Flight

“You’ve got ten minutes.”

The warden’s voice echoed through the visitation room as Tom trudged inside. His feet felt like cinderblocks as he took in the sterile white walls, the lifeless silence, and the sweltering Texas heat that seemed to have followed him in from outside. There was a gravity to the whole room, one that yanked him down as he sat on the small and uncomfortable aluminum stool.

After taking off his JanSport and dropping it onto his lap, Tom peered through the grimy glass barrier. A woman stared back at him, wrinkles and creases riddling her face, her hair resembling a dead shrub.

After a few seconds of this wordless exchange, she picked up the phone beside her and motioned for her visitor to do the same. Tom instinctively muttered “I know, I know” as he did what he was told.

“Took you long enough,” she said.

Tom gasped upon hearing her voice. It was raspy and weak, like a car engine about to sputter and die, but he could still hear the sing-songy tone that had woken him up everyday as a child.

“Sorry,” Tom said, looking down at his lap. “I’ve been busy.”

“With what?”

He looked up to see her staring at him, waiting. Eventually, she sighed. “Forget it. You haven’t changed.”

Her eyes and mouth drooped, forming three flat lines. Tom had seen that face before — it was the one she’d always make, in the kitchen, after Tom said that he was skipping waiter duty to go to the library.

Zip

With a shaky hand, Tom pulled a document out of his knapsack and held it up to the glass. The top of it read:

Culinary Institute LeNotre

Student Application Form

After reading it, she looked back at Tom with narrowed eyes. “Don’t tell me…”

Tom nodded and forced a smile. “After I graduate, I’m gonna reopen it.”

He waited for her to say something, to laugh, to burst into tears and cry, “That’s my boy!” But instead, the flat expression remained as she looked down and away from Tom’s eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She pointed a bony finger at Tom’s lap. “What’s that?”

Tom looked down to see The Feynman Lectures on Physics peeking out of his open knapsack.

“It’s for a class,” he said.

“At LeNotre?” Her eyes narrowed.

“No. UT Dallas.”

“And how are you going to LeNotre if you’re already enrolled there?” There was a growl to her voice, like a mother waiting for her child to confess to having broken a window. The knapsack felt heavier in Tom’s lap as he swallowed and let loose the truth.

“I… I’m gonna drop out.”

The next few seconds were a blur: chair legs squealing against the floor, yelling that was loud enough to pierce through the glass, and guards seizing her by the arms.

“We’ll be cutting it here,” said the warden, grabbing Tom’s shoulder. Tom opened his mouth to argue, but his voice trailed off, evapourated by the heat.

But before he stood up, before they dragged her away — he saw the eyes. The same eyes from when he found her holding the blood-soaked paring knife; when he passed her on the way from the witness stand; when he looked at her after the judge declared:

“Capital Punishment.”

Whenever Tom saw those eyes, in recollections and in dreams, his spine turned to ice and his heart caved in. But this time, those eyes were filled with tears, and in their reflection, he saw only himself. It was then that he understood what those eyes were saying, what they had always been saying:

“Don’t blame yourself.”

As the guards took her away, as tears rolled down his cheeks, Tom held her gaze — and smiled. Her eyes went wide, but then she did the same. The last image Tom had of his mother, before the prison doors slammed shut, was of her leaning back in the guards’ arms, as if she were being lifted into the sky.

Once she was gone, Tom took the warden’s hand off his shoulder. With nothing left to hold him down, he stood up and faced the exit.