Tonight as I was leaving choir, my sister, who had just finished the drive from her apartment in a New York suburb to our childhood home in Southeastern Pennsylvania, sent me this text message: Sooo I get home and there were cops. Bradley died :( had a seizure. Mom found him.
Bradley. He was the son of a man my mother saw for a while when I was a senior in college, seven years ago. He was odd, like his father, but his father exploited my mother, using her for housing and eventually "borrowing" her car when he moved four hours away from her to manage a hotel. He had her car for six months. She was too codependent to take it back. Finally, she broke up with him and he returned her SUV with no thanks, no monetary compensation, and many miles on its engine.
Bradley's father was seven feet tall, wrote fantasy, and believed in fairies. He had a deceased wife and, I believe, ex-wives as well as children scattered across the country. He liked to talk about his kids, how many he had, and how he was a father, but in actuality, his kids never saw him. To say he was around his son Bradley would be a backwards statement; Bradley was the one who stuck by his father's side. At least, Bradley was loyal to his self-serving father until a few years ago when...I forget what happened. Bill forgot his son's birthday (again?) or didn't give him a Christmas present or stopped calling him or in some other way (for a hundredth time?) made it very clear to his son that he did not care about him. Bradley was a couple years older than I was, and though it took him a while to figure out that his father was a narcissist, when he figured it out, he got free of him and moved into my mom's house.
Why? Why would he choose to live with my mother, of all people?
My mother is one of the least nurturing people I know. I couldn't fathom why a guy who had been trying his whole life to get his father to acknowledge him would want to move in with a surrogate mother who would treat him the same way.
But you know what, my mother always favored boys. I could tell by the way she treated my brother when we were growing up that she favored him, not because he was in some way better than me and my sister, but because he was her son. She told me once that she felt a bit like a mother to Bradley, so I wager she told him at some point while he was living with his father that he could move into the house with her, that she'd charge him very low rent. And she'd been kind to him in the past. Had cooked him meals, had talked to him, had kept him company. And that was important because Bradley was a loner.
Bradley had, to our knowledge, no friends. But he had enemies. He used to bike to Walmart, where he worked, in the snow. I remember watching him suit up in these shiny black bike tights and goggles one winter when I was home for Christmas, how he sailed through the falling flakes and the snow on the long curve of our rural driveway, how he looked like a snorkeler out of water, his giant feet flopping over the bike's small pedals, his stick thin legs pumping the air. He biked to work not necessarily because he enjoyed it, though he did, but because he wasn't legally allowed to drive.
When Bradley was in his young 20's, he was cornered by a couple of guys in the bathroom at work, and beaten. The traumatic brain injuries he received turned him into an epileptic who suffered from frequent seizures. I never saw him have one, but my mom has periodically told me about them over the phone.
As I was saying, Bradley didn't have any friends. He may have had virtual acquaintances, however, because he spent much of his time in his room on the computer. I suspect, from conversations I had with him, that he was on the autism spectrum. He never really seemed bothered by the fact that his life was so solitary, and in fact, the conversations he had with the people at the house--my mother, my grandmother, and the occasional renter of my former bedroom, as well as me, my brother, or sister when we would visit--were probably enough.
I didn't know him well. But I knew him well enough to exchange gifts with him at Christmas. And I knew him well enough to know he was a good guy. Benign. I knew him well enough to feel sorry that he had to die at my mom's house, in the basement, the day before Thanksgiving, a holiday that would have seen him sitting in my mother's dining room with a bunch of people who didn't really know him and who were not his mother or father or any blood relation.
Today, his last day on earth, he helped my mom around the house. She's been renovating the kitchen and building a kitchenette in the basement area just off Bradley's bedroom while simultaneously preparing for tomorrow's meal. He was a gentle guy, and would do just about anything if asked. I'm sure she bossed him around, like she does everyone else, and didn't thank him for his help. So he spent his last day on earth with my ungrateful mother, hauling stuff around, maybe nailing things together, probably watching my 83-year-old grandma, possibly even cooking. And then, sometime in the late afternoon or early evening, went to his room for a break.
When my mother knocked on his door to see if she could get in to work on some wiring, he didn't answer. She decided to come back later. When she returned, she knocked again, and again there was no answer. She spoke through the door, told him she was going to come in, that she needed to do some work in there.
She noticed his glasses first. Bradley couldn't see past his nose without his glasses. They were on his nightstand, which is where he'd put them if he was sleeping, but he wasn't in his bed. She peered over the edge and saw him on the floor. By the time she found him this way, he was already growing stiff.
My sister came home shortly after my mother discovered Bradley. She came home to cop cars and flashing lights, to the upstairs renter driving down the driveway where she gestured to him to roll down his window so she could ask him what was going on.
"Someone passed away," he said.
And she thought maybe it was our grandmother. Maybe the cancer that had spread from her breasts to her bones had taken her home. "Who?" she asked.
"The guy in the basement."
Bradley. The guy in the basement.
And now my brother and his girlfriend, who also arrived tonight, to a house where a young man without a family was pronounced deceased by a coroner and carried away in a body bag, are trying to sleep on the living room couch while my sister texts me about how my mother and her asshole alcoholic boyfriend continue hammering into the wee hours of the night. And my mother, who did not clean the den so my sister could sleep on the couch in there, tells her, "I'll move all this crap out of the way," and the "crap" is the stuff on the den floor, the stuff my mom cleared out of Bradley's room days ago so she could work in there. The "crap" is what is left of a man who thought of my mother as a mother.
And this is Thanksgiving at my house. And this is why I do not go home. And I won't sleep tonight, wondering who will cry for Bradley, who will miss him if not his father, if not my narcissistic mother. Are my tears enough?
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