Within Reach
Her sons grew up knowing their mother was alive, a short drive across the city, and that she would not come. She sent poems instead. Heather Smith loved her children; that was never in question, and it never once helped. She could not sit in a room with the people who needed her, and she had learned to make that absence look like grief rather than a decision. What was done to her as a child was unforgivable. What she did with it was understandable, and unforgivable too.
Two boys grew up with a mother who was alive and would not come home. The younger she could not bring herself to feed; the elder learned to read a room for the moment she began to leave it without moving. They were given a kind word for it — illness — true, and no use to them at all. She answered their childhoods with poems sent on the dates that mattered, signed with a love they could feel on the page and never feel in a room. She watched herself become this, and she did not stop.
Beneath it was a wound that explains her entirely and excuses none of it. A secret from the hour she was born; at seven, taught in her own home that her body was not hers to keep. Everything done to her was real. None of it was permission.
Her one terrible talent was to take the unendurable and make it beautiful — which kept her alive, and let her get away with everything. She could send a verse where a mother was needed and make the leaving look like art.
She knew exactly what she was withholding, and from whom. She withheld it anyway — not for any lack of love, but because love had never once been enough to carry her across the room.
