A Mother's Eyes

S. R. Gabriels

I got my blue eyes from her. That was the only thing. I’ve been told I look like my father my whole life. Same hair, face, smile, build, height… You are your father’s daughter, they would tell me.

My mother’s blue eyes were nothing special. No “speckles” of green or “twinge” of gold. I know how some people get very touchy deciding who has the most “unique” eye color. My mother did not. Not a gray-blue, baby-blue, aquamarine, turquoise, teal, green-blue, navy-blue, indigo. There was no special way to describe them or compare them to something else. No break-of-dawn-blue, river-blue, ocean-tide-blue, sky-blue, sunset-blue, twilight-blue, midnight-blue. Do you ever say a word so many times that it doesn’t feel like a real word anymore? Her eyes were blue. Regular and plain.

I knew she was sick. I guess it was worse that I didn’t care. We hadn’t spoken in five years, and to be quite honest, it was mutual. No special reason. I knew we didn’t get along when I got older—mother and daughter stuff. But I guess I just stopped trying to end fights and she stopped trying to fix them. So I left. I was eighteen.

I didn’t say anything when I walked into the hospital room. My brother sat in a chair on his phone, and my father stood with his arms crossed in the corner, looking out the window into the hospital parking lot down below. She was asleep. Softly closing the door behind me, I walked to the foot of the bed.

I knew I wanted to make it fast when I got the call to come visit. I knew I wanted to make it fast when I contemplated for a full twenty-four hours if I even wanted to make the trip in the first place. I knew I wanted to make it fast when I drove the hour north. I knew I wanted to make it fast when I parked my car. I knew I wanted to make it fast when I rode the elevator up. I knew I wanted to make it fast when I passed the doleful nurses and stagnant doctors in the hallway. I knew I wanted to make it fast when I reached the door to her room. I knew I wanted to make it fast when I saw my brother on his phone, my father in the corner, and my mother in the bed.

So, let’s make it fast, I thought.

I walked immediately to my mother’s bedside and waited. I didn’t take a seat. Slowly, as if she could feel I was near, she opened her eyes. She didn’t smile or blink or sigh in disgust. She just looked at me. Like she was trying to break a code I had scrambled half a decade earlier. I stared back at her, looking for the same.

Like I said, her blue eyes were still nothing special. But, they were the only thing that remained the same of what was left of her. I’ve never seen someone’s legs turn gray or the red of someone’s lips fade to white. Seeing a pulse beat through someone’s hand where bones and ligaments act as spindle-like supports for loose and flimsy skin is like watching a sunflower grow toward the moon. It’s not natural.

And we just stared at each other. My hands hung loosely at my sides and hers laid limply in her lap. The only sounds in the room were the cliché hospital heart monitor beeps and her deep breathing. That was when I saw it.

I have never seen my mother cry, so the presence of the small tear forming in the corner of her right eye was mesmerizing to me. I could see it well up and thought to myself that if it kept expanding, it would congeal into a blob and float away like a bubble—something so rare must have even rarer consequences. Instead, it grew too heavy and raced down the side of her face.

The tear traced the side of her slender nose near her nostril, and I remembered when I was ten and my friend Rachael came to school with a pink stud in the side of her nose. I begged my mother for a week to let me do the same, but she refused. She said I was too young, that I wouldn’t be happy with a hole in my face. Thirteen years later, I stand before her with gold hoops dangling from my ears, a pearl in my belly button, and the prodigal rhinestone studded to the side of my nostril. She doesn’t know about the tattoos.

The tear reached the corner of her lip. My mother was not a very affectionate mother, at least toward me. I don’t remember hugs or kisses before bedtime, and there were certainly no handwritten love notes in my lunchbox. I played at other friends’ houses—they never came over. She didn’t know how to cook well either, and I vowed at twelve never to eat macaroni and cheese again because after she finished boiling and burning the third box of noodles that week, my father had decided it was time for him to leave.

The tear slowed near the curve to her chin and paused at the same spot where my brother’s birthmark was on his chin. It was a blotchy red color without a uniform shape. He was four when the first kid told him it looked like a spider, five when another cried and said it scared him, seven when a classmate took the end of a pencil to his face and tried to erase it, nine when his teacher scolded him for being messy with his peanut butter and jelly, ten when a girl slapped him in the face because she thought he stole her lip gloss, eleven when he hit back, thirteen when he nicked it learning to shave and it healed over funny, sixteen when his girlfriend said it grossed her out, and now, at twenty, it’s gone. Through the years, he tried everything to scrub away what others called the “kissy mark,” “blood stain,” and “paint splatter.” Several attempts and layers of skin later, he replaced the permanent mark with another—a scar. My mother called the daycare, the middle school, and the high school—she would not have her child bullied. She told him she liked his birthmark, that it made him handsome. Told him to “embrace” his “true self.” She never did that for me; she never said that to me.

The tear quivered as it hung from the bottom of her chin, like it was trying to hold on. Our house had a leak in the kitchen ceiling every spring. My father would go on the roof every April to try and figure out what was causing it, but he never found a crack or hole or signs of any animal infiltration. And every May, we accepted the leaky roof’s timing and grew to respect it until the summer.

Then, like a rain droplet clinging to the edge of a plump leaf, the tear simply let go. I have to admit, it lost its grip fast, but it felt like it fell through the air for an hour. And I wondered how something so small and sad could look so perfect, so fragile. Untouchable. Like if I were to try and save it from splashing, I would be committing sacrilege and get excommunicated from the family. I felt like it was too special, too other-worldly for me to see. Like Neptune had fallen from the night sky from her cheek, a wonderful blue orb… Like my mother’s eyes.

It met her shoulder with such force, like someone had dropped a boulder from high above. I felt its shockwaves and stared at the tiny damp spot on her hospital gown, perhaps thinking of wanting to slow down, not wanting to make it fast. Sit a little. Speak a little.

With more power than her sob, I was startled and looked to my hand as she squeezed it tightly in hers. In that moment, the words we needed to speak to each other were known, not said. I looked back up into her eyes and watched them disappear for the last time. Nothing left but a single damp path down only one side of her face—like a streak of blue lightning.

I am my mother’s daughter. I cried her blue tears.