My son is here. He comes in the door and approaches me. I’m in my wheelchair. He reaches down and embraces me. I struggle to say his name, telling myself he deserves the effort. I see the letters in my mind. I try to make the sound that is his name. That name as familiar to me as my own.

There was a time it was so painful that I wished I could forget it. But there it was, just below the surface. I try to pluck it from the air now, but the sound comes out jumbled. Even I can hear it isn’t right. All those wasted years that I had the ability to say what I meant. All those words, squandered.

I motion for my talking machine. I run my finger over the icons for chair, toothbrush, toilet. But where are the symbols for I’m sorry? For I wish I’d done things differently?

He hands me a lollipop. I struggle to unwrap it. He helps, as if I am the child, and he, the parent. I plop it in my mouth. It is very, very sweet. I do not try to speak now. It takes so much effort—those words all lost to me now.

Maybe the time has come, finally, for him to speak and me to listen. But he is unpracticed. He wastes his words on pleasantries. I want to tell him “NO!” Say something, finally, about your pain. How you suffered because of my selfishness. My stupidity. But he doesn’t seem to have the words, either.

My son bends down and unlocks my wheelchair brake. In silence, we go out and look at the stars.

Suzanne Samuels’ fiction and essays have appeared in online and print journals; her nonfiction work has been widely used in college courses on law and politics. Suzanne is currently at work on a historical novel set in early twentieth-century Sicily and New York City. She is also working on a book about the youngest person to swim across the English Channel and Catalina Channel, and around the island of Manhattan. Suzanne is 2019 Artist-in-Residence at Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts at Denali National Park.

Header image by Amador Loureiro via Unsplash