After mom died the shirts made it even worse. I know it sounds silly, but intense experiences create weird triggers, and I swear it was like her faded blood was splattered all over him. I could barely stand the sight of him coming home from work.
That Christmas I saved up all my babysitting money and went down to the shop when dad wasn’t there. Jimmy ordered a new shirt for him and promised not to tell. When he opened my gift he smiled for the first time in months. We exchanged a look that told me how grateful he was. Jenny stormed up to her room and slammed the door. It was a normal kind of kid mistake that shouldn’t have been such a big deal, but mistakes are harder to deal with when you have to look at them in the mirror every single day.
She quit dancing and started hanging out with some girls in the neighborhood that didn’t have the best reputation. I tried to talk to her, but she stayed out too late on school nights and dad was too exhausted to care very much. Most of the time I lied for her, saying she was at the library or a friend’s house. I kept hoping she’d turn it around, but I had all I could handle trying to keep house and keep buying groceries and keep from failing school.
I guess that’s when I started to get good at organizing things. I made charts for Jenny and I so we could get all the chores done. I created a budget and tried my best to stick to it, spending my weekends going to the different stores that were advertising specials to save money on the essentials. It felt better somehow, keeping things in order, like everything I was doing kept what was left of us from falling apart. Most importantly, it gave me a purpose when I really needed one.
Dad got more and more depressed. The more I took care of things the less he tried. He worked late at the shop almost every night and every Saturday trying to make enough to cover the hospital bills, but it was never enough. He came home every night at around eight o’clock, drank a beer, sat in his chair for an hour with the TV on, ate something I warmed up, and then went to bed. On Sundays he slept most of the day and drank more beers than usual, but otherwise it was the same.
When Jenny was sixteen she started going out with the head of one of the gangs in our neighborhood. He was my age, two years older than her, and I tried to warn her off of him, but by then she’d stopped listening to me altogether. We were like opposite poles of a magnet, pulling our lives in completely different directions. Looking back now I really wish I’d tried harder with Jenny, but I was just a kid. And at the time I was too busy studying and applying to colleges to notice just how bad it had gotten. I guess dad and I had the same problem, we just chose different methods of dealing with it.
The nice part about being from a single–parent household with a good sob story is that you qualify for a ton of financial aid. I’d somehow found a way to squeeze in work for the student newspaper and my grades were holding steady in the low nineties. I killed it on the SATs so my future was looking pretty hopeful as far as college was concerned.
Then one night in May, three weeks before graduation, Jenny came stumbling through the door. I figured she was high and told her to head up to bed before dad got home and saw her like that. She was holding her stomach.
“Are you sick?”
She didn’t answer me.
“Jenny what’s wrong? Didn’t you hear me? You’d better get up to bed.”
When she looked up at me she was deathly pale. She unwrapped her hands from her middle and they were covered in blood. I jumped up from my chair, spewing books all over the place and just barely caught her before she hit the ground. Her shirt pulled up as she fell, revealing a gushing knife wound under the right side of her ribs.
“Oh my God! Jenny what happened?”
She had a glazed look on her face and I grabbed the phone to dial 911. I tried not to panic and did what they told me, putting a pillow under her legs and covering her with a blanket while we waited for the ambulance.
“Carlos said not to worry, that they wouldn’t dare hurt his girl.” She mumbled. “But they jumped me and then left me for dead. He doesn’t know yet Truly. You have to tell him. He’ll have to answer for this. He’ll have to pay them back.”
“You’re kidding me, right? Jenny you’re bleeding to death and you’re worried about Carlos? What’s wrong with you?”
“But I love him,Truly. And he loves me.”
“That’s not love Jenny.” I stroked her hair back and kissed her forehead. “That’s not love.” I held her head in my arms and rocked like that for five eternal minutes until the windows reflected the spinning red and blue lights that I hoped would rescue me from the nightmare I was caught in. She was slipping away from me too. Just like that.
The paramedics came through the still open door and got right to work, asking me questions while they assessed her condition. When they saw how much blood she was losing they scooped her up and got her right on a gurney, using words like shock and liver laceration.
She was unconscious by the time we got into the ambulance. I tried to call my dad at the shop but Jimmy said he was welding and he’d have to call me back. I gave Jimmy the name of the hospital they were taking us to and told him something terrible had happened to Jenny.
I sat in the front seat of the ambulance next to the driver while a man and a woman worked on Jenny. One was on the radio with the hospital telling them to prepare the trauma team, while the other was sticking an IV in her arm. She didn’t make a sound, and Jenny hated needles. I looked down at my hands, covered in blood.
“Miss?”
I was rocking again.
“Miss? Hey, is there someone we can call for you?”
Was there anyone? It was a valid question. There was dad. And there was Jenny. I had a few friends at school but I hardly ever went out. My best friends were my books and my writing. When I needed to process something I went off by myself and wrote a story about someone else’s life. When my mom died I remember writing a story about a girl whose family moved to the other side of the country and how she had to learn to make friends all over again.
Somewhere in the distance the ambulance driver was still talking to me. I shook my head in the negative. “I called my dad at work. He’ll probably meet me at the hospital.”
“What about your mom?”
“She’s dead.” I swallowed. It had been a while since I’d said that…understood that. Felt it.
“Oh.” He managed. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” I put my head on the window and watched the houses speed past.
Then all of a sudden, Jenny just stopped. Her heart stopped. Her breathing stopped. She just… stopped. It sent the two paramedics in the back into a panic. The ambulance sped up, but I knew somewhere in my heart that we weren’t going to make it to the hospital in time, and even if we could it wouldn’t matter. She was gone. Gone to be with mom. It was like Jenny just up and walked out of that ambulance, but left her body laying on the gurney. I knew it as truth and yet I couldn’t connect it to a feeling, just numbness covering over everything else. Even after we pulled up to the hospital life went past in a slow-motion blur.
Jenny died that night in May. We buried her next to mom. It seemed only right. I handled all the arrangements. Dad barely spoke the whole summer. I tried to organize things best I could so he could manage ok when I left for NYU. By then he’d lost all three of us, one by one. Part of me wanted to stick around and just keep taking care of him, but when it came right down to it I just couldn’t live in that tomb of a house with its bloodstained memories. I tried to convince dad to move to a smaller place with less bedrooms and no grass to cut. He said he’d think about it.
I was hoping that maybe when I left he’d come back to life. Maybe when the grass got so long the neighbors started to complain he’d step out into the sunshine once in a while. Then again, maybe I was kidding myself. You just don’t recover from a series of losses like that. It’s not like the chicken pox where one by one all the spots go away and never come back. It’s more like tuberculosis, the bacteria brooding even in its dormancy, relentless in
its pursuit, scheming at ways to overpower your defenses and stealing your breath away.
Till death do you part.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lynda Meyers has been passionate about writing since childhood. Letters From The Ledge is a story she saw unfold in a vision one day, each character coming into view like a scene from a movie. Telling Brendan, Sarah, Paige and Nate’s story has been an incredible journey. Letters From The Ledge is her second novel.
Her third novel ( truly. ) can be sampled on her blog at: www.writeonedge.blogspot.com , where it’s currently being serialized in weekly installments. She lives and writes in New York with her husband, four amazing kids and two pretty adorable Maltese puppies.
For the latest update on this title and others please visit:
http://www.lettersfromtheledge.com
http://www.hallway11.com
http://www.writeonedge.blogspot.com
Letters From The Ledge Page 36