Chapter Nineteen
Ten Years Ago
“I am so sorry about the way things turned out. I should have stayed there. I knew what I was getting into, and I shouldn’t have hoped for any more than he could give. It was me who changed and messed everything up.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Eden mumbled. Then, but in the brighter, more chipper voice that both she and Isla had conditioned themselves to speak in because they wanted Elise to only have happiness and light in her life, what was left of it, she said, “Oh, Mom, don’t worry.
We don’t need my father. I’ll make it well enough on my own and get a beautiful house where you can have your own room that lets out onto the patio and backyard, where you will keep your garden just like you do here. ”
They both knew that Elise wouldn’t make it long enough to see the end of the month, much less years down the road, with enough money to buy a home they could live in.
“And Isla too,” Elise wheezed through labored breaths, a wave of pain coming up on her. Isla’s throat closed up. Elise was thinking about her. At this time.
Elise flopped a hand to wave away the attempt of the hospice care nurse to give her morphine.
She wanted to be lucid in this moment. She had something to say, and maybe Isla shouldn’t be here for it.
After all, she was only a friend. Not family, though Elise and Eden had never made her feel anything but—Isla a parentless ward of the state about to age out of the system with nothing but a couple thousand saved from her job at McDonald’s.
Isla’s throat hurt from the emotion she tried to stifle.
She tried to do as she’d always done, detach herself from anything that felt like emotion.
Keep a poker face. Show that nothing and no one could faze her.
Because that was the only way to survive the heartaches of child services—the hope of adoption or fostering in a system that was overworked, understaffed, and criminally underpaid.
It was the only way to survive the initial moments of hope that maybe a family would take you in and see your worth and want you to be a part of theirs, only for them to choose a younger, cuter kid or send you back to the group homes.
Group homes that could be bad or good or bearable.
One had been pretty bad. Two too good to be true.
The rest of them bearable once she came to the realization that no one there was bad, or out to get her.
Everyone—staff and kids alike—was just trying to survive. They were all in it together.
She had been hardened for so long, resigning herself to a life alone.
She’d made herself okay with that. In a couple of years, she’d age out of the system, and Florida’s child services would give her a couple of bucks and well-wishes on a productive life.
They’d mean well, but they wouldn’t be able to do much for her.
So yeah, she was set to be on her own, but Eden and her mother had managed to crack through and wiggle their way in enough for her to care about someone else again.
They had given her hope that maybe being alone in life wasn’t going to be her fate.
But they all had secrets. She had her own regrets. Her own guilt from inaction and fear, which had eaten away at her since she was eleven.
“We can be the Three Musketeers. Or Amigas. She doesn’t have anyone, and when I go, you need someone in your corner, because this world . . . that family . . .”
Isla finally allowed herself to admit that she liked being part of a family and never wanted them to go, even though Elise’s illness was the first thing Eden had told her about two years ago when they’d first met.
“My mom’s sick and is probably going to die from it.”
Isla had been sweeping the dining area, part of her job as cashier when they were in between afternoon and dinner rushes.
Weekends were all-day work. Anything was better than counting minutes at the home or fussing with one of the girls about who had used whose makeup, transactions of which she was never a part.
She used her own and expected no one to touch hers.
Again, the point was to not make relationships too deep when one of them could be adopted, reunified with their parents, transferred for space, or aged out, a.k.a. just gone. So why bother?
Anyway, when Eden said that about her mother, Isla slowly stopped sweeping.
What did she want Isla to say? Did she want one of those lines people said that didn’t really mean shit?
Condolences for your loss and prayers for your family, which Isla supposed people meant even if they couldn’t really empathize.
What did the grieving really want in that moment when they’d said their loved one was gone?
Isla pushed the broom head back and forth.
“My dad ended up in the river because he was too nice to say no and caught the heat for something he didn’t know about.
And as for my mom, well, a baby wasn’t a good look for her, so .
. .” She shrugged. “Who knows where she is now or even if she is now, you know what I mean?”
That sparked life in Eden, and she watched Isla like she was alive and not the zombie she’d just been.
“Death sucks.” Isla swept again, this time with a little shrug as she did it. “You know?”
“Thank you,” Eden said, shaking her head like she couldn’t believe Isla’s audacity.
She’d been expecting those true but empty lines of sympathy.
She hadn’t been expecting the truth. Isla had taken a chance with a surprise attack, and she wasn’t sure why.
She didn’t know Eden from a hole in the wall.
She’d seen her around, sure, at the counter or in the drive-through.
They’d never talked. And Eden had never dined in until today.
Isla had shocked her into forgetting temporarily about impending death with a death that had already happened, as if she were saying, “See, I got nothing and am still sweeping.”
They say the rest was history. But for Isla and Eden, it was also a beginning.
Hearing Elise struggle opened up a wound Isla had barely begun to heal—the death of her dad and her life as a ward of the state.
She was pissed at the world, at God, at fate for letting someone as good as Elise die sad and still thinking about someone from her past. It was one thing to see someone you cared about leave and never come back.
It was worse to actually watch them die.
Isla couldn’t take the room, or how warm it was in there because Elise was always cold.
She couldn’t take the smell of impending death, both sour and sweet, anymore.
She had to step out, abandoning Eden for the first time ever.
She’d have done anything for Eden. But this thing, watching Elise die, was one thing she couldn’t do.
She couldn’t be the strength for either of them, for all her tough talk. All she could do was run away.
She didn’t go far, though. Just right outside the door, where at least a wall could be between them. Where she could still be there without being in there.
Elise said, “You are the best gift he could have given me. You know that? My Garden of Eden.”
Eden sniffed. “Some gift. I can’t even help you.”
“But you can. And you were my perfect baby girl. The best thing. You are loved, Eden. By me. By him. Go back, okay? That thing that happened. Forget it all. Sell this house. Use the money I’ve left you.
Do all you want to do, but let the past go, okay?
Forgive yourself. Take this.” There was movement, and Eden protesting, “I can’t take that. ”
“Please. So I’ll always be with you. My chain to your bracelet, a matching pair. It shows he loves you. Please talk to him.”
“Sure, Mama” was Eden’s reply. She sounded light and chipper on the outside.
But Isla could tell it was all bullshit.
Whoever Eden was supposed to forgive and talk to, she wouldn’t.
Whoever had caused her and her mother to be here, she’d never let go.
Isla knew that because Eden had told her over and over.
But she’d tell her mother anything she wanted to hear.
Elise had lived a life of hurt and regret.
And Eden would take on her mother’s pain in the deepest grudge, which Isla would never understand.
“All right, then,” Elise said. Isla took the cue to peek in on them, watching as Eden gripped her mother’s hands.
Elise’s sigh was deep and tired. “You should go now. I want to rest. Just put my pills on the stand in case the pain comes, but I have the IV to help too.”
The machine would only dispense pain medication every few hours so that Elise could never administer too much.
The thought made Isla cold inside and out.
Eden hesitated before finally coming out of her mother’s room. She gingerly touched the gold chain that was now around her neck. Her mother had always worn it, just as Eden had always worn the bracelet on her wrist. Neither of them had ever been without these pieces until now.
Eden and Isla stayed up in the living room with the TV on, though Isla couldn’t have told you what was on.
They fell asleep to the methodic beeping from the machines in Elise’s room.
Then, at 2 a.m., something woke Isla. A light breeze moved across them where they sat with Murder, She Wrote, one of Elise’s favorite old shows, playing in the background.
The breeze was light as a feather, grazing the tips of the hairs on Isla’s skin, making them rise.
And just as it had come in, it was gone, like the scent of perfume lingering behind.
She and Eden looked at each other, not needing to say what they both knew because the machines had started beeping.
Elise found a way to administer too much.