MFF#11: by Angie Ballard

Welcome to Unwritten's  May Flash Fiction challenge! Every story (600 words max) begins with this sentence: 

 I never expected to be in this position so soon, saying goodbye to my son. 

I found today's flash fiction by Angie Ballard to be very appropriate for Memorial Day. As people from across our country remember their lost loved ones, my heart especially goes out to those who have lost a child. No one's prepared for that, no matter what the circumstances. Read about this mother's heartbreak and feel free to share about any lost loved one you're thinking of today.

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I never expected to be in this position so soon, saying goodbye to my son.  I thought he was at the “safe age” - too old for SIDS or incurable childhood cancers but too young for high school car wrecks with their middle-of-the-night phone calls.  But there is no safe age, no safe place, no guarantee that a mother will outlive her child.

We’d been led to a small room in the far corner of the recovery room, the only one, I’d noted, with real walls instead of curtains.  The white sheet and blanket were pulled neatly to his chest, and his arms, covered in downy hair, lay at his sides.  That’s when I knew he was truly gone.  My Jack has always slept tangled in covers, half-hanging off the bed, dirty feet on pillows with the rest of him hidden under the comforter.  His hair was combed, neatly parted at the side, which made my heart crack open just a little wider as I remembered telling him not to comb his hair down over his forehead, to part it and comb it back so the oil from his hair wouldn’t make his acne flare up.  His few pimples looked purplish on his blue-tinged skin, and when I grasped his large hand in mine it was cool.  I knew he’d have been cool to the touch even if he’d made it through the heart surgery, and I’d talked bluntly to Michael as we lay in bed the night before about what to expect when Jack got out of surgery.  As a nurse, I’d seen the tubes, wires, monitors, and immobility of postop patients frighten families who hadn’t been prepared.  I thought we were ready.

Jack’s mouth was closed, but its shape was slightly distorted by the braces he’d worn for a year and a half.  They were due to come off next month.  I thought of calling his dentist, who’d known him since he was a toddler, and couldn’t imagine telling them why I was canceling his appointment.  I’d never see his new smile.  No one would.  Not the cocky grin of a sixteen-year-old with a new learner’s permit, not the sheepish grin of a self-proclaimed nerd who’d gotten up the nerve to ask a girl to the prom, not the confident smile of a young man whose parents had just hauled all his belongings up three flights of stairs into his freshman dorm room.

He would forever be thirteen, the awkward, self-conscious age.  The age where we fought about grades, TV, video games, cell phones, and everything else that didn’t matter.  He wouldn’t be in his older brother’s wedding pictures next year, and the hand I was holding would never slip a ring on some lucky young woman’s finger.  Michael sobbed softly from across the bed, and I reached for his hand so that the three of us formed a circle, but I couldn’t meet his eyes.

I was the one who’d assured Michael everything would be alright, who’d smiled at John as they wheeled him off to surgery, saying we’d see him soon.  From the day at the pediatrician’s office when they first heard the murmur I took charge.  I selected his cardiologist and his cardiovascular surgeon carefully, I did all my research.  Jack’s wasn’t a rare abnormality, and the surgery itself was fairly straightforward, as open heart surgeries go.  But something went wrong.  I saw it in the surgeon’s eyes as soon as he opened the door to the private conference room we’d been put in.  I’d been prepared for everything else, but not this.  Never this.

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Angie Ballard is a nurse, mother of sons, and dog-lover who got started writing with her blog, The Jammie Girl, which is part chat with a girlfriend over a glass of sweet tea, part conversation overheard in the grocery store checkout line, and part Thanksgiving dinner with the crazy branch of the family.  Although her only published work to date is a frugal cookbook she is currently writing her second novel in the Women's Fiction genre when she's not wasting time on Facebook and Twitter.