32. Jonny
Chapter thirty-two
Jonny
Ipack recklessly, shoving the contents of my drawers into the suitcase with no rhyme or reason.
I shove spice jars next to my underwear, chuck the sketchbooks next to my laptop, and strip the bathroom of my toiletries with a ruthless efficiency.
For once, all of the packing up and moving on has come in handy.
It takes me ten minutes and an internal checklist to clean the apartment out.
At the end, I take off my bracelet and bury it under the coffee grounds, where the sight of it won’t hurt me anymore. When it’s done, I close the door and slide my copy of the key under the door. Less than five minutes later, I’m letting myself into Aunt Shelley’s place.
“It’s all over the news,” Aunt Shelley says by way of greeting. She mutes the TV. “I’ve been worried sick. They said on the news that you were attacked.”
I come to the sofa and hug her. “It’s over,” I say.
She eyes my suitcase, which is currently lying in the dining area. “So I see,” she says, and sighs. “Are you going to tell me what happened between you two, or do I have to hear Jackie’s version at book club?”
So I tell her. All of it, from the beginning—Nash coming out of the dark behind that curtain, the taser, the shoulder coming out of its socket, Lance strangling him. She doesn’t interrupt once.
“And I’m fine, Aunt Shelley. I really am.” It comes out steadier than I feel. “It’s just the violence. It really scared me.”
“Go on.” She leans forward.
“I had to say his name three times before he stopped. If I hadn’t, he’d be in jail right now on murder charges. And then he decides, in the aftermath of all that, that he wants to marry me.”
“Wow!”
“I know!” I say. “Like, oh, since you have the blood of my enemies on your skin, yes, that sounds like a very good idea right now. Plus, he knew Nash could try something and didn’t tell me.
He was ‘protecting’ me.” I make the quotes with my fingers.
“And then, when everything was falling apart, he said things about Mom.”
“What things?”
“That she was abusive. That I was her free childcare. That Elliott would never have lived independently and I was going to spend my whole life as their warden.” I look at my hands.
“He compared what she did to me to what Nash did to him. It was horrible. She’s dead, Aunt Shelley.
She died in a fire. And he was picking her apart like she’s a case study. ”
Aunt Shelley is quiet for a long time. Then she says: “Jonny, I need to show you something. And I’m sorry I didn’t show you sooner.”
She goes into her room and comes back with a small flash drive and her laptop. She sits down and looks at it in her hand for a long moment before she plugs it in.
“What is this?”
“About five years before the fire, your grandmother called me to come and see her. Angela and I were already arguing, and when Mom called out of the blue, I came right over. She said she wanted to make sure her last wishes were preserved.” She pauses.
“I think she knew she was starting to lose her faculties, and she waited for a good day to make this recording.”
She presses play. The first image is my grandmother’s face, close to the camera. She looks younger and sharper than I ever knew her—this woman with her penetrating eyes was a stranger to me. I lean forward.
“You were about twelve or thirteen when it was made, I think,” Aunt Shelley says. “You and Elliott were at school.”
On the screen, my grandmother speaks. Her voice is younger. Lighter. Softer.
And then she talks, and it goes through me like something cold poured straight down my spine.
Because I had forgotten it. Completely. I have spent ten years not being able to get at the sound of my grandmother’s voice, and here it is coming out of a laptop speaker in Aunt Shelley’s front room, and it turns out it was never gone at all.
It was only ever behind a door I couldn’t find on my own.
I put my hand over my mouth and I don’t take it away for a while.
“I don’t like this,” she says. “I came here to take care of Elliott. Well, let’s call a spade a spade, honey.
He’s what they used to call simple. But she don’t do nothing to keep him reined in.
He needs boundaries. He’s nine, but he’s throwing temper tantrums like he’s a toddler. Soon he’ll hurt someone.”
She pauses and wets her lips. “It’s my fault about Uncle Clement. I coulda said something, but back then—”
Aunt Shelley pauses the video. “That’s your Great-Uncle Clement. Believe me, this next bit was hard for me to understand at the time, too. She does get to the point.” She restarts the tape.
Grandma purses her lips. “He was—Clement was my brother. My baby brother. A momma’s boy, they called him. That was the polite word for it.” Her gaze slides off the camera, somewhere I can’t follow, then comes back. “Momma always said he was too delicate for the world. So we kept him home.”
“And he was gentle, Clement. A gentler soul you never met. And he never once—he never married.” Her mouth works. “No. Of course he didn’t. We saw to that, didn’t we? Kept him close and used his good hands and called it kindness.
“He babysat two generations of youngins, and he wasn’t never nothing but sweet to them.
That Thanksgiving we had at our house—you were two and your sister was ten that year.
” She pauses. “He had gone off to fetch a pie and your sister called him Clementina, and Daddy and your uncle Harold laughed so hard they looked like they’d about fall over.
I turned around and I saw him standing there, looking hurt.
The next morning, when he didn’t come down to breakfast, I sent Angela to go and fetch him down. ”
She shakes her head. “I made Angela hide the pill bottle. We put it out that his heart failed overnight. I told her that we were protecting the family from the scandal. I should have told her that we had done wrong to him. But what could I do? We took that boy, we used him, and then we erased him when he wasn’t there. ”
For a long moment she says nothing, and I think maybe she’s drifted off the way she used to at the end. Then the fog goes out of her eyes all at once, the way a cloud slides off the sun, and she looks dead into the lens. “Parker. You understand me. This is about Parker.”
“Parker? Are you saying Parker’s gay? He’s twelve.” Aunt Shelley’s voice on the tape.
“I’m too old not to know what this looks like.”
“Are you saying that Angela is treating Parker like your mom treated Uncle Clement?”
Silence. Then: “You look at those two bedrooms and tell me who the second-class son is. It’s wrong.
He’s already talking about colleges he wants to go to, and places he wants to see, and it breaks my heart.
Angela just says we can’t afford it, but what she’s really doing is trying to make sure he don’t dream too big.
” Her eyes glisten. “Soon, I’m gonna need to be put into a home.
And if I were in my right mind, I would ask you to see to it.
That’s why you’re here. I want this on video.
I don’t want to be a burden for Parker to take care of.
Because that’s who it’s gonna fall on. Angela will work and Parker will stay home for the rest of his life taking care of me and Elliott, until he’s old and gray, and he won’t know no better. ”
Grandma straightens herself and puts her chin out defiantly.
“But I don’t want this for him. And I don’t want it for me.
When my mind goes, I want you to play this for Angela and make her understand that I want to go someplace where I won’t burden nobody.
And Elliott needs to be in a place where he can get the structure and supervision he needs. ”
Aunt Shelley shuts off the video.
I am almost completely numb. Grandma knew my heart before I did. She saw the pattern repeating and she tried to stop it. She cared. She really cared about what my future would hold. The prickle of tears comes knowing that such love had been there for me, and I’m gut-punched by the loss of it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask my aunt.
“You had just lost everything. Your home, your family. What good would it have done to tell you this when you were eighteen and broken? I knew you would always miss your mother, but I was letting you build up a fantasy, and it’s hurting you now.”
“So Lance was right about her.” I look out the window at his building. His blinds are closed.
“That doesn’t mean that everything he’s doing is okay,” Aunt Shelley says. She sighs. “But maybe he’s as out of his depth as you are. That ex was a really bad guy. He really wanted to take you somewhere and hurt you.”
She has a point. And despite my fears, and all the red flags waving in my head, Lance has saved my life twice now.
“But his reaction was way over the top,” I say. “You must see that.”
“I do. And he needs to get help to deal with that, because if he doesn’t, it’ll happen again. But when people are under attack, they revert to training. That’s what the Marines taught him to do. It doesn’t make it right. But it makes it understandable.”
“It’s a lot,” I say.
“It is. And I’m sorry. You have no idea how much. I had hoped I would never need to have this conversation, but I can’t avoid it anymore.” She puts her hand on my knee. “Don’t make any decisions right now. But at least be fair to him.” She pauses. “And more importantly, be fair to yourself.”