Good Girl : An Enemies-to-Lovers, Roommate Romance (Alphahole Roommates Book 2), page 37
I pull her up into my arms and tip her chin up.
“It’s gonna be okay.”
No tears, just a vacant expression. She’s been through trauma. It hasn’t hit her fully yet. She stares at my face blankly, blinking slowly for a minute before she shrugs.
“They took so long to come and I just… I just sat here at this table drinking cup after cup of crappy coffee.”
“You should’ve called me,” I say, cupping her jaw.
She frowns and backs away from me, staring at me like she can’t figure something out.
She shivers. Her teeth chatter.
“You need sleep,” I say, taking a step closer and touching her face. She’s cold.
She shakes her head, but doesn’t back away this time.
“Try.”
“I have so much to do. I have to talk to the doctor and see about telling Shane. I called and I’m waiting for the doctor to call me back. I don’t even know if I should tell him…until he’s stronger. I told him – Dad, I mean – I told him I had to be here because the first week there’s a big chance of another stroke. And we got past that week. I asked him to tell me how he was feeling and he just kept saying he was fine and bitching me out when I tried to stop him from doing things his doctor told him not to do. But I knew he wasn’t fine. He kept holding his head, like he had headaches. He kept lying when I would ask. I could tell he wasn’t feeling good, that he was ignoring that. He tried to kick me out like… four times while I was here and I refused to leave. I even yelled at him a couple times. I’ve never yelled at him.”
“Baby…”
“Except… then I went out again yesterday, because he was being crabby and I wanted to go to my writing workshop and it was only a couple hours, then Raven wanted to go for coffee and Andrew showed and… I only stayed for half an hour but what if I was here instead of out for coffee with people?”
“This isn’t your fault.”
“I didn’t know what to do. I sat here day after day with him and he barely spoke to me. He’d just stare at that TV. Or tell me to leave. And it’s been over a week, so I thought… I thought that… I didn’t think going out for a few hours that he’d be gone when I came back. He even insisted he was going back to work Monday. He just… he had no intentions of changing a single thing about his lifestyle to make sure he didn’t kill himself. He kept smoking, kept drinking, kept eating garbage food just coated in salt, and…”
“It’s okay. Come on. Let’s sit down.”
“I can’t. I have to call his job.”
“I’ll do that. What’s the number?”
“And I have to make funeral arrangements. I have to go get clothes for him for the … I don’t know what arrangements he wants. I don’t know what his wishes are, I don’t know any of that. And my brother… I can’t… will my brother even be able to come to his father’s funeral? He’s being moved to a new hospital today, a place where he can finally get some help.”
She heads out of the kitchen and I follow her up the stairs.
We get to the top of the stairs and go left to a bedroom. There’s a banister all the way around with two bedrooms on one side of the staircase, one bedroom and a bathroom on the other. A window straight ahead looking out at the street.
We walk into the dark room. She flicks the light on. The room is dusty. Smells like an ashtray. There’s an almost overflowing ashtray on the table beside the bed with a package of cigarettes and a blue Bic lighter.
Smoking in bed. I shake my head at that.
The king-size bed takes up most of the room other than a dresser. She puts her hand on the closet doorknob and holds it.
“I never go in here. It’s always been the rule. I haven’t opened it since I was a kid and got yelled at for it. But I’ll need to take clothes to them for the funeral … he’s in his pajamas. I need to get out his suit.”
She stands there just holding the knob. Clearly she doesn’t want to open that door.
“Sit down. I’ll get it.”
“Why are you here, Austin?” she asks.
“Jada.” My voice and my face must betray my emotions. I feel like they do, but she stares at me blankly.
“I have to do it.” She turns away and twists the doorknob, but it takes a good minute before she finally pulls, like she’s mentally preparing to do something that’s expressly forbidden.
“Sweetheart, I can do it for you.”
“I have to do it,” she whispers and pulls it the rest of the way open.
It’s a stuffed to the brim standard clothing closet with boxes on the floor and on the shelf above the hanging rod.
Jada stares blankly and then starts flicking through the hanging clothes.
“He kept everything,” she whispers, flipping through women’s clothes. “My mom has been gone since I was a kid. She took a suitcase and that was it. I watched out the front window up here and saw her cross the street with that floral carpet suitcase. The rest of it’s still here.” She holds onto an orange and green floral sleeve and examines it for a long beat before she lets go of it and pulls out a dark suit under clear dry-cleaning wrap, a yellowed receipt on it making it obvious it was dry-cleaned and stored a long time ago.
She lays it across the bed and then pulls out a white shirt and a dark tie and puts them on the bed as well.
She pulls open a dresser drawer and hauls out a white t-shirt. Another drawer. Men’s briefs. Another: dark socks.
“I’ll have to look for his good shoes. You know, even doing his laundry I could put everything away except what needed to go in there. He never wanted me in there. I had to lay the stuff to be hung on the bed.”
She’s then flipping through papers in an off-white file folder that she’s pulled out of the sock drawer.
“Last will and testament of Richard Miller. He did one of those will kits. At least there’s that.”
She takes the stack of paper and sits on the foot of the bed beside the clothing and starts leafing through it.
I sit beside her.
“He had a life insurance policy. A little more than enough to cover the funeral, I guess.” She flips the page over. “I’m beneficiary.”
She’s flicking through more papers, confusion etched between her eyes, then she stops.
“What?” she whispers, then a horrible sound comes from her mouth, like it’s been yanked out of her. Papers flutter to the carpet in front of us.
I lean over and lift them, seeing an old newspaper clipping from the Connecticut Post stapled to other newspaper clippings.
The headline reads,
Jane Doe hit by car. Do you know this woman?
Underneath the stack of paper clippings, there’s a death certificate.
“Lindsay Ann Miller?” I say.
She takes it from me. Her fingers are trembling. She shakes her head while she reads.
I put my hand on the back of her neck and squeeze gently.
“Baby,” I whisper.
“Two years later. Two years? Why didn’t he tell us?”
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” I squat in front of her.
She folds over and rocks a little, headbutting my chin, but she doesn’t even realize it. She’s suddenly sobbing.
“I thought she left and didn’t care. He let us think she just left and never gave us another thought.” She looks up at me, tears streaming. “Why?”
I stare at her, how broken she is, watching tears fall from her eyes and a fist clenches inside my chest.
“Why?” she pleads, staring at the mess of papers on the floor. She covers her face and sobs.
I scoop her up into my arms and carry her out of there. I come to the door of the next room, open it, and it’s a room filled with stuff, including boxes piled on a bed, so I move along, past the front window, around to the other side of the upper floor and find the next door open. I carry her in there. Her face is buried in my shirt and she’s shaking, crying, clutching her biceps, trying to fold into herself.
It’s obviously her room. Pink and purple floral wallpaper on one wall, the other walls painted lavender. A single bed with a purple comforter. An empty doll cradle in the corner. I sit on the bed and continue to cradle her close. She sobs into my chest some more, eyes shut tight, like she can’t bear anything as she holds onto my shirt. I kick my shoes off and lay down with her, holding her close to me.
Jada cries for a good ten minutes while I stroke her hair. She’s still clutching my shirt and it’s soaked with tears. After a while, the sobbing slows to broken breaths. That goes on for a while and then her breathing evens out. She’s cried herself to sleep against me.
I shake my head with dismay, sadness. Seeing her cry, I felt the pain coming at me with a ferocity I’ll never forget. I’ve never felt such suffering looking at someone else suffer before and I hated how powerless I felt to do anything to take it away. Fuck, I want to take this away so much.
I lie with her for at least half an hour holding her, ruminating, before I slide out carefully and cover her up.
I head across the hallway and lift all the papers from the floor and bed, try to organize them for her. There’s a sealed envelope with “Jada” printed on it in blue capital letters.
I take the file folder downstairs and set it on the kitchen table, looking around at the place she grew up.
It hasn’t seen a coat of paint in decades. The furniture is old. Out back there’s a rusted swing set and some old trash bins. The place is surrounded by a rusted old chain link fence. There’s a covered car in the driveway behind an at least fifteen-year-old Ford Ranger pickup. The front bumper is hanging off.
The neighborhood is filled with similar houses, but this house has zero curb appeal compared to what’s on either side and across the street. Some little houses, some bigger ones, but all but this one with landscaping, character, care.
The place has no personality, no character. Jada Miller was not raised in a house filled with love. This place… it makes me fucking sad to imagine her being a child in a place like this.
Even if my childhood was less than perfect, it was a metric fuck-ton better than this. And I’m not talking about the fact that it’s an old, run-down house. Suki’s sister’s house isn’t much different, even smaller and older than this, but it’s filled with love. Everything about it when you walk in lets you know that.
This place isn’t like that.
And yet this girl is warm, giving, caring.
I think about her taking care of the father who wouldn’t let her move in when she was evicted because he was pissed off at his son. He left his kids’ bedrooms empty when he could’ve given them shelter. I think about her trying to look after her brother because nobody else would and the guy was incapable of taking care of himself. It put her life and her dreams on hold. She talked to me about how her father didn’t believe in mental illness or getting treatment. I think about Jada growing up without the warmth of a mother but yet still being sweet with my niece and nephew.
I think about her up there sleeping now after sitting here all fucking night alone with her father’s body waiting for him to get picked up and not calling anybody to come be here with her, for her.
And that especially - it pisses me the fuck off.
I think about her being at my brother’s condo because she had nowhere to go and there I was treating her like she was worthless, making her practically beg to stay and cook and clean up after my privileged ass.
And then I fucked with her feelings by being a selfish asshole who couldn’t give her anything besides sex games. And even that I fucked up with vacillating between hot and cold with her.
I look at the notepad on the table at notes she’s made about her brother. Legal resources. Doctors. Names that look like medications. I slide my finger across the touchpad on her laptop and a browser window comes to life. A local funeral home’s website, their ‘contact us’ page.
I grind my teeth thinking about the burden she has right now and my behavior for the past month.
I guess this is that come-to-Jesus moment she talked about.
Her cell phone rings and it says it’s Dr. T Lexington calling. I answer.
I fill her in about Jada’s parents and her concerns about talking to her brother.
And then I call the funeral home page she has on the screen and make an appointment for her for Monday morning.
After that, I phone my sister who says she’ll also phone our sister-in-law to be on standby for Jada.
“Austin, are you and Jada a couple?” Adele asks.
“Yes,” I say. “As soon as I tell her that we are.”
“Explain,” Adele demands.
“I’ve been a dick. I’m finished being a dick and now I’m gonna be here for her through this trauma and when I get the opportunity, I’ll be telling her we’re a couple.”
“What’s that gonna mean for-”
“I don’t know anything about what it’ll mean for anything right now. Right now, Jada is the priority. She’s all that matters right now. I’ll figure everything else out later.”
“Good enough. Call me when you have the details for the funeral.”
51
Jada
I wake up disoriented. Was that a dream?
No. No, it wasn’t.
My dad died. My dad died and my mom died. My mom died a long time ago, but it feels like it just happened.
And I’m so numb about it, and so close to being on the verge of angry at Dad, but more than angry, I’m really, really sad.
I haven’t been able to remember much about her for a long time, it’s all felt so foggy – any memories I have of her, but right now I feel like I remember a little more.
I remember her in that floral dress I saw today. I remember her smiling while wearing it, her face under a floppy hat with sunglasses and lipstick on and we were laughing, sitting under a tree on a picnic blanket. And Dad was playing catch with Shane.
Mom had on big hoop earrings. She took me the next day to get my ears pierced and my dad lost it when I came home teary eyed with pink lobes. He was so angry with her for doing that to my ears without talking to him first.
And then she left. She left just days later and no one noticed I got an ear infection because they were still healing and Mom wasn’t there to put the rubbing alcohol on them.
Dad noticed when I started crying about it in bed and he had to dig the earring out of my swollen earlobe while I bawled my eyes out.
He was so angry about that, about my mother piercing my ears and then leaving him, leaving me so I’d get an infection and him having to deal with it.
Pain assaults me. Not physical pain. A pain I can’t describe. A hollowness in my chest, in my fingers. Numbness, maybe. I don’t know.
Why didn’t he tell us?
I’m reeling.
And still… she didn’t die days or even weeks after she left.
What was she doing that two years without us? She didn’t come home for two years. Would she have done it eventually if she’d never been hit by a car and killed?
I’ll never know.
Other memories assault my brain rapid-fire and most of them are of her being sad. Out of order, some when I’m really small, some just before she left. Memories of her sometimes crying. Memories of me trying to talk to her while she was in bed and she wouldn’t answer. Sometimes staring into space when I was trying to talk to her in the kitchen, like I was invisible and she couldn’t hear me. Sometimes she was shouting at Dad and him just staring at the TV and ignoring her. Him ignoring her, her ignoring me. Shane upstairs drawing on his walls or drawing on his skin with sewing needle punctures done in shapes, sometimes words, even though he’d get the belt for it later. Memories of Shane’s arm bleeding because he wrote the word DAM on it with a razor. And when it was angled the other way I knew he didn’t just put a bad word, he put MAD. Because he was angry.
Dad screaming that if she wanted to go, she wasn’t taking us with her off into LaLa land. And him saying something about her taking too many of those ‘damn pills’. Her laughing and saying without the pills she wasn’t happy.
She didn’t say goodbye.
She just left.
And I wanted to go live in LaLa Land, too.
And another memory. Coming home alone after Shane got suspended and I walked in and found Dad sitting at the table drinking booze out of the big bottle and his eyes were red. Like he’d been crying. But I’d never seen him cry and he didn’t say anything, so I thought maybe he wasn’t crying, just feeling sick.
Shane was in his room, sent to bed without dinner, and I snuck him a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich after I made one for me. He told me Dad didn’t even hit him for getting in trouble. Dad always walloped him when he was out of line, either across the butt with the belt or as he got older, across the back of the head with an open-handed slap.
He didn’t get punished for getting suspended for cussing out a teacher after getting a bad grade. Just got picked up from school and told to go to his room. And then Dad started drinking.
Maybe that was the day he found out about Mom.
I don’t know.
I need answers. I deserve answers.
But I won’t get them, will I?
Did he bury her? Does my mom have a grave? Does Dad visit it and put flowers on it on her birthday?
When was her birthday? I can’t remember. March 12? Maybe?
All we had besides Dad was my Aunt Jade, Dad’s much older sister. Mom was estranged from her family; we’d never met them. I wish Aunt Jade were here so I could ask her more questions. Did she know about what happened to my mom? I need to talk to my cousin, Darlene.
Darlene’s dad was Dad’s brother, and he died of leukemia when she was little. Dar spent time with Aunt Jade, too.
I go to the bathroom and take a shower. After I’m dressed, I’m back in my father’s room, looking through the closet at my mother’s clothes with memories assaulting me with almost every article of fabric I touch. Memories of her that I’d forgotten. Most of them are sad memories. Memories where she was there but I felt like I wasn’t because she was in her own world and it was like I wasn’t there.
I find a photo album.
“It’s gonna be okay.”
No tears, just a vacant expression. She’s been through trauma. It hasn’t hit her fully yet. She stares at my face blankly, blinking slowly for a minute before she shrugs.
“They took so long to come and I just… I just sat here at this table drinking cup after cup of crappy coffee.”
“You should’ve called me,” I say, cupping her jaw.
She frowns and backs away from me, staring at me like she can’t figure something out.
She shivers. Her teeth chatter.
“You need sleep,” I say, taking a step closer and touching her face. She’s cold.
She shakes her head, but doesn’t back away this time.
“Try.”
“I have so much to do. I have to talk to the doctor and see about telling Shane. I called and I’m waiting for the doctor to call me back. I don’t even know if I should tell him…until he’s stronger. I told him – Dad, I mean – I told him I had to be here because the first week there’s a big chance of another stroke. And we got past that week. I asked him to tell me how he was feeling and he just kept saying he was fine and bitching me out when I tried to stop him from doing things his doctor told him not to do. But I knew he wasn’t fine. He kept holding his head, like he had headaches. He kept lying when I would ask. I could tell he wasn’t feeling good, that he was ignoring that. He tried to kick me out like… four times while I was here and I refused to leave. I even yelled at him a couple times. I’ve never yelled at him.”
“Baby…”
“Except… then I went out again yesterday, because he was being crabby and I wanted to go to my writing workshop and it was only a couple hours, then Raven wanted to go for coffee and Andrew showed and… I only stayed for half an hour but what if I was here instead of out for coffee with people?”
“This isn’t your fault.”
“I didn’t know what to do. I sat here day after day with him and he barely spoke to me. He’d just stare at that TV. Or tell me to leave. And it’s been over a week, so I thought… I thought that… I didn’t think going out for a few hours that he’d be gone when I came back. He even insisted he was going back to work Monday. He just… he had no intentions of changing a single thing about his lifestyle to make sure he didn’t kill himself. He kept smoking, kept drinking, kept eating garbage food just coated in salt, and…”
“It’s okay. Come on. Let’s sit down.”
“I can’t. I have to call his job.”
“I’ll do that. What’s the number?”
“And I have to make funeral arrangements. I have to go get clothes for him for the … I don’t know what arrangements he wants. I don’t know what his wishes are, I don’t know any of that. And my brother… I can’t… will my brother even be able to come to his father’s funeral? He’s being moved to a new hospital today, a place where he can finally get some help.”
She heads out of the kitchen and I follow her up the stairs.
We get to the top of the stairs and go left to a bedroom. There’s a banister all the way around with two bedrooms on one side of the staircase, one bedroom and a bathroom on the other. A window straight ahead looking out at the street.
We walk into the dark room. She flicks the light on. The room is dusty. Smells like an ashtray. There’s an almost overflowing ashtray on the table beside the bed with a package of cigarettes and a blue Bic lighter.
Smoking in bed. I shake my head at that.
The king-size bed takes up most of the room other than a dresser. She puts her hand on the closet doorknob and holds it.
“I never go in here. It’s always been the rule. I haven’t opened it since I was a kid and got yelled at for it. But I’ll need to take clothes to them for the funeral … he’s in his pajamas. I need to get out his suit.”
She stands there just holding the knob. Clearly she doesn’t want to open that door.
“Sit down. I’ll get it.”
“Why are you here, Austin?” she asks.
“Jada.” My voice and my face must betray my emotions. I feel like they do, but she stares at me blankly.
“I have to do it.” She turns away and twists the doorknob, but it takes a good minute before she finally pulls, like she’s mentally preparing to do something that’s expressly forbidden.
“Sweetheart, I can do it for you.”
“I have to do it,” she whispers and pulls it the rest of the way open.
It’s a stuffed to the brim standard clothing closet with boxes on the floor and on the shelf above the hanging rod.
Jada stares blankly and then starts flicking through the hanging clothes.
“He kept everything,” she whispers, flipping through women’s clothes. “My mom has been gone since I was a kid. She took a suitcase and that was it. I watched out the front window up here and saw her cross the street with that floral carpet suitcase. The rest of it’s still here.” She holds onto an orange and green floral sleeve and examines it for a long beat before she lets go of it and pulls out a dark suit under clear dry-cleaning wrap, a yellowed receipt on it making it obvious it was dry-cleaned and stored a long time ago.
She lays it across the bed and then pulls out a white shirt and a dark tie and puts them on the bed as well.
She pulls open a dresser drawer and hauls out a white t-shirt. Another drawer. Men’s briefs. Another: dark socks.
“I’ll have to look for his good shoes. You know, even doing his laundry I could put everything away except what needed to go in there. He never wanted me in there. I had to lay the stuff to be hung on the bed.”
She’s then flipping through papers in an off-white file folder that she’s pulled out of the sock drawer.
“Last will and testament of Richard Miller. He did one of those will kits. At least there’s that.”
She takes the stack of paper and sits on the foot of the bed beside the clothing and starts leafing through it.
I sit beside her.
“He had a life insurance policy. A little more than enough to cover the funeral, I guess.” She flips the page over. “I’m beneficiary.”
She’s flicking through more papers, confusion etched between her eyes, then she stops.
“What?” she whispers, then a horrible sound comes from her mouth, like it’s been yanked out of her. Papers flutter to the carpet in front of us.
I lean over and lift them, seeing an old newspaper clipping from the Connecticut Post stapled to other newspaper clippings.
The headline reads,
Jane Doe hit by car. Do you know this woman?
Underneath the stack of paper clippings, there’s a death certificate.
“Lindsay Ann Miller?” I say.
She takes it from me. Her fingers are trembling. She shakes her head while she reads.
I put my hand on the back of her neck and squeeze gently.
“Baby,” I whisper.
“Two years later. Two years? Why didn’t he tell us?”
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” I squat in front of her.
She folds over and rocks a little, headbutting my chin, but she doesn’t even realize it. She’s suddenly sobbing.
“I thought she left and didn’t care. He let us think she just left and never gave us another thought.” She looks up at me, tears streaming. “Why?”
I stare at her, how broken she is, watching tears fall from her eyes and a fist clenches inside my chest.
“Why?” she pleads, staring at the mess of papers on the floor. She covers her face and sobs.
I scoop her up into my arms and carry her out of there. I come to the door of the next room, open it, and it’s a room filled with stuff, including boxes piled on a bed, so I move along, past the front window, around to the other side of the upper floor and find the next door open. I carry her in there. Her face is buried in my shirt and she’s shaking, crying, clutching her biceps, trying to fold into herself.
It’s obviously her room. Pink and purple floral wallpaper on one wall, the other walls painted lavender. A single bed with a purple comforter. An empty doll cradle in the corner. I sit on the bed and continue to cradle her close. She sobs into my chest some more, eyes shut tight, like she can’t bear anything as she holds onto my shirt. I kick my shoes off and lay down with her, holding her close to me.
Jada cries for a good ten minutes while I stroke her hair. She’s still clutching my shirt and it’s soaked with tears. After a while, the sobbing slows to broken breaths. That goes on for a while and then her breathing evens out. She’s cried herself to sleep against me.
I shake my head with dismay, sadness. Seeing her cry, I felt the pain coming at me with a ferocity I’ll never forget. I’ve never felt such suffering looking at someone else suffer before and I hated how powerless I felt to do anything to take it away. Fuck, I want to take this away so much.
I lie with her for at least half an hour holding her, ruminating, before I slide out carefully and cover her up.
I head across the hallway and lift all the papers from the floor and bed, try to organize them for her. There’s a sealed envelope with “Jada” printed on it in blue capital letters.
I take the file folder downstairs and set it on the kitchen table, looking around at the place she grew up.
It hasn’t seen a coat of paint in decades. The furniture is old. Out back there’s a rusted swing set and some old trash bins. The place is surrounded by a rusted old chain link fence. There’s a covered car in the driveway behind an at least fifteen-year-old Ford Ranger pickup. The front bumper is hanging off.
The neighborhood is filled with similar houses, but this house has zero curb appeal compared to what’s on either side and across the street. Some little houses, some bigger ones, but all but this one with landscaping, character, care.
The place has no personality, no character. Jada Miller was not raised in a house filled with love. This place… it makes me fucking sad to imagine her being a child in a place like this.
Even if my childhood was less than perfect, it was a metric fuck-ton better than this. And I’m not talking about the fact that it’s an old, run-down house. Suki’s sister’s house isn’t much different, even smaller and older than this, but it’s filled with love. Everything about it when you walk in lets you know that.
This place isn’t like that.
And yet this girl is warm, giving, caring.
I think about her taking care of the father who wouldn’t let her move in when she was evicted because he was pissed off at his son. He left his kids’ bedrooms empty when he could’ve given them shelter. I think about her trying to look after her brother because nobody else would and the guy was incapable of taking care of himself. It put her life and her dreams on hold. She talked to me about how her father didn’t believe in mental illness or getting treatment. I think about Jada growing up without the warmth of a mother but yet still being sweet with my niece and nephew.
I think about her up there sleeping now after sitting here all fucking night alone with her father’s body waiting for him to get picked up and not calling anybody to come be here with her, for her.
And that especially - it pisses me the fuck off.
I think about her being at my brother’s condo because she had nowhere to go and there I was treating her like she was worthless, making her practically beg to stay and cook and clean up after my privileged ass.
And then I fucked with her feelings by being a selfish asshole who couldn’t give her anything besides sex games. And even that I fucked up with vacillating between hot and cold with her.
I look at the notepad on the table at notes she’s made about her brother. Legal resources. Doctors. Names that look like medications. I slide my finger across the touchpad on her laptop and a browser window comes to life. A local funeral home’s website, their ‘contact us’ page.
I grind my teeth thinking about the burden she has right now and my behavior for the past month.
I guess this is that come-to-Jesus moment she talked about.
Her cell phone rings and it says it’s Dr. T Lexington calling. I answer.
I fill her in about Jada’s parents and her concerns about talking to her brother.
And then I call the funeral home page she has on the screen and make an appointment for her for Monday morning.
After that, I phone my sister who says she’ll also phone our sister-in-law to be on standby for Jada.
“Austin, are you and Jada a couple?” Adele asks.
“Yes,” I say. “As soon as I tell her that we are.”
“Explain,” Adele demands.
“I’ve been a dick. I’m finished being a dick and now I’m gonna be here for her through this trauma and when I get the opportunity, I’ll be telling her we’re a couple.”
“What’s that gonna mean for-”
“I don’t know anything about what it’ll mean for anything right now. Right now, Jada is the priority. She’s all that matters right now. I’ll figure everything else out later.”
“Good enough. Call me when you have the details for the funeral.”
51
Jada
I wake up disoriented. Was that a dream?
No. No, it wasn’t.
My dad died. My dad died and my mom died. My mom died a long time ago, but it feels like it just happened.
And I’m so numb about it, and so close to being on the verge of angry at Dad, but more than angry, I’m really, really sad.
I haven’t been able to remember much about her for a long time, it’s all felt so foggy – any memories I have of her, but right now I feel like I remember a little more.
I remember her in that floral dress I saw today. I remember her smiling while wearing it, her face under a floppy hat with sunglasses and lipstick on and we were laughing, sitting under a tree on a picnic blanket. And Dad was playing catch with Shane.
Mom had on big hoop earrings. She took me the next day to get my ears pierced and my dad lost it when I came home teary eyed with pink lobes. He was so angry with her for doing that to my ears without talking to him first.
And then she left. She left just days later and no one noticed I got an ear infection because they were still healing and Mom wasn’t there to put the rubbing alcohol on them.
Dad noticed when I started crying about it in bed and he had to dig the earring out of my swollen earlobe while I bawled my eyes out.
He was so angry about that, about my mother piercing my ears and then leaving him, leaving me so I’d get an infection and him having to deal with it.
Pain assaults me. Not physical pain. A pain I can’t describe. A hollowness in my chest, in my fingers. Numbness, maybe. I don’t know.
Why didn’t he tell us?
I’m reeling.
And still… she didn’t die days or even weeks after she left.
What was she doing that two years without us? She didn’t come home for two years. Would she have done it eventually if she’d never been hit by a car and killed?
I’ll never know.
Other memories assault my brain rapid-fire and most of them are of her being sad. Out of order, some when I’m really small, some just before she left. Memories of her sometimes crying. Memories of me trying to talk to her while she was in bed and she wouldn’t answer. Sometimes staring into space when I was trying to talk to her in the kitchen, like I was invisible and she couldn’t hear me. Sometimes she was shouting at Dad and him just staring at the TV and ignoring her. Him ignoring her, her ignoring me. Shane upstairs drawing on his walls or drawing on his skin with sewing needle punctures done in shapes, sometimes words, even though he’d get the belt for it later. Memories of Shane’s arm bleeding because he wrote the word DAM on it with a razor. And when it was angled the other way I knew he didn’t just put a bad word, he put MAD. Because he was angry.
Dad screaming that if she wanted to go, she wasn’t taking us with her off into LaLa land. And him saying something about her taking too many of those ‘damn pills’. Her laughing and saying without the pills she wasn’t happy.
She didn’t say goodbye.
She just left.
And I wanted to go live in LaLa Land, too.
And another memory. Coming home alone after Shane got suspended and I walked in and found Dad sitting at the table drinking booze out of the big bottle and his eyes were red. Like he’d been crying. But I’d never seen him cry and he didn’t say anything, so I thought maybe he wasn’t crying, just feeling sick.
Shane was in his room, sent to bed without dinner, and I snuck him a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich after I made one for me. He told me Dad didn’t even hit him for getting in trouble. Dad always walloped him when he was out of line, either across the butt with the belt or as he got older, across the back of the head with an open-handed slap.
He didn’t get punished for getting suspended for cussing out a teacher after getting a bad grade. Just got picked up from school and told to go to his room. And then Dad started drinking.
Maybe that was the day he found out about Mom.
I don’t know.
I need answers. I deserve answers.
But I won’t get them, will I?
Did he bury her? Does my mom have a grave? Does Dad visit it and put flowers on it on her birthday?
When was her birthday? I can’t remember. March 12? Maybe?
All we had besides Dad was my Aunt Jade, Dad’s much older sister. Mom was estranged from her family; we’d never met them. I wish Aunt Jade were here so I could ask her more questions. Did she know about what happened to my mom? I need to talk to my cousin, Darlene.
Darlene’s dad was Dad’s brother, and he died of leukemia when she was little. Dar spent time with Aunt Jade, too.
I go to the bathroom and take a shower. After I’m dressed, I’m back in my father’s room, looking through the closet at my mother’s clothes with memories assaulting me with almost every article of fabric I touch. Memories of her that I’d forgotten. Most of them are sad memories. Memories where she was there but I felt like I wasn’t because she was in her own world and it was like I wasn’t there.
I find a photo album.
