All This Life

“I’ll mail him a letter and a picture of my tattoo.” Kathleen hands Deb the portrait. “Would you put this on my back?”

Deb takes and studies it. “This will make a good tattoo.”

“Let’s do it once you’re done with him.”

“Let’s wait. I never tattoo someone who’s emotional. That’s one of my rules. Like I don’t tattoo drunk guys.”

“Why not?”

“Drunk guys bleed too much.”

“I mean why not me?” Kathleen asks.

“Don’t push me, or when I finally do it I’ll add a Chinese character that means ‘farter.’”

The man looks up from his phone. “Do you really think they have a character for that?”

“People fart all over,” Deb says. “I’m sure there’s a Celtic word for it too. I can add it on your arm if you want.”

The guy smirks sarcastically, goes back to his phone. Deb hands the picture back to Kathleen and fires up the gun again.

“I need your help,” says Kathleen, the photo in her hand uselessly. “I want him to know how much I’ve been thinking of him.”

“What’s wrong with email?” Deb says.

“Why can’t you be more supportive?”

Deb starts laughing, looks at her client. “She says to her AA sponsor.”

The guy flashes that techie smirk again.

“Right now you’re just my friend,” Kathleen says. “Not my sponsor.”

“I’m always your sponsor, sugar. If I wasn’t, I’d be a shitty one.”

Kathleen has a plan to instigate contact with her son again, and it’s a good one. She’d banked on Deb’s eyes and ink and needles, banked on a portrait to show her son, his likeness forever on her flesh. Look, she’ll be able to tell him through the tattoo, I’ve always loved you and I’m sorry and let’s start over.

That’s impossible, she knows. There’s no such thing as starting over. It’s a ruse. Memories are time machines, zooming us through our experiences, and because of this, people are never clean of their yesterdays. There is no transcendence. One minute, we’re forty, then six, and ten, and twenty, and twelve. We remember our shames and humiliations. We remember trauma. Rodney might not recall one thing about Kathleen except that she left. All the good she did throughout the first twelve years of his life might be erased, and if not outright expunged, at least painted over. Covered up. It’s the opposite of Deb tattooing cancer survivors, making the damaged skin into art. Kathleen is a breathing scar, her whole life hardened over by that one mistake.

All of this whizzes through her head as she stands there holding the portrait.

Deb dips the gun into a glass of water, flushing out her needles, then plunges it into an ink cap full of black, goes back to work. “If you mail him a picture of the tattoo, so what?”

“So what?” Kathleen asks.

“Why would that make him feel better?”

“Because it shows I’m thinking about him.”

“The tattoo is for you,” Deb says. “Calling and starting the healing process — that would be for him.”

“I’m finally ready to try and you’re not helping me.”

“You’re making this harder than it has to be,” says Deb. “Call him.”

“I can’t.”

“That brass band that jumped off the Golden Gate?” says Deb. “The one who survived is going to a mental hospital.”

“She needs help.”

“That’s my point,” Deb says. “The doctors can help her. The program has helped you; I’ve tried to help you. But you have to face this fear. You have to face him. I’ll be right with you. We’re all survivors, but even we need help, Kat.” Deb takes her foot off the pedal and her gun goes silent. “How about a compromise? You call him now and I’ll tattoo you after I’m done with this Irish cross.”

“Celtic,” the guy says.

“Now you’re learning,” she says to him.

“That’s bribery,” Kathleen says.

“Only if it works.”

“Fine,” she says to Deb, who gets the phone and asks, “What are you going to say?”

Kathleen dials her old number. If it’s possible to get an adrenaline rush from a phone call, that’s what’s happening. Heart racing and sweating and all her saliva vanishes. And the crazy thing is how good this all feels. How freeing.

“Hello?” a man’s voice says.

“Is Rodney there?”

One thing about mythological punishments: What if you simply stopped rolling that boulder up the hill? Refused to prop it up anymore? Moved out of the way and let it roll down to who knows where, not caring about the consequences?

“Who is this?” says the man’s voice.

“Is this Larry?”

“Nah, this is Felix.”

“Hi, Felix. This is Kathleen. I’d like to talk to my son, please.”

There is a wonderful charge in her, an anticipation, a kinetic thump. Kathleen is about to hear her son’s voice. She’s about to communicate with him. They’re about to talk. To begin, not from scratch but from a place that looks forward, not back. This is the first step toward healing, reconciliation.

“Cunt!” Felix screams.

The miserable syllable shoves through the phone and into her ear, worming around her body and kicking her in the heart.

Then the line goes dead.

That’s all she gets.

And in a way, that’s what she deserves.

She’s earned someone calling “Cunt!”

It’s stitched onto her.

Burned on the skin, its own scar.