Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (18 page)

“I just need to get the scar healed up and maybe put on a pound or two and get cleared for surgery. Then everything will get moving in an upward direction.” Sarah said this with her eyes closed. Like it was a mantra. Like it took too much effort to actually say. Des smashed the heels of her palms against her forehead and tried not to come apart. She looked at Sarah, really
looked
at her. This was why Sam was freaking out all the time. Getting angry. Sarah was slipping away. Right in front of all of them. There was barely any of her left, and what was left wasn’t holding any more than the places where she had been cut into.

“You’re moving in with me. I’m telling Sam.” Des tried to keep her voice steady, but the edges of it were filled with angry tears.

“No. Find another roommate to make rent. Ask Sam for money, whatever, just no.” Sarah still had her eyes closed.

“Is that how you’re making rent, Sarah? Sam?”

Sarah squeezed her eyes tight but didn’t open them. Des ignored the tear that slid along Sarah’s nose. “Fuck you.”

Des swallowed. “Then I really don’t care. If Sam’s paying, then he gets a say, and I bet he’ll say you’re moving in with me.”

Another tear collected against Sarah’s nose and she shuddered a breath in, held it. Des held hers. Let her own tears fall. “Okay,” Sarah whispered.

Des grabbed for Sarah’s hand again, but Sarah pulled it away, tucked it under the afghan, and turned her face into the cushion. “I’m just so worried, Sarah. That’s all.”

“I know. I’m worried, too. I know. You have to know this isn’t me, and I’m tired. I’m tired of not healing, of the pain, of dragging myself through half a day and barely making it. I don’t …” Sarah looked at Des, her funny eyes filled with tears. “I don’t
mean
it Des, you have to know that.”

Des squeezed Sarah’s hand. “I do. It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

Des sat with her until she fell asleep. It didn’t take long. She counted Sarah’s inhales and exhales, remembering the number that was normal from the nurses in the hospital. She counted for a long time, her tears steady. When she was sure Sarah would carry on the work of breathing, Des walked to the little galley kitchen, cleaned up the awful mess of uneaten takeout, water glasses, and prescriptions.

She shoveled through the rest of the mess in the little apartment, found Sarah’s phone. Called Sam. He answered in a panic because the call was from Sarah’s number. Des explained what they needed to do, and Sam said he would help her take care of it.

Before she left, she counted Sarah’s breaths, matching her own to the rises and falls of her chest. Then she adjusted the blinds until the front room was dark.

Sarah lived on the second floor, and the steps were along the outside of the building—no elevator. She thought of all the take-out containers and hated herself for not realizing that Sarah couldn’t manage to get groceries into her apartment on her own.

When she got into the POS limo, she was shaking. She wrapped her arms around the wheel and pushed her head into her arms. The parking lot of Sarah’s building was starting to fill up, everyone coming home to make their dinners and settle in, watching TV, making calls, maybe getting dressed up to go out.

Sarah would probably sleep on that couch all night, her hip hurting and stinking with infection, the kitchen bare of food, nothing but an old afghan covering her as the night got cool.

She started the Lincoln, pushing tears off her face. She drove the few turns to her own house on autopilot, unable to get the image of the mess of Sarah’s hip out of her head.

Des breathed in deep, turning carefully into her own short and narrow drive so she didn’t clip the cars parked along every inch of the curb, and was gratified when she didn’t even need her usual three-point turn to make it.

Des inched forward until the tennis ball hanging from the ceiling of the shadowy single garage thunked softly against the windshield, and cranked off the ignition. Her
phone hummed next to her as soon as she stopped. Her best friend Lacey had probably seen her pull in from her big living-room window down the street and called as soon as Des parked.

“How’d it go?” Lacey asked.

“Honey,” Des said, her voiced rubbed out. “I can’t. Call Sam.”

“Oh, Des.”

“Yeah.”

They sat in silence over the connection for a long minute. “Come over,” Lacey said. “Eat dinner with Nathan and me. We’re having something really disgusting like box mac and cheese and Tater Tots. Then we could all watch a movie about evil robots that turn into cars and trucks and I’ll make root beer floats.”

“I think I’m just—done. Could we do that this weekend, maybe?”

“I’m worried about you, Desbaby. I’m worried about you worrying all the time. At least call that pretty woodcarver and make him distract you.”

Des closed her eyes and felt damp grass seeping into soft jeans, a big hand at her jaw, warm lips against hers. His face in her neck, his breath panting over her shoulder, his hips working against hers in slow rocks that moved him inside her in heavy, stretching glides that built and built and built.

Yes, that would completely distract her—and break her into even smaller pieces.

Lacey started saying something to Nathan, so Des hauled her busted-ass carcass out of the Lincoln, and squeezed herself sideways along the side, trying not to snag her shirt on car rust from the front or cover her last good skirt in cobwebs from the back.

Once she exited the garage, she reached up and gingerly pulled down the single door until it rested on the roof of the Lincoln, which she had figured out how to protect from scratches by duct-taping a foam pool noodle to the bottom edge of the garage door.

She kept walking to the end of the drive and hauled open the squealing back door of the limo and grabbed her orange traffic cone out of the back passenger bay. She looked down the narrow street, crowded with parked cars, shaded with old trees, and let herself close her eyes for a minute, listening to Lacey talk to Nathan.

Then she mentally smacked herself, hard, and snugged the orange cone behind the stretch limousine’s bumper to warn traffic not to careen into the vehicle, which overshot the end of the driveway by half a foot.

Des executed the hip-bump-smash-push necessary to reshut the back-passenger-bay
door, and tried not to catch the fluttering banner of privacy film peeling off the window in the door.

POS Limo, tucked in for the night.

Des interrupted and they said their good-byes. Des leaned against POS Limo, to put away her phone, but had failed to notice Betty, her landlady, lying in wait on her own porch next door.

Betty marched over, smiling but determined. Beautiful in a wise-hippie sort of way.

“Destiny Marie.”

Des winced. “Hey.”

“Don’t
hey
me. I’ve been looking for you all day.”

“Sorry.” Betty looked at her, and Des knew she expected her to elaborate, but Des was beyond elaboration. Beyond explaining herself to anyone, especially anyone who she had known her entire life, maybe especially all of the people she had known her entire life.

“You know I wouldn’t evict one of Paddy and Marie’s kids, but you’ve never out-and-out missed a rent payment until this month, Destiny.” Betty was obviously going for the jugular, and Des had to admire that.

How Betty always confronted everything.

Life or death, it didn’t matter. Betty faced it.

She had realized, recently, how young Betty had been when she lost her husband, Marvin. Younger than her dad had been when he lost his wife, a mother to little children.

That kind of loss must move the way the ground feels under your feet, the way you look at other people when they cry or when they laugh or when they do anything. That kind of loss must change the number of breaths you’re supposed to breathe in an hour until you can imagine just not breathing at all. Loss like a crater that you sit on the edge of, throwing things into it in the hopes you can hear them hit the bottom.

Betty’s husband had been sick a long time; Des barely remembered a time when he was well, except for a flash of Betty in a summer halter dress, the same braids she wore now, sitting in the lap of a tall brown-limbed man with a huge smile, his chest bare with tiny circlets of dark hair, teasing Betty’s nape with a cold beer bottle.

One of her mother’s cookouts. Millions of breaths ago.

She felt tears threaten, coming up behind the ones for Sarah. She took a deep
breath and focused on the geraniums planted in Betty’s window boxes.

“I know. And I appreciate it, Mrs. Lynch. I really do. I can give you part of it right now, and then my first check from the library will come—”

“Hush.” Betty interrupted and looked away from Des. Des swallowed, hard, past the constriction in her throat and tried to ignore the flush on Betty’s neck.

Des closed her eyes. “Thank you, Mrs. Lynch.”

Betty let a small smile surface and leveled her stare back at Des. “You were always a good girl, Destiny.”

“I know.”

“Mmm.” Betty touched Des’s shoulder. “What are your dinner plans, Destiny Marie?”

Des ignored the little ragged edge of guilt that came with getting ready to lie to a woman she had known since birth. Almost as hard to ignore as her growling stomach when she remembered that Betty always made her meat loaf with that delicious sugary glaze stuff on Thursday nights.

But Des couldn’t sit at Betty’s little banquette right now and eat meat loaf and canned green beans and dry dishes while she washed and have “just one” cup of coffee before she left. She couldn’t. She couldn’t, even knowing that Betty would sit at her banquette alone and have too many leftovers. Not even knowing that Betty fell asleep in front of the TV most nights, curled up in her late husband’s plaid glider.

“Actually, Mrs. Lynch …”

“It’s fine,” she interrupted, looking back up at her own porch. “I know you’re busy, these days, and that’s good. It’s just that Rennie usually comes over on Thursdays, but he’s at the school, working with the guidance counselor on a scholarship application.”

Des smoothed the wrinkles in her skirt, looking away from Betty as Betty looked away from her.

“Well.” Betty flipped back her shiny blond-and-gray braid, and actually turned to walk back to her house. “How’s the Lincoln running for you, Destiny?”

Des looked up. Betty had changed direction to stand next to her and put her hand on the limo, patting it like a horse. “Okay. Rennie is still begging to convert it to run on vegetable oil.”

Betty smiled. “I think you should let him. He’s smart, that boy. You know, he reminds me so much of Marvin.”

“You’ve said.” Des watched Betty scrape off a little rust with her nail.

“I think it’s nice you’ve been driving folks in the neighborhood. Your dad would have liked that. He always talked about starting a door-to-door service for neighborhood folks once he retired. You know, like you’re doing for some of the older people who need to get to an appointment. Or for your sister. Rennie. It’s a treat to ride in Paddy’s limo.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Lynch.”

Betty reached up and kissed Des’s cheek. Des cleared her throat over the tears again. “You have a good night, Destiny.”

Betty went back into her house and Des stayed where she was, looked out over the street. Her phone started buzzing and she peered down to the corner to see if she could see Lacey standing at her front window, but the curtain was closed.

“This is Des Burnside.”

“Hey.”

“Hey, Sam. I’m sorry I called like that earlier … I just. I didn’t know Sarah was so bad, not like that.”

Sam sighed, long and frustrated. “No, you were right to. I went over there. Thanks for cleaning up, by the way. I haven’t had a chance to, lately.”

“She needs so much help, Sam. And I can’t even believe that because it’s
Sarah
. Sarah doesn’t need help, not ever. This is scaring the shit out of me.”

“She’s planning on scheduling the surgery as soon as a she gets an okay, and honestly, Des, I don’t know that she’s going to get one.”

Des felt her heart stop, actually stop inside of its space in her chest. She choked in a breath, her spit thick in her throat. “What do you mean?”

Sam was quiet, and the screen of her phone slicked against her face with sweat.

“She’s not healing like she should. She’s doing too much, then has to spend days lying around in pain, doing nothing. I think … I think she’s depressed, maybe.”

“I should be with her more. I can’t believe I didn’t realize what a bad idea it was that she lived on the second floor. You have to work, and all this time I wasn’t working, I could have been picking up more of the slack, and …”

“Stop. It’s not like that. But yeah, I can’t help her like I want to. And she was asleep when I went over, so I didn’t talk to her about moving in with you, but that would be better. You’re on one floor and Betty had that wheelchair ramp put in for Marvin years ago.”

Des hunched over, restless. “Do you think she’s going to need a wheelchair?”

Sam was quiet. “Remember when they brought her into the Emergency Department when she first got in her accident?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry I was so rough on you that night. It was too soon after Dad, maybe. And I gave Dad such a hard time once he started getting sick, blaming him even, for the years of smoking. His diet. Maybe I was blaming him for Mom, like it was my chance to just let him have it for not taking her in sooner, and I shouldn’t do this, blame people. Blame Sarah, because—I don’t want things to …” Sam stopped. And Des felt sick.

“You think Sarah is in really bad shape. You want to be nice to her because
you don’t know
. Like, you don’t know. You’re worried. In a bad way, a really bad way. Sam, please tell me, please, please tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I think it’s a good idea to move her in with you. For now, I think it’s a good idea because it will be easier and help you both out with expenses. And yeah, I work a lot. I’m going to try to sell it to her as something that will give her more freedom, not less.”

Des looked down the street again. It had gotten much darker while she talked to Sam. Most of the light was coming from the houses themselves—blue and yellow light—from porch lights and room lights and televisions. The air smelled like the crabappple blossoms getting started and the cigarette smoke from after-dinner smokes in the alleys.