Son of Mine

Content warning: This story contains depictions of dementia/memory loss, substance use, homelessness, and implied overdose.

The man’s sobs sounded strangely familiar. They had a singularity to them, a warmth I couldn’t place. I now watched a lot of television. The news for the first time in years. I heard a lot of people wail in foreign languages over rubble. And this is how I thought that perhaps he was from a place I knew.

He was on his knees on the steps of the Holy Family Parish on King Street. It was an odd place for a church, wedged tightly, as though by force, between a hair salon and a Circle K. The latter is where I had been, buying overpriced water because everything else was closed at eight A.M. on a Sunday. From where I stood against the overgrown trees, I only saw the back of him. Beige trousers that may have once been white and sneakers with holes in the soles.

“The service starts at ten,” I said loudly, trying to be helpful. He just cried harder, choked sobs, lowering his face and then burying it in his hands. My own was shielded by the branches. I repeated it louder in case he hadn’t heard, but didn’t want to get closer to him. The news alerted me to all sorts of crime in the city. Stabbings, assault, armed robberies. I didn’t have anything of value and I was well past the prime of womanhood, but I knew better than to think myself immune to anything. Plus, I had begun to forget.

My anxiety dissipated the longer I looked at him. He was just a boy. Just like my Peter. Except Peter was no longer a boy. I racked my brain for his age. Twenty-five? Thirty-five? I vaguely remembered a conversation where I wished him a happy thirty-ninth birthday, reminding him that his father died at that age, which upset him terribly. I remembered apologizing. But it is also possible that I was mistaken. That I imagined things that were never said, experiences we never shared. It had been so long since we shared anything at all. I made sure of this by checking my call log on the telephone, which refreshes at the beginning of each month. So I was sure that it had been a month, at least, since I last heard from him. But I suspected it might have been years.

I took slow steps towards the boy. The distance was far enough for me to second guess my actions but not far enough to backtrack. I stood in front of him and his hands retreated from his face until he was staring at my shoes.

“Young man, are you alright?”

He coughed, fat and viscid. “I don’t have anything to eat.”

“There is a Circle K right over there,” I replied, before I could register how it sounded. A second later I produced a bar of chocolate and a bottle of water from the plastic bag I carried. “I could get you more,” I said by way of apology.

The boy—or was he a man?—shook his head and told me not to trouble myself. I voiced my inquiry and he informed me that he was twenty-one years old.

“And all alone in the world?” I asked, dumbfounded and concerned.

“Twenty-one seems like an obvious age to be alone in the world.”

Up close, he looked even less menacing than he did from behind. A face and fingernails that were both caked with dirt save for the splotches on his cheeks that had been cleansed by his tears. Those cheeks were rounded with youth, but the rest of him was scrawny, obviously starved. His hair was in dire need of a trim, his sweater threadbare. But his eyes were both soulful and sorrowful, indicating that he had seen too much and simultaneously not enough.

“Let me get you something to eat. Please. You’re skin and bones.”

“You could get me something to eat,” he said. His eyes narrowed indignantly. “And then what?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Will you find a job? A place to sleep where my stuff won’t get stolen within two minutes?”

“Hmm,” I pretended to ponder. “I’m not great with jobs, considering I don’t have one, either.” My back was beginning to tire, and so I placed the Circle K bag on the ground between us. “And perhaps the roommate option could come up again once we know one another a bit better. In the meantime, we could start with a sandwich.”

My monologue brought a small smile to his face. One of his incisors was angled inwards, just like Peter’s. “Thank you. I guess we could start with a sandwich.”

I shuffled back into the Circle K and fished the most appetizing option out of the refrigerator. While I was paying, I realized I had left my own things on the ground next to the boy, and when I returned they were unmoved, as was he.

“Thank you,” he repeated, swallowing it in a handful of large bites.

“Maybe you should stay for the service. I’ve come here once or twice when I needed guidance. I found it helped.” As the words came out, I wondered how true they were.

“What did you need guidance about?”

“Grief. My son.” I accidentally phrased it so that they sounded like one and the same, which I supposed they were.

“Oh. I’m really sorry.” The boy’s eyes looked sad again. I didn’t bother to correct his assumption that Peter was dead. But those eyes told me why he was so dejected on those church steps: he was too soft and feeling, unprepared for life, let alone the life he was either thrust into or chose for himself. Then, I wondered how much choice we really had. I thought of my memory, which meant I didn’t think much at all, but thought about the lack of thoughts, the emptiness and darkness where something meaningful should have been.

“I’ll pray for you,” I said simply. He nodded.

I didn’t bother to pick up my things off the ground before I left. I figured he needed them more desperately. As I walked home I tried my best to cement his face in my mind and avoid distractions that could prevent this from happening. I was doing quite well until I registered something dead. I thought it was a rat at first, nestled between the bushes, but upon closer inspection I saw it was a squirrel. Soft and brown. Resting on his back. His O-mouth was stiff as though he cried for his mother. I wondered why no one else was stopped like me, thinking about this squirrel. I wouldn’t call myself an emotional woman, but I fought the threat of tears. I debated a funeral for him but I had nothing to wrap him with and so that was impractical. In the end, I kicked a bit of dirt over his body and kept on my way.

To my surprise, the boy was crouched in the same position on the church steps the next morning. I stupidly thought for a moment that he might have stayed in place this whole time, and then I recalled the previous day’s service, and then was surprised that I recalled it. I pictured old men and children in polished shoes stepping over the boy on their way inside and the image produced a solid lump in my throat. As if he sensed it was me, he raised his head from where it rested on his arm, opening his eyes slowly, like a kitten. I regretted waking him.

“What’s in the bag?” he asked, his voice gruff with sleep.

“Apples. Some sandwiches. Water. I don’t fully remember. See for yourself.”

He began to hack into it feverishly, the Velcro closure of the bag producing a violent tearing noise that discomforted me. He paused his efforts for a second to meet my eyes.

“Thank you.”

“It’s nothing,” I responded coolly, his eyes widening in shock when I sat beside him on a step. The events of the past two days were, in fact, not perfunctory for either of us, and so brushing it off felt dishonest. I was probably the first person to truly help him, and the conversations we shared were the longest I had had in months.

“What’s your name, young man?”

He cleared his throat. “Arthur.”

I repeated it back to him, testing it on my lips. I didn’t know any other Arthur, and I told him so, and also that my own name was Francine. “That sounds like a fine name for a fine young man.”

Arthur snorted, loudly biting into the apple, a bit of red skin wedged in his angled tooth. “Sure.”

“Might I ask what you’re doing on the streets?”

“The same thing as everyone else. I wouldn’t be here, obviously, if there were somewhere else I could be.”

“It must be awfully lonely. Cold in the winters. Where do you go in the winter, Arthur?”

“We’ll find out,” he said, and he laughed humorlessly. “I’ve only been out here for, like, a few weeks.”

I felt the pieces of my heart chip from their core, like old nail polish. An image of Peter’s face appeared in my mind, and to my horror, I couldn’t hold onto it. Parts of him evaporated: his ears, his front teeth, one eyebrow, until what remained was a total blankness. As much as I tried, I couldn’t revive it.

“Don’t you have a family looking for you?”

“I don’t.” The too-loose sleeve of his thin sweater rode up as he scratched his arm to reveal small red puncture wounds. He hastily covered them up. “What about you? Do you have a family?”

“I have a son,” I said, and the words sounded foreign even to me.

“How old is he?”

I was too embarrassed to say I didn’t know, and so I said that he was thirty-five.

“He must ask you to make him sandwiches all the time,” Arthur surmised, and I noticed he had eaten a full turkey-and-cheese already. “This is amazing.”

I squeezed every crevice of my brain to conjure the last time I had made food for Peter, then, the last time I had seen Peter, then, the last time I had heard his voice, and my silent failure at all three produced a heat in my chest that expanded and bloomed with shame, like the expulsion of a child being born. I began to wonder if Peter was truly his name, or just a name I assigned to him now because it felt like something I might have chosen because he looked like one, but without a reliable evocation of his face, it was entirely possible that he did not look like a Peter at all.

“You should stay for the service,” I told Arthur. “It might help you get some guidance. I know it helped me.”

Arthur looked at me funnily. “The service was yesterday.”

“Oh, right,” I replied, because it was easier than arguing, although I was almost certain it was a Sunday.

Arthur thanked me again for the food and said he would “see me around,” and I fought the giddiness that this evoked in me. I wondered if I could credit Arthur as much as the prospect of a soul in the world who recognized me, a population dwindling in unison with my own decline. I suppose it made sense. The less you do, the less you are felt. And with each day I could see myself becoming less in this world, smaller, too small for my clothes and shoes, the place I lived, the name I carried, the names I gave to others, and wondered on which day I would wake up and find that I ceased to exist at all, and if I would even notice that something was amiss.

I suppose things must have been different, once, but my recollection of past normalcy is hazy. I was born in a small town on the outskirts of where I live now and moved to a larger one for college. The strangest things give me flashbacks to those days that sting my eyes like rays of white. For instance, when I saw the boy in front of the church, wedged between the salon and the Circle K, those steps with all their dirt and grime reminded me of being a girl. So long ago that, while my first instinct is to grasp onto a memory, I questioned whether I had the right to. If I could truly say it belonged to me. In college my friends and I would get ice cream and sit on a stoop and speak very deeply about our lives. About the things we wanted that we weren’t really sure we wanted. If we just wanted them because it seemed like everyone else did.

Then, I met a man who I remember very little of, just that he was terrible and then he died. That man was Peter’s father. There are some privileges that come with memory loss. Namely, forgetting the bad. And so while that man who was Peter’s father carried a vague darkness, Peter himself was entirely inundated with white. Like the cushion of snow that blanketed the front of our home during the earliest days of winter: pure, untouched, begging to be rewritten. I found I was also glad to forget the good. Size five shoes, a hot dog and orange juice in his lunchbox, a report card with a large red-letter S for “satisfactory.” A broken arm from the jungle gym, the first dance at his wedding, the sharp cry of a baby’s lungs filling with air for the first time, belonging to either Peter or a child of his, I was not so sure. When I forgot the good I forgot the pain that was often interwoven with it, the bouts of joy and forgiveness in between hurting one another very deeply.

For so long I wanted to forget myself, and I believe I did. I would wake up in strange places surrounded by gawking faces, some tense with worry, some concealing laughter. It was not so much that I would wake up as that I would snap back into myself, and that whatever spell had led me on a train to Vaughan in the middle of the night in winter with no coat on, for example, would be broken. I lost all contact with people. My telephone contact list is full of names I cannot remember and cannot risk calling. The vulnerability is not worth it. It stung worst on the night when—years ago or months ago or last night—I dialed Peter’s number and was met with his tense dismissal, his “I do not want to speak to you again, ever,” the beepthat went on for miles when he hung up. I have no memory of what happened between us, or perhaps I worked hard to suppress it. I vaguely recall a stubborn insistence that it was not my fault, that he was unreasonable. Now, I do not know him, or myself, well enough to say. Losing your memories requires others to fill in the blanks of your life, which is difficult once you realize that none of us are reliable.

I tried my best to remember where I lived, but sometimes I stumbled into apartments a block away. Shocking, how many people left their homes unlocked. When I eventually reached my residence I willed myself to forget it: its nakedness, the hum of the old, yellowing refrigerator, the portraits of a young man hanging on the wall who I know to be my son. Sometimes I wonder if I have any others, or if Peter was just my favorite, the only one who crossed into the crevices of my consciousness.

It felt lazy to say that Arthur reminded me of Peter. Inaccurate. I had nothing to be reminded of, no tangible thing to associate Peter with, save for snapshots of a childhood I might have very well imagined. When I looked at Arthur, I saw a person, which I supposed was the whole point of looking at people. So I was more so reminded of a feeling. A dark room thick with the smell of squelchy blood and stickiness, and from that room a white light, a cry of hunger. Hands grasping for things in the dark.

“Nonsense,” I told Arthur. “I insist.”

“I really don’t want to be a bother, Francine. You’ve done more than enough.” Arthur and I were standing in front of the church steps some weeks later, after a consistent routine of me dropping things off to him there every morning. We had graduated from sandwiches to shampoo bottles and blankets and toothpaste, and, eventually, books I rented from the library. We had long conversations about his life, who was giving him trouble, which intersections he could stand on so people would be most likely to buy him a coffee. Arthur was giving me more funny looks. He gave me back some of the books he finished, which I had no memory of ever giving to him. I often walked past him without a second glance, only responding when he chased me down the street or called my name—and sometimes not even then. I was looking at him funny, too. When we were standing outside the church that day discussing my invitation for lunch, he had a cloudy fog in his irises, and he would often dip his head to one side and sway. This worried me. But I thought of Arthur as a small squirrel. One step too close and he would be scared off.

I was insistent because of the kinship I felt, which I hoped was not one-sided. It seemed we were the only unhappy people in the whole city. Sure, there were others, unhoused, banging on the windows of the Streetcar on Dundas at every stop sign, begging for help. But I forgot them all when I was walking to the church, my face blossoming red under the sun. I saw only the happy families at the park on King Street, walking their fluffy dogs and reading their books and pushing their cherubic children on the swings. Wait until they get older, I thought. Wait until you do.

The sight of these people unsettled me in a way that could not be rectified until I reached Arthur. It was only then that I felt human, still. People pitied me. They stood up sheepishly when they were sitting on the priority chairs of the Streetcar. Gesturing at me to fill their seats. Please, I insist. I wanted nothing to do with most people. So, the presence of an anomaly in my life awakened me to all sorts of possibilities. I even felt like I was remembering things better, but I couldn’t be so sure.

After we argued back and forth, Arthur eventually agreed to have lunch at my apartment. He hauled his torn backpack onto his shoulder, and I debated the politest way to ask him to leave it outside my door. We walked there in silence, as I was afraid of accidentally leading us to the wrong building. Thankfully, I did not. The sight of Arthur in my foyer, dirt and all, so much dirt, felt strange in the sense that it was not strange at all. Rather, it was nostalgic, as though he had always belonged here. And unexpectedly, I didn’t mind the dirt; people who looked clean on the outside had souls that were caked in it.

“What would you like to drink?” I didn’t want to sound too eager, but I had purchased cans of pop from Circle K on the off chance he accepted my invitation. Other than that, I prepared chicken cutlets. I was planning on making potato salad, I think, but there was none on the table. I must have forgotten.

Arthur only wanted water. We ate in relative silence until he asked me why I lived alone.

“My son and I are not on speaking terms,” I said.

“Oh.” This made him uncomfortable. After squirming, weighing his words, he asked why not.

“I don’t know, really. I’ve been having some trouble with my memory. No official diagnosis. Or if there was, I can’t remember it. Anyway, all I know is that we haven’t spoken in at least,” I paused to count, “thirty days.”

Arthur chewed on this. In the dim light of my apartment, he looked both younger and older. There were dark circles imprinted on his pinked cheeks. “That’s sad. You seem like you’d be a great mother.”

I nodded, but I wasn’t so sure. It was difficult to know myself when all the things that cemented my identity were slowly withering away. Could I have been a good mother? I suppose so. There were times when I must not have been. I didn’t remember myself as a wife, as an employee, or as a girl. Everything came to me in random snippets, a treasure I tried to cup in my palms that fought for freedom, escaping the tight clasp of my fingers.

I must have been thinking for a while. Arthur cleared his throat and told me that he was not speaking to his family, either. That they hated him.

“‘Arthur’ seems like a name you’d only give to someone you love,” I said. “A name that requires thought.”

“I got into some trouble at school. I was kicked out.” As he shifted in his seat, his sleeve rode up to show me the same track marks I noticed last time, but now multiplied. His soft skin lacerated, an oddity to me. “And then I started fighting with my parents, and I just packed up all of my stuff and ran away.”

“Are they looking for you?”

He wouldn’t know, he said—he no longer owned a phone.

“But the police?”

“There are so many people on the streets,” he said with a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t know if they’d bother with it.”

My phone rang, breaking our trance. I hurried towards where it lay on the counter, like I always did, in case it was Peter. But it was not. My screen was alight with the words POTENTIAL SPAM.

“Someone important?” Arthur asked. I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or excited at the prospect of being asked to leave.

“I thought it was my Peter,” I said, ashamed.

“Is that him?” Arthur pointed to a smiling portrait on the wall.

“No, that was his father. A wonderful man.”

“He looks a bit young, right? Like, maybe this was taken recently. Judging by the lighting and stuff.”

I squinted at it. It did, in fact, look brand new to me. Who was that? I realized it was not my Peter or his horrible father, but actually some stranger who found his way into my home.

“I don’t know who that is. You take it.” I looked at the young man sitting across from me, his dirty face and fingernails around my utensils, chewing on chicken. “Who are you?”

“You know me, Francine,” he began, but I was even more afraid, because my name was not Francine. I tried to dredge it up but my mind was so murky.

“I’m not Francine,” I repeated, again and again, louder, louder, and then I shrieked like an animal, flapping my arms, my wings, because there was a stranger patting my leg, and I had no idea where I was.

I guessed that something must have happened with Arthur because I dropped off snacks the day before and he stared at me like I had grown a third head. He said I behaved very strangely at lunch and should probably talk to someone. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about but trusted that such an event took place. He himself was acting strangely, too—jittery, his eyes hazy and far away, unable to lift his head for more than a few seconds. For a second he looked like a stranger again, tense, cruel, but then I remembered he was just a boy, and my nerves settled.

The next day I prepared a proper rotisserie chicken cut into practical portions and packed into Ziploc bags, along with some chips and drinks. I walked to the church. When I passed the park on King Street, I paused, watching a young mother push her son on the swing. She could not have been more than twenty-five. I tried to remember how old I was when I had Peter, but I was unable to. “Higher, mommy!” The boy called, and the young girl shoved him with a reasonable amount of force. Interesting, the parental instinct that develops, that teaches you just how hard to push without breaking the delicate thing in your hands.

When I got to the church Arthur was not there. In his place was an ambulance with two paramedics, one young, one old, and a police car with two officers, one young, one old, jotting things down on a clipboard.

I thought Arthur may have stepped into Circle K, but he was not there, and then I tried to remember if it was Sunday, if he could have been inside the church, attending the service. The entrance to the church was closed off with yellow tape, and I said to the officers excuse me, excuse me, I am looking for a young man, a boy, and the older officer placed a firm hand on my shoulder to steady me. I peered inside the ambulance. I was not sure what I saw but I may have seen a flash of something clean and white.

Arthur must have gone inside, because it was snowing. All around me was white and blank because of the snow. I could barely walk; my socks were soaked. I was in entirely wrong shoes—why was I wearing sandals? My feet felt very cold, and so did my ears and lips. I had to remember, later, to shovel the snow in front of our home, or to ask my husband to do it. From inside the home I could hear Peter’s laugh, the heavy steps that told me he was about to come through the door. I remembered to remind him about his gloves. There he was, then, in front of me. Such a small, beautiful boy. My boy. I picked him up in my strong arms. We were going somewhere together, just the two of us. A place I couldn’t remember, but that didn’t matter, then.

Samira Jafar is a writer based in Kuwait. She's the author of two self-published poetry collections and one short story collection, and her work has appeared in Still Here Magazine, The Times Kuwait, and World Insane Literary Magazine, among other places. She currently teaches English at Kuwait University.

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Editor's Note:

Thank you for reading Samira Jafar’s “Son of Mine.”

What makes the person you love feel so irreplaceable? Is it your memory of them? If so, what happens to our obligations when evidence and memory disappears? How much of loving someone depends on remembering who they are, what they have done, and what we have done to them?

In Jafar’s story, Francine’s failing memory has left her estranged from her son and increasingly uncertain of her own history. Her tenderness toward Arthur, a young man living on the streets, offers a troubling glimpse of maternal love stripped of its history. She can feed him, worry over him, and recognize his vulnerability with a clarity she can no longer bring to her relationship with Peter. Yet even this new attachment is subject to the terrible instability of her mind.

The story’s most disturbing suggestion concerns the relationship between forgetting and forgiveness. Francine has lost the memories that might explain her son’s anger, along with those that might justify her own. Her innocence is therefore impossible to establish, even to herself.

And still, she keeps bringing food. Jafar leaves us with the painful persistence of an instinct that can outlive the knowledge of whom it was meant to protect.—Jon Negroni

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