Chapter Six
The bristles of my toothbrush sweep across my bottom lip.
“Remind me why I’m doing this again?” I prompt Jade, teeth clenched.
Jade giggles, toothbrush pushed to her own. “Just a little longer.”
According to my best friend, brushing your lips will make them appear fuller. I didn’t care all that much, but she insisted.
I throw the brush down when I taste blood.
Jade gasps, her crystalized blue eyes bugging out of her head.
“That actually worked, look!” She pushes her eyeshadow palette across the plastic fold-out table in front of me.
I flip it open, hold the internal mirror in line with my now crimson red puffer-fish lips.
“Yeah, and it fucking hurts.” I laugh, pressing them together, returning the palette to her open makeup bag, swallowing the taste of metal that slides over my tongue and down my throat.
“Beauty is pain, my girl,” she mumbles, brushing a little harder.
I roll my eyes, snatching my Diet Coke and taking a cool sip. I reach for one of Jade’s fluffy makeup brushes and bubblegum pink blushes, starting on my cheeks.
We are outside, at the back of the trailer and the last of the day's bright yellow sun is melting to fiery orange, dappling through the tall trees scattered around us.
The warm breeze pushes its trembling hands through my hair, guiding the ironed strands away from my face and over my shoulders.
“Do you think tonight—” I begin, when I hear a delicate knock on the side of the trailer, and one of my favorite human’s soft voices behind it.
“Laikey, are you in, sweetheart?”
I smile, raise my chin. “Around the back, Nan!” I call out.
Jade pushes out of the fold-out camper chair when we see my grandmother's perfectly styled short white hair peek around the corner of the trailer. It’s blow-dried back off her wrinkled face like it always is, not a lock out of place.
“Nanna June,” Jade greets her with a smile, wrapping her in a hug.
Nan does her best to tuck her small chin into Jade, welcoming the warm gesture, only, both of her frail and shaking hands are struggling as she clasps tightly to a duck-egg blue porcelain casserole dish, painted with budded coral tulips in front of her.
Delicately, she pushes it into Jade's stomach. “Would you take it, dear?” she croaks.
“Oh, shit, sorry,” Jade says, relieving my nan of the weight. “Crap, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to swear. It just, ugh, slipped out.”
Jade berates herself, and I snort. Nan does much the same before releasing a high-pitched, yet quiet laugh that is so uniquely hers it has me smiling, then frowning, when it slips into a cough that has her weathered face turning beetroot red.
She looks at Jade with watery eyes, retrieves a handkerchief from the front pocket of her three-quarter cotton cream pants, dabbing beneath wrinkled eyes.
“It’s like you young things think us old folks have never cussed before,” Nan states with a final cough and a swipe of her nose.
I grin, push up from my own chair, reaching for her and drawing her in for a hug. Nan’s arm trembles when she wraps it around me and I relish the feeling of being in the safety of my grandmother's arms.
“Bad girl,” I tease, pulling back, grabbing onto her shoulders.
She pinches my hip, like she always does.
“Nan!” I laugh.
And she chuckles with me, so does Jade, then she’s reaching for something tucked into her front pocket.
“I made you girls something,” Nan tells us.
Jade and I look at each other, smiling. It was so like Nan. Whether she was in the kitchen cooking, or at the kitchen table with her sewing machine, or adding another plant to her already abundant garden, she was using her hands and her brain. She was keeping herself busy.
Nan takes two long pieces of pink and red gingham ribbon from her pocket, shakes them out, then extends her tired arms toward us.
We take them from her, appraising them.
“I found one of your old dresses from when you were little, Laikey, in storage. It was the one with the big—”
I speak over her, “Stain. God, I loved that dress.”
“Yes,” she says, “The one your mother didn’t wash the way I suggested.” She clicks her tongue, shakes her head. “I digress. I thought I’d make some new hair ribbons for you both. I hand stitched both of your initials on the bottom.”
I run my hand down the length of the fabric, seeing the L embroidered in white on one side and the C on the other.
Jade looks at hers, then at mine, “Wanna swap?”
I nod, passing it over.
“Yes, oh, yes,” Nan says, hand to her heart. “Beautiful girls.” She is passing me, moving toward the camping chair I had not long pulled myself out of.
“I wasn’t sure if you girls still wore ribbons but…” she mumbles off.
We hadn’t for a while, but I wouldn’t tell her that.
“We do,” I tell her, reaching for Jade’s, tying the one with my initials around the elastic at the back of her head into a big voluminous bow.
She does the same for me, then takes one of the mirrors off the table, cranes her neck, staring at her reflection.
“I love it, thanks, Nan,” she praises.
“You’re very—” Nan overestimates the drop into the camper chair and falls into it with a big ‘whoop,’ her legs flying up beneath her, dangling over the ledge.
And I try not to laugh, but when I look at Jade, and see she is fighting the same battle, we both naturally burst at the seams.
Thankfully, Nan has always had a playful sense of humor and knows when to laugh at herself, too.
Still chuckling, I reach for Jade’s mascara at the table, taking a seat on the dead grass in front of them.
“Is she okay?” Nan croaks, and she doesn’t have to say her name for me and Jade to know who she’s talking about.
I shrug, biting the tube of mascara and sliding the brush out with a pop. I wiggle the brush back and forth at the base of my lashes before extending it through to the ends. “She’s out like a light.”
“Of course she is,” she mumbles, seemingly unfazed, though I can tell that the words hurt; who her daughter has become…hurts.
Nevertheless, she pushes the pain away, because there is only so much pleading and begging and crying you could do.
My mother, her daughter, was too far gone.
Nan reaches forward and taps the side of the casserole dish with her short, unpolished nail.
“I made your favorite pasta bake, the one with fresh pesto, sun dried tomatoes, ricotta and chicken.”
“Ugh, that sounds so good,” Jade’s words moan out of her. She pushes up from her seat. “I’ll go grab some pla—”
Nan stops her with a hand to her arm. “No, no, that’s okay…
” She continues holding onto Jade’s arm as she works herself out of the dipped chair, finding her feet.
“I’m going to head off, but Laikey…” She pauses, turning to me, adjusting her peach-colored blouse back on her curled shoulders. “Can you ask her to call me, please?”
I nod, feeling tears lick the back of my eyes when I watch Nan’s resurface at the front, dulling the green, turning them into a misty gray.
“Yeah…” I’m still nodding. “Yeah, I will.”
Nan smiles, though it’s sad. She reaches upward, places both of her hands on my cheeks and whispers, “So beautiful.”
Then she turns to Jade and repeats herself.
“Says you,” Jade replies, her sunshine smile extending across her face.
Nan has treated Jade like her own grandchild since the day she met her. And I believe it filled a void Jade never knew was missing. Her grandparents had passed away long before she was born.
I wrap my arm around Nan’s shoulder, walking with her to the front of the trailer where she left her scooter. I give her another hug, then we watch her head back toward the entrance of the park, trailing at the edge, doing her best to avoid potholes before disappearing around the corner.
She lived a few blocks over, it wasn’t too far for her to come and go, and I know she liked finding a reason to get herself out of the house.
I spin around, ready to eat Nan’s pasta bake and finish getting ready for the night when out of the corner of my eye, I see movement, the cream gauze fabric at the front window of the trailer shifting before slipping back into place.
The slight creak of a door follows, then my mother slowly emerges through the opening.
Her pale skin looks paper thin and lifeless, and I know she notices that we are staring at her bruised and tracked arms when she curls one across her body, sliding the plain gray crewneck from the bend in her elbows to her knuckles.
Her nails are lacquered the same hot pink as mine and Jade’s, only hers is almost completely chipped away.
Her fingers curl and twist over the edge of the fabric.
The three of us were supposed to have a girls day last weekend.
We watched a movie, painted our nails and ate too many sweets.
But then it felt like it had finished before it had even started.
When the closing credits began rolling, Mom snatched up her handbag and told us she needed to be somewhere.
Every week I clung to the hope that there'd be a change, but I knew deep down that Mom wanted to see Dad again, and I often wondered if succumbing to the needle took her there, to the entrance gates. I just wasn’t sure what kept pushing her back.
Was it Dad? It had to have been Dad.
Still alive, still breathing, meant she was still here for me, right? That I wasn’t alone?
It didn’t matter that most of my days were spent with her unconscious on our sofa. That I’d already somewhat adjusted to being alone.
“She looks like shit,” Jade mumbles beside me.
“Yep,” I reply, voice empty.
Jade’s fingers slide between mine, squeezing before slipping away. “I’m going to go grab the food.” She offers us her privacy.
And when Jade corners the trailer, I shuffle toward the ghost that used to be my mother, taking a seat on the cinder block step.
I fall down next to her, and she wraps her small arms around me, dragging me into her side.
My arms coil her waist, and I feel her lips touch the top of my head, her breath cool as she breathes over my scalp before letting go.