The Mythic Koda Rose

by Jennifer Nissley

  “Jeez,” I say.

  She rubs her sore-looking eyes.

  “This all happened overnight?” Flurries are one thing, but snow in bulk?

  Incredible. Some piles have fluffed onto the windowsill, and while I wait for Sadie to tell me what’s wrong, I sear my fingertips in it, shivering.

  Sadie moves a hand to her nose, sniffling. Then she lurches for the bathroom and doesn’t come out. Not even after ten, fifteen minutes.

  “Sades?” I call.

  The guitar is in her bedroom. While I listen for movement, I pick it up, try a quick chord. It doesn’t sting. “Hello?” I try again. She disappears in there all the time, but now—I don’t know. Something’s off. I put the guitar down and knock on the door. “Sadie.” My mind starts to race. “Sadie, what’s wrong? I’m coming in if you don’t answer.” I try the knob, expecting it to be locked. But the door creaks open, revealing Sadie scrunched on the toilet seat, clutching her nose.

  “Shut the door,” she barks.

  Her fingers glisten crimson.

  “I’m fine.”

  I book for the kitchen. Her fridge doesn’t have an ice cube maker, or trays for doing it the old-fashioned way, but when I wrench the tap on, the water is already pretty cold. I fly back down the hall to find the door still open, Sadie where I left her. It takes some prodding—I have to physically pry her hands from her nose and stuff the dripping paper-towel wad at her—but she seems to get the idea. “Put this on your nose. It’ll constrict the capillaries. Blood vessels,” I clarify as she blinks, uncomprehending. “That’s what causes nosebleeds.”

  The paper towels don’t help, wilting red in no time. I slide down the wall so Sadie won’t see my legs quaking, but being this close to the blood makes me feel worse. Throw-up worse. “I used to get nosebleeds when I was little,” I say, needing to hear a voice. “The doctor said they were from the air in LA being too dry. Maybe that’s your problem? Your apartment’s always so hot.” Even now, I’m sweating. Sadie maneuvers around me to hawk blood into the sink.

  “It’s the hole in my nose.”

  I look up.

  She slurps from the tap, rinses, spits. “Used to be I wasn’t doing as much coke as when I was younger. Few lines here and there, with Em, but then she went and got all fucking sober, and you came waltzing into the picture, with your puppy dog eyes and guilt trips, and I remembered, oh right, I’m an addict. This is how I cope.” She gulps more water. “Well, according to Teddy.”

  The tiles are ice. I draw my knees up, and Sadie softens with something like pity. “You didn’t know,” she says. “I knew you didn’t know, which was why it was so easy to hide it from you. From the beginning I told Teddy, ‘I’ve got this.’ I was all, ‘How could some kid hurt me more than I’ve already hurt myself?’ Guess I’ve finally got my answer.”

  My fingertips ache, numb from the snow and cold water. I curl them inside my sweatshirt cuffs, mindful of my budding calluses. The baby nubs. “I—”

  “When Mack died, I went back upstate to my parents’. Climbed into bed and didn’t get up for a month. Anytime I considered it, I’d hear paparazzi rustling around outside, shutters clicking, and there was all this stuff Mack had given me while we were in school, photos and notes and drawings tacked all over the walls. I’d wake up sometimes and think he was still there with me. Like we were kids again and he’d snuck in through my window, fallen asleep.” She paws her nose. “That’s what it’s like having you with me. One look at you, and I’m plunged back into a dream I haven’t had in years.” She squats in front of me, eyes huge behind her glasses, like fish in a bowl. “I’ve hated you your whole life. Bet you didn’t know that, either, did you?”

  I try to say what I’d meant to before, but it comes out halfway, this strangled I’m sorry. Sadie dismisses it. So quickly I realize, yet again, that I have said the wrong thing.

  “Even before you were born, I fucking hated you. Who hates a baby? But now”—she grasps my face in her hands, eyes brimming, but because I remember her saying a little cry might be good for her, I don’t move, even as more blood drools from her nostril—“you fill me up. Like I fill you, right? We leave no room for anything else.” She pats me. I almost whisper, Take that, Lindsay.

  A sensation, wet, warm, blooms on my knee. We look down.

  “Don’t,” Sadie whimpers.

  Blood soaks my jeans.

  “Don’t go.” She folds against me, sobbing. “Please, baby, don’t go.”

  CHAPTER 26

  THE HOSPITAL IS FRANTIC.

  “What’s your relationship to the patient?”

  I’m frantic.

  “She’s my aunt.”

  Doctor blinks.

  “Adoptive. Adoptive aunt. Please, can I see her? Is she okay?”

  I don’t know if Doctor is old enough to be a real doctor, but he’s wearing the right stuff, papery spearmint scrubs like you see on TV. He leads me back to where people are waiting—where I’ve been waiting, for way too long—and then there’s pressure, his hand on my shoulder, that makes my butt hit the pleather seat. “What happened? Has your aunt had problems like this before?” His questions ding off me. Answers fall out. She was bleeding. I say this over and over. “She started bleeding and I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t stop!”

  Doctor vanishes, leaving me alone again. I put my head between my knees and let the sobs loop. When the paramedics arrived, they wouldn’t let me near Sadie. She was linoleum-clammy by then. Oatmeal-colored. They patted her cheeks and shone lights into her pupils, shouted commands she couldn’t follow. They strapped her onto that thing sick people get strapped onto and brought her to a hospital. This hospital. Right down the street. I ran the entire way and a nice lady in the lobby directed me up here, but the nurses said I had to wait and I must’ve looked awful, because when I sat down, somebody’s grandma sat next to me and rubbed my back. She said she was waiting for her grandson, who broke his arm sledding. She told me she was scared too.

  Gradually, I regain composure. Return to the upright and locked position. The grandma’s moved away from me by now. Or she left—her grandson is better? He’s going home? Somewhere in this cavernous, beeping hospital, Sadie is bleeding. I still don’t know what to do.

  Blood smears my sweatshirt and jeans, mud-colored now as it mixes with oxygen. Hemoglobin. A science word. Others include: aorta, globin, atheroma. I’d take my sweatshirt off but can’t remember if it’s snowing. I’ll need it if it’s snowing.

  “Koda!”

  A woman strides toward me. Flapping Burberry trench. Red hair.

  “Mom!” I heave myself up. “Mommy!” She catches me in her arms, and the world goes kaleidoscope. Fluorescent lights, confused flutter, and then there are hands on my shoulders again, her hands, walking me backward. She shrieks at the blood on me.

  “Koda! Oh my God! Are you hurt?” Her face isn’t the sewn-up professional one she reserves for meetings but open, splitting with fear. No. I shake my head. Not hurt. She yanks my sweatshirt in front of everybody to be sure. I don’t have the strength to tug it down. “Your voicemail said—but our driver wasn’t—what are you doing in Queens? You hung up—”

  “When the paramedics got there.” I remember. There was blood by then, more blood, dribbling from Sadie’s mouth.

  Mom draws me against her, and we collapse together onto the seats. She smooths my hair with her smooth hands, oblivious to—or deliberately ignoring—the gawkers who have gathered around us, Doctor explaining the situation in his patient doctor’s voice. I jolt. Tickled by a new fear. Do these strangers… recognize me now? Phones are out. Doctor’s expression betrays nothing. But I know enough to hold my breath as Sadie’s name leaves his mouth and detonates on the linoleum.

  Ka-boom.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom interrupts. “Who?”

  My breath splinters out.

  Doctor’s eyes twitch from me to Mom, who, gawkers will appreciate, has exquisite posture. In their pictures, her bac
k will be straight enough to snap.

  “The patient,” Doctor says. “Sarah Pascal.”

  A hand seizes my wrist.

  “Pasquale,” I scream over my shoulder. I’m caught. Being dragged away by the Mariah riptide. “Pasquale!”

  A sign says: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, TAKE STAIRS. Mom goes down them too fast, her nails stabbing into me. I yell at her to slow down. I’m not graceful like her. I don’t know what floor we’re on, or where Sadie is. We fill each other up. I can’t leave without knowing where she is.

  A minor cosmic event outside the hospital. Bursts of light so stupefying I duck automatically under Mom’s Burberry wing.

  “Mariah! Mariah! What happened! Is Koda Rose okay! Girls, over here! How’s it going over at the magazine! Ladies, have you ever been to Queens!”

  Beneath the trenchcoat Mom has her silk robe on, and her hair smells like jasmine—musky jasmine, because she’s sweating. She clutches me close, feeding pazzos terse, even lines through her teeth. “Get away from my daughter. Get away. One more step and I’ll have your balls.”

  Silver car glides up. Hands on my hips and then she’s practically on top of me, scrambling to slam the door. I huddle against her. Close as I can get, close as we used to be, squashing her pretty bedhead waves. We pant. Soft thuds engulf the car as it nudges forward. Who called the pazzos? Who could’ve tipped them off? Somebody at the hospital…? Driver’s eyes skitter frantically in the rearview mirror, but I avoid them.

  Mom tips her head back against the seat.

  “Mom.”

  She really is sweating like hell.

  “Mom, I—”

  The hand comes out of nowhere. So fast I hear the smack before it cracks me, and everything else, wide open.

  * * *

  Mom puts it all together by dinnertime. “The East Village.” Sarah. Queens. Driver gets axed, and that proves a whole new kind of terror, having to estimate how many times I’ve visited Sadie behind her back. Mom bawls some more, then sends me to my room. Until she figures out our next move.

  Around midnight, when I still haven’t been summoned, I summon myself. Slipping through the connector door, I find Mom slumped in bed, scrolling through her phone.

  “Mom.” My outstretched hand trembles. “Give it. Please.” It’s the same model as mine. I tap the browser open and swipe away articles without reading them, words like MAYHEM and ER SCARE jagging across the screen. “Can’t you listen to those chants your last therapist prescribed? That podcast with that guy whose really boring voice helps you fall asleep?”

  “You’re supposed to be in your room,” Mom answers. But I’m already retrieving the face goop from her vanity, which means I have to stay, at least for a few minutes. She sighs when I return with the jar. “I don’t see how you can blame me for wanting to know what’s being said about us, about you, now that this is all out in the open.”

  My throat is sticky, raw from hours of crying. Probably my stomach hurts too, but I can’t sort that ache out from the others. Mom rakes her hair back, piling it high on top of her head before letting it fall again. I need to say something to console her. Something positive, but my mind has been scraped empty, the hospital a fluorescent blur. Mom covers her face. “You’ve known each other since that night at the restaurant, haven’t you?” she says through her fingers. “Or before that. Weeks before.”

  “Only two months.”

  Her eyes widen in shock.

  That’s almost as long as we’ve been in New York. What does she expect me to admit—that Sadie’s all New York is to me? Stepping closer to Mom, I nearly feel clammy bathroom tiles again, smell the coppery blood pouring from Sadie that I couldn’t stop with paper towels, my sweatshirt, my hands.

  Pain must be twisting across my face—Mom softens and busies herself with the belt on her robe, muttering, “For God’s sake.” Which is when I remember the jar in my hands. I can’t quite look at her as I unscrew the cap. The goop smells nice. I never realized. And it’s white, a good white. Not Sadie-pale at all.

  Mom takes the left side of her face, I take the right. The key is to spread evenly and not gob any in her eyelashes. “Put your tongue in,” I say after a few minutes. I’m icing myself a big Mariah cake. It’s like swimming. My hands, my body, know what to do, move without me. I put the finishing touches on her jaw, rubbing so the heat of my fingers will activate the goop’s anti-aging properties. Then she sits with her eyes closed. Breathing.

  “I don’t know.” She nibbles a cuticle. “I don’t know what I want to say to you. I’ve always thought—you make me so proud, Koda. That’s the problem. I prided myself so much on your thoughtfulness, the maturity with which you handled the photo shoot, those leaks, that I guess I took you for granted. And now I can’t really begin to articulate how disappointed I am in you, the terrible judgment you’ve shown. I would’ve found a way to connect you with Sadie, discreetly, if that was what you really wanted. It would’ve hurt me, but… all you had to do was ask.” My throat pinches. She’s lying. She said, Sadie’s unreliable. A mess.

  She wasn’t wrong.

  Tears rise up, but I choke them down.

  Mom continues. “But now you’ve put us in a terrible position. The press is all over this, calling left and right, demanding comments, explanations. To have you defy me, to go off with that woman behind my back…” Her hand drops to the bedspread. “Did she get you high?”

  “What! No! Mom, I would never—”

  She grasps my face in both hands, just like Sadie, and it’s stupid, but all I can think is—I have to text Lindsay.

  I was the first person she called when her dad Trevor had those bad chest pains last summer. Mom drove me to the hospital, and waited in the car while I ran in and hugged her. The next day, as doctors ran more tests, we sat in the waiting room for an eternity together, playing gin rummy with her other dad’s ratty cards. I felt guilty not knowing what to say.

  But maybe words aren’t the point. Maybe it’s the distraction. Company. A best friend to reassure you that no matter what you’re facing, you don’t have to go through it alone. Mom’s doing an okay job, even though she’s lying. Even though she never would have introduced me to Sadie, and Sadie—why would Sadie speak to Mom? When we were together, Mom’s existence shimmered invisibly between us. There, but unmentioned. Untouched. So, yeah. Lindsay would be preferable. I’d tell her, I’m so sorry. I’d tell her, You were right. It was drugs.

  But drugs can’t change what Sadie is to me.

  A tear skips down my cheek. Mom thumbs it away.

  “She was bleeding,” I say stupidly.

  “I know, honey.”

  My head’s so full of Sadie—thoughts of whether she’s okay, when she’ll come home, that I forgot until literally now that all I’m wearing is a T-shirt and undies. My bloody clothes have been stripped off and flung into the wash. I don’t remember when. I don’t remember why I couldn’t put on fresh clothes. “I was scared,” I burble. “It was so scary.” I know, Mom repeats. The saddest smile flits across her lips.

  Sharing a bed with your mom probably isn’t the sort of thing that can continue once you’re eighteen. Maybe I don’t care. Maybe I’m doing this strictly because being alone is impossible right now, although that only partially explains the unexpected pang of seeing Mom fluff pillows, pull the covers back. I can’t sleep. Opt for drifting. Anchored by the warm, soothing weight of Mom’s arm across me. Then—I’m not sure. My breathing must trick her. She rolls away, and the silence fills with cuticle gnawing. The pinch and scrape of teeth. I wriggle closer. And it’s weird. The girl curling against Mom isn’t the same girl who comforted Sadie and kissed her. But they’re both me.

  CHAPTER 27

  BLOGS BLARE HEADLINES THE NEXT day about my and Sadie’s relationship—publicly, Mom’s lawyer insists that there is none—but offer no word on her condition. Huddled on Mom’s marshmallowy office sofa, I check and recheck my phone. Sadie hasn’t answered my texts. Or the whisper-voicemails, twelv
e in all, that I left last night.

  She’s in and out the whole morning, trailed by chirping, scribbling assistants who periodically offer Dasani and individually packaged servings of almonds. Somebody orders sushi for lunch, and she eats at her desk, using fingers instead of chopsticks. Nobody offers me anything. I wouldn’t eat, even if they did. I’m hiding. Hair tentacled around me, curled in my Sadie-less shell. Misery, it turns out, makes prime camouflage.

  Lindsay doesn’t text me either, even though she must have seen the news by now.

  Around seven, we take a taxi home. Mom makes tea. Chamomile, which I don’t have the heart to remind her isn’t heartburn-proof. We sit on my bed, not speaking. “I could make you something else,” Mom offers. I shake my head. Ginger tea, peppermint, it’s all crap, and even though I appreciate her attempts at what I did for Lindsay—the company thing—after crying for ten hours in her office, I want her to leave. Why aren’t we discussing her judgment? She forced me to do the photo shoot. Forced me to move, never paused one second to consider what living in the epicenter of all things Quixote might do to me. And when I think of that, I don’t feel sad anymore. Just this shattering anger.

  “Mom.” I wait for her to look at me. Steam drifts from our mugs. “You should know, I didn’t do this to meet Sadie. I wanted to meet my father. She was the closest thing. And now she’s I-don’t-know-where. So…” Where’s my quest for courage, and honesty and truth, gotten me? Nowhere. That’s not an approximation, either. The honest-to-God, courageous truth. Lindsay won’t speak to me. My father’s still unknowable, as bottomless as the sea.

  And now Sadie’s gone too. The only person I had left has all but abandoned me.

  My breasts feel tender. Another ache in a long day of aches. Maybe I’m getting my period. Maybe this is just what being without Sadie means, only I’m too wiped to think about even that anymore. Too wiped to do anything but take my phone out and dial Sadie’s number. It’ll go to voicemail, but I’d switch to speaker anyway. Let the song of her voice fill the room. Hey. Leave a message…