Few Kinds of Wrong (16 page)

“Oh God,” Mom says and a tear rears its ugly head.

“It's nothing,” I say, trying to find a comfortable position. “It's a couple of bruised ribs.”

“What happened?”

I just stare at her. Not speaking. I know Mom won't let it stay that way for long. Silences need to be filled, especially the uncomfortable ones.

“What happened?” she asks, her tone formal. She straightens up and pushes her shoulders back.

“Get out.”

“What?”

“Get out of my room.”

“Jennifer, I'm your mother,” she says. Her hand reaches out for me then pulls back.

“You're a whore,” I say and it feels ugly and wonderful. It feels like a surge of anger that washes some of my pain away. It is a hideous release and even the look on her face, her hand to her mouth, the tears in her eyes, makes me feel better. Her hurt lessens mine.

“So get out. And tell those other two not to come back in here either.”

She turns and runs out the door. I hear voices outside and BJ shouting, “We'll see if she can look after herself,” obviously leaning toward the door so I can hear, words directed right at me. And then there is silence in my room. Fifteen minutes later the doctor gives me a prescription and asks me how I'm getting home. I cry for ten minutes before I call Michelle and ask her to pick me up.

“BJ told me not to,” Michelle says. “She told me you upset your mom. That's a sin, Jennifer. I think it's good her and Bryce are together. And you should too.”

I hang up the phone without saying goodbye and call a taxi. A nurse helps me get in the cab, and the driver helps me get in the house. The painkiller prescription in my jeans pocket remains unfilled and there's only a small bit of Bacardi left. I want to get in the car and drive but I can't. I pop six Extra-Strength Advil, lean against the arm of the couch, and turn on the TV.

An hour or so later, I hear a tiny knock at my door, like the rap of a child. As the door opens, I remember that I didn't lock the door. A bunch of flowers stand in my doorway wearing khakis, a white shirt and the leather jacket I gave Jamie for his birthday two years ago.

“Wow, walking flowers,” I say.

Jamie moves the flowers aside and smiles. “Surprise,” he says.

“Flowers. I must be really sick.”

“I gave you flowers before. Lots of times.”

“On Valentine's Day or if I was mad at you.”

“Not true. I gave you flowers lots of other times. I picked a flower and gave it to you the morning after we first made love.” He smiles and tilts his head in a way that makes me wish I could kiss him.

“Really? I don't think so.”

“You honestly don't remember that?”

“No.”

I remember everything about it. I can almost feel his lips all over me that first night in my bed. The way he smelled of sweat and Ivory soap, the way his tongue felt inside my mouth, the way his lips brushed my nipple, making me shudder before he took it into his mouth and sucked while I reached my hand down to the zipper in his jeans, unzipped them and released what had been straining against the denim. My fingernails, short as they were, dug in his back in the moment we shuddered together.

The next morning I woke to a half-empty bed. With Jamie nowhere to be seen, I thought I'd lost the first thing I ever desperately wanted as a grown-up. Until he showed up at my bedroom door with a coffee and a red rose.

“For you, madam,” he said and gently kissed me until the coffee went cold.

“That looks like one of my neighbour's roses.”

“Hmm. Yes, well, it committed rose suicide when I went outside. Just leapt off the bush.”

“Poor, sad rose,” I said and laughed, stopping only when his lips covered mine again and we fell back down to the bed for another round of Jamie.

“Well, I did give you a flower,” Jamie says, bringing me back to the present. “A rose, to be exact.” He places the bouquet of wildflowers, complete with vase, down on my coffee table.

“I'm not supposed to be here. BJ thinks we're enabling your self-destructive behaviour.”

“BJ is a bitch sometimes.”

“So are you.”

I nod. “Yet you're here.”

“I am. But I feel bad because I kicked you.” And when he moves to me, he touches my face and kisses my lips. I don't push him away.

11

T
HENEXT DAY
I wake up with a pain in my side and Jamie in my bed. There had been no sex but he had held me and kissed me and I welcomed him to share the bed with me. Our bed. The headboard and mattress we picked out two weeks after our wedding. The sheets we'd slept on so many nights. The bedspread on which he'd made love to me many times.

I stare at him as he sleeps. His eyelashes are long and golden. I've admired them since I met him. His nose is long and aquiline, the perfect Jamie nose, I often called it. His face has tiny pockmarks you'd have to be this close and staring in order to see. And his lips, his lips are full, full of so much I want but am afraid of. Yet I can't stop myself and I kiss them gently, just a brush.

He returns a long, soft kiss, his tongue playing around inside my mouth, making me curse the pain in my side. He keeps his eyes closed until he pulls himself away, opens them, revealing ocean-blue eyes, the colour always different depending on the lighting. The chameleon of eyes.

“I thought I was dreaming,” he whispers.

“Not unless your dream involves me trying not to breathe with the pain in my side.”

“In my dream, all your pain would be gone.” He kisses my forehead.

The day goes well. Jamie tends to me, we rent a movie and drink wine in the evening, going to bed again with no pressure for anything but companionship and sleep. I don't ask him to leave. Not once.

I don't hear from Mom, BJ, or Michelle and I wonder what would have happened to me if Jamie hadn't shown up. I'd missed brunch and no one even bothered to call. I go to sleep grateful for Jamie and feeling a little less sore. The next three days are the same—relaxed, easy, boring. Jamie goes to work a couple of times to check in and tells me that Bryce knows where he is if he needs anything.

But on the fourth night he is there, things change. Lying in bed, Jamie's hand on my arm, I'm back on to him when I say, “I think my ribs are a lot better now.”

“Good,” he says.

I turn around and touch his face. “No, I mean I think I could move a lot now.” I raise my eyebrows.

“Oh. Well …”

“You don't want to?”

“No. It's just that … the last time you said I was just to make you forget. I need to know that's not what this is about.”

I stare at him. He closes his eyes. In a minute he is out of the bed.

“Jamie. I want you. I'm not saying I need you but I want you. I don't know why. I haven't analyzed it. But I want you and that's all I can tell you.” I say this even though I know there is an emptiness inside me I need him to fill.

I'm not sure who is hungrier. No words are spoken. Nothing. Only two people locked in something wild and passionate. It hurts my ribs — to the point that sometimes I can't breathe — but the explosion inside me once we get there makes it worth it. I roll over and Jamie holds me, telling me how much he missed me, how happy he is to be with me. He hardly pauses for me to say anything back and if he does, I feel no urge to fill the silence. I say nothing and try not to think about exactly what it is I am not doing.

The phone wakes me up with a start and a quick jolt of pain to my ribs, having performed a less than careful move. In the darkness, I reach over to grab the phone, touch Jamie, and let out a yelp. This body I had lain next to for so many years startles me in the dark by its presence.

Jamie sits up and says, “What? What?” in the instant before the phone rings again.

“Who is it?” Jamie asks me as he reaches for the phone.

“Don't answer that,” I scream and lie across him to grab it. No one needs to know he's here.

“Hello?”

“Jennifer,” Mom's voice says. The clock tells me it's 2:53. I know this call will change things. Mom isn't the call-to-chat-about-things-at-2:53 type of person.

“It's your grandmother.”

And like that the phone is back on the receiver.

“Wrong number?” Jamie asks.

“I'm not ready for this. Unplug the phone.” My voice sounds frantic, even to me.

“What?” Jamie says as the phone rings again.

“Don't answer it.”

“Why? What is it? Is something wrong?”

“Nan.”

And Jamie says hello as I put the covers over my head and cry.

12

M
OM RARELY CALLED
the garage. She and Dad managed to stay out of contact most of the hours of the day. So when the call came that day a couple of years ago, when I saw Mom's number on the caller ID, I knew without picking up the phone that things weren't right. Dad was on the other side of the garage using an air gun so I couldn't call out to him and tell him to answer the phone like I wanted to.

I didn't say hello, just picked up the phone and listened.

“Hello?” a voice other than Mom's said from the other end.

“Hello. Who's this?”

“It's Maisie. Is that you, Jennifer?”

“What's wrong?”

“Is your father there?”

“He's in the garage. I'll get him.” A sense of relief swept over me. She'd asked for Dad and skipped telling me.

“No, that's okay. Could you just ask him to come home? It's important.”

Why? What's happened? Is Nan okay? Why isn't Mom calling? The list of questions in my brain didn't reach my mouth.

“Okay,” I said.

I got Dad and, at his request, joined him on the ride to the house.

“Did she sound upset?” Dad asked on the way. He'd asked questions ever since I told him about the call and what Maisie said, my answers not giving him enlightenment.

“I don't know.”

“Well, why didn't you ask?”

“I don't know. I was too surprised that she was calling.”

I was half afraid when Dad made the turn onto Shea Street. I was relieved to see a quiet street, no signs of ambulances, fire trucks, or police cars. There was nothing outside to indicate why we were there. A tranquil street on a quiet Tuesday afternoon.

Walking into the house, while less tranquil, did not immediately answer our many questions. In fact, more questions sprang to mind: Why is there blood on the cabinets and floor? Why does Mom have gauze on her arm, shoulder, and neck? Where is Nan?

Dad kept his boots on as he walked to Mom, crouched down and asked her what happened. Mom tried to answer through the tears that came but nothing she said made sense.

Dad looked to Maisie.

“Your mom got a knife.” A thousand words might be provided by a picture, but the picture in front of us was suddenly clarified by those five.

“Oh God, where is she?” Dad stood up.

“She's asleep. I gave her a tranquilizer. The important thing now is to get Grace to a hospital. She'll need stitches.”

“Why would she do this?” Dad said to no one. He touched Mom's face twice, stood up, crouched down and touched her again.

“She was wild,” Maisie said, looking straight at Dad. Grace called me. She'd grabbed the cordless phone and had herself barred in the bathroom. I could hear your mother screaming on the outside
of the bathroom door, pounding on it while poor Grace told me what was going on.”

“I was just doing the dishes,” Mom finally said. “It was quiet. Your mother was watching TV. The next thing I knew she was screaming for me to get out, and before I could even think, she had the knife. She was so strong, Jack. You wouldn't believe it. I used both hands to try and get that knife from her, but she wouldn't let go. When she got my neck, the blood squirted out … I thought I was dead.” Mom's voice broke into gulping sobs.

“She was lucky, Jack,” Maisie said. “She got awful close to the jugular.”

I swallowed. A loud swallow I thought everyone must hear, no saliva in my mouth. It felt like burning sand in my throat. Dad got Mom's coat and gently put it on her. He slipped a pair of boots on her feet and tied them up. His hand rubbed her calf through her jeans, the way you'd rub a child's hair in passing. I looked away, jolted by the intimacy I wasn't used to seeing.

Dad stood up and turned to Maisie. “You said the contacts you got at Hoyles, you can get her in there quick.”

“Dad, you said you'd never put her in there,” I piped up.

Three words I never heard before or after from the headstrong man who, I was sure, believed until that moment that he could control the universe, or at least his small part of it.

“I was wrong.”

Blood seeped through the bandages on Mom's arm and the gauze she had pressed to her neck. Above the deepening red of her gauze collar was such an expression of relief that my arguments not to put Nan in a home stopped before I could say them.

Maisie had told Dad before, several times, that Mom couldn't do it on her own but Dad always had a solution. When Nan started to wet the bed, Dad got Maisie to pick out the best diapers; when Nan would no longer stay in the bath, Dad relented to letting someone come in twice a week to do it, as long as Maisie would be that someone; when Nan left the house once in the middle of the night, Dad got a lock on the outside of her door; and when Nan's screams and banging on that door got too much, he got Nan tranquilizers and Mom gave them to her every night. Mom got her own tranquilizers too, the strain etching in her face and in the dark circles under her eyes and the once-manicured nails that became chewed-off nubs. But his wife bleeding in the kitchen, lucky to be alive, there was no fix for that.

“Stay with your grandmother,” Dad said as they left.

“I'll help you clean this up,” Maisie said, motioning to the blood and to the butcher knife in the sink. She bit her lip.