Mothered (69)
She wished she could call Miguel. He was so behind on the corkscrew twists of her daily life. Before everything blew up, if one of them had been busy and they were out of touch for a week, it was easy to get caught up; once upon a time her days (and nights) had been wonderfully mundane. Now, how would Grace even begin to explain any of this? Miguel sent her short texts when he was up for it—he’d thanked her earlier for the flowers she’d sent the previous day—and those few seconds of communication felt like a lifeline to the outside world. He was the one in the hospital, but Grace was a captive in a disorienting purgatory.
She toyed with the idea of going to the hospital—not to visit Miguel but to get tested. Check herself in. With the way things were at home, it was probably safer there, in spite of the pandemic. It was hard to tell anymore what was cause and what was effect, but she really didn’t feel well. Intermittently the back of her neck was sweaty, wet enough to make her hair soggy as she finger combed it off her skin. But as soon as she was ready to crank up the air conditioner, a chill would scuttle across her body, nullifying the need. So she lay there. Hot, then cold. Clammy, then shivery.
Determined not to sleep, but too lethargic to actually get up, she thought about the deal she’d made with her mother. It would be easiest to just lie and tell her she’d thought about it and nope, no recovered memories of killing her sister. She couldn’t wait to help Jackie pack up her things, ferry her to the Waterfront. But her mother would know she was lying. She’d squint at her, trying to drill into her conscience, and Grace would confess under the scrutiny. Better to just spend a minute thinking about that evening—and then she could tell the truth. And haul Jackie’s ass to a hotel in the morning.
Coco finally stopped running around and made a nest for herself in the sofa corner near Grace’s feet. Gently, she stroked the cat’s silky fur with her toe. Perhaps Jackie wasn’t asking for a lot—five minutes of reminiscing—but it felt all sorts of ways malapropos. Grace had mourned and dealt with her shit in her own way, and she resented her mother’s demand that she now invest a little more effort. And then there was the simple cruelness of it, like a diabolical child who delighted in ripping off other people’s scabs.
44
Hope was back in her room, the curtains drawn. Mommy had been very specific about where Grace should and shouldn’t spend the evening: not upstairs in her bedroom (because she might not hear if Hope needed anything); not in Hope’s room (because her sister’s immune system was fragile and the last thing she needed was Grace’s cooties—not her mother’s exact words). That left the living room and the kitchen.
Grace washed their supper dishes, one eye on the blackness beyond the small window. She hated how early it got dark in the winter. It looked like midnight, but it was just after six. Everything about being alone in the house was worse when the sun wasn’t shining. The gloom settled around her like something stiff and scratchy, and Grace privately acknowledged that the problem wasn’t that Mommy wasn’t home; Grace was afraid of the dark. It didn’t help that their stupid old house had high ceilings with stupid little light fixtures that barely illuminated the rooms. In winter, the rooms shrank into shadows, leaving only glowing islands of safety.
Her birthday wasn’t for another six weeks, but she decided then and there that she was going to ask for a lamp as her gift. And not a desk lamp (she didn’t have a desk), but something with a big fancy lampshade that could handle a high-wattage bulb. She snorted and laughed, imagining herself carrying it from room to room, plugging it in, switching it on. Her mother might scoff, call it a daft request, but Grace would remind her that she was going to be twelve and a lamp was practical (mature) and a better use of money than the name-brand makeup Hope would beg for. She saw a vision of them, six weeks in the future—
Hope leaning into the glow of the birthday lamp as Grace applied her sister’s makeup, per Hope’s exact instructions. And then her sister would say, “Just try on some eye shadow,” and Grace would look at herself in the mirror and dab a little on each eye. So in the end, both of the gifts would be for both of them.
With the dishes neatly stacked by the sink to dry, Grace scanned the rest of the room, looking for anything out of order. She winced, spotting the splotches of tomato soup on the floor and table. On the one hand, Grace understood why Hope wanted to try and do more things on her own—like feeding herself—but Hope was never the one to clean up the mess. Grace got on her knees with some wet paper towels. She couldn’t leave a single speck of evidence that Hope had left her bed and come into the kitchen for supper. Mommy didn’t need to know how they bent the rules, and Grace would be the one to get in trouble even though her only crime was caving to Hope’s demands.
“Grace!”
Before responding to her sister, Grace double-checked that the kitchen was as it should be—as Mommy would want to find it when she got home.
Grace slipped past the decorative curtain and sighed. This was the exact kind of night—cold and dark—when all she wanted was to make a fort of Hope’s room and stay in there with her all night. Not only did Hope have a lamp on the card table beside her bed, but she also had a space heater. The lamp was ugly with a body like a lump of painted lava, but it was bright, and her room was by far the warmest. Hope needed these things, the extra light and warmth, so she could manage better when using her commode chair and be more comfortable when having a sponge bath (when they didn’t feel like carrying her upstairs to the bathroom). The card table had enough room for the medical stuff Hope needed when she was sick and the books and fashion magazines she liked to keep near at hand.