by Fox, Ella
Everything slowed down and I struggled to understand the meaning of her words.
“Baby?” the neighbor asked.
“Oh, yes. You should’ve seen her. Lola is just the most beautiful little girl I’ve ever seen—and if it weren’t for that little liar over there, she’d know her grandmother. Can you imagine being denied access to your family because of one lying snooty bitch?”
It was like being sucker punched. The sensation was so extreme that I couldn’t catch my breath. My heart slammed against my chest as I hurried toward the door, desperate to get inside. My hands shook so badly that the mail I’d been holding fell to the ground, but there was no chance I could bend over to pick it up since my head was spinning and my legs felt like I was taking my first steps on land after a year at sea. I grabbed for the door handle, missed, and grabbed again, turning it with fingers that had lost all coordination. When I finally got it, I flung the door open with such force that it banged against the entry wall. I stumbled through the door in a rush only to drop down onto the tile entry as soon as I was inside.
A baby. A girl. God had taken my child, but Jewel was blessed with a daughter? The same woman who had treated me like an inconvenience for my entire life—the one who had repeatedly made it known how much she disliked children—had gone ahead and had another baby. I wanted to scream, to rage at the fucking world for the injustice of it.
It felt like my head and heart were both being squeezed in a fist, the pain so extreme it took me back to what it felt like to lose Melody and leave Garrett. All I could think about was escape. The sound of my harsh and erratic breathing was like torture to my eardrums. I needed silence so badly I could practically taste it, and I damn well intended to get it.
When I finally got to my room, I crawled right to the bedside table, flung open the top drawer, and frantically pawed at the contents until I got to the bottle of Klonopin I kept in case of emergency. I’d been given a prescription for it nearly two months after Melody died, but after three weeks of daily use I’d realized I was dangerously close to being dependent even though it wasn’t actually helping me at all. In fact, it had made my depression worse. I weaned myself off, but for some reason had picked up the refill the doctor called in. I kept it like a talisman, like just having the bottle of pills was enough to keep me from breaking.
I fumbled with the lid until I got it off, grumbling as a few of the pills scattered on the floor. Picking them up, I put two in my mouth and swallowed, praying they’d take effect quickly. Then for good measure, I took another two before I put the rest back in the bottle, put the cap back on and let the bottle drop back to the floor.
Having the medication on hand didn’t keep me from breaking. How could it when I was already fucking broken? Knowing my legs wouldn’t hold my weight if I tried to stand, I stayed on the floor and pulled my comforter down on me. Curling into a ball, I waited for the medication to kick in. Soon, I would be calm. All I had to do was hold on.
Chapter Eight
Shaelyn— August 2001
The sound of Alan frantically repeating my name woke me up. Cracking one eye open, I looked at him in confusion and wondered why I was on the floor with him bent at the waist looking down at me.
“What, what’re you—” I stopped talking and swallowed past the desert in my mouth.
“Can you open both eyes and really look at me?” Alan asked.
I swallowed again as I nodded. “I guess.”
“Then show me that, honey. I need to see your eyes.”
I frowned, wondering why he wanted to see my eyes. My brain and tongue both felt lazy, and I was having trouble putting thoughts together. I felt loopy in the way I had when I’d gotten my wisdom teeth out. My heartbeat sped up a bit as I opened my eyes and took in the ashen quality of Alan’s skin and realized he was upset about something. With both eyes open, I realized something was definitely weird about what was going on. “Did I have surgery?” I asked. “And why am I on the floor?”
“You didn’t have surgery, and quite honestly I don’t know why you’re down there,” he answered. “I was hoping you could tell me. When I got here, I found mail scattered all over the courtyard and the front door was wide open. I thought something terrible had happened. Did you feel faint? Do you have a migraine? Should we call the doctor?”
His rapid-fire questions jarred me out of the twilight state I’d fallen into. The mail and the door I remembered. And with that, I remembered everything else— and the fucking pills I’d taken to get me through it stopped doing their job.
“I don’t need a doctor,” I answered flatly. “But I do need my grandmother. Can you please call her at work and tell her to come home? I need her.”
Alan’s brows shot up toward his hairline in surprise. Possibly it was due to the fact that since Melody died, I never asked for anything or anyone. More likely his surprise was because I was asking for Goldie to leave work and come home immediately, which meant whatever I needed was important.
“Of course,” he said calmly, like his tone of voice would soothe me. “I’ll call her now.”
I nodded and said thank you as I got up off the floor and tossed the comforter onto my bed. When I turned back around Alan was still standing there, only now he was staring down at the floor. Following his gaze, I saw the bottle of Klonopin, face up with my name and the medication printed as plain as day.
When he looked up, I could tell he was thinking the worst. “My god, Shaelyn. Are you… did you… try to kill yourself?” he asked.
“No. No,” I said again, more firmly. “I wouldn’t do that to any of you,” I assured him. “Something happened, and I needed to take a pill.”
He assessed me quietly for several seconds. “When you woke up you asked me if you’d just had surgery. I don’t think one pill would’ve left you that confused.”
I sighed. “I took four, but they’re the lowest available dosage and I swear on everything that means anything to me that I wasn’t trying to kill myself. What happened was… bad. I needed some relief.”
He nodded, seemingly accepting my answer. Still, before he left the room he bent down, grabbed the bottle, and took it with him. I didn’t say a word.
* * *
When Goldie got home, she had a brief conversation with Alan in hushed tones that I couldn’t quite make out, not that it mattered. Even without hearing exactly what they said, I knew the overall gist. Alan was worried about the way he’d found me and Goldie was panicked that I’d asked for her to come home from work.
I was sitting cross-legged on the bed, back propped against the oak headboard when she walked in. Outside I probably appeared calm, but inside was another story. I felt like the Titanic after hitting the iceberg. I had taken on too much, too fast, and now I was emotionally capsizing. Going down seemed inevitable.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Goldie asked as she sat on the bed next to me.
There was so much trapped inside of me that for a few moments I struggled with putting together the words to explain what the issue was.
Finally, I decided to go with the most essential thing. “Jewel had…” I trailed off, unwilling to say she’d had another daughter. The truth was she’d never been a mother to me in any way that counted, and she certainly hadn’t treated me like a daughter. It felt wrong to even think of that word in relation to Jewel and myself. The loss of my daughter rocked me every single day— Jewel hadn’t missed me at all. Swallowing hard, I tried again. “Jewel had a baby?”
My grandmother sucked in a harsh breath. “Was she here?” she asked, her voice angry.
I shook my head. “No. I overheard Jean telling the new neighbor what a horrible person I am. Part of her spiel about me was based on the fact that Jewel had been here in June with her… daughter,” I spluttered, “and you turned her away. Why didn’t you tell me she’d been here?”
Goldie let out a sigh. “First of all, Jean can go pound sand because she’s a miserable gossip and a horrible person. I’m ashamed of her for
buying what Jewel was selling, but you best believe I’m going to set her straight. Whatever she said about you will be addressed.”
I nodded once, understanding why Goldie was mad. I was pissed at Jean, too. If Goldie wanted to go off on her, I wasn’t going to tell her not to do it.
“And really, Peanut Breath, you have to know that everything Jean said was garbage,” Goldie said gently. “Aside from you, what good has ever come from Jewel? It’s always something with her, and you and I both know that all too well. To be perfectly blunt with you, the idea of telling you about her visit when it happened seemed like a terrible idea—and I don’t think it’s any better that you know now. You’ve been through enough. I didn’t think adding more of Jewel’s nonsense to the pile would be healthy and I stand by that decision.”
The idea that I was keeping her away from her granddaughter made me ill. After all, I’d grown up with Goldie. I knew how big she loved— and how much of a difference her presence in my life had made for me. Maybe Jewel trying to reestablish a relationship with Goldie was about needing help with her baby. I shuddered to consider what my life would have been like without my grandmother. How could I sit by and take that option away from another child who might need her? The answer was that I couldn’t.
I forced myself to look directly at my grandmother when I spoke. “If it weren’t for me and my problems you’d have let her in, wouldn’t you?”
Goldie held my gaze as she shook her head emphatically. “No, I wouldn’t. My daughter let me down in a million ways, and I spent too many years making excuses for her. No matter what she got herself into, I always did whatever I had to do to bail her out. To be blunt, some of the things I had to do humiliated me and thinking back on them makes me ill. A good person would not ask for or expect the kind of sacrifices she regularly demanded— first from me and later from you. Those kinds of things happened over and over again because she only ever cared for herself.”
Goldie frowned and looked away from me before she went on. “Jewel’s type of poison doesn’t just affect one life— it gets to everyone she comes in contact with. I’ve been through thirty-six plus years of it, and I know I don’t have it in me to deal with her lies and manipulations anymore. I hate what that says about me as a mother but the truth is, my well ran dry a long time ago where she’s concerned. After she attacked you in Utah, I finally accepted what I’d avoided believing for years. She’s a bad egg, and nothing I do or say will change that.”
I hated Jewel for making Goldie feel for even an instant that she’d failed as a parent. “You weren’t a bad mother to her, Goldie. She took advantage of how much you loved her.”
My grandmother nodded. “That same thing applies to you, too. Taking advantage of everyone around her and lying are the two things about her that will never change. Jean may have bought the act Jewel was putting on when she showed up here, but I didn’t.”
“So then, she’s… the same?” I asked.
“No,” Goldie sighed.
My heart plummeted, which caused me great shame. How could I be disappointed to hear that she had changed? It was for the best that she’d turned a corner.
“Honey, she’s worse.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. Hearing Jean talk about Jewel as if she had become a pious woman had really messed with my head.
“She is?”
“Yes,” my grandmother said, her tone telling me she meant it.
“How so?”
Goldie waved her hand dismissively. “I was against telling you she was here at all and I’ve not changed my opinion on that. You don’t need to know the details, Peanut Breath. All I’ll tell you is that she’s an even more rotten human being than she already was. Jean bought the act— the same way Jewel’s victims always do. She turns on the charm, and people lose their ability to see the wolf in sheep’s clothing. We know better because we learned the hard way. I wasn’t fooled for even one second, and you wouldn’t be, either.”
My emotions were a mess. I’d been devastated to think she’d changed, but it was unbearable to know that she was worse than ever. How could someone so wretched be blessed with a child? How?
I was trapped in my head for a bit as I tried to sort through my emotions, but they were so powerful that I couldn’t seem to get ahold of them.
After a few minutes of silence, Goldie prodded me. “Are you okay?”
No. I was far from okay. I wasn’t even in the same time zone as okay. If okay were an island, I was on the opposite side of the world from it. Still, I didn’t want to upset my grandmother more than she already was. I decided to say something bland to end the conversation. “I just…”
I tried, but that was as much as I could get out. Looking back at me, Goldie waited for me to finish my sentence. The thing was that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t commit to a lie or a bland statement. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t raging. Beneath the surface, my anger was boiling up all over again.
When I didn’t say anything, she prodded me. “What do you ‘just’?”
I felt like a volcano as anger flowed through my veins like lava. Everything that had been bottled up inside of me was now at the surface, and I no longer had the strength to hold it back. I lost it in an instant, my voice raised as I raged over the unfairness of it all.
“Jean was spouting off about how Jewel found God and was blessed with this new baby, and it hurt so much I could barely breathe. But now I know Jewel didn’t find God at all. She lied about that the way she lies about everything. She’s a compulsive liar, a thief, and a con artist, the same as she’s always been, and I’m so mad I want to scream. God took the little girl that Garrett and I would’ve loved with everything we had away from us. He never even gave me a chance. If I was going to be such a bad mother, why not take me instead of her? Garrett would’ve been an amazing father, and I’d never have tainted her. Only instead of taking me, he took her!”
My breath came in harsh, ragged gusts as I let it all out. “How is that right? What did I do that made him hate me so much? Why did my daughter and my husband have to suffer because of me? I’ve given everything up and still, the hits just keep coming! This is a giant middle finger to the face, yet another reminder that I fucked up at some point and need to pay for it more. I lost my daughter and gave up my husband so that he can have the family he deserves. I failed as a mother and a wife, and I’ll have to live with that every single day for the rest of my life. Shouldn’t that be punishment enough?”
“Shaelyn, honey, please—”
“No!” I yelled. “I can’t believe this is happening. My daughter is dead, my marriage is over and every day is a struggle, but somehow Jewel was able to pop out a baby like it was nothing. I feel bad enough as it is! How much more am I supposed to take?” I wailed. “I have nothing left to give!”
Goldie wrapped her arms around me and held me tightly. I knew that she was speaking, but I wasn’t listening because my head and heart were too full of all the anger and pain I’d tried to keep hidden. Now that I’d opened the lid, everything was coming out at once and my body shook as each uncontrollable sob racked my body.
I was vaguely aware that she was telling me I was wrong, that God had never set out to punish me, but I was crying too hard to really take it in. I sobbed for what felt like hours. My tears were for Melody, the daughter I’d never had the chance to know, for Garrett, the man I adored who’d lost everything because he’d been fool enough to love me, for my grandmother who’d had her heart broken time and time again by her selfish daughter, and, finally, for Lola, the little girl who had Jewel as a mother. I’d been all the way down that road and couldn’t imagine anything other than a personality transplant could have changed what Jewel was at her core.
I cried for all the things I couldn’t change, and I did it until there were no tears left and emotional exhaustion dragged me down into sleep.
Chapter Nine
Shaelyn— August 2001
My room was dark but the second I ope
ned my eyes, I knew he was there. My first thought, as always, was how settled I felt with him close by. For a second or two it was just that, the comfort of knowing the person I loved most was with me. And then I remembered where I was—and in the next instant, I realized Alan must have called and told him I had a bad day. Fresh guilt arranged itself on my shoulders as I thought of the look on Alan’s face when he took the prescription bottle from me. Shit, I thought, he’d probably told Garrett I’d tried to off myself.
“Garrett,” I sighed.
There was a hiss of breath after my voice broke the silence. “Goddammit Shaelyn,” he answered, his voice thick with emotion. “What the fuck?”
I sat up slowly, pushing my hair back from my face as I looked toward the end of my bed where I could just make out the faint outline of him.
“I’m okay,” I said softly.
He let out a choked sound of disbelief. “That’s bullshit, and we both know it.”
Standing, he made his way to the bedside table and turned on the lamp. I blinked a few times to adjust to the light before I looked up at him. When I did, my heart dropped. He was staring down at me and the expression on his face was one I’d seen from him before— but never directed at me.
“You’re pissed at me,” I breathed, my tone one of surprise.
He shook his head as he sat down on the edge of my bed and turned to face me. “You think?”
I took a deep breath and promised myself that no matter what he said, I’d survive it. If he needed to vent, I’d take it. “Yes, I do. I’m sure it’s about the medication Alan took from me earlier, and I’ll tell you what I told him. I wasn’t trying to off myself, I swear. I wouldn’t do that to any of you.”
His expression softened a little bit. “I believe you.”