Donnie
Dug was agitated and I couldn’t pin point why. His face was flushed, his moves were jittery and he couldn’t sit still. Ness had noticed it too. “Dug, what is wrong?” I asked him. He looked at me andthe deepest look of sadness crossed his features. It made my insides feel all gooey, and not in a good way. “Dug, you can tell me what is bothering you. I am in your friend,” I reassured him. He sat down in the chair and started to rock back and forth.
“I am going to make us some sandwiches,” Ness said. “You boys just have some time to talk if you want.” She gave me that look mother’s give, the one that said, maybe you can figure out what is wrong.
I went across the room to Dug and sat on the floor and front of him so he could look at me. “Dug, tell me what is wrong, please. I am worried and your ma is really worried. “
He grabbed my shoulders and whispered to me. “Donnie, the neighboring man hurt your mother. I saw it while I slept last night. He hurt her real bad. I want to go help her and clean that room she is in really nice and tidy. It’s not nice and tidy. Not at all. She made him really mad.”
My heart dropped and doubled its beat. “She isn’t….dead, is she?” He looked me in the eye, his slanted eyes serious and very un-childlike. “No, she isn’t but she is hurt pretty bad. She is bleeding and Donnie, she peed on herself. She wet herself and he left her in it.” He voice showed that he was angry and the indignity of it all.
I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to know but I knew I had to ask what was done to my mother. The woman I had treated so cruelly these last several months, the mother I may lose to a madman. I licked my lips, they were so dry and my throat didn’t seem to be working right. “What did he do to her?”
“He hurt her with a whip that cut her skin, Donnie and he stuck…his thing in her,” he told me. He was embarrassed. I heard dishes crash behind me.
Ness was standing there with her hands shaking and the tray of sandwiches on the floor. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God.” I rushed to help. Ness with the mess. “I can’t go through this again.” She whispered. “I am too old.”
“What do you mean, Ness? “ I asked her confused.
She took my hands in hers. “I know you don’t understand, Donnie. I can’t talk about it now, but we have to help your mother somehow. Some things that happen to women in the heat of violence, it changes them. It can ruin them.”
I shook my head yes. I still didn’t know what to say. Ness looked like she had seen a ghost. I helped her clean the sandwiches off the floor and she went back into the kitchen to make us some more. I could hear her sobbing quietly.
“She thinks I don’t know,” Dug said sadly.
“Know what?”
He smiled his child like grin. “That she’s not my real ma.”
“What?” I asked shocked. “She raised you, took care of you-that’s a real ma, Dug.”
He laughed. “I know that, silly.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“She didn’t give birth to me. Her sister, Bernie did. I know this because sometimes when I sleep, Bernie sings to me and tells me she loves me and misses ma. She says ma is the most beautiful mom ever and that she watches us sometimes from heaven and is so proud of us,” he explained. “She is so pretty too. She tells me that her and ma were not only sisters but best friends and that a bad man hurt her but out of that hurt came me and that I was the best gift ever. The hurt was worth it just to get to have me. She loves me.”
I just looked at him, shocked. I was a little dumbfounded. Here was this mentally challenged man who was telling me he was talking to his mother whom I presumed was dead. I didn’t want to believe him but everything he had told me so far had been true. How could I doubt him now? I began to wonder if my mother died, would she talk to Dug and tell him she loved me or had I hurt her so bad that she wouldn’t love me anymore? I hoped she wasn’t dead, Dug said she wasn’t but I was scared that if she wasn’t dead yet, how long would this asshole keep her and how long could she hold out before she begged him to just kill her and stop her suffering?
Ness came back into the room, her eyes dry but I could see she had been crying. “I hope you boys are hungry,” she said. “I have got some turkey sandwiches here that are going to be disappointed if they don’t get eaten.”
Dug got up and kissed his mother on the cheek. “I’m starvin’ like Marvin.” He told her.
She smiled up at him. "Who exactly is Marvin? Do we know?" She adored Dug. I didn’t know the story of how Dug came to be, but I know the good Lord was watching out for him to place him with Ness.
I hoped with all my heart if there was a God he was watching out for my mother.