5. Ava
FIVE
AVA
Mavey’s shallow, rattling breaths fill the double-wide trailer, and as I lean against the doorframe of her cramped bedroom, I stew, knowing that in a matter of hours, she will be gone.
Blair, her hospice nurse, checks her vitals, but it’s only a formality. Mavey is dying, and if her steady decline in the past twelve hours is any indication, she won’t last the night. It’s all I can do to hold back the tears pricking my eyes since I walked in and saw that concerned look on Blair’s face. Not concern for Mavey, but for me.
We’ve been preparing for this for weeks. It started with three dreadful words: I have cancer. And it has been inching into our lives ever since; a heavy storm cloud that fills every room and weighs down every conversation.
I thought my world had ended when I was told my mom died during a Moonie riot robbery at the mini-mart she worked at. But knowing death is coming and watching it eat away at the one person you love most is torture. Seeing the woman who raised me when she didn’t have to lie in bed like this is the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to stomach. And strangely, the most relieving. No more pain. No more fretting. No more holding our breaths, wondering if she’ll never wake up again.
Blair turns off Mavey’s bedside table lamp, leaving her to sleep in the moonlight filtering in from the window. She’s about to close the drapes when I step inside.
“Leave them, please.” I glance at Mavey. She looks thinner than I realized in the shadows of night. Perhaps it’s because, in seeing her daily, I haven’t noticed her gradual change in appearance. Or, I simply didn’t want to. “She loves looking at the moon.”
Blair doesn’t bother pointing out that Mavey won’t be awake to see the moon tonight. She looks back down at her patient, brushes a gray strand of hair from her brow, and then Blair collects her things from the room.
I don’t know if hospice nurses are supposed to be so kind and attentive—to look at their patients with affection—or if it’s because loving Mavey is so easy.
Blair’s features soften as she steps out of Mavey’s room. “I’ll stay?—”
“No.” I shake my head. “I know you’re short-staffed and you’ve got other house calls to make. Besides, I know what to do, and I’ll call you if I really need to,” I promise. “We’ll be okay.”
Blair lifts her hand and squeezes my shoulder, and the faint scent of her floral shampoo fills my nose. “She doesn’t feel any pain,” Blair promises. Her eyes are red, and I know it’s from the long day she’s had, driving from town to town to check on her patients after the earthquake earlier today.
“Thank you,” I whisper, grateful to see the furrow smoothed from Mavey’s brow.
Blair scans the house—the small bathroom behind me, and the living room, cluttered with clean laundry I haven’t had time to fold. She stares at the discarded medical supplies and equipment no longer in use. “Are you sure?—”
“I’m sure.” I give her a quiet, pleading look because the last thing I want to do is stand here arguing about it.
Blair concedes and glances at the old Formica island in the kitchen. “I left a few brochures for you.”
“I saw,” I say before Blair can coerce me into another support group. “But...” I shake my head. “I don’t know how long I’ll stay here once she’s gone.” And that’s the truth. There will be nothing for me in Sonora anymore—nothing but painful memories.
Blair shifts her medical bag from one hand to the other. “Will you go to your uncle’s?” she asks, not as a nurse but as a concerned friend.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I’ve considered a dozen places with better job opportunities, but with everywhere getting so unstable...I might not have a choice.” Saying that out loud only makes my heart hurt more, and fear prickles the edge of numbness. I’ll be in it all alone now.
Blair’s form blurs as tears burn the backs of my eyes again. As if she can sense it, Blair continues toward the door, giving me my space.
“Get some rest, Ava,” she says, her last order of the night. With that, she steps out of the house, leaving me in a suffocatingly quiet, dim-lit trailer with the only person in the world I have left dying right before my eyes.
Wiping the tears from my cheeks, I walk into Mavey’s room and pull the kitchen chair Blair had shoved in the corner closer to the hospice bed.
“So.” I breathe, sniffling as I sit down. I take Mavey’s cool hand in mine and stare at it. It’s frail, just like she is, and her skin is so thin the veins in her hand bulge. “You would have a fit if you saw how long your fingernails are,” I muse, and before I know what I’m doing, I walk into the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet, and grab Mavey’s nail file and clippers.
“Julio called me today,” I tell her, heading back to her bedside. Mavey’s shallow breaths are her only response. “I didn’t answer—well, he called while I was at the diner, but still...I haven’t called him back.” Gently, I lift her palm into mine, pull a tissue from the box on her bedside table, and flatten it beneath her hand before I start to clip.
“You used to do this for me,” I remember with a smile. “You wanted me to feel pretty on the days that were the roughest.” Growing up without a mom made the whole girly thing difficult. I had Julio, but he was a farmworker. He was always dirty, we were always poor, and we never had nice things, let alone girly things.
Tears fill my eyes until I can no longer see. “I know you’d want to feel pretty right now, too.”
Hastily, I wipe the moisture from my eyes with the back of my hand and focus on her nails. When I finish clipping, I file the edges to smooth them, and suddenly I’m grinning. “I’m going to paint them pink,” I tell her. “Fussy Flamingo, your favorite.” It’s the color she always wanted to paint mine, even if I can’t stand a single shade of pink. Of course, Mavey never painted her fingernails at all, and that makes me smile even more.
Gruff as she was, though, Mavey always seemed to know when I needed her. She had a way of appearing in my life, like an angel, even if I’m not sure I’ve ever believed in them.
Whatever Mavey’s reasons, she always kept to herself, save for when it came to an orphaned little girl. I think it’s because she lost someone very dear to her before I met her, and she couldn’t bear to form more relationships than she had to for fear of what might happen. For some reason, however, she took a shine to me. Or, rather, she pitied me, knowing I had lost my mother and lived with my drunk uncle in the trailer next door. When he was arrested after the accident, Mavey adopted me—didn’t even think twice about it. And it’s been the two of us ever since.
Nostrils flaring, I blink tears away, blow the file dust from her hand, and analyze my work. The tips of her nails are square, the way she likes, and the ends are flush with the tips of her fingers.
“It’s nice to see they are still clean,” I tell her, and rising to my feet, I head back into the bathroom to search the drawers for the horrible pink nail polish I know is in here somewhere.
I try to be quiet as I rustle through the cupboards, even if I know it doesn’t matter; Mavey is on enough morphine that she’d sleep through the end of the world without stirring. After the big earthquake today, there’s an immense sense of comfort in that.
“Ah-ha!” I smile when I find the bottle, and wiping a rogue tear from my cheek, I walk back into her room. I re-situate myself beside her hospice bed and can’t help my grin. “Oh, to see your face,” I tease her, but it takes all the elbow grease I have just to open the damn bottle that’s been dried shut for years. When I finally break the seal and pull the brush out, it’s thick and goopy with old paint. It makes no difference, though, and I start with her pinky finger first.
“I don’t think I can go to Julio’s,” I confess, my thoughts drifting back to my uncle. “I know it’s the easiest thing to do, at least until I get my life on track, but I don’t know if I can handle dealing with the past on top of everything else. Not yet, at least.” I’m not sure there’s ever a good time to reunite with the man who single-handedly ruined your life, anyway.
Though I’ve never been great at coloring within the lines, let alone painting fingernails with any sort of finesse, I take my time, determined to make Mavey’s nails look as good as I can. As I watch the paint strokes, my mind drifts to after. After Mavey is gone. After there is nothing left for me here.
We knew it was coming, and even if I have little to no money saved, it’s a lot easier to care for my own needs when I don’t have to worry about Mavey’s too. I’m twenty-five. I’ll figure it all out. Still, my chest squeezes, and I straighten, clearing my throat as if it will chase the emotions away.
When I’m finished painting, I pull back and assess the damage I’ve done. “Absolutely horrendous.” I scoff at my lack of ability to do even this. “I think we can safely cross a nail salon job off the potential career list.”
The moon rises higher in the sky and the shadows move through Mavey’s room. When her fingernails are the color of the wild freesias that grow by the front steps in the springtime, and I’ve cleaned up the paint on her cuticles as best I can, I cap the polish and set it on her bedside, suddenly exhausted.
“You won’t be too sore with me if your toes don’t match, will you?” Mavey responds with another rattled exhale in her blissful sleep, and I study her profile. Strong features—Roman in a way that makes me wish I could see what she looked like in her youth. But she never had photographs. I didn’t realize how strange that was until I went to summer camp, and the girls all had photos of their families, friends, and pets. That was the first and only year I ever went to camp. I wasn’t the most popular kid in town. Having the same blood running through my veins as the man who killed one of the town’s most beloved schoolteachers made me tainted to everyone but Mavey.
Carefully, I take her palm in mine, avoiding Mavey’s drying fingernails as best I can, and trace the protruding veins in her hand.
“I’m going to miss you,” I confess. I’ve thought about it a million times, but Mavey and I didn’t talk about feelings, so I never actually said the words out loud to her.
Kissing her hand, I let the tears fall because I know I can’t stop them. I don’t want to stop them, and a part of me wishes I could crawl up there with her, fall into a deep sleep, and never wake up again. It would be a kinder fate than whatever’s left of this cruel place. Where people are hateful because they can be. Where you can’t earn a decent wage or access the healthcare you need without running yourself into the ground to get it.
Resting my forehead against Mavey’s hand, I let the sound of her rattled breaths and my sobs fill the room until I can no longer keep my eyes open.