by Marni Mann
I ignored Lilly’s yelling. She could wait, but the phone call couldn’t. Three people had my number; I had spoken to my boss this morning, and Lilly was in the next room.
There was only one other.
“Are you doing all right?” Dallas asked when I picked up.
Whenever I returned from an Emma memory, I was filled with ice. But Dallas’s voice brought me warmth, a fire that spread to each of my limbs. I ignored Lilly’s second shout and moved toward the pillows, leaning my back against the wall, hoping the steadiness would stop my quivering. It didn’t.
“I’m fine.”
Dallas knew that yesterday was the anniversary of my accident. We’d been hooking up for over a year and he saw it every time he looked at my hand as I’d gotten the date of the crash tattooed above the heart. He also knew I didn’t have anyone else in my life who would call.
“You don’t have to lie,” he said. “I know you’re not fine. I was going to call yesterday, but I figured you needed a minute…that you’d probably be hurting more today.”
Though my leg had fully healed from the break, I still got random tweaks, and it stiffened up on cold days. That wasn’t the pain he was referring to, though; during the few times I’d had a little too much to drink around him, I’d purged more than just alcohol. He knew the emotions that had taken up residence in my stomach, and how, even five years later, they hadn’t lessened a bit.
“I need you,” Lilly yelled. “You’d better not leave without coming in here first.”
My alarm clock showed that I had less than an hour before I had to be at work. I got up from the bed and took a seat on the floor in front of the mirror. “Thanks for calling.”
His breathing filled the silence. Then he cleared his throat. “I don’t know what to say.”
I swiped bronzer across my cheeks. “There’s nothing you can say.”
“I mean about us.”
“There isn’t anything to say about that, either.”
“I miss you, Cee.”
The way he said my name…it was as though he were whispering it into my ear. I felt the heat that came from his mouth, the chill that ran through me from his touch. His hands and fingers—I missed it all. A throbbing started in my lower stomach.
Dallas used his whole body to tease me; he knew just how to push me toward a peak, and how to let me come down. If he would have asked me to come over, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself. But then, after falling flat on his pillow, we’d be right back in that place—the talking and pleading, him asking me to move in, to unzip and show him every speck of black glitter that didn’t fall from just my paintings. It all threatened the barrier that I had formed around my heart. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to give him that; it was more that I couldn’t. So I gave him what I could. But sex wasn’t enough for him.
“I…I have to go,” I said quickly. I hung up before he could say any more.
My mind moved back to the times we’d fucked in the bathroom at the train station, in the alley behind our favorite restaurant, on the grass behind his apartment. The toys he had used on me…how he’d carried around a pair of my dirty panties and kept my smell on his scruff when he went to work so he could taste me all day, because a finger or two would never have been enough for him.
My hands began to move, buttoning the waist of my pants and locking my belt into place. I placed my bag diagonally across my body and pulled a light jacket over it. My cell phone went in my back pocket, and I shut off the light. There would be others, I reminded myself, who wouldn’t ask me to open up. Others I wouldn’t give the chance to ask.
“Charlie! Now!” Lilly called.
I walked into her room, noticing how greasy her hair was, how the sides had stuck to her cheeks. Her lips were flaky and cracked, her tongue so dry it had gone white with thick spit. Her fingers gripped the blanket like she was trying desperately to hold on. In a way, she was. But every morning when I delivered her pills, I watched her become more submissive to her disease. With every day that passed, her hygiene and appearance mattered a little less. In the past, I tried to wipe away the grime on her face, and the filth that had accumulated on her body. It only angered her, so I stopped.
Ovarian cancer. That was the diagnosis the doctor had given her four years ago when she went to his office to get the results of her screening. Before the exam, she hadn’t had a checkup in years and only made the appointment because something didn’t feel right. She hadn’t expected it to be cancer, or for the last two rounds of chemo to have no effect or for it to metastasize to her pelvic and leg bones. The pain medication kept her stable, but she no longer had the use of her legs and found it difficult to move in and out of her wheelchair.
Lilly had always looked like an older version of me, with her long chocolate hair and full lips. But my eyes were green, while hers were caramel. Despite all the liquor she drank, her skin had been creamy, an olive and gold complexion. And whenever someone heard her sing, they would ask why she was unsigned—or at least the drunks at the bar would, when she’d stand up on a speaker and belt out some old school metal jam. She was beautiful and she had the voice, but she would answer, “I can’t raise a kid on the road. Charlie ain’t got no one but me.”
I wasn’t the reason Lilly didn’t have a record deal; it was her fear that had kept it from happening. Boston was where she’d grown up, where she knew enough people to keep her employed and to help raise me, and where she wasn’t judged for being an alcoholic. But claiming to stay for me made her look noble—or at least like a good mom—so she preferred that story over the truth.
But now her beauty was gone. The wilted flower stared up from her bed with red, watery lids. Her tongue swiped over her lips. She reached underneath the damp washcloth, scratching at the patches of baldness on her head. If I were to paint her, wisps of white would have filled the page.
“Can you get me some water?” She lit a cigarette and dangled it between her fingers. She coughed as she exhaled, barely having the strength to take a second drag, but she refused to quit.
I handed her the cup from the side table and bent the straw so it would reach her mouth.
“You get the mail?” she asked.
I nodded. Not having enough energy to use her wheelchair, she wasn’t able to make it downstairs to the mailbox. I was thankful for that.
“Anything from the landlord?”
“I should have enough to cover the whole bill, plus what we owe from last month.”
“Can’t you work overtime so this shit won’t happen again?”
“Like I told you this morning, I was only approved for thirty-six hours.”
“I forgot, goddammit!” She pounded her fist on the mattress.
I opened my mouth, but the only thing that came out was a sigh. I searched inside, deep within my body, for the tingles Dallas had left. Seconds passed. The only things I felt were the dull ache between my eyes and an overwhelming urge to shout inappropriate things at her.
She was dying; I had to remember that.
“How would you like to be stuck in this bed, at the mercy of your daughter?” she asked, glaring at me. “You wouldn’t like it, would you, Charlie? You wouldn’t like to be forty-two years old, rottin’ the fuck away in this bed.”
For the first six months after my accident, I had to wear a cast from my ankle to hip. Almost a full year of physical therapy followed. The crutches rubbed my armpits raw, and the rash became so bad the doctor had to treat that, too. That was only the physical pain; the mental pain was even worse. I was at Lilly’s mercy then. But she’d worked nights at the bar—the shift she’d had since I was a kid—and would go out with different men during the day. She would return home in the early hours of the morning and cozy up to me in bed, relaying her night at work—telling me about the tips she’d made and the drunks who’d come in to visit her. Then she’d leave me for several minutes while she mashed together items from the fridge, returning with a plate of overcooked scramble and a full de
scription of the man she had slept with. It was too much detail for a mother to be telling her daughter, but asking Lilly to stop sharing only made her talk more. So until she passed out, she would tell me about the man’s love, how many times he had said it during the night, the characteristic that had attracted her. And after she rested, she wouldn’t speak his name again…unless someone else she slept with happened to have the same name.
Lilly stopped working at the bar two years ago. She needed a caretaker to do even more than I had already been—someone to pick up her medication from the pharmacy, cook her meals, pay her bills and help her in the shower. I became that person. Medicaid sent in a nurse once a day to check her vitals and treat her bedsores. But I was the one who listened as she whined about getting pregnant at eighteen, and about the men who had wanted to marry her until they found out they’d have to support me as well. About the stretch marks I had put on her body, and the cellulite on her ass. I was the reason she had been a bartender, now with a disability check that barely covered our rent, and had no man who loved her. And she liked to remind me of it every single day.
We both knew she was dying now; the doctor confirmed it during our last meeting with him. She was told she had three months to live. That was a month ago.
It wasn’t her fault that her body had rejected treatment and, since I didn’t have other relatives, I would be without any family once she died. I accepted that she was going to be gone soon. What I couldn’t accept was that she had chosen alcohol over me long before she’d gotten sick, had abandoned her responsibilities and let our neighbors and her bar buddies raise me—that was, until I found Emma’s family, who were far better parents than Lilly ever could be.
Not only had she deprived me of a childhood, but she’d compromised my future as well by stealing my identity. Shortly after her diagnosis, she opened three credit cards under my name using my social security number and accumulated an enormous mound of debt. It would take half my life to pay it off. But I didn’t report her to the police; I couldn’t put a dying woman behind bars. So I consolidated the balances and paid the most I could each month.
“Answer me, dammit!” she shouted.
“No, I wouldn’t want to be rotting away,” I said.
Her hand shook in the air as she pointed at me. “Then the least you can do is have some fucking patience with me.”
I ground my teeth together, pulled the cigarette from her fingers and stabbed it into the ashtray. There was a lot I could blame her for: me not being able to take a full semester of classes, being the reason I still lived at home, being a shitty mother. But I wasn’t going to argue with her today.
I set the pills in her hand. “Take these.” Then I left her room and shut the door behind me.
***
The art building was next to the train station and not too far from my work, so I stopped by Professor Freeman’s office to drop off Kerrianna. He took her out of my hand, tore off the protective brown paper, and set her on the easel in the back room.
Standing in front of her with one arm crossed and the other palm cupping his chin, he said, “Your pieces always introduce the darker side of life. But this…this is the darkest.”
Being honest in my work was the only way I knew how to paint, but there were consequences and risks when using a darker hand. Had I taken it too far this time?
“I feel her pain,” he said. “It’s surging though the canvas.”
I smiled and nodded. A tingle sparked in my lower stomach.
“Your sugar skull was an interesting creation; fresh and inventive. But this shows significant progress, Charlie.”
In the previous class I had taken with him, our final project was to paint our own theoretical autopsy, and what we thought a pathologist would find inside of us. Most of the students incorporated their vices and showed how those would be their causes of death. Mine was a self-portrait; I wore black lace lingerie and let hints of my body poke through the sheer fabric. White powder covered my face, black lines ran down the length of my lips, and a large splotch dotted the tip of my nose. Swirls decorated my cheeks and chin, a web extended across the width of my forehead, and outlining my eyes were circles of teal. My face was a sugar skull. For me, every day was the Day of the Dead.
The difference between Professor Freeman and everyone else in the art department was he knew the many sources of my pain. He lived in the suburb of Newton, the same town as me, and he had heard about the accident. When I had turned in the sugar skull, we discussed the origin of some of my inspiration. What he had taught me during this past semester was how to channel the hurt from the crash, from the noises and visions, and turn them into objects.
This was what I’d done with Kerrianna.
“I didn’t include her face because—”
“I know why,” he said, “and I think your reasoning is brilliant. The whole piece is brilliant. Bravo, Charlie. Bravo.”
My brows raised; I couldn’t seem to keep them down as I faced him. And after I fumbled with the first few words, I gave up and smiled. Of course he knew my reasoning; I had opened up to him. It meant that he also knew the similarities between Kerrianna and me. I still wasn’t sure how that made me feel.
“I’m assisting a former student with her new gallery in the South End; it will be open and running within the next few weeks. This could be the perfect opportunity for you, I believe. An exhibit…late summer or early fall. What do you think?”
I couldn’t believe what he’d just said.
“Yes, of course…thank you, I would love that.”
He laughed. “It’s settled, then. Why don’t we reconnect in a month or so to discuss the details?”
“I’ll email you,” I said, and I smiled again. “And I’ll stop over for our regular meetings, like we discussed previously.”
Even though part-time students didn’t have advisors, Professor Freeman had offered to become mine. He had outlined my courses for the next few years; he knew I had two planned for summer term, which would complete my freshman year credits, and his mentoring and reviewing of each piece would continue straight through.
“Please do,” he said, pausing. “Charlie, I know yesterday was a hard day for you. I’m glad to see you smiling today.”
I thanked him silently and turned toward the door.
CHAPTER THREE
I’d been employed at the Back Bay Grand Hotel as a front-end supervisor for four years. It was only the second job I’d ever had. My first, in high school, was at a jewelry boutique; I worked there until the accident. The hotel was close to the train and to Northeastern—both just a short ride from my apartment—and since I worked the night shift, I could take early morning classes. Lilly’s pain was worse at night, so she took an extra pill that knocked her out until morning. She required less care in that state. I didn’t like leaving her alone for all those hours, but I had to work, and school was equally important. Besides offering a slightly higher wage, the night shift was also the quietest shift available. My life was loud: the shouting at home, city honking, bursts of creativity exploding in front of my eyes, the screams I heard inside my head. All of that was reduced to a drone when I had the time and space to relax my breath. That opportunity came to me late at night, while everyone slept.
But if Jody was staying at the hotel? My mind would be roaring then.
I logged into the computer; he had checked in this morning. It only took an hour into my shift before I felt him. He hadn’t actually touched me; he didn’t need to. I was so tuned in to his movements and sounds that I could sense him—smell him, even—as soon as he stepped off the elevator. The heels of his shoes clicked on the marble as he walked over to the desk. When he pressed his hands against the wooden counter, the outer rim of his tattoos poked through the cuffs of his button-down. A black winter hat covered his shaved head, even though it was warm outside, and scruff dusted his cheeks. He was beautiful.
“Evenin’, Charlie,” he said. His voice was deep, slightly raspy, and his accent
caressed my ears.
With just his stare, my flesh felt as though it had been licked. And bitten. Was it a true need…or was it just me needing him?
“Did you have a good flight, Jody?”
He nodded, and coughed into his fist. The gesture revealed a little more of the dragon that swirled around his forearm. “I came in from Vancouver. Cold as hell up there.” He lived in London, but consulted for a high tech company so he traveled the world. At the end of every month, he stayed at the hotel for at least three nights.
He always told me about the place he’d last visited. I’d never traveled outside of New England; in my mind, though, Jody brought me to all the countries that had been stamped on his passport.
“How long are you staying?” I asked.
The computer showed four nights, but I liked to hear him talk, to have his attention, his hands gripping the desk with tension. Aviator glasses hid his blue eyes, but I knew they were on my lips…and my breasts.
He shifted his jacket, moving it from his right shoulder to his left. “A few more nights. Then it’s back to London for a bit, before I head to Bangkok.”
My mind didn’t just travel the globe with him; it fucked him, too. My eyes moved from his lips to his fingers, ignoring the circular shield of gold that he wore. I studied each one, picturing how they would look when they shined from my wetness. His mouth opened, and his tongue touched the inside of his lip. I could feel it flick my nipples.