Chapter 24 Britt
Britt
After Britt became Angeni, there was a period of transition when she did not know exactly who she was.
Anyone who had known her as Britt continued to call her Britt.
Rainbow and Aurora (née Becky) called her Angeni for the most part, but there were slipups.
They were bound to happen, Rainbow said.
This was part of the process, the caterpillar becoming the butterfly.
Rainbow’s congregation continued to grow and, with it, donations from members.
The donations didn’t amount to much at first. Rainbow relied on her Reiki clinic to pay bills, and she relied on Aurora to help run the clinic.
Aurora started painting and hanging her finished works on the walls of the clinic—she got a sale every now and then.
Angeni got a job at a natural foods shop so she could contribute to the household.
It was there that she began amassing a significant amount of knowledge about herbs and nutrition.
She loved that her name tag said angeni, that her manager and all the shoppers never knew her as Britt.
When she wasn’t working at the store, Angeni helped Rainbow prepare her sermons.
Rainbow would share her stream-of-consciousness thoughts with Angeni, usually while smoking a joint, and Angeni would take notes and turn those thoughts into the week’s offering.
Aurora acted as the administrative assistant, making runs to Kinko’s to print off copies for the congregants.
“You have a real gift for this,” Rainbow told Angeni one afternoon, after Angeni read back the sermon she’d written.
Angeni could feel her cheeks redden with Rainbow’s praise. In this new life with Rainbow, she felt she had purpose. She felt like she mattered.
“You think so?”
“I think you and I are on the same wavelength. You really get what I’m trying to say. You articulate it better than I can,” Rainbow went on.
“I don’t know if that’s true. Your sermons have always been beautiful, long before I started helping.”
“Maybe,” Rainbow said. “But they’re more beautiful now.”
“That means a lot to me,” Angeni said.
She had to look down because she felt like if she held Rainbow’s stare, she would cry.
Angeni had Mondays off work and usually spent the day alone in the apartment, lazing about or skimming one of Rainbow’s Buddhism books, looking for nuggets of wisdom they could interject into their sermons.
On this particular Monday, she was startled by the front door opening, Rainbow coming through saying she wasn’t feeling great so she’d left the clinic in Aurora’s hands for the day.
Rainbow fell onto the couch in the living room and pulled her knees into her chest.
“Is it your stomach?” Angeni asked.
She knelt down next to the couch, put the underside of her wrist to Rainbow’s head.
“It’s a splitting headache,” Rainbow said.
She was closing her eyes hard, rubbing her temples with her fingers.
“Do you want some medicine?”
Rainbow sat up abruptly. “My god, I can’t even think.”
Angeni started to panic, with flashbacks to the helplessness she’d felt when her mother was shot. Or rather, when she’d shot her mother. She still couldn’t get the language right.
“Should I call someone?” she asked.
Before Rainbow could answer, she opened her eyes with terrifying alarm, looked right at Angeni, and said, “Britt!”
Then she fell forward. Her head would have hit the coffee table if Angeni hadn’t caught her.
A ruptured brain aneurysm, that was what the doctors said. Half the time, they’re fatal. Rainbow was in that half.
Angeni had called Aurora immediately after calling 911.
Aurora arrived before the ambulance, and the two women stood there before another dead mother.
Rainbow had been complaining of headaches for a few days.
Should they have known something this awful could happen?
The doctors said they couldn’t have known, but they were so accustomed to carrying guilt that they added this to their load.
The members of Rainbow’s congregation chipped in to pay for a nice memorial service. She’d been cremated, and they spread her ashes at the park where they had done their gatherings. Everyone was so distraught.
After the service, an older woman approached the girls and introduced herself as Cheyenne.
She had dark-brown skin, lines etched into her forehead and around her eyes and mouth.
Her graying hair was in a thick braid that hung over her shoulder.
Angeni remembered Rainbow talking about Cheyenne, referring to her as a wise Sioux elder.
“I know she was your mother, but she also birthed this community,” Cheyenne said to Aurora and Angeni. “I’ve always said mother is a verb. She mothered all of us.”
A dozen people had stood up to share words at the service, and all of them said something to this effect.
“She loved this community,” Aurora said.
“Maybe there is a way to keep it going,” Cheyenne said.
But Aurora and Angeni were too grief stricken to even consider what that would mean.
There wasn’t time to grieve properly. They had to survive.
They didn’t tell the landlord what had happened, just stayed in the apartment as if nothing had changed.
Aurora didn’t know enough to fully manage Rainbow’s clinic, but she tried, for a while.
At first, clients continued coming, accepting whatever amateur massage Aurora provided, sometimes buying a painting too.
But then their sympathy ran out, and it no longer made sense to keep the clinic.
Without the distraction of running the business, Aurora fell into a depression so severe that she appeared catatonic some days.
Angeni picked up as many shifts as she could at the natural foods store—both to offset the lost income from the clinic and to avoid being around Aurora.
She loved Aurora, but the darkness of those days reminded Angeni too much of her mother.
Angeni made enough to pay rent and get groceries, thanks to her employee discount from the store and the manager giving her whatever expired items they were going to throw away each day.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Aurora said on several occasions.
Angeni didn’t know what Aurora would do either.
Angeni had learned to survive without her mother because she’d never really had a mother, not in the typical sense.
She’d always been on her own in many ways.
Aurora had been fused with Rainbow, the two of them closer than any two humans Angeni had ever seen.
Angeni considered it her duty to mother Aurora now.
Mother is a verb. She owed it to Aurora. She owed it to Rainbow.
In the years since she’d gotten off the pills, Angeni hadn’t thought much about them.
But in the weeks and months following Rainbow’s death, they were there again, in the periphery of her consciousness, whispering to her about how they could take away her pain.
Angeni smoked weed instead—too much but not enough to affect her daily functioning.
Her manager, a guy with straggly hair and an ever-present hemp necklace, was her supplier.
Whenever she was short on cash, he told her she could pay him in other ways, and Angeni knew what he meant.
He was a nice guy, not a jerk, never mean.
He was easy to please. She would go down on him in the back of the store, in his little closet-sized office next to the walk-in fridge, and he would be so appreciative that she didn’t even feel disgusting. She felt pleased, proud.
His name was Ted. He was thirtysomething but had the disposition of a teenager.
Angeni lost her virginity to him shortly after her nineteenth birthday.
She didn’t tell him he was her first and was relieved he didn’t ask.
She didn’t love Ted, she was well aware of that, but she did enjoy sex.
It gave her what the pills had—a brief exodus from life, a pleasure that felt almost transcendental.
Some nights, they went back to his place, an apartment he shared with two guys who always offered her weed and a pint of the beer they’d brewed in their garage.
For Angeni, Ted was a way out, an excuse not to go home to Aurora and her sadness.
She preferred Ted’s old, mushy mattress to sleeping next to Aurora in her dead mother’s bed.
Ted took Angeni to backyard bonfires and bar meetups where she got high and drank and flirted with whatever men were there.
Ted was never jealous—“I have no interest in possessing you, baby,” he said.
It was a type of freedom Angeni thought Rainbow would have approved of.
Rainbow had never had a dedicated boyfriend, but it was clear she was loved.
The men in her life, labeled as “friends,” were doting and kind.
They were all sobbing at the memorial service, as if they all believed they’d lost the love of their life.
Aurora never made Angeni feel guilty about the times she was away with Ted or whomever else.
She was only thankful, always promising that she would get herself together “one of these days.” Angeni didn’t know if that was true.
All these years, Angeni had wanted a mother like Rainbow.
She’d envied Aurora. But now she saw the downside.
The loss of a mother like Rainbow was so profound, seemingly insurmountable.
Angeni longed for something she’d never had; Aurora longed for something she’d once had.
Angeni thought that must be a worse kind of pain.