Ryan's Mom
She almost missed the building. It was more like a half-rotted tumor at the edge of a decommissioned rail yard than anything people would label a structure. The siding was stamped aluminum, warped in the middle like a dead lung. The entrance, barely visible under a brown scab of rusted awning, stank of rain and urea and whatever chemical hangover the county left behind after the last big clear-out. She idled the car at the curb, squinted through a windshield filmed over by dried wiper fluid and the perpetual exhaust haze that followed her every step lately.
Mom didn't get out right away. She sat behind the wheel, scanning for movement. Her hands hovered over the dashboard, not quite steady, as if she expected the building itself to lunge out and eat her. Even over the phone, she must have known my voice was a loaded gun, but I’d made her believe there was a crisis worth braving this corner of the world for. I’d made sure to leave just enough of the old “I need you” trembling in the script to trigger her full cavalry charge. She was always too quick to forget: the lessons about coming when called were ones I’d learned at her knee, and then improved on, as I got older.
It took her a full minute to spot me. I sat hunched on the bottom step, head down, hood up, cradling my phone between both hands as if it was my last lifeline to anything worth missing. My jacket was sopping from the earlier drizzle. The cuffs dripped onto the concrete and formed little islands of damp around my sneakers. I didn’t look up when she killed the engine, or when the driver’s side door opened with the slow, hydraulic wheeze of a drowning man’s last breath.
Mom came at me, brisk and no-nonsense, rain shell pulled tight over her pajamas. Her boots scuffed against the frost-shattered blacktop, each step as careful as if she was crossing an active minefield. She’d aged, fast, in the last year. The lines had doubled around her eyes, and her mouth, once famous for re-engineering a frown into a smile for the benefit of neighbors, now just hung in a permanent parenthesis of “how can I fix it for you?”
“Ryan?” she called, voice high and strained. “Honey, are you okay? Where’s the car?”
I let the question hang, let her close the gap to three paces before I looked up. “Left it two blocks back. Something in the engine compartment started smoking and then all the lights died. No signal. Had to walk here to call.”
She hovered over me, squinting into the gloom as if there were answers painted on my face. “You said you were freezing. God, Ryan, you look—” The rest of her sentence died as she took in my soaked pants, the cuffs stiff with urban grime.
“You got the charger?” I asked, voice flat and brittle as the step under my ass.
She fumbled in her bag, digging past receipts and lipstick and a travel-size first aid kit. She’d brought the big portable battery bank, too, the one I’d given her for Christmas two years ago and watched her stash in the disaster drawer for emergencies just like this. So predictable.
I took the battery and cord, not thanking her, and jammed my phone into the charge port. It blinked, just once, before the screen crackled to life in low power mode. She waited, watching my hands shake, or maybe just fidget, unable to find a proper anchor.
“You want to sit in the car?” she tried. “I can turn the heater back on. You must be…”
“I’m not going back out there until someone picks me up,” I said. “I’m fucking done with freezing my balls off for one day.” I eyed the door behind me, then her, then back to the scabbed awning. “If you want, you can come inside. It’s dry. Or you can go, if you want.”
It was an old, cheap play, but she never missed a chance to overcorrect for all the times she’d left me hanging as a kid. She looked like she was considering a retort, but instead she pressed her lips into a flat, “let’s get this over with” line and stepped up onto the landing.
I led her through the door. It shuddered on the hinges, the screech loud enough to set my teeth vibrating. Inside, the air was thick with rotted wood and black mold. Mom’s nose wrinkled as she stepped in; her hand went to her mouth, like maybe if she filtered the stench through her palm it wouldn’t choke her all the way down.
“What is this place?” she said.
“Old supply depot, I guess,” I answered. “Or was. It’s all just empty rooms now.” I flicked the phone flashlight once, showing ...