JOSIE
It’s past midnight when I leave the bar and drive slowly through town.
Grandma’s neighborhood is eerily quiet and dark except for one house with the lights on—Mrs. Snickett’s.
She’s a night owl. A smoker, a drinker, curses like a sailor—she’s the opposite of my grandma, and I can’t even picture them being friends back in the day.
Grandma’s house is dark except for the light in the kitchen.
As always, I creep in. I’m in my mid-twenties, and still, I feel like a high schooler who’s done something wrong and is about to be scolded by a parent.
She should be sleeping. Except she’s not. As soon as I walk in the kitchen and take off my shoes, she walks in, her braided gray hair in place like it hasn’t touched the pillow. Nightgown. Fluffy socks. An empty glass in her hand. Grandma can hear ants walking, I swear.
“Hey, sweetheart,” she says softly as she refills her glass with the water from the fridge dispenser.
“Hey, Grams. Why are you up?”
I toss my car keys and purse onto the counter by the door—no need to creep around anymore.
“Can’t sleep,” she says, pulling out a chair and taking a seat at the kitchen table.
Knowing Grandma, that’s an invitation to talk.
I can’t shake off the feeling that she’s trying to gauge what state of drunkenness I’m in.
They say parenting never stops, no matter how old your children are.
I still feel like I did back in high school when I got drunk for the first time and made my best effort to look sober, slurring, “Grams, I’m soooo tired,” like I had a chance to cover up my drunkenness with a silly excuse.
I stiffen under Grandma’s observant gaze, though it’s not judgmental like it used to be.
She believes she's peering into my soul or something.
Old people do that. They think because they've lived for decades, they know better.
Doesn't matter if they haven't traveled farther than a fifty-mile radius from their homes in their entire lives.
“I was at Carrigan’s,” I say. “Nothing exciting.”
She looks down, scratches at the surface of the table with her fingers, all five of them, then lays her palm flat and does the same with her whole hand.
I’ve noticed that peculiar thing about her—using her entire palm to feel textures, as if her fingers are slowly losing sensitivity.
Her movements are slow and careful, too.
It might be age, or cancer, though every time I ask if she needs help, she brushes me away with her usual, “Don’t worry, sweetheart.
When you grow older, you do all the same things as before, just slower. ”
But I worry. Constantly. She’s lived on her own since I moved out, yet now that I know her condition, I get nervous about everything she does outside the house, especially driving. I try to do the grocery shopping, but she still drives almost every day, doing who knows what.
“I’m not a child, Josie. I have arms and legs,” she tells me. But she also has this thing eating her from the inside.
I bring her food from the diner daily, but often, she only pecks at it. She’s lost weight, but that’s not what scares me the most. It’s the subtle change in her eyes, the softness that’s jarring, because that was the last thing anyone would ever say about my grandmother—that she’s soft.
She asks me about work, but it’s all the same.
When I run into a problem at the diner, I do research, talk to the staff, figure out the paperwork on my own instead of calling Grandma.
I’m trying to prove to her that I can handle anything, and she doesn’t have to worry.
I don’t want her to worry. She’s done enough of that raising me, watching my every move, all my friends, where I went, what I was up to on any given day.
I know it was because of Mom and what happened. And I told her so many times, “I’m not her.” Except, apparently, what I did back in Pittsburgh proves that I’m just like her. Grandma never said it, not even once. But others in this town do. I know they trash-talk behind my back.
Grandma’s hand shakes as she picks up the glass of water again and takes a little sip, like a bird, barely wetting her lips.
The heart-pinching feeling is back in my chest, the feeling I had when I found out her diagnosis. “Not much longer left.”
I bite the inside of my cheek and look away as tears well up in my eyes.
It’s booze, I know, making me all whiney and dramatic, but I can’t help it.
The heartbreak in me grows stronger every day.
I already miss Grandma—silly, I know—despite her still being here and doing more or less well.
I know I’m losing her. It’s a matter of time.
It doesn’t help when now and then she sits me down on her bed or the couch and pulls something out of a drawer or a closet.
“I want you to have this.”
Either a photograph from back in the day, usually of my mom when she was a kid or a teenager, or a notebook of hers, or a drawing, a piece of jewelry, a trinket, an expensive brooch, Grandpa’s war medals, though he passed away before I was born, so I never met him.
It’s the phrases like “I want you to have this” that trigger me, like she’s saying farewell.
They’re pulling at my heartstrings every time.
They upset me more than she thinks, making me dread what’s to come, like she’s turning into an apparition that’s fading day by day, and one of these days, she’ll disappear completely.
Deadlines are stressful. Hers is heartbreaking, that horrible deadline that starts with the letter “C.” The most devastating thing is not the death of your loved ones—it’s watching them dying.
I excuse myself and go to my bedroom, crawl under the blanket, shut my eyes tightly, and take deep breaths to stop myself from crying.
I listen to the sounds from behind the door, making sure Grandma makes it to bed safely.
When I hear her bedroom door close, I relax a little, but this dark silent house is a steaming pot of grief.
Damn booze.
It’s never a good thing to drink when you’re depressed. Back in the bar, life seemed easier, happier. Louder. Rika reminded me that I’m not the only one stuck in this town. Others remind me that many have it worse than me.
Here, in the dark, the loneliness weighs on me like a giant pile of snow.
Life sucks. It just doesn’t go anywhere.
Only months ago, I had dreams. Things were taking off, but then one stupid mistake sent my life spiraling without warning, without a “Buckle up, Dorothy,” and dumped me like a tornado back in Burnville.
And now I get more messages from the stranger. It’s a relief—he is alive. But it might be a warning. He saw me by the fairgrounds, knows I ran away after the accident. Will he use that against me?
I didn’t reply. Before I do, I should talk to someone about it.
Being tipsy, I won’t fall asleep for a while. I know I'll just keep thinking about the worst. Grams’s diagnosis. My failure. The stranger. Something is always happening in my life, and not in a good way. Sometimes “boring” means “safe.”
I need a distraction. I sit up in bed and turn on my nightstand lamp.
My gaze lands on Mr. Bunny, my favorite plush toy from childhood, a white rabbit with one eye and no nose, patched up and worn out.
When I moved back, I took boxes of my old stuff to the basement. I should get rid of all the old things.
My eyes shift to the guitar propped against the wall in the corner. It’s barely visible, hidden by the shadows, but whenever I step into the room, that’s the thing that immediately draws my attention.
When I was a teenager, that beautiful thing helped me get through the best times but most of all through the worst. Those were plenty.
I poured my all into the songs I composed on nights like this, dark and rainy, when I thought there was a big, beautiful world out there, and I would conquer it, because how could I not? I was young. I felt invincible.
And I did see the big wide world once I moved to the city. I was conquering it, too, going viral, getting paid to play at gigs, amassing a substantial online following.
Lately, though, the beautiful instrument covered in stickers, my best friend that witnessed the best times of my life, reminds me of my epic downfall, the stupid thing I did and someone even stupider who recorded it and put it out for the whole world to see.
I look away, my eyes roaming the walls with posters I collected when growing up, the signed copy of a Modest Mouse album, the books I reread a hundred times.
All those objects are dark like ghosts in the dim light of the nightstand.
If I stay here much longer, I need to rip it all off the walls.
This room is like one of those carefully preserved museum displays, but it’s mine, my former life, and staying in it six years after I left feels like I never left in the first place.
The familiar feeling comes back—like I’m at the bottom of a dark well, looking up, crumbling while the world is fine, carrying on, leaving me behind because I can’t crawl out of this dark space.
I push the blanket away, walk to the bookshelf, and pick up one of the old books.
I used to love reading as a child. It was an escape.
Dark and scary stories. Or thrillers. It was reassuring to read about someone whose life sucked even more than mine.
Helpful to learn to cope with suffocating loneliness.
Or how to get out of crappy situations, because my life was abundant with those. Just like now.
Needful Things by Stephen King was my childhood favorite. The slow burn into gore will definitely distract me right now.
I settle in bed and open the page at the bookmark—part 1, chapter 4, section 9.
Brian didn’t realize he had been holding his breath until he let it out in a long, whistling sigh.
I take a deep breath and hold it for a while, focusing on the tension it creates in my body, slowly growing, making my head dizzy, burning my chest.
I feel like I’ve been holding my breath since I witnessed the hit-and-run, but I’m afraid to exhale, because once I do, everything might spiral out of control.