Authors: Denise Mathew
“Oh there you are Marilyn. We’ve been worried sick. After everything that’s happened already the last thing your mother needs is added stress,” Harold said. He wagged his finger at me. I stared back at him incredulously. I guess being diagnosed with a life threatening illness wasn’t enough to garner any sympathy. Obviously in Harold’s opinion all the attention went to my melodramatic mother.
“I…” I started to say. A lump formed in my throat so rapidly that I couldn’t utter a word in my defense. He closed the distance between us, raking his hand through his thinning dark hair. Although there was not much left on his head, what was there, had been dyed black, according to Mom’s specifications. The last thing she could cope with was Harold’s grey hair. It was a wonder that she hadn’t already hooked him up with a hair transplant doctor since she couldn’t stand bald men either. I wondered if that sentiment held for bald daughters too. I tried to swallow but it seemed impossible, so I stared blankly at him.
“I’m going to bring her in now. I expect you to be on your best behavior.”
“Me?” The word came out in a squeak. Once again I couldn’t believe that Mom had hijacked a time in my life where I should have been the one supported, not the other way around.
Harold laid his delicate hand on my shoulder. I recognized the pity in his gaze and it almost unhinged me. Yet I knew that whatever sympathy he felt for me would never supersede his commitment to his Luanne. The way he hovered over her made me think that he was actually grateful that she had married him.
“You know your mother. She doesn’t do well with bad news. Try to understand.”
“I’ll try Harold but did you forget that I’m the one who has cancer not Mom?” The word cancer caught in my throat. I fought to hold back the tears ready to overflow. He stared back at me. I knew by his expression of resignation that I didn’t have a snowballs chance in Hades of making him see that I deserved as much care as Mom did. I shrugged. What else could I do?
“She just needs time,” Harold said. He released an extended sigh. “I’m going to get her now. Dr. John gave her a sedative, so she’s going right up to bed.”
He turned and moved toward the door. When he did I couldn’t help but notice that his usually crisp button down white shirt was uncharacteristically rumpled, and one tail dangled over the back of his black wool slacks. Oddly in some strange way his slightly disheveled appearance made me feel like he was actually as thrown by my diagnosis as I was.
Minutes later, Harold returned with Mom. If it was possible to cling to someone who was six inches shorter than you and still manage to appear frail, Mom did. Her bleached blonde hair was in an atypical tangle. Her mascara was a mass of scraggly black trails on her cheeks and her lipstick was smudged all around her lips. I’d seen her have more than her fair share of emotional meltdowns, usually over trivial things like a bad haircut or when she’d broken a nail. I’d never seen her quite as bad as she looked right then.
She glanced over at me with her watery bloodshot eyes then dabbed at her nose with a crumpled pink tissue. I was sure it was from her personal stash. She always had tissues available since she cried at just about anything, maybe even a stop sign. Of course in her world tissues always had to be colored and scented.
“My poor baby,” Mom wailed. She waved a hand weakly, as if it was too much effort to reach for me.
“Now, now Luanne, she’ll be all right,” Harold said. Mom buried her head in his shoulder and once again I was struck by how strange they looked together, like an Amazon warrior and a gnome.
“Damn,” I breathed.
Mom broke into a fresh set of hysterics. I did the only thing I could, I tore up to my bedroom. When I pushed into my room, a place that I had used as a refuge more times than I could remember, where I’d always felt safe, it was suddenly too pink and fluffy. I couldn’t understand how everything could be so artificially cheery when my whole world had fallen apart. I wanted to rip the petal pink and lilac duvet off my four poster bed and burn it. In fact I wanted to torch the whole place because the decor wasn’t even my style, it signified that once again I’d given in to Mom’s dreams. I’d always been the perfect and dutiful daughter, always attempting to make everyone happy. And look how that had turned out for me.
Since I could remember I’d lived my whole life by a code that said that it was my job to make sure that I was perfect in every way possible. Now none of that mattered. Not one moment of my time spent on the Prom committee or my hours studying for tests to bring up my GPA, could do anything to change that I had cancer, and I might never make it to my eighteenth birthday.
2. Jax
Sirens pealed and flashing lights strobed through my bedroom window. It was time to get up. Years before, I’d stopped wondering who’d been shot, killed or mugged on the sidewalk below our apartment building. There was nothing I could do about it. Police lines, blood on the sidewalk and chalk drawings were just another day of life on the Strip.
“Jackson? Are you up yet dear?” Gran yelled.
She was the only person in the world who still called me Jackson, my full name. To everyone else I was just Jax.
I stared at the red numbers on the clock and groaned. 6:00 am. was downright inhuman. My head ached and my eyes were sandy with sleep. Three hours of z’s just didn’t cut it after a long night of sets at the dive of a bar that my band did gigs at. I knew the only reason why we’d been hired was because we were the cheapest act in town, but I didn’t let that little fact get me down. It was a place to play, even though the smoke that saturated the space seemed to cling to every part of my body for days after. It didn’t matter how many times I showered and changed my clothes, I always smelled like a burning cigarette or at least I thought I did.
“Yeah Gran,” I said, throwing my bedspread off. It was supposed to be my day off, a rare occasion when I didn’t have to work at my paying job at the retro record store called Vinyl. Unfortunately I’d had a moment of weakness and had agreed to do a shift at my non-paying job at St. Martins Hospital for Children. A choice I was already beginning to regret.
I sat at the side of the bed like I did every day, taking a second to stare down at the track marks on my arms and the tattoos that were slowly covering them. I stood up, moving to the cracked window in my bedroom that faced the street. From the look outside it was going to be another shitty day of rain. That meant I was going to get drenched in a few seconds flat, probably as soon as I stepped out the door to go to work.
I hiked up my boxers, pulled a wrinkled Led Zepplin t-shirt over my head and strode down the hall of the two bedroom apartment that Gran and I shared. The scuffed beige linoleum was cold on my bare feet. I knew if Gran caught me without my socks on again she’d skin me alive, literally. I chuckled to myself, thinking that an old woman as skinny as a stick and only half my height, scared most of my so called
tough
friends into submission.
She just had to give them a look, one that said just try and mess with her, and she’d set you and your world right. But as tough as Gran could be she also had a soft side, like gooey marshmallow, and all my friends loved her for it. Gran loved to take care of people and she usually never picked a fight unless, in her opinion, it was warranted. Like if I skipped a meal or went out in the winter without a hat. Major offenses in her opinion were ones that involved the possibility of someone getting sick. In her youth Gran had been a nurse and had seen too much sickness and death not to worry about people.
“The bacon and eggs are already on the table, the toast is coming,” Gran said without turning around. She was positioned in front of the two burner hotplate, bobby-pinned curls covered every part of her bluish-grey hair as usual. It was Gran’s ritual to put her hair up every night in pin curls.
“Bacon, what’s the occasion?” I said, tugging one of the metal and plastic chairs out from under the wooden table. Bacon was expensive and as far as we were concerned, a luxury reserved for special times. But as soon as I’d said the words I remembered that it was four years already since…
I grinned. “You have a memory like an elephant,” I said.
Gran spun around quicker than I’d expected. She shook a spatula my way. A wide smile spread across her face, putting even more creases at the corners of her eyes and showcasing her pearly white dentures. So far all her teeth were intact since she hadn’t dropped her dentures in the sink yet. Gran had snapped more teeth off her dentures than I thought possible. It was an odd experience to see her with a perfect set, how long that would last was anybodies guess.
“And because it’s such a special day I want to turn the cards for you,” she said, giving me the beady eye.
I heaved out a huge sigh. Before I could protest she cut in.
“Please Jackson, just do it for me this once, it won’t take but a minute.” Her blue eyes twinkled in a way that I couldn’t resist. I shook my head and shrugged.
“Fine, but it has to be quick I have to work at the hospital today…” I started to say.
Gran passed me a few slices of buttered toast. She placed an arthritic hand on her waist. “I didn’t think you were working there today.”
“I wasn’t supposed to be but…they were kind of stuck so I offered.” I stuffed a fork full of fried eggs into my mouth and bit off a piece of toast.
“Jackson you’re too good, you work yourself to the bone…” she started to say but then seemed to reconsider. Her voice trailed off. “I know, I know…I just worry that you’re working yourself too hard, I couldn’t bare it if you got sick…” she said before I’d said a word. Sudden and unexpected tears shimmered in her eyes and seeing her like that made me swallow a few times more than was necessary to get my food down.
I couldn’t help but remember how much I’d put her through over the past few years. I wished with all my being that I could take away her fear that she would somehow lose me. But I knew I couldn’t, she’d seen me at my worst and she knew. Sadly once you knew something there was no way to un-know it. Desperate to divert the conversation away from a time in our lives that neither of us wanted to recall, I did the only thing I could, I bit the bitter bullet.
“So are you going to do my cards or not?” I said, shoveling more food into my already stuffed mouth. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but if Gran reading my cards meant that she’d get some sort of peace about my future, then it was the least I could do.
As expected Gran jumped on the offer. The tears that had filled her eyes miraculously dried up. She was up and off to our poor excuse for a living room in a flash. She moved toward the one piece of furniture that she’d kept from our old house. A hand carved teak armoire that my grandfather had built for her, not long after they’d been married. The piece was almost fifty years old and it was the one bit of memorabilia that Gran had managed to hold on to over the years. My grandfather had died from a massive stroke when I was too small to really remember him. From what Gran had told me about him, he’d been a great man who’d done everything he could to take care of his family.
Gran said that I was the spitting image of him, only a Goth version. I laughed because it was funny that Gran called me Goth, something I wasn’t even close to. As far as Gran was concerned anyone with tattoos, of which I had two sleeves, was Goth. Although lately she’d taken to calling me Emo, obviously a word she’d heard somewhere. I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that Emo wasn’t actually my style either, since my hair was too short and I didn’t sweep it to the side to cover one eye like a twisted Cyclops.
Sure I had shoe black dyed hair and piercings, but I didn’t have enough to rate, not to mention that I hated Screamo music. It also didn’t matter to Gran that I was the lead singer in a three man band that played cover pop music, that was so far from Emo. She had no idea that those two types of music resided in different zip codes. The bottom line was that I preferred not to be labeled. I was just Jax and with the crap that I’d lived through, being just me was more than enough.
Gran eased out the third drawer of the armoire. She pulled out a dark wooden box with a brass inlay of the Eye of Horus that she kept her tarot cards in. Gran was what people called a sensitive, intuitive, or the name she hated the most, a psychic. Whatever you wanted to call her, Gran told people’s fortunes. For the most part she did it for fun and didn’t charge, but if people insisted that they pay her she never took money. Instead she usually did a trade for something else, like a gift card or a dozen eggs or pretty much anything someone wanted to give her. The oddest thing that she’d gotten was a brass thing that looked like a miniature birdbath with a spike coming out of the center. Neither Gran or I knew what it was, even so she had it on display with all her other knick knacks. Something Gran had a crap load of.
After she slid the drawer closed, she ran a hand over the ornately carved front panels of the armoire. I’d seen her do that more times than I could count, as if she were somehow caressing a living person not an inanimate piece of furniture. Every time Gran touched the armoire, a dreamy expression crossed her face and for just a second. I knew she was remembering my grandfather Pat and the life that they’d had together. Watching her like that made me never want to love anyone that much, because I knew more than anyone else that death was always waiting for us especially when we least expected it.
Before Gran came back I cleared my dishes from the table and put them in the sink, already filled with warm soapy water. I picked up the scrub and started washing the dishes.
“Jackson leave those alone, I’ll do them later. Come here and shuffle the cards before it’s time to go to work…”