Confession by Deborah Forbes
Helen’s mother Eleanor is a forcefield. Helen’s mother is a small, pale body swaddled into a hospital bed.
“She no longer recognizes me,” Helen’s brother said on the phone. “This may be your last chance.”
The part of her mother Helen recognizes is the eyes. They grow hawkish when she enters the room.
“Where did you go Christmas Eve?” Eleanor demands.
That was four months ago. An odd opening question, but a mercifully easy one. “I went to the National Cathedral with Deirdre. My friend from work.”
Her mother rolls her head against the elevated bed. “When we spent the night with your grandparents. That big snowstorm.”
Helen hasn’t had grandparents since—Oh.
“What do you mean, where did I go? We were all together.” Helen redistributes her weight on the plastic chair. She is sixty with pressed trousers and a silver-gray swoop of a bob. She is a teenager, wary of getting caught.
“I found your shoes. You can’t get water stains out of satin.”
“Rafe Matthews,” Helen says. How many years have passed since she’s said that name?
Eleanor makes a derisive strangling sound. “What kind of person names a child Rafe?”
They weren’t supposed to spend Christmas Eve at Helen’s grandparents’ house. They were supposed to drive there for Christmas dinner the next day, but a snowstorm was coming and her grandfather urged, Come now, spend the night! Get snowed in with us!
Eleanor complained about the impracticality of bringing all the presents, but she couldn’t say no to her father. No one knew Helen had other plans for Christmas Eve.
They’re dragging me off to the country she wail-whispered into the phone.
I’ll come anyway. Rafe’s voice was like his five-o’clock shadow, manhood new and barely touched.
It’s miles; it will be snowing, she pretended to remonstrate.
I’ll come anyway.
“Well?” Eleanor rasps from her perch. “Where did you go?”
“We can talk about that another time. Let’s focus on getting you better.”
“I’m not getting any better.”
Stubbornness, Helen tells herself. Nothing more. “We didn’t go anywhere. We just parked for a bit.” The truth.
Eleanor snorts and then chokes.
“Mother–”
“I’m all right,” Eleanor croaks. “You think I don’t know what that means.”
“I know you know what that means. Don’t hurt yourself.”
It was tricky to sneak out of her grandparents’ house, the bedrooms clustered upstairs small and close. Helen was lucky to have her own. She dressed as carefully as if she and Rafe were going out. Pantyhose, lipstick, hair still warm from the curling iron. A risk, if someone caught her in the hall, but she wanted him to be struck by her all over again.
In the sterilized hospital room, Helen can feel her nyloned feet slide across the worn wood floor. She had to move by touch, not sight. Nothing was as close or far as she expected it to be. Giddiness tipped into fear. She could be anywhere. She felt with her feet for the top of the stairs. Slowly, slowly.
Her soles were newly alive as they sought each edge. The pressure as even as she could make it on each step. A floorboard creaked on the landing. She froze and listened. The small muscles in her feet and lower legs tensed, but there was no break in her father’s snoring.
Eleanor thought Helen was loose, this divorced daughter who still occasionally let herself be taken out by a new man. Helen could tell her, that night I was more aware of my body on the stairs than I ever would be with Rafe.
More aware of my connection to the joints and fissures of my grandparents’ house. To you.
She passed the parlor with its dark tree sheltering gifts from her family and felt the innocence of their desire to please her. She promised herself she’d be back before they knew she was gone—and yes, she felt guilty; yes, she knew she was risking more than herself. Fear, guilt, even grief, but she was only doing what must be done; everyone has to leave home sometime.
“If you knew, why didn’t you say anything?” she asks her mother.
Eleanor’s eyes have shut, but she answers. “If I set those shoes in front of you and demanded an explanation, you would’ve lied.”
“I would’ve said I went out to check on the reindeer. I would’ve said I heard sleigh bells.” As if there were time to mend the moment with playfulness.
“In your good shoes.”
“In my good shoes.”
Her mother’s eyes open into watery slits. “You were growing up. I couldn’t see the point in making you lie.”
Helen couldn’t see the point in telling her the truth. Not about the divorce. Not about how it has felt to be alone all these years. The wearying grind of it. The pride and subtle shimmer of it.
That night she stepped onto the porch and slid into the shoes she’d been carrying in her hand. She’s never understood what will give her away.
Her flesh tightened against the cold. She thought of Rafe driving the empty roads for miles, heavy flakes falling into his windshield. He could’ve been stopped by car trouble, a slick spot of asphalt. Slid into a tree, cracked glass, blood—she hovered on the precipice of imaging this—the terrible romance of him dying to have her—No.
She stepped off the porch. It was brighter outside, no special star, but the moon was nearly full. The fresh snow quieted her footsteps, but she didn’t have to worry about making noise anymore. She was free.
She turned onto the road and his headlights burned in answer.
“I was so young,” she says out loud.
Her mother makes no reply.
“Do you know how that feels, to mistake recklessness for love?”
As if it weren’t too late to ask for the truth. As if Eleanor could answer.
Deborah Forbes is a poetry scholar turned fiction writer living in Clifton, Virginia. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize and first place in Zoetrope All-Story’s fiction contest and has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, and Electric Literature. “Confession” is an excerpt from her novel Threshold.
4 August 2023
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