The First Day of the Rest of My Life

by Cathy Lamb

  The pee soaked the mattress.

  The next day Annie and I asked our momma if Annie could put her bed in my room. I wanted to protect Annie, and I wanted to protect myself at night. Over Sherwinn’s vehement protests—“They aren’t babies, they should have separate rooms . . . how are they going to study if they’re together . . . they got to learn independence . . . those two are like twins . . . too attached . . . it’s friggin’ weird . . .”—she said yes, and we moved the bed in. Before we went to sleep that night, and every night thereafter, we moved the dresser and the desk in front of our door.

  This didn’t always work, though. As soon as our momma headed to bed, often early because of her headaches, we grabbed snacks, water, all of our homework, and told her to come in and give us a kiss good night. When she left we shoved the dresser and desk in front of the door, believing we were safe. But we weren’t. Twice Sherwinn was there, hiding in our closet.

  The doors opened, slowly, quietly, his eyes maniacal, that grin splayed on his face, like the devil rousing himself from hell, and our torture would begin.

  Why do I have no closet doors?

  Now you know.

  Sherwinn’s friends, Pauly Gyrt and Gavin Samson, came over a lot, almost always when our momma was at the beauty parlor. They would watch me, their eyes slithering up and down, like snails on high speed. But when Annie walked into the room, their tongues almost fell out of their mouths. Even I could tell she was gorgeous with her thick hair and those blue-green, murky eyes. She was the pretty sister. That prettiness was her downfall.

  Gavin was an assistant night manager at a factory and Pauly worked as a manager of a photo shop. He was divorced and had one son, Sam. The first time he saw us he wiped a fist over his slobbery lips, burped, and said he wanted “to photograph you two pretty, sexy, young girls.”

  Sherwinn giggled.

  Gavin rubbed the waistband of his pants, his forehead soon sweaty.

  Pauly reached into his backpack and showed us a book filled with statues of naked people. He lurched toward us, his bowling ball stomach preceding the rest of him. “Do you know what art is, girls? That’s art. Do you like art? You don’t need to be embarrassed about being naked. Naked is art. See, all these famous artists made sculptures of naked people. They used models who were naked for their art. The models were famous. Like the models today. They were lucky.” He eyed Annie and me, and burped again. “Do you girls want to be models?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m not going to do that,” Annie said.

  Sherwinn giggled, glanced at his creepy friends, and nodded. I was a child, but I didn’t like that nod. I knew it meant something bad for us.

  Sherwinn blocked the family room door when we turned to run. He grinned for a second, then laughed, superdeep, a laugh that had been brought in by red demons.

  “Sure you want to be models,” Gavin said. “You’ll be famous then. Like the girls in the magazine.”

  “See?” Pauly said, burping again. We shook our heads as the stench from his burp surrounded us.

  “See all those girls? They’re models, like you’re gonna be. We’ll take some pictures of you. It’ll be great. I got my camera.” He took a complicated-looking camera out of his dirty backpack. “Smile!”

  We did not smile.

  “Smile!” Gavin said again, his voice edgy.

  We did not smile.

  Annie said, “Can we go now?”

  “No, smile!” Gavin yelled.

  We did not smile.

  “Goddammit, do what Gavin says!” Sherwinn yelled. In two long steps he was before us, his hands in our curls, yanking our heads together. “You put a goddamn smile on your goddamn faces right now or I’m gonna cause you a problem in a place you ain’t never had a problem in before!”

  Annie burst into tears, as did I.

  “Goddammit!” Sherwinn roared again. He grabbed the front of our pink dresses and shook us hard, our heads flopping back and forth, then leaned in close and whispered, “Smile.” He stuck his fingers in both of our mouths and pulled back the corners, hard, so our mouths felt like they were ripping.

  Pauly said, “Back off, Sherwinn, you don’t want to bruise them, their mother . . .”

  “Fuck off, Pauly,” Sherwinn roared.

  Bob the Cat, our gray, ten-year-old cat, wandered in and Sherwinn giggled. He picked her up and threw her across the room. Annie and I screamed as she crumpled to the ground. “You tell your momma and I’m gonna do to your momma what I did to Bob the Cat. Got it? Do you want that to happen to your momma?”

  We stared, shocked, at the crumpled body of our cat. She meowed, softly, weakly.

  “Do you want that to happen to your momma?”

  Bob the Cat tried to get up, but she collapsed.

  “Are you fuckin’ deaf?”

  Bob the Cat lifted her head, then it flopped back down.

  “No,” I whispered. “No, we don’t.”

  We didn’t.

  We loved our momma.

  As we darted from the room, I grabbed Bob the Cat. Bob the Cat’s tail waved, then sagged.

  She lived. She never stopped limping.

  That about sums us up, too.

  We lived, but we never stopped limping.

  15

  Corky, the chair thrower, stomped into my office later that day at two o’clock.

  I did not get up from my desk, for self-protection. I waved my hand so she would sit in the new chairs in front of it.

  She glared at me. I watched her carefully. I definitely wanted to flop behind my desk if she flew off into a Corky-style temper tantrum again.

  “Madeline,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You weren’t very nice.”

  “I’m not here to be nice.”

  “You said some mean things.”

  “You should have heard them years ago from someone. It would have made your life easier.”

  “You were harsh.”

  “Deal with it.”

  Her face got all scrunchy, and she bawled and snuffled, head down on my desk, shoulders heaving, hands wrapped tight around herself.

  I stood and patted her back. “We’ll get through this, Corky. Hey. How about if we get out the giant wooden blocks and talk about how each one of the blocks is representative of your life and how we’re going to get rid of some of the heavy blocks and add some positive blocks. What do you say?”

  Her shoulders shook, up and down.

  “There, there, Corky. You’ll be okay.”

  “But everyone hhhhh-h-hates me,” she stuttered through a deluge of tears.

  “Yep. They do. Currently. You’ve been obnoxious for a long time. But we’ll change that. Your relationships are gonna change. No throwing my chairs again, though, please. I don’t want any blood on my suit. It might stain.”

  She nodded her defeated head.

  That evening, about eight o’clock, darkness blackening my windows, I checked my calendar. It wasn’t long before the Rock Your Womanhood conference. I would be speaking before thousands of women. If it went over with a bang, it would be huge for my career.

  What did I feel? Sadness. Overwhelming sadness. It didn’t take a genius to know why I was feeling that heavy sadness, either. The life I was leading, on so many fronts, was collapsing around me like I was standing in a black hole.

  Marlene’s article would rip my past and the gunshots right into the open again. She clearly was onto something about my grandparents. The photos would resurface. They would be printed and distributed. My grandparents were not who I thought they were, which meant my momma wasn’t, which meant that I am not, either. I don’t like my home. I don’t like my car. I don’t like my clothes. I don’t even think I like the city.

  I am two people. The public Madeline O’Shea, flamboyant and confident, who inspires people, mostly those with vaginas, to grab life, shake it around, and sling it in a new direction, and the other me who cowers, likes to be alone with my seriously unbala
nced mind, doesn’t trust, battles near-crippling fear and sadness, and has problems breathing because the air gets stuck under my armpit or in my stomach, or around the corner from my spleen.

  I am a lie.

  This lie scrapes against my quaking soul every day.

  I have no more business advising people what to do with their lives, or their relationships, than I have advising NASA how to build a spaceship to Alien Monster Land.

  I am unqualified for my job. I am unqualified to give any advice.

  I am unqualified.

  Period.

  Someone was outside my window.

  I froze in bed, petrified, and yet . . . I was ready to fight, ready to hit, ready to swing the bat I kept under the bed, or wield the knife I kept in my dresser or shoot the gun in my nightstand.

  I would fight. I was ready. I would not let any man come and hurt me again. The rage that is barely tamped down in my tightly strung body roared to life.

  I heard the noise again, closer to my window, slunk out of bed, dropped to the floor, pulled my gun from my nightstand, pressed myself against the wall, and peered out through the warm fuzz of morning sunshine to see . . . Ramon. Hard-working, focused Ramon who wanted to live with his brother full time. He was hauling a mongo-sized rock in a wheelbarrow.

  I sagged in relief, put the safety on the gun, dropped the gun in the nightstand, told my breath to work with me here, work with me. How I wished I’d had a gun as a child.

  I pulled on my robe and headed outside.

  “Hi, Ramon,” I called.

  He stopped what he was doing, turned, and smiled. And in that smile, one of the few smiles I’d ever seen from him, I saw what we all need, what we all can’t live without, what we can’t dream or plan or love without: Hope.

  “Hi, Miss O’Shea.”

  “I love what you’ve done. I love it.”

  “You do?” He was vulnerable, so very vulnerable, and desperately needed my approval.

  “It’s incredible.”

  “You think?” His voice wobbled. He was still such a kid.

  “Yeah, I think. It’s incredible.”

  He smiled again, then bent his head and tried to hide a couple of tears. “Thanks, Miss O’Shea. Thank you.”

  I patted his shoulder. “Ramon, thank you. I have a present for you, wait a second.”

  I went inside and got the gift certificate. It was to an automobile sign painting business. “Now you can get Ramon’s Landscaping Services painted on your truck.”

  He gaped. He didn’t hide those pesky tears again. He hugged me.

  Annie called me that night at two in the morning. I’d been in bed for about five minutes, after working until midnight. I’d been hearing Mendelssohn’s Concerto in my head, subdued and muted, for about an hour, which inspired me to play my violin on my deck. I’d hoped it would soothe my screaming nerve endings.

  Annie was in the back of an ambulance. “They think he’s had a heart attack, Madeline.” Her voice was calm, but I heard the pain.

  As she’d told me years before, “Grandma and Granddad love us beyond life itself. I think it’s the only reason I haven’t killed myself. Had I not had Grandma and Granddad and you, after losing Mom and Dad, I would not have stayed on this planet. God gave me a gift with explosives, and I would have used them to self-destruct. I think He still would have let me into heaven, given our circumstances. There’s no need in heaven for explosives, unless there’s a Red Sea and it needs to be parted again. I think God’s only going to do that once, though. Like the talking burning bush. That was a one-time deal, too.”

  “I’m coming,” I said, already jumping into my clothes. “Annie, I’ll be right there.”

  “It was a heart attack,” Dr. Rubenstein said to us in the hospital hallway, his white coat too tight for a body built like a linebacker. “He needs twenty-four-hour care.”

  “We’ll get it for him,” Annie said.

  “No problem,” I said. “We’ll set things up. We have round-the-clock care for Grandma. We’ll add another person for Granddad. Plus, Annie is three minutes away, and I’ll move in.”

  Dr. Rubenstein nodded. He was the son of two other Dr. Rubensteins, both of whom were my grandparents’ best friends. His father had been our granddad’s doctor before he and his wife retired and moved to Arizona. They still talked on the phone weekly and were even at my momma’s wedding and trial in Massachusetts. Dr. Rubenstein Jr. had kind eyes, like his father. There was a picture behind him. It was his wife and six kids, all adopted from other countries.

  “Unfortunately, this heart attack, the stress on his body, will obviously exacerbate his other underlying conditions.”

  “What?” Annie asked.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked, brushing my furiously flattened hair back from my face, my hand shaking. Seeing Granddad lying out on a gurney, doctors and nurses rushing around him, Annie leaning against a wall, gray with worry, had turned my world upside down with a sucker punch.

  “What other conditions does he have, Dr. Rubenstein?”

  Dr. Rubenstein blinked at us, his eyes huge behind his glasses. “You don’t know?”

  “No, we don’t,” Annie said.

  He hesitated. “I don’t understand. He hasn’t talked to you about this?”

  “About what?” Annie asked. She was standing tight, preparing for a blow, but her face was calm, militarily calm.

  Dr. Rubenstein sighed. We were next of kin, Granddad’s wife had dementia, and we would be providing his care.

  “He has prostate cancer.”

  What?

  “What do you mean prostate cancer?” Annie said. I felt her shock zing through my own.

  Dr. Rubenstein twirled a pen in his hands, his eyes so kind. “He has prostate cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and now with the heart attack . . . I believe he is willing himself to live for your grandma.”

  Prostate cancer? Heart disease? Arthritis? What?

  “Willing himself to live, you mean . . . you mean . . . what you’re saying is . . . are you sure . . . you’re saying he’s dying?” I asked, feeling a chill spread, head to foot, as if someone had dumped ice into my head through a slit.

  “He’s told you nothing?” Dr. Rubenstein eyes blinked owlishly behind his glasses. “This generation. So secretive. They buck up and take it, don’t share their problems, believe that they should handle everything themselves, independent, brave—”

  “Nothing. He told us nothing.”

  “I’m not surprised, in a way,” Dr. Rubenstein said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “This group fights. They know how to fight, which is what your granddad is doing now. They’ll do things their own way, though, and they don’t like interference. Especially your granddad. He wouldn’t want to burden you girls.”

  “Dr. Rubenstein,” Annie said, “is he . . . what is . . . Madeline, I can’t say it. You say it.”

  I tried to get a breath, which was hard for me, as usual, especially now when I felt like curling up with my arms over my head. “How much time does he have?”

  “It’s hard to say. The prostate cancer isn’t what I would predict would kill him. He could have that for years. It’s the heart disease that’s the issue. Anyone else, someone who wasn’t your granddad, I’d say they could go at any time. But your granddad, maybe not. He may still have some time, I’d bet on it, and I’m not a gambler.”

  “How . . . how much time?” I felt grief riding into my body, like a thief, black and mean.

  “Impossible to know. Impossible. I’m sorry, Annie, I’m sorry, Madeline.” His voice squeaked as tears flooded his eyes. “I love your granddad, your grandma, too. I’ll be with you on this, the whole way through.”

  We nodded at him, through the shatter of pain.

  There were good men on the planet. He was one of them. I gave Dr. Rubenstein a hug. I pretended not to notice when he wiped his tears.

  My granddad and grandma were dearly loved by many people.

  I don’t like
mysteries. I don’t like secrets. I don’t like unanswered questions. I don’t like the unpredictable. I don’t like surprises.

  Annie and I sat on a couch in the hospital in a waiting area. We held hands. Outside, dawn was arriving, soft and sweet. I see dawn often, as I wake up early, whatever is on my mind yanking me out of sleep.

  This dawn had new meaning for me, though. This was the dawn of a whole new time.

  A time of death.

  That’s what it was. The sun was rising, our granddad’s life was ebbing. We would not be the same again.

  Would we know his mystery before he died? His secrets? I didn’t know.

  I squeezed Annie’s hand as I heard a full orchestra burst into Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

  “She’s hanging birds.”

  “She’s what?”

  “She’s hanging birds,” Annie said.

  Annie and I peered around the corner of our grandma and granddad’s master bedroom suite.

  Yep. She was hanging birds, and humming while doing so.

  The walls of their bedroom were painted light blue, the ceiling and trim white. There were two sets of French doors and windows that framed a panoramic view. Furniture they bought decades ago, still polished often, and Grandma’s makeup table, with the oval mirror and red rose flowered skirt, added authentic charm and history.

  A rather naughty painting of two swans hung on the wall facing their king-sized bed with the lace canopy. The woman swan was in a blue negligee, the man swan was in . . . nothing but a black top hat. They were in bed, their wings holding champagne glasses clinking together, smiling at each other. Over their heads was another painting, of a woman swan, wearing nothing, her “hip” curving into the air, cleavage showing beneath a wing. The words “You Are My Home. I Love You” were painted across the top.

  Grandma painted it for Granddad on one of their anniversaries.

  “Look,” Annie whispered to me.