A mother’s love: ‘All I had to do was get out of the truck’

    It had been more than a year since Robyn Duck had heard anything from her son, Christopher Heddings. He had left his home in Stone Mountain, Ga., at age 22 and headed to Baton Rouge for the first real job of his life as an electrician’s helper.
    Duck and Heddings had established a routine. Every Sunday, after church, she would expect a call from her son to let her know how his job was going. Then, suddenly, in August 2012, the phone calls stopped. The phone company said the cell number had been disconnected.
    This wasn’t simply the case of a rebellious youngster trying to ditch an overprotective mom. Life had been hard – and fragile – for Heddings. As an infant, he had contracted chicken pox, but that episode masked a much more serious problem that baffled doctors for months.
    “He died four times in my arms,” Duck said, recalling the medical treatments her son had to endure in a game of medical Russian roulette. “He had been passed from country doctor to country doctor to country doctor, and they were saying they didn’t know what was wrong with him.”
    When doctors at Children’s Healthcare-Scottish Rite in Atlanta finally pinpointed what was going on in Heddings’ body, Duck couldn’t make sense of it, much less spell it: Langerhan’s Cell Histiocytosis, an extremely rare disease that attacks skull and facial bones.
    “It usually kills infants,” Duck said. “He was diagnosed at 2. They told me to prepare for the funeral.”
He couldn’t fit in
    At school, where everyone tries to blend in, Heddings did everything but. He wore a special helmet to protect his thin skull. The disease stunted his growth. “He was just a little bitty thing,” Duck said. “He was 10 and he looked like he was 5.”
    Finally, in fifth grade, Duck decided to take Heddings out of school so that she could home-school him.
    “He just didn’t want to be different,” Duck said. “Like any other kid that has stuff going on from birth, many times he cried, ‘Why can’t I be normal?’”
    Duck, a Baptist, said during one particularly trying time when doctors asked her to “choose” between alternate forms of chemotherapy for her toddler, she awakened her cousin late one night and asked him to drive her miles into the hills, into the clearing where the Bethany Baptist Church sits.
    Normally, the church elders leave a key under the doormat so that anyone can go inside to pray, but there had been a rash of petty robberies in recent months, and the key was hidden someplace else. Duck searched for the key everywhere but couldn’t find it.
    “I was outside, praying under the stars,” she said. “God heard.”
    At one of her hospital visits, someone gave her a small piece of red cloth, with an image of Jesus on the front and a picture of Mary on the back. Connected to the edge of the cloth was a chain with tiny, black rosary beads. It had been blessed by a priest. She carried it everywhere she went.
    When Heddings turned 14, Duck threw the biggest birthday party ever for her son.
    “You’d better believe it,” Duck said. “They told me only one other kid who had this as an infant lived until he was 13, and then the leukemia came back. We had hot dogs and hamburgers and played kickball. It was a big family thing. So many people were praying for Chris.”
Job was an exciting start
    Heddings never got his GED, but the promise of a full-time job in Baton Rouge glistened like a gold ring on a carousel. Duck calmed her anxiety over her son’s moving to Louisiana because she had arranged for him to pick up his medicine for diabetes at a national pharmacy.
    “I wasn’t in a big fear,” she said. “He’s telling me he’s doing well, and he wanted to be out on his own.”
    And then, the phone calls stopped.
    “He just disappeared off the face of the earth,” Duck said.
    Duck was beside herself. She searched the Internet for any sign, but her son did not exist.
    Earlier this summer, Duck found out that her son had been arrested in New Orleans for failure to appear in court on a misdemeanor charge and was taken to jail. But by the time she found out, Heddings had been released and was, again, nowhere to be found.
    “I told the police I was ready to jump in the car and run to New Orleans, but they told me, ‘Do not do that. This is a dangerous town, and you can get killed looking for your kid. Keep looking on the Internet.’”
    During one of her regular calls to police, someone mentioned the Bishop Perry Center, an outreach center for the homeless recently opened by the Archdiocese of New Orleans. She called the center, and a security guard was there when the call came in.
    “Ma’am, I think I saw your son less than two hours ago,” he told Duck, describing a young man who had come in looking for winter clothes.
    Duck emailed a picture of Heddings, and the match was confirmed. Duck’s son, missing for more than a year, had been found – only to vanish again.
    “The priest (Father William Maestri) told us he walks around the area several times a day, and he said he would call me if he found my son,” Duck said.
    Last Sunday night – Oct. 20 – Duck still had not heard anything. She leaned back in her recliner and prayed. She was sure of one thing – early the next morning, she and her fiance were driving to New Orleans to do their own search.
    “Before we left, I said, ‘Jesus, go before me and find him so that all I have to do is get out of the truck,’” Duck said.
Finding a needle in a haystack
    They arrived in New Orleans on Monday morning, looking for Bishop Perry Center on Dauphine Street. Being unfamiliar with the surroundings, they took several wrong turns before rolling up next to a park on Elysian Fields Avenue.
    “Excuse me, sir,” Duck asked a man standing on the sidewalk. “Can you tell me the name of this park? He told me, ‘Washington.’ Then I looked at my fiance and said, ‘This is the park that the people at the Bishop Perry Center told me the kids hang out.’”
    It was about 11 a.m. They drove around looking for a parking spot. In the distance, maybe 30 yards away, Duck spied a young man, sleeping on his back on the ground, with a black Reebok baseball cap covering his face.
    At 30 yards, with no sign of his face, Duck declared: “That’s my son! That’s my young’un. Right there!”
    She jumped out of the truck. The first gate was locked. The second gate was locked. The third gate was open.
    “I’m not taking my eyes off him the whole time,” Duck said. ‘My fiance said, ‘You can’t walk up to a total stranger and wake him up.’ I said, excuse my language, ‘Like hell, I can’t. That’s my son.’ I walked up to him. I wasn’t five feet from him when I saw the mole on his neck.
    “I said, ‘Chris … Christopher … wake up.’ I bent down on my hands and knees. He had the hat over his face. I knew it was my son. I rubbed his arm. ‘Christopher!’ He took that hat off his face and he cried, ‘Mom, is that you?’ He’s crying and I’m crying. Let me tell you, God walked before me and did exactly what I asked him to do. All I had to do was get out of the truck.”
    Lazarus, come out.
    “I can’t describe how I felt,” Duck said. “It was my boy lying there, and he was alive and he was a little dirty. He smelled like we dug him out of a garbage can. He was skinny because he hadn’t taken his medicine in a year and a half.”
    Duck asked Heddings, “Son, are you ready to go home?”
    “He was still on the ground, crying,” Duck recalled. “Then he got up and said, ‘Mom, first you’ve got to meet some of the people who took care of me.”
    He took them to the Bishop Perry Center, where he had dropped in for clothes and cold water. They met the kind people at Mona’s Café, who would slip him meals and pita bread to sustain him. They saw another couple who had urged him to go home to his mother.
Strangers helped him survive
    During his year in New Orleans, Heddings had slept in the park and in front of the Old U.S. Mint. He survived on “white boxes” – the takeout boxes with leftovers that people throw in trash cans.
    When Heddings lost his phone and his contact numbers, he said he couldn’t get in touch with his mother. People offered him money to take a bus home, but he had lost his ID card, and you can’t get on a bus without one. Maybe he was too embarrassed to go home.
    So, Heddings worked an intersection with a sign that read: “Looking for random acts of kindness or any acts of kindness.” One day, three members of a church group gave him $20 each – the most he ever made.
    And then, one day, he woke up, looked into the October sunlight and saw his mother.
    “I knew it was her by the sound of her voice,” Heddings said. “I was awake, but I think in my subconscious I might have still been dreaming. I started crying because she was crying. She was holding me, and I was hugging her.”
    Heddings said he hopes to validate his mother’s love by getting his life “started the right way,” beginning with a GED. He wants to “get out of the fire.”
    He is the answer to prayer for the mother who gave her love to her son in a prodigal way.
    “My mom’s always been a godly woman,” he said. “She’s not perfect, but she believes in the power of Jesus.”
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].