Tyrannosaurus Tess

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“May the Lord guide your heart. You may confess your sins.”

“I’m relieved that my mom is dead.”

“And why’s that?”

“I wouldn’t want to see her all messed up from the explosion. And I don’t think my dad could handle it, either. It’s better knowing she’s at peace now.”

There was a pause, then a sigh. “Hal?”

“Yes?”

“Do you want to lift the divider?”

I stared at the black screen that separated confessor and absolver. Then, I raised my hand and lifted it, revealing Father Jameis’ kind, wise visage. “Hello, Hal,” he said.

“Hello, Father Jameis.”

“How many times are you going to come in and confess the same thing over and over?”

“What’s the point of having a divider if you’re going to guess who I am, anyway?”

Father Jameis smiled. “You don’t make guessing difficult.”

I looked down. “I keep confessing it because I keep thinking it. And every time I do, I don’t know if I should feel at peace or absolutely terrible.”

Father sighed. “Well, I certainly don’t think you should feel absolutely terrible. This feeling of relief is your natural inclination, not a wish of any sort of ill-will towards your mother.”

“There are people that survive explosions like that, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But they don’t look the same afterward.”

“No, they don’t.”

“I want to go to Afghanistan and ask the people that laid those bombs, ‘why?’ I want to show them a picture of my mom. I want them to feel what she felt when her unit went over their bomb and--”

“Hallie.” Father Jameis’ gentle, yet stern voice cut through my fantasy, and I found myself rushing back down to earth like a fallen satellite. “See, what you were doing, that right there was wishing ill-will on another.”

I raised my eyes to meet his. I could see they were filled with compassion and concern, two things I seemed to see in everyone’s eyes when they looked at me these days.

Lifting my hand, I grabbed the divider, sliding the black screen back down between us. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I wish my mother’s killers were dead.”

***

Fifty stars, thirteen stripes. Every Sunday, the miniature American symbol stood sticking out of the grass in front of my mother’s grave. Twelve Sundays had passed since we had first laid her to rest there… well, “laid her to rest.” She wasn’t actually buried under the headstone; we had cremated her. It’s what she wanted, should she leave the Earth under the… physical state in which she had. We all agreed to keep that information away from her mother, though. Grandma would always lay right down on the grass before the headstone and hold on tight, as if the wind would sweep her away from her forty-four-year-old marine daughter that she thought lay six feet beneath.

“Hal?” I snapped to attention at the sound of my dad’s urges, and I knew he’d been saying my name for a while now. He offered a small smile of understanding. “It’s your turn this week. Go ahead.”

Each Sunday, the three of us rotated in sharing a memory of, or something we loved about Mom. It was Grandma’s idea; she thought it would help keep her memory alive. I cleared my throat. “When I was little, Mom would always hoist me up on her shoulders and walk around my bedroom pretending she was a dinosaur before she put me to bed. She called herself--”

“‘--Tyrannosaurus Tess.’” Grandma finished the sentence with me. I looked down at her in confusion and saw she had a very tiny, very sad smile on her face. “I used to do that with her. She got it from me.”

***

The drive home with Dad was rather quiet, which wasn’t unusual. When we pulled into the driveway, however, he suddenly had some things to say. “I have very important news I’ve been withholding from you, Hal.”

“So I am adopted.” I shook my head in mock disbelief, and Dad shook his head in very real annoyance. It was an old joke I’d sometimes pull to push his buttons, but whenever I was out in public with just him, I had a feeling most people that saw us together figured I was adopted anyway; my brown skin didn’t exactly match his tan white. We shared a bit of resemblance in the face, but my skin color was definitely more in line with my mother’s.

“I’m serious, Hal. This is big. You’ve come into twenty thousand dollars.”

I chuckled. “Okay, Dad.” He didn’t chuckle back. I blinked. “Dad.”

“I should have told you sooner.”

“Dad!”

“I’m sorry. I’ve just been… processing a lot. But, it’s from your mother. Well, her life insurance. It’s split between us; she named you as a beneficiary. This will be really good for when you start college next fall. I guess I hesitated to tell you because saying it would make the whole thing so much more real.”

“It didn’t feel real when we were lowering her empty casket into the ground?” Dad looked down, and I felt immediate remorse. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just processing, too.”

He nodded. “There’s one other thing.”

Inside the house, I stood and waited while Dad rummaged through his office. After a few moments, he revealed a little black notebook and held it out to me; if “ordinary” had a picture in the dictionary, that notebook would be it. “Dad, what’s this?”

He hesitated as he held back tears. “This was your mother’s. They sent it back with her belongings from Afghanistan. It’s… her notebook. I gave it to her right before we got married… you know how she always loved to write. Anyway, she started writing in it when she got deployed. Twenty years later, and she kept it all this time. She wanted you to have it. To read it.”

Ten minutes later I sat alone in my room, notebook in hand, still unable to open it. My curiosity was burning, yet my hands shook unreasonably. Mom could’ve been holding this just hours before she died. Suddenly, I felt such a strong connection to her from that notebook, it was as if my hands willed themselves to fling it open and let her out.

The first page held only four words: Will, Hallie, my hearts. As I was running my fingers over her writing, I heard the tiniest voice.

“Hallie?”

I jumped, dropping the book to the floor. It landed facedown, and the voice called again. “Hallie? My hearts?”

Slowly, I reached down and picked up the book. As I held it, a hand suddenly reached around from behind me and grasped the book as well. For the second time in the span of ten seconds, I jumped out of my soul.

Whipping around, I saw standing before me a woman in uniform… a marine uniform. As if a stranger standing in the middle of my room wasn’t weird enough, the woman completed her outfit with the strangest thing: a dinosaur costume headpiece that completely obstructed her face. A tyrannosaurus headpiece.

She stood cautiously, her outstretched palms inviting me forward. My eyes fell upon her hands, and I felt a sense of familiarity. Tentatively, I made my way towards her, taking her hands in mine. The brown of her skin matched mine exactly. I knew these hands, down to the last detail. “Mom?”

Without another word, she swept me up into the warmest, closest hug. Never in my life had I felt less alone.

After an eternity that wasn’t long enough, she let go. I reached up to remove her headpiece, but she stopped me. Instead, she picked the notebook up from the floor and sat on the bed, gesturing for me to sit beside her. She began flipping through the pages and speaking as she went.

“Hallie… I miss Hallie… I am so proud of her, I wish she knew…”

At first, I was confused about her referring to me in the third person. Then, I realized: she was reading from the notebook, piecing different sentences together. I blinked.

“Can you only say what’s written in here?” I whispered.

She nodded. Flipping some more, she continued. “...a million things… could be said--”

“I don’t have a million questions,” I interrupted. “Just a few.” She nodded for me to continue, and I took a breath. “Did you read my letters?”

Page flipping. “Hallie’s letters make me wonder what I’m doing all the way over here at all.”

“If that’s true, then why didn’t you come back?”

Flip, flip. “I have an obligation… nothing is easy… I love my country.”

“You love it more than me? Than Dad?” I suddenly felt anger rising within me.

Quickly, she responded. “No… not at all… hard to explain…”

I stood up. “Well, you’d better start flipping, because you’re not making sense.”

“This is what I was meant to do… I am Hallie’s mother, Will’s wife… a soldier…being pulled so many directions…”

“Why wasn’t being my mom and Dad’s wife enough? Why’d you have to go over there, to a place where you knew you might not ever come back, might not ever see me or Dad again?” Mom started flipping again, but I grabbed the notebook. “Stop hiding behind this!” I shouted, shaking the notebook before flinging it across the room. “And stop hiding behind this!” Before she could stop me, I reached out and yanked the stupid tyrannosaurus headpiece from her head. I thought I would feel a wave of relief, but instead, I felt deep, deep horror.

The woman under the mask was not my mother. At least, not the mother I remembered. All I could see were burns, burns, burns. She was torn apart. I had never actually seen pictures of her after the explosion; I could never bring myself to look. Now, a living picture was right in front of me.

I let out a cry and turned around, my hands over my face. I felt my mother come up behind me, her hands resting on my shoulders. “I do love you, more than you know. More than you could ever know. Every day apart from you could have killed me.”

“But you were killed for real.”

Silence.

“Is it true what they say? About seeing your life, before you die?”

“I saw fire. I felt pain. But the love I felt for you outweighed everything in that moment. I saw you and Dad. I saw us, together, in your room before bedtime.”

“Tyrannosaurus Tess,” I said, closing my eyes. I felt my mother wrap me in her arms, and again I was back in infinity. That couldn’t have come from the notebook.

“Hal?” Dad’s voice cut through, and I opened my eyes to see him standing by the door. I turned around, but Mom was gone, and infinity was over. I turned back to Dad. He was crying.

I ran into his arms. “I think she loved us. A lot.”

“I know she did.”

***

“Hello, Hal.”

“Hello, Father Jameis.”

“Anything to confess?”

“Not this time.” I couldn’t see him through the divider, but I knew he was smiling.

“So, no more ill-will?”

I paused. “Everything happens for a reason, right? I think this happened to let me understand my mother more than I ever could have otherwise. And that made me realize, there are other people out there like me that need help understanding. I want to be that person for all those kids of fallen soldiers. I’m going to use her life insurance money to go to school and study grief therapy.”

“I’m sure she’d be happy to know that.”

I smiled down at my hands. My mother’s hands. “She knows.”