Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
We slip inside the front door. It’s quiet, the lights dimmed.
Vivi gives a soft, sad smile when she appears from the living room. “I tried to get her to bed, but she wouldn’t go. She kept saying she was waiting for Lovie to come back.”
Adam and I share a look of alarm. I beat him to the living room.
Lovie fell asleep sitting up where I left her, head crooked at an unnatural angle as it searches for somewhere soft to rest. That will hurt in the morning.
“You did the right thing, Vivi. We’ve got it from here.” Adam nods at her, and while the young nurse gathers her things and debriefs with him, I pad over to my grandmother.
I crouch in front of her, place a hand on her knobby knee. “Lovie. We’re back.”
She wakes with a start, hands coming up defensively. The Elle of two months ago would have shied away, especially knowing the damage she could do. I smile at her instead.
Her hand falls when she sees me. “Oh.”
“You got her?” Adam asks from the doorway. His gaze is heavy on my back. It drips across my skin like candle wax, melting and languid.
“We’re just fine,” I whisper, more to myself, patting her cold and wrinkled hands. “Aren’t we, Lovie? Let’s get you to bed.”
She is surprisingly amenable as I help her into pajamas and get her tucked in. Even under the blankets, she shivers, and her hands have a blue tinge I’m not a fan of.
“I’ll grab another blanket from the closet,” I offer. “Or some socks?”
She hums noncommittally, intent to sit there turning purple. Her ribs are practically clanking together.
I grit my teeth. Of all the things she gave me, all the lessons she passed down and bits of wisdom and DNA we share, did it have to be her stubbornness that’s stuck around into this next chapter of her life? “A blanket it is.”
I walk to her closet. She keeps chunky knit blankets at the top, alongside hatboxes stuffed with photo albums and mementos. First teeth, locks of hair, et cetera.
I pull a blanket from the shelf. Something heavy falls with it, toppling onto my foot. I stoop down to pick it up, but a loose paper hanging out the side catches my attention.
Hometown Heroine Goes Underground With Chicago Podcast Success
My eyes skim as quickly and thoroughly as they can in the dim light, but everything on this page is familiar. My name, my words. My story.
This article is about me.
Thumbing open the album, I bite the inside of my cheek. There are articles and interviews printed and preserved. Screenshots of my Buzzfeed and PopSugar features. They’re all about me.
Catch the Train with Elle Monroe
Another Chart-Topping Year for Elkhart Native
15 Heartwarming Podcasts to Binge After You Finish Your Favorite
There’s a photo of me on the next page. My hair is normal, mousy brown, pulled back from my face so as not to draw attention to it. Everything about me was that way back then: designed to fit squarely inside boxes never made for me. Lovie was the one who encouraged me to quit my desk job when the podcast started taking off.
I wrote my resignation email sitting by her side, and I sent her this photo exactly two weeks later, me pretending to throw my employee badge in the garbage. Done , I texted. Officially self-employed!
You can do this , she texted back. You’re doing this.
I did this. And she saw the entire thing.
“What are you gawking at over there, girl?” Lovie says.
Will my voice still work if I try to use it? “My—your articles,” I correct, holding up the book for her to see.
She struggles to push herself up, makes a surprising amount of progress for someone with so little muscle mass. “Bring them here, into the light. I haven’t dug around up there in ages.”
I shuffle across the room, draping the blanket over her lap and making sure her feet are covered. I point to the bed. “Can I?”
Lovie tilts her head. “Come on, then. Sit down.”
With unusual sheepishness, I crawl up beside my grandmother. When I spread the book open between us, she sighs. “I used to love looking at this book.”
“What made you stop?” I don’t know what’s changed tonight, why she’s not at my throat. But I refuse to question things outside my control. I’ve learned so much since moving home, and, once again, I have her to thank.
She fiddles with her hands in her lap, forever spinning her wedding band, yellowing teeth catching wrinkled lips. “I think it—well, it makes me frustrated. Because I know they’re important, but I can’t remember why.”
I shut my eyes to keep my tears at bay. She’s reached directly into my chest and holds my heart in her hands. “I think she’s your granddaughter. The girl in the articles.”
“That would … that would make sense. I love them almost as much as I love her.” Fatigue is making her voice droop like her jowls, the space between her words getting larger.
“Why not display these in the house somewhere?” A tear slips down my cheek, but I just let it splash onto my already ruined shirt.
Another tired sigh. “They’re not for everyone else. They’re just for me.”
“I bet she’d like to see them when she visits, though.” I press a fist to my mouth, trying to hold in the pain.
Lovie chuckles, and I open my tear-filled eyes in time to see her shake her head, smiling fondly down at the papers on her lap. “She’s never needed anyone else to see how successful she was. Never lived for anyone else either.” My emotion is invisible to her as she grins conspiratorially. “We have that in common. I needed to see it sometimes, though. To remind myself I did good with her.”
I can’t stop the whimper that comes out of my mouth, past my hand. I take her wrinkled one in mine, curling her cold fingers to her palm, the way Adam showed me. “Oh, you did, Lovie. You did so good with her. And she—she loves you very much.”
“I raised her, you know.” Her voice is distant, stuck somewhere in a barely there memory. “Her parents … they died when she was three. Car wreck. Drunk driver.”
The defining moments stick with us longer than the rest, don’t they?
Something moves beyond the open doorway, a form I now know as well as my own.
“She was in the car,” I say, not for Lovie’s benefit but for Adam’s. I can’t see his face, just his shadow leaning on the wall across from the door, but I know he’s listening. In the same way I know what started as a trip home to my grandmother’s has irreversibly changed my life. “Sleeping in the back seat. Her parents lost their lives, and the only thing she got was a scar on her knee.”
I trace it now, the way Adam has so many times.
“She doesn’t remember anything.” I blow out a shaky breath. “She was three, after all.” He was exactly right about that—that, and so many other things. “But she still doesn’t like driving because of it. Has lived almost her entire adult life in cities where she doesn’t need to.”
In the hall, Adam is stock-still.
“But she’s okay,” Lovie says. Not a question. Maybe somewhere in her mind, she already knows the answer.
“She’s okay,” I confirm, wiping my cheek across my shoulder. I glance at the shadow in the hall again. “Every day, she is more and more okay.”
I give myself a few more minutes to enjoy this, the comfort I have here, in this house. In the same bed I used to crawl into after nightmares, in the same arms that held me together in the midst of all my falling apart.
When Lovie succumbs to sleep, I pull the scrapbook off her lap, tuck pages into the album again. Place it back into the closet, for another time.
Maybe.
Maybe there will never be another time.
I shut her bedroom door and all but collapse into the arms waiting there for me, pain and bittersweet memories tearing my chest inside out. Adam leads me to the other bedroom. And like I did for Lovie, he holds me while I fall asleep.