Dreaming of Flowers

"Dee?" My mother called out into the house the second she walked through the front door four hours later. 

I heard her coming into the living room, her heels clicking on the wooden floor.

She gasped when she rounded the corner and finally got to take in the sight of me. 

I knew I looked as insane as I felt. My hands, clothes, and face were covered in dust. I had taken each box, each stack of pictures out of the bookshelf and looked through every single one, except for a few extra dusty ones that I didn't need to look through. 

Because I had found what I was looking for. 

About fifty pictures of the field. 

These were taken during the day, but there was no mistaking the fact that this was the very same field I had been visiting. The grass was a bit shorter, the trees just a little younger looking and lacking the frayed tangles of rope. In none of the pictures could you see the man-built house in the background, but I was sure. 

This was the place. The skip in my heart when I looked at it told me I was right.

"Dee, what in the hell are you doing?" She exclaimed, kicking off her shoes and walking over to look down on me. 

"Where is this mom?" I hold up one of the better shots. She's perfectly captured the forest and sky in one shot. 

She stares at the picture, and I can see tears welling up in her eyes. 

"Why are you looking through my old pictures?" She asks, clearly avoiding the question. 

I stand quickly, causing a few stacks of dusty pictures to tumble to the floor. I hold the picture tightly in between my fingers, as though it's going to disintegrate and my whole day will have been for nothing. I look her in the eyes, and the truth gushes out of me. 

"I've been dreaming. Dreaming of this place, of a boy in this place. For days now, I've been trying to figure out where I've seen him and this place before. I still don't know where he came from, or who he really is, but these pictures are very clearly the same place."

She stares at the picture, as though what I'm saying is irrelevant. She backs up and flops down into one of the brown armchairs taking up a corner of the room. Her eyes stare off a little, and she sighs. It's a good minute before she says anything, and when she does, it's like she's talking to herself rather than to me. 

"Your father and I used to live in a really crappy town down south before we moved here and started over. We were young and broke and couldn't afford anything better. So we ended up living in kind of a dump around people who gave us nothing but bad memories… especially your father. We moved there to get away from people, to be by ourselves. You know already my parents weren't very nice, and your father's died when he was young. I was tired of living under the same roof as them and your dad… well he didn't care where we went. He always said he just wanted to be by my side. So we settled for less, just to get away. It just caused trouble for us, though. At first, everything was perfect. We were away from all our old problems, our old lives. We were together and could finally start building our life together.

Your father, however, had some unresolved addiction problems when we were still newlyweds. He spent a lot of time in foster care and on the run when he was young, and it hurt him a lot. It made him seek comfort in things I could never imagine turning to." My heart clenches at the thought of my father like that. I knew his parents died when he was very young, but I never thought of what that meant for how he grew up. I felt guilty for not knowing this about him. "He got badly influenced by a group of guys he was working with at the time and was sucked back into his old habits. Drinking every night after work until after midnight, snorting his breakfast and swallowing pills for his dinner." She sighed and looked down to her knotted-up hands that rested in her lap. While my mom had no problem talking about my dad, it was always good things. What a good, kind parent he had been. How much he loved both of us. How he would've never chosen to leave us. I had never heard of or seen this side of my parents.

"It definitely drove a wedge between us for a while there. One day, the day I took those pictures, I guess, we got into it pretty bad. I called him out on how he was acting, and he didn't like hearing it. He told me to leave so I did. Well, for the day. At least that's what I said in my head. I wasn't really going to leave him, I just wanted to startle him into straightening up. So, I packed a bag, pretended like I called my parents, and they would have me back home, and I left. I had planned on going to the nearby hotel and staying for a couple nights. 

I never made it there. I know this isn't what you want to hear, but I don't know what happened to me after that. I remember leaving, dragging my suitcase down the road, and thinking, he'll come after me, right? And that was it. Blackness for the next four days. Apparently, I just showed back up on the doorstep in front of your father, drenched in water and delirious and confused. He took me to the hospital, and they said it looked like I had some kind of head trauma that caused the memory loss. We moved a few months later, my plan had worked apparently, and your father realized what he was doing to me." She looks at me then, shrugging and hiding guilt in her eyes. 

I would trade almost anything I think to know what had happened to my mother.