I’m Mom’s MedicationChapter 4

All I could do was nod and be amazed as I stared at the woman who was definitely my Mom, yet seemed so different. Mom’s hair which she had cut in that short, pixie style my whole life was now long, hanging down around her shoulders — the luxurious black gone peppery gray. Her face was still relatively unlined for a woman of 42 and her slender figure had filled out some, making her face fuller and less angular. A peaceful expression was on her sleeping face, making her look more beautiful than I remembered.

It was only then that I saw my father cry as he uncharacteristically hugged me to him and cried softly, “We got our girl, back, John! God be praised, I’ve got my Cassie back!”

We watched her sleep for a bit and then the local police showed up and gave us some details. Some teenagers had broken into a house on a lark and had found her there, handcuffed to a bed in an upstairs bedroom in what had been otherwise an empty house. The officials told us this a bit awkwardly and their uncomfortable glances informed me that they were leaving things out, apparently for my sake.

In the end, between the newspapers and news shows and what little Dad shared with me, I learned most of it. Mom had been kidnapped by a man who had called himself Darren Jones, a fiftyish white and nondescript male who had kept Mom locked up in a small bedroom with steel plates over the windows and a reinforced steel door, and who had used her for sex — raping her times beyond counting. The local police and the federal guys were all highly complimentary to Mom — claiming that it was her strength of character that allowed her to survive the ordeal.

All evidence pointed to Jones having simply packed up and moved on, leaving Mom handcuffed to the bed to die of thirst. It was pure dumb luck that a couple of juvenile delinquents had broken into the house and found Mom before she died. They called 911 and never surfaced to claim any reward. As for Jones, he disappeared and the F.B.I. offered vague hints of seeing this madman’s work before and that Mom was very, very lucky. To date, he’s never been caught.

Dad was told more, but he shared it with no one. Maybe it was what the police told him that made him more remote, but in any case, it was an awkward reunion with Mom — Dad holding Mom almost at arms length and Mom herself very quiet and reserved, staring at us both like we were strangers. She cried once, when I came into her arms and she held on to me for minutes, hugging me tight, pressing her body against mine like she meant to never let me go.

I had dreamed of having Mom in my arms again, but the reality was quite different as feelings of utter joy and happiness were suddenly competing with the young male instincts of having a well built woman rubbing against me with only my clothes and a hospital gown between us. There was no ignoring the fact that Mom’s full breasts were mashing into my T-shirt…I could even feel her nipples — large and thick, pressing against me, so full and hard, it was almost like there was no clothing at all between us. To my dismay, I was sporting a respectable boner in my jeans when she let me go and I quickly, albeit awkwardly, shifted to the chair beside her bed, positioning myself to obscure my erection.

Mom looked as flushed and awkward as I felt and I was suddenly cognizant of how good looking a woman my mother was — she’d always been my pretty Mom, but now, I saw her as something else…something more — maybe it was the long and graying hair and the new, more lush figure that made me regard her as more than simply a beautiful woman. Maybe it was those lovely blue eyes that somehow regarded me with both a familiar motherly appraisal and something that was more primal. Her gaze gave me shivers and made me throb between my legs in a way I knew wasn’t right.

My uncomfortable feelings were left behind as we all sat there, soon joined by Mom’s brother and his family and began catching Mom up on the family and events over the last two years. Still, once in a while, Mom would glance over at me in such a way as to make me think she knew full well what I’d been thinking.