My Stupid Girl

by Smith, Aurora

  “What’s going on, David?” My shoulders fell, but I forced myself to be genuine with him. It was easier than I expected.

  “I’m just--” I paused to try to get it straight in my own head. “I’m lonely, scared, tired, confused…” I trailed off when I saw him smiling at me.

  “I know I had to get there before God had any place in my life.”

  “What happened with Sarah?” I was trying to get the full picture before I confessed anything more to him. He laughed. I had basically just asked him about the next few years of his life. He summed it up pretty well, though.

  “She moved out. I decided to stay in Montana instead of moving to New York. I became a nurse and have been seriously happy the last few years.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. I gotta’ say, for the record,” he was grinning at me, “I know for sure that, while it hasn’t been all unicorns and butterflies since then, my life has been good. Even when stuff gets really rough, I still have a good life. That wasn’t the case before.”

  “Yeah?” I could see in his eyes that he was telling the truth. I had felt happy before. Lucy had made me happy. Could I be happier than that? Get to the point where I could honestly say that my life, my whole entire life was good? “Was it church that made it good or what?” I was still looking for a magic bullet. It had to be in there, somewhere.

  “I don’t know about church, dude. I think it had a lot more to do with holding myself to a different standard, God’s standard. There’s a lot of good fallout from really throwing yourself into that with all you got. You know, I even took the girl who plays piano at our church out on a date. How cliché am I? Falling for the piano player?” He started laughing and sitting back. I could tell his lack of sleep was creeping in.

  “Can I ask you something, Sean?”

  “Anything, man. Go for it.”

  “If I did become a Christian, but it was because I needed the stability, not because I really bought into all of it, would that still count?” Sean gave me a wry look.

  “That’s kind of like asking if going to rehab will work if you don’t actually participate in any of it. What’s the point, if you’re not going to give it 100%?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking down and chuckling at myself. I was still glad I asked. It was a question that had been bugging me ever since Lucy invited me to church.

  “Listen, David. I’m not saying that what you have right now doesn’t work. Jesus hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors because those were the people who really needed him. God doesn’t want you when you’re perfect; he actually wants you broken. That’s when he can do you the most good.” He considered me carefully. “If you’re going to do it, though, don’t go into it thinking ‘I don’t buy any of this.’ Try to do something closer to, like, ‘ok, God. Show me what you got.’”

  That made me laugh. He said it like a cowboy, but I understood what he meant.

  “Okay.” That made way more sense, it was honest. Sean smiled.

  “See what happens, man. Decide for yourself.” I wanted to have what Sean had. He was the furthest anyone had ever been from trying to force religion on me. He was just telling me what had worked for him and what he truly believed.

  That had been what I needed.

  “Thanks, Sean.” I put my hand out to shake his. I felt bad about keeping him from his sleep. He took my hand and stifled a big yawn, his lower lip ring stretching with his skin.

  “Hey, did you ever draw that tattoo I asked for?” He came awake with excitement.

  “I did, actually. I’ll have it with me the next time I come here. I think I’ll be here a lot, actually.” I could feel my face drop as I remembered where I was.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow, and I’m going to bring a bible I don’t usually use so you can take a look at it. Or pass it on, whatever works for you.” He reached his hand out and shook mine. “Good to see you, David.” I shook his hand and watched him walk away, then walked slowly back to my grandma’s room. I wasn’t really ready to be alone again, but I wanted to be there when she got back.

  I was too late. Grandma was sleeping on her bed, looking pale and completely worn out. Big strides took me to her side where I kissed her forehead, so happy to see her alive.

  “David?” I heard a deep voice ask. A man in a lab coat stood at the door. He motioned that he wanted to talk to me. It took me a minute. I did not want to hear what this man had to say to me.

  I took in a deep breath and fought the urge to pick my grandma up and run away from all this. I already knew, by the look on his face, that it wasn’t good news. Finally, I walked over to him. He wasn’t going to disappear if I ignored him, so I went.

  “You’re David, Doris’ grandson?” He made sure of my identity. God forbid the bad news went to a random stranger wandering around in patients’ rooms. My head bobbed in answer and my hands shoved deep in my pockets. My shoulders hunched, preparing for the blow I knew was coming.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, David, but from all the tests we did today it looks like your grandma has colon cancer. It’s progressed so much that it is inoperable.” He gave me a second to take it in and then dropped the final bomb. “Best case scenario, she has a few months left.”

  I felt like a cold bucket of water was suffocating me, dousing me with terror. I looked back into the room at my grandma, that sweet woman who took me in and cared for me, the punk. She was lying on a hospital bed, being given a death sentence. The doctor put his hand on my shoulder, snapping me out of my daze.

  “I’ll give you some time. Why don’t you write down some questions you might have? I’ll be glad to answer them when I come back in a little while. We haven’t told her yet. We can or you can, that choice is up to you, but we’d like to do it in the next few hours so she can make some decisions about her care.” He turned around and walked to the next room, hopefully bringing them better news than he brought us.

  I walked back into my grandma’s room and sat down in the stupid reclining chair facing her bed. Her little feet hardly made a bump in the end of the sheets. She looked cold so I grabbed another blanket and placed it on top of her, pushing in the sides around her tiny body. I bent down and put my face on her bed, feeling completely and utterly broken.

  25. BLACK HOLE

  I had my grandma for a little over four months after that day. They were the sweetest four months of my life.

  We spent three days in the hospital, going over every option they could offer her, but all of them led to the same road. She had less than a 20% chance of surviving any treatment and her life beyond that would consist of colostomy bags and pain meds.

  “I’m not afraid of dying,” my grandmother told me one night, while the two of us sat alone in her hospital room. I had moved that terrible reclining chair next to her, on the other side of the bed and away from the wires that were connected to her. They looked like a multicolored spider web, all coming out of different places on her body, going to a single machine monitoring everything going on in her body. Her words interrupted me from studying an informational sheet on chemotherapy.

  “Grandma, there are options here.” I shook the papers at her.

  “Oh, hush. You know there are not. They just gave you those because you asked for them. They told both of us, many times, that if we opted for chemo I probably wouldn’t survive the first round. You want me to die all miserable and sick from chemo?”

  “Oh, Grandma.” The papers dropped to the ground as I buried my head in the bed, my face completely engulfed in her many blankets.

  “I know, Davie boy.” I looked up and saw that her sassy eyes were filled with tears, but she still looked happy. “This is just life, bub. We are born, we have good lives, and then we pave the path for someone else.” She reached her hand up to my hair, pulled it away from my face, and patted my exposed cheek. “Don’t be afraid of life, David.” I groaned at her and put my head back down to resume my sulking.

  “You don’t have to be so happy
all the time you know; it doesn’t make the situation any better.” My growling voice was filled with as much frustration as I could get away with.

  “No, maybe not. But it annoys enough people to make the effort worth it.” She peeked at me from the corner of her eye and chortled.

  We compromised. I let her come home and not do any treatments when she agreed to a live-in nurse. When I say I let her come home, I mean to say that I really had no choice at all. But she gave me the win on the nurse.

  I ached to talk to Lucy. Every couple of days for four months, I would try to call. I’d leave a message and I would get a short text back, never a return call. But she was the only one that I wanted comfort from. I wanted her arms around me and I needed her to tell me that she loved me. I thought about her so much that when I was sleeping and I was in that time in between being asleep but knowing your dreams weren’t real I could almost feel her fingers weaving through my hand, her big lips pressed against the tips of my fingers. She was always the one that made me feel like I could conquer anything. She was one of the first people who ever believed in me, her and Grandma. For a long time those were my two girls. I didn’t want to lose them both.

  But the bitter truth was that I was about to lose one, the most amazing person that ever existed. That ornery old woman had called me out on every one of my issues and lit a fire underneath me to go and get what I wanted. And I had. And now she was on her way out.

  My mother Jane’s whole side of the family was with my grandma Doris when she passed away. Her two sons and their wives were there, along with all her grandchildren. Their kids, who were all roughly around my age, didn’t seem to care much. They were sad because their parents were sad, but they weren’t all that interested. It was a stretch for me to be hospitable to them and act like they were family. It took my grandma slapping me upside the head to make me take them seriously. When she had slapped me it felt like someone was fanning my hair, I had to look to see what she was doing to know for sure. Then I had to bite my tongue to avoid laughing at her attempted physical discipline. She glared at me and told me to be nice because they were family.

  On the night she passed away it wasn’t the uninterested cousins or their parents that she called for, though. It was me. The nurse had given Grandma a fair amount of morphine so she wouldn’t be in pain. She'd had enough to have a conversation, but barely. I walked slowly into her room, knowing that this was probably the last time I would be able to talk with her. Each step closer to her made me feel like I was putting the nail in her coffin. She was even smaller than she had been four months ago, and looked like there was no blood left in her body. I sat down on her bed and leaned my head into her bony chest, keeping all of my weight in the air so I wouldn’t break a rib or something. Her weak arms raised to hug me and she sucked in a deep breath of air that sounded like it hurt. I tried to lift my head but her arm kept it in place. She kissed the top of my head.

  “You have grown into a fine young man, David Johnson.” Her voice was soft. It sounded like each word was difficult for her to say. I tried to shush her but she beat me to it by telling me to be quiet. I complied. “You listen to me, David. If there is anything that I want you to remember--” she coughed and arched her back in pain. Her nurse came over and fiddled with the morphine tube. Grandma quickly relaxed. Her body spread even lower into her bed.

  She was giving up.

  She opened her eyes and stared straight into mine, a thing that used to freak me out, but now I longed for. “David,” she tried again with less energy but more desperation, “I want you to get what you want, work hard, do the right thing and love.” She smiled at me, grabbed my face with her brittle fingers, and put our foreheads together.

  “Thank you Grandma.” I spoke through desperate tears. I needed her to hang on until I was able to express myself. “Thank you so much for loving me.”

  “It was easy, honey.”

  Those were the last words she spoke to me.

  So there I sat, in a limo with my aunts and uncles on the way to Grandma’s funeral. She had passed away two days ago, on a Thursday morning. As much as I missed her, I was glad she wasn’t in pain anymore. I’d paid for the casket and flowers, her sons paid for the rest. I had spent way more on Grandma than I would ever spend on myself; she deserved it. Over the last few months we had gone back and forth about the in-home nurse. She’d said the only way she would allow one in her house was if the insurance paid for it. I wasn’t a very good liar, but I got away with that one. I started chuckling when I thought about it.

  Tears jumped to my eyes when I walked into the church. The place looked amazing.

  Sean had called me the day after she had died to tell me his church was offering to have the funeral service there. People from the church were going to set it up for us so we could be with family. Sean didn’t realize, of course, that I didn’t really want to be with this part of my family, but I appreciated it and let them do it.

  Johnny and Jennika stood in the far corner, putting some flowers on a table completely covered with pictures of my grandmother, starting from when she was a baby to a couple of months before she died. Sean was setting up chairs and, to my surprise, Isaiah was helping. He was limping around, straightening chairs and making snarky comments to Sean in a low voice. I felt a rush of excitement when I saw Evelyn and Rachel setting up the keyboard and guitar, because I knew if they were there, Lucy had to be around. I had never seen this crowd without her. I scanned the room again, but I didn’t see Lucy anywhere. She was there, though. I knew it. She’d loved my grandma more than almost anyone else.

  “Hey, David.” Sean lifted his hand, then came over to me and gave me a hug. He had a way of hugging that felt real, like I was important to him.

  “This place looks great, Sean. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Oh, it’s the least we can do. Your grandma was amazing. I thought she was going to punch me when I met her and she saw my tattoos. When she found out about yours, that was priceless, greatest thing I had ever seen.” I started laughing with him, remembering that day: the best birthday I had ever had. “Speaking of, man, check this out.” Sean looked around the room, making sure no one was looking, and lifted his left pant leg up. On his calf was the tattoo I had drawn.

  “Whoa, that looks amazing, Sean.” I took in the two hands I had drawn, a waterfall of water flowing out of two holes in the base of the palms. It was something I thought Sean would appreciate. And he had.

  “It does look amazing. You know, the lady that put this on for me asked me where I got it, she said that her shop would pay over a hundred dollars for the template of a tattoo like that.”

  “Really? That’s a lot of money.” I was amazed that someone thought that much of my little doodles.

  “I’m telling you, David. If you really wanted to sell those, you could make serious money.” He patted my back and looked at me, like he wished he could just do it himself. That was a change, Sean wanting to be like me.

  “Have you seen Lucy?” I blurted, not able to keep the question in any longer. I was afraid of spontaneously combusting. That would have been a shame, especially at my grandmother’s funeral.

  “I haven’t seen her yet, but she told me yesterday she was coming.” He straightened an already straight chair, avoiding eye contact. Whenever I mentioned her, everyone got nervous. First Evelyn at Isaiah’s physical therapy, then Michelle when we were egging Rachel’s car, now Sean. The thought of everyone knowing more about Lucy than me made me sick to my stomach. So I pushed it down and decided to ignore it and believe that he really was just straightening a chair.

  “Hey man.” Isaiah came over and hugged me.

  “Looking good, gimp. How are you feeling?”

  “Well, my muscles are still sore, but I’m pretty much healed up. The skin looks amazing, it’s like a road map of Rhode Island or something.” Trust Isaiah to make a joke of a gnarly injury. He looked over at the stage then looked back at me quickly, hoping I hadn’t seen his eye
s wander over to Evelyn.

  “So, you guys officially going out yet?” I punched his shoulder as I spoke. He grimaced and looked at his feet.

  “No. I don’t think so anyways.”

  “You don’t think so?” I started laughing at him and he shot daggers at me.

  “I took her to this movie. It was about zombies. I think she got sick afterwards.” He laughed.

  “So you took her on a date?”

  “She made me, but I got to pick the movie.” He winked at me and looked back over his shoulder in her direction. She was looking back at us as well, scowling as usual, at Isaiah. “She is crazy, if you ask me. She’s gotta’ be just messing around with me. Or thinking there’s some fuzzy-puppy-nugget of goodness hidden somewhere. Nuts, right?” His eyes studied me seriously. It was a rare occasion when Isaiah asked a straightforward question.

  “Awww, but then she’d be right. You’re secretly a puppy-dawg eatin’ cotton candy.” Isaiah grimaced but I had to keep going. The opportunity was too good to waste. “Maybe she just likes you because you won’t give her the time of day. That kind of thing freaks pretty girls out. It means they have to win you with more than their good looks.”

  “In that case I’m going to go slap her gorgeous face.” He winked at me again and limped off towards Evelyn. As I expected, he did something completely opposite from a face slap. I watched him all the same. He bent down to pick up something Evelyn was pointing at, then followed her towards the entrance. She stopped where I was standing and smiled so kindly at me, I was about to introduce myself, thinking we had never met.

  “David, I’m sorry about your grandma.” She reached in and took me in her arms for a hug, her little body feeling like a toothpick.

  “Thanks, Evelyn.” I gulped. Isaiah was looking at the back of her head with a mixture of confused longing. She patted my shoulders comfortingly then spun her little body around and linked arms with Isaiah, who instantly shook her off, but followed her out of the room, still carrying her things. Like a puppy dog.