PART 10 – The Longer I Waited for Answers, the More I Understood That Loving My Son Could Not Mean Ignoring What Had Happened

I had never imagined that I would spend a night in a hospital wondering whether I could trust my own son.

I had imagined plenty of other things.

I had imagined helping Maggie through an illness.

I had imagined growing older together and learning to accept the inconveniences that came with it.

I had imagined Kevin visiting us with his own family and sitting around our kitchen table.

I had not imagined this.

The hospital staff continued checking on Maggie.

I remained close enough to hear them when they needed me.

I answered questions about her habits and what I knew of her recent days.

Whenever I reached the limits of my knowledge, I said so.

I could not fill in the missing days.

I could not tell them what had happened at the kitchen table.

I could not explain why Kevin had told me his mother was merely tired.

Those answers belonged to people who had been inside that house.

I had to face the fact that I was still outside the truth.

That morning in Knoxville, I had walked through Kevin's front door expecting to find an explanation.

Instead, I had found a situation I could not understand.

I remembered the way he stood in the doorway.

He had looked surprised that I was there.

Then he had tried to reassure me.

He had said Maggie was upstairs resting.

When I insisted on seeing her, he had tried to slow me down.

At the time, I had been too worried to study his behavior closely.

Now I remembered it in pieces.

His hesitation.

His repeated explanations.

The way he seemed more concerned with keeping me calm than with helping me understand how sick his mother was.

I could not know what those things meant.

But I could no longer pretend I had not noticed them.

I thought about Brittany, too.

She had appeared on the stairs with her hair neatly arranged and her voice under control.

She had told me that Maggie wanted to sleep without being disturbed.

I remembered looking at her and wondering how she could say that when Maggie had not answered me for days.

I still did not know what Brittany understood about Maggie's condition.

I did not know whether she had been frightened, mistaken, or aware of something I had not seen.

I would not invent answers simply because I was angry.

That was not how I wanted to handle this.

I needed to understand what had happened.

I needed Maggie to recover enough to tell me what she remembered.

Until then, I would keep my questions separate from my conclusions.

I had learned that much from the mistakes I had already made.

My phone remained quiet.

I picked it up and looked at the screen.

For a moment, I considered calling Kevin.

I wanted to ask him why he had not come to the hospital.

I wanted to know what he had meant when he said they were handling Maggie's condition.

I wanted to know why Earl had believed an ambulance was necessary while Kevin had apparently convinced the earlier responders that nothing needed to be done.

But I could not think of a question that would make Kevin tell me the truth if he did not want to.

I put the phone down.

There was no point in starting an argument while I had no new information.

Maggie needed me to stay focused.

That was where my attention belonged.

I watched her rest.

I remembered her telling me that Kevin and Brittany were overwhelmed by the move.

She had wanted to help because she loved them.

She had not gone to Knoxville expecting anything in return.

She had simply wanted to make their new house feel like home.

I wondered how many times she had pushed herself to finish a task because she did not want to disappoint somebody.

I knew that habit.

She had always done more than she needed to.

Sometimes I had teased her about it.

Sometimes I had asked her to sit down and let someone else take care of things.

She would smile and tell me she was almost finished.

I wished I could hear her say that now.

I wanted her to come home.

I wanted the questions to become something we could discuss together rather than something I had to carry alone.

But I could not make the future arrive any sooner.

So I sat beside her.

I waited for the doctors.

I listened when they spoke.

And I stopped making excuses for the people who had left me without answers.

Click here to continue reading: PART 11: I Could Not Change the Days Maggie Had Spent in Knoxville, but I Could Decide What I Would No Longer Accept