mine, so the onus is on her to make things better.’” I shook my head, took a deep breath, and gestured vaguely behind myself. “I said ten minutes ago that I’d learned my lesson, and I have.”

“Have you now?” she asked skeptically.

“I just spent the past five months blaming you for our estrangement, putting the onus on you to keep in contact, and refusing to make the first phone call on the principle that I shouldn’t have to. And all I ended up doing was make myself feel even worse for it. I don’t give a shit about fault and blame. If I know what I’m capable of doing to make the situation better, then I’m responsible for that.”

“But you didn’t know you were capable. You’re my child. I’m your mother. Am -I- not responsible for doing what I’m capable of doing to make the situation better? Am -I- not to blame for my own inaction?”

I shook my head. “That’s your burden. I don’t need to judge you or anyone else for what you choose to do or do not do, and I’ll happily take any responsibility if it will help us find a solution.”

“That’s the wrong answer. You’re still trying to be noble; but falling on your sword is by definition ‘suicide’. And while that mentality will not literally get you killed, it will cause the death of more than one of these precious relationships you hold so dear.”

I pursed my lips and took a deep breath. “You say ‘will’ as if the future was set in stone. If this is my nightmarish version of A Christmas Carol, you’re showing me possible futures of what may come to pass.”

“What will come to pass if you fail to change: Samantha losing herself in her career, drifting away from you, and losing her ‘home’; Naimh winning ‘the prize’ and wearing your engagement ring, only to be consumed with guilt over the breakup of your precious club; and Belle…”

I blinked. When Mother’s voice trailed off, I frowned and said, “You never actually told me what happened between me and Belle.”

Mother took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. “Truth be told: Belle leaving was not your fault. Well, perhaps you held an ounce of fault, but of course you will try to shoulder her burden. Regardless, she will choose to leave and try to make a life for herself away from everyone else.”

“A rather shitty life from the look of it. Abusive boyfriend… Dead-end jobs…”

“An intelligent, beautiful, kind little girl she loves very, very much,” Mother finished with a rather wistful smile on her face.

I shook my head. “I won’t let Belle leave me. I won’t.”

“Some things are meant to be.”

I frowned. “What, you’re saying Belle is supposed to leave me?”

“What is the saying you’re so fond of? That the girls aren’t Pokémon. You can’t keep them ALL.”

“I can damn well try. And you can be damn well sure I’m gonna keep Belle. Especially after that horrific vision of her future I just saw. You think I want to let that shit happen to her? Hell-fucking-NO.” I gestured vaguely behind myself and vehemently shook my head. “She’s my Annabelle. We belong together. And I WILL protect her no matter what.”

“I’ve no doubt regarding your good intentions. But you will always struggle to see her as more than the little girl you grew up with. Doesn’t she deserve better than that? Doesn’t she deserve better than being in love with a man who will always love the tall, gorgeous, big-titted queens she can’t compete with?”

“I think she deserves to be in love with a man who loves and cherishes her as his precious Annabelle AND her best friends who happen to be tall, gorgeous, big-titted queens. BTC 2.0. Happily Ever After. Together.”

“You can’t keep them all.”

“You don’t KNOW that. You CAN’T know that, because you’re nothing more than a figment of my imagination who can’t possibly know anything more about the future than I do. This isn’t real. This is a super-pill-induced fever dream.”

“Perhaps it is. Or perhaps there’s a bit of magic in this world that you don’t yet understand. Is that any less reasonable to believe than the idea of seven beautiful young women all falling in love with one man and choosing to live their lives sharing him instead of seeking meaningful companionship elsewhere?”

“Didn’t you just say I can’t keep them all?”

“You most certainly will not be able to keep them all without putting forth the active effort it will require to keep them all.” Mother raised her eyebrows and gave me a serious look. “You got lucky - very lucky – with the formation of your precious club. You grew up with Annabelle since infancy, and she brought Mariangel with her. Mariangel was the one to make friends with Samantha, who in turn brought Zofia, and later brought in Naimh. They built the Big Tits Club.”

“Alice was my friend first,” I pointed out, before wincing at how whiny and defensive I sounded.

“The foundations of your relationship with Ailiseu are rooted in childhood games, and she’s the only one of the club you would willingly see fall in love with another man.”

I waggled my head, unable to argue with her about that.

“Your passive, unthreatening nature served you well for a group of developing teenagers uncertain of their sexuality. You gave them a safe space to experiment – a metaphorical sandbox in which to play. But they won’t be teenagers forever.”

“I know,” I insisted.

“Their needs have changed. Their requirements have matured. The girls no longer need a benign crash test dummy on which to explore their burgeoning desires and adolescent feelings.”

“They need a man who will continue to be everything they need,” I interjected, “even when those needs have transformed into adult needs instead of teenage needs.”

Mother blinked. “That sentence included perhaps too many repetitions of the word ‘need’.”

I barked a short laugh and shook my head. “You know what I mean.”

“I do.” Mother’s smile was enigmatic. “But do you truly know what you mean?”

“Of course I…” My voice trailed off before I realized I wasn’t exactly sure what I needed to do.

I took a deep breath to collect myself, grateful that Mother patiently waited me out this time rather than continue to scold me. I thought back over everything I had witnessed tonight since first waking up to find Mother unexpectedly standing in my bedroom. And when I felt like I’d started to wrap my mind around it all, I finally spoke.

“After showing me Sam’s future, you told me that was how the future would come to pass if I continued to passively accommodate Sam’s focus on her career, to let her take me for granted, and to allow our love to wither and die on the vine. I’d like to think I’d already figured out for myself that I need to ‘squeak up’ and save our relationship. I know Sam loves me, and I know she doesn’t mean to neglect me; but I also know that it’s easy for her fire-fighting nature to get caught up in the crisis of the moment instead of paying attention to the routine maintenance aspects of life. That’s just the way she is, and I accept her for that. It means that I’ll need to put my foot down every now and again, to demand she spend time with me every now and again. I’ll tell her she’s being a ‘tight-ass’, use some gift wrap ribbons to tie her to the bed, and then sit down next to her and have a pleasant conversation while she can’t run away.”

“While she’s naked so you can play with her boobs,” Mother remarked with a gleam in her eyes.

My eyes popped open wide as I gave Mother a look that plainly asked, Seriously?!?

“What?” Mother smirked. “Samantha is an incredibly beautiful, sexually attractive young woman, and very pleasant to look at. Especially naked.”

I grimaced, clenched my eyes shut, and rubbed my forehead. “Um, I’m gonna choose to believe those statements were from my own inner psyche talking to me instead of my mother.”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

“Moving on.” I waved her off. “You told me that it’s impossible to be what every girl needs me to be, that I can’t make all of them happy. At some point in my life, different girls will need me to be different things, and I’m gonna end up disappointing someone. That sort of thing has already happened within The BTC, but usually the girls always worked it out on their own. But high-school tiffs and childish disagreements are going to give way to more serious issues with longer-lasting consequences. And I’ll need to decide what -I- want for myself and take action to achieve those things.”

“You’ll need more specific goals than ‘Keep as many of them as I can’,” Mother warned.

I pursed my lips and frowned. “Well I really don’t want to end up impregnating a married Neevie and then watching some other man raising my kid, assuming I don’t ruin her marriage entirely.”

Mother shrugged. “Perhaps getting pregnant with your child is the catalyst for Naimh leaving her husband and reuniting with you. You can’t say having a family with Naimh wouldn’t be a happy ending for you.”

I clenched my eyes shut and rubbed my forehead again. “It would be the most royally fucked-up route of getting there. I’ll find a better way.”

“A way that doesn’t involve you passively saying, ‘I understand’ when Naimh tells you to your face that she can’t live with the guilt and has to leave while secretly wishing you’d fight for her to stay. A way that doesn’t involve you apologizing and meekly surrendering as if you don’t deserve to be happy instead of actively helping a girl make up for the mess she created.”

“I get it, I get it.”

“Do you? Do you really?”

“Wake me up and find out.”

She gave me a skeptical look. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you wake up?”

“Call my mom.”

Mother stopped and blinked at me a couple of times. For a figment of my own imagination, she sure seemed surprised by that answer.

“Call my mom,” I repeated quite seriously.

Mother blinked at me again, curious and… touched… with a small smile on her face.

“I want to tell you that I love you. The phone calls we had before were brief: little more than exchanges of Christmas and New Year greetings with promises to keep in touch. At Christmas, I was a little too stunned and emotional at the time for a long, in-depth conversation. For New Year’s Eve I was… uh… a little busy.”

Mother smirked, the inner psyche version of her knowing exactly what I was busy doing on New Year’s Eve.

“But I’m ready now to really sit down and talk to you,” I continued. “I’m ready now to tell you that while some part of me will always resent you not spending enough time with me growing up, for me to not stay in contact with you going forward would only be spiteful and continue a vicious cycle of anger and regret. I AM grateful for the things you gave me to help make my life the way it is. By any reasonable metric, I live a pretty great life, in large part due to you. Thank you, Mother. Thank you.”

“Oh, Matthew…” Mother sighed quietly.

I shook my head slowly. “You’ve shown me four visions of the future tonight, and I don’t want to see any of them come to pass: Sam’s loneliness, Naimh’s unhappiness, Belle’s misery. I take that back: Gizmo can stay.”

Mother chuckled and smiled.

I took a deep breath and then finished. “I don’t want to see you in a casket.”

“We all die eventually,” Mother repeated somberly.

“Well I am most certainly NOT doing your wake in our house, at the very least. The PTSD flashbacks would just… fuck.” I waved both hands and shook my head. “But more importantly, when you finally die – of old age having lived a long and fulfilled life – it will only be after we’ve had a chance to spend more time together and get to know each other as adults better. You once said that the older I get, the more we’ll have in common. Maybe one day I’ll make you a grandmother and you can give me shit about it being my turn to realize how difficult parenthood can be.”

“I look forward to that one day… LATER. Much, much later. After you’ve graduated at least, hmm?” Mother’s scolding look was back, but there was a twinkle in her eyes.

I took another deep breath and looked around the kitchen of my childhood home. The walls at the far edges had started to go blurry. This dreamworld was starting to fade away into infinite white, and I realized that my time with Mother was almost up.

“Thank you for this,” I told her sincerely. “At first I thought it was a nightmare. But now I see that maybe this is the dream I was meant to have.”

“You’re very welcome,” she replied.

In the distance, a bell started ringing to my left and I turned to look, only to find that I couldn’t discern the source of the ringing. When I looked back, I found that Mother was now standing, her angelic white wings now on full display while she was bathed in a soft glow of heavenly light. And she gave me a beaming, brilliant smile full of uncharacteristic warmth.

But even if such warmth was uncharacteristic for the mother she had been for me growing up, I realized it suited her. It suited the nature of a new relationship between us. She may not have been the most present and available mother for a little boy during my childhood, but I wasn’t a little boy anymore. I was a grown-up: fully capable of taking responsibility for my own actions and making an effort to connect with her. She still lived clear on the other side of the country, but we lived in an age of cell phones and video conferencing. For that matter, I should probably look into investing in new telecommunications technology, if my visions of the future should be believed.

Why do I suddenly feel like taking a bite out of an apple?

Bottom line: Our relationship would NOT be dead as a door-nail. Not if I could do something about it.

The world around me kept fading away into infinite white. The backsplash behind the sink was gone, as were the refrigerator, the dishwasher, and the pantry. The doorway to the formal living room had faded away as well, and a ticklish crackle of electricity started creeping up my spine.

“Take care of yourself… AND the young women of whom I know you’re so very fond,” Mother stated.

“I will,” I replied confidently, and by now even Mother herself started to fade away.

“Goodbye, Matthew.”

I wouldn’t say ‘goodbye’. This wasn’t ‘goodbye’ to me. Instead I replied,

“I’ll see you soon.”

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Prologue & Chapter 1: The BTC: https://www.patreon.com/posts/99290461

Chapter 2: Hoalauna: https://www.patreon.com/posts/99357682

Chapter 3: E10: https://www.patreon.com/posts/99433482

Chapter 4: Leeloo: https://www.patreon.com/posts/99506524

Chapter 5: The Fifth Element: https://www.patreon.com/posts/99618767

Chapter 6: Lily: https://www.patreon.com/posts/100326143

Chapter 7: The Hangover: https://www.patreon.com/posts/100548952

Chapter 8: Quality Time: https://www.patreon.com/posts/100806434

Chapter 9: The Favor: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101140618

Chapter 10: Ku’uipo: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101372817

Chapter 11: The R-word: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101672192