The Last Teardrop | J. Paul Ross

The cursor pauses in mid-screen, hesitant and unmoving despite the tremble of her hand, the sob in her breath and the welling tears. It seems frozen there, locked and unable to complete its task, unable to make the choice and, with a single click on the word YES, unable to send those pictures to a place where nothing returns.

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO PERMANENTLY DELETE THESE ITEMS?

There are four-hundred-and-fifty-three images there. Four-hundred-and-fifty-three memories she doesn’t want anyone else to have and she wonders if her little boy will forgive her when she sees him next. She wonders if he’ll understand this was something she had to do, the only thing left she can do.

She was his mother after all.

Sighing, she takes her hand off the mouse and reaches for the glass of vodka beside the mound of her remaining pills.

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO…

A real mother would be strong enough to hold on to these photos of his slender frame, his lopsided grin and the dark-brown eyes that gleamed when he was happy and smoldered when he was upset. She’d be strong enough to cherish them, to want a memorial to his giggles when she kissed his newborn toes, the pink hue of his cheek from rubbing his yellow cotton blankey against it, the way he’d chat with her for hours when she’d tuck him in, the way he…

No. She can’t think of those things anymore, can’t stand how she won’t be able to lose herself within these pixilated mementos while her beautiful, fourteen-year-old boy smirks at her.

The drink is cool, the house is quiet and outside, the cul-de-sac’s absent the rows of cars parked bumper-to-bumper within its circle. It’s May ninth and the sun’s hot, the sky’s a pale blue and at hearing the sound of children’s laughter piercing the windows, she wonders if any of them are peddling their bicycles with the training wheels rattling and the pillowcase taped to the handlebars billowing in an attempt to fly.

Yes, it’s spring for them but, for her, it’s remained fall.

He stepped through the door in the fall and he never came back and there’s hardly anything left of him here. Even his scent is missing from the cobweb-draped corners and the unvacuumed rugs and, turning to the jammed shredder a few feet away, its bin full and dense with compacted, fragmentary memories, she keeps telling herself a part of him has to have remained in this house. There has to be bits of his awkward posture lingering in the garbage bags bloated with clothes no one wants and there has to be slivers of his laughter in the games and the fantasy novels no one will ever play or read. She can almost sense him, stuffed away and littering the floor like the boxes waiting to be donated anonymously so nobody will have to worry about their child being infected, of rising from bed one morning and…

ARE YOU SURE…

She runs her fingers between the tangled strands of her auburn hair and swirls the dozen pills left on the table in a circle.

The clink of their shells reminds her of those little plastic bricks he used to play with but she can’t fathom why a dreamless sleep hasn’t consumed her yet. She shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t have to stare at these walls or into this computer screen and he should be in her arms.

But it’s four o’clock, she’s still awake and this has to be finished.

It’s been eight months of the same moment repeating forever and she realizes it should’ve been a simple matter of pressing the button and letting the tears go back to carving valleys into her cheeks. It should’ve been a point and a click but she had to give them a last look, hesitating at every remembrance from his baby pictures to the most recent. And though every time she gazes at them, she only sees his ruined face at the morgue, she again pauses because having them reduced to tiny, indistinct markers in narrow columns stretching down the screen isn’t right. It’s as if his whole existence has been condensed into nothing more than a rectangle with a date, kilobyte size and a title like, 1st Xmas or raking leaves 2015 or swimming lessons or tee ball 2010.

Some don’t even have a name, just a number.

AH30548: The photo of him with his little navy cap, saluting the flag on the boat ride across San Francisco Bay.

S10013: The one where he’s about to learn he can’t wear his red cowboy hat and sheriff’s badge to Easter Services and seconds away from throwing a tantrum.

P724023: The photo of him at the fishing hole in Wyoming, squinting in the sun and holding up the brook trout he caught with a length of kite string and a worm secured with a knot.

And then there’s A56258 — the one she took at the company picnic twelve months ago, the celebration she forced him to go to, him skinny and pale, and the heavy bangs of his unwashed hair covering his eyes.

PERMANENTLY…

Four-hundred-and-fifty-three is such a tiny epitaph but, restraining her final teardrop, part of her wishes those people who gaped and pointed and whispered were here today. She wants to tell them who he was, wants to remind them of how he refused to take money for shoveling the neighbor’s sidewalks. She wants to make them laugh with the story of him quitting Cub Scouts because the den meetings kept him from his cartoons and describe the night he stole the show in his third-grade play. She wants them to know the real him, wants them to remember the boy who dreamed of being a space commander when he grew up.

The child who was afraid of the wolfman from the old movies.

The kid who’d catch miller moths in the house and let them go in the front yard.

The little boy who had a rabbit named Ani.

The teenager who always grimaced when his mother asked him to fix her computer.

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO PERMANENTLY DELETE THESE ITEMS?

She wishes they could remember him like she does — as the kindest, gentlest person in the world, her innocent baby who never hurt a single living thing in his entire life…

At least not until the day he walked into that school.

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©2023 J. Paul Ross
All rights reserved

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