Chapter 19
Sloane
The linoleum in the room is mocking me. It’s too pallid, too yellow, too clean, and it smells sour, like the disinfectant was so pure they couldn’t bear to throw some lemon in there. I run the rubber toe of my converse against it until a dark line appears and smile, satisfied.
“Ms. Tucker?” a woman we aren’t familiar with says, her head popping between the door and the frame.
“Hi.” Mom sits straighter in her chair, and I wince because it takes effort.
She’s all brittle bones and thinly disguised apathy, but that is why today I brought a puzzle.
These rooms are so dreary, and the treatment bays are worse when the dogs aren’t there.
Things were so busy this week, what with the Gen and Grant of it all, that I forgot to check what programming is happening today.
Problem-solving, though: it’s really what I do best, maybe other than painting, and so I brought this puzzle.
It’s kittens, something Connie really loves, on a beach of all things.
Not entirely sure if cats can, in fact, swim, but they looked so precious on the box, and my mom’s not a stickler about realism—neither am I, and—
“—is not working as well as we’d hoped.”
“I figured,” my mom says, her smile more of a shrug, and I look between the doctor and my mother.
“Okay,” I say, my third cup of coffee skipping through my veins. “What’s next? There was a list—”
“Sloane.” My mom’s frail hand finds mine, squeezes it, and the doctor slips out of the room.
“Did you already talk about the next option? Sorry I was lost in my thoughts,” I huff, nervously, dread pricking my cold skin. I reach for my sweater, hastily pulling it over myself before pumping the hand sanitizer, suddenly conscious of all the germs.
“Honey…” Connie’s eyes, the sockets hollow from the way she’s been wasting away, are tired, and I know what she’ll say if I let her.
“Why don’t you want to try?” I snap. “What is so wrong with just trying?”
Her throat bobs, the fine ligaments there, accentuated by the thinness of her skin, shifting as she breathes. “I did try. But there’s somethin’ to knowin’ when to call it.”
“Well I don’t know!” Pressure builds behind my eyes.
“How about we both know? How about you ask me if I think it’s time to call it?
” Gripping the edges of my long sleeves, and I wrap my arms tightly around me.
She takes a steadying breath instead, blinking over at me, and I can see the steel collecting in her gaze.
“Alright,” she says softly, her smile sun-dried and creaky, revealing that one tooth that chipped sometime after she lost us the second time. “A little more, Sloane.” I feel my chest, which had constricted, let out the smallest bit. “But promise me that when it’s time, you’ll let it be.”
Behind my closed mouth smile, my teeth chatter. Adrenaline runs cold through me, and it’s only my oversized sweatshirt that can stop the shivers. I have the thought that a hug, that being held, would help me keep it all in, but it’s not something I want to ask for. Not right now.
A ring sounds through the room, and I reach for my phone before it clatters off the chair and onto the sickly floor. “Hello,” I answer, unsure of who I picked up. I just did, accepted their intrusion like the life line Connie is too broken to throw me.
“Hey,” the voice says, and it’s Andrew, his voice wary and tinged with vocal fry—like he just woke up or like he’s been talking all afternoon. Contentment cracks against the cold shell I’m rattling against, makes its way in the more I hear him through the phone. “Are you at the conservatory today?”
“I’m near there.” Connie squints, like it’ll help her hear. I hold up a finger, still feeling the cold sting of anxiety when I do.
“Carm usually takes the city bus on Wednesdays but rehearsal ran late…” he drifts off for a second. “I’m not gonna be able to get over there for an hour.” The noise of wherever he is falls to a murmur, and a door shuts.
“Go,” she mouths, the squinting having worked. I tilt my head as she picks up her phone, showing a screen with a car lift app, and I scowl.
“I get it if you can’t, or—” Connie rolls her eyes, and I whisper shout that the doctor still needs to come back in. “Sorry, what?” Andy asks, uncertainty lacing his tone.
“Sloane, I can handle it. Now get out of this god forsaken place, or else—” she lifts her brows, the skin pulling taut, and I finally relent.
“Sorry—yes, of course I can pick up Carmen. Give me like, twenty minutes.”
“Thank you, Sloane,” he says quietly, but it’s incomplete, something else hanging on the other side. He hangs up anyway, and I stare into my phone.
“You wanna tell me who that was?” Amused curiosity sits in her gaze, that tooth poking out again, but all I can think about when I look back up at her is the defeat I caught in it just ten minutes earlier. And maybe I shouldn’t be mad at my sick mother, but I am.
“Not really,” I admit, crossing my arms. “But it’s time to go.” I gather my bag, hold my palm out for her to clasp it.
“Darlin’, you are wound up like a—”
“Connie,” I cut her off, making a concerted effort not to lose it. “I’m takin’ you home, and before that, we’re stoppin’ at the nurses’ station.”
Huffing out a breath, my mother grabs her oversized bag, resigning herself to my will, and I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t easier to convince her to stay.
Getting Carmen to put her seatbelt on was a battle in and of itself, so when she tells me I don’t need to walk her up, I just follow her up the stairs anyway, unsurprised by the way she greets every single person we pass.
She slots the key in the door, glancing over her shoulder to shoot me a tight smile. “Thanks for the ride, Rapunzel.” She slides inside so quickly, my fingers almost get crushed by the paint chipped door.
“Wait,” I say, forcing the door back open, ignoring her eye roll. “Are you gonna be fine alone?” A door slams shut at the end of the hallway and Carmen flinches. A less than put together man drunkenly holding himself up against the wall. It’s four in the afternoon, for God’s sake.
It isn’t a rough area—I remember living in worse at her age—but she’s not fighting size, not like I was when I’d walk the dirt path to my uncle’s trailer with only the moon as my guide.
And while her personality is ferocious, I’m not entirely sure she can even reach a cabinet without stacking something on a chair.
“Yeah,” she shrugs, but I can feel the hint of wariness in her voice, and I know my question’s not even one she should have to answer. I push my way in, my earlier bullishness finding a new target. “Suit yourself,” she says, but whatever burden was in her voice is lighter now.
The apartment, with its inelegant assembly of vinyl and carpet, is charming.
Knick-knacks pepper the kitchen counter, the built in shelves that frame the television, the modest coffee table.
Everything feels loved—the couch, whose worn appearance is evidence of how often this family’s curled up on it; the table in the nook off the kitchen, where more than one pen mark mar the deep wooden grain; the kitchen towels hanging off the oven door, faded and stitched—one with ghosts and one with turkeys.
“If you’re hungry—” I start to say, but she’s already illuminated by the fridge’s glow.
Two cheese sticks in hand, she waltzes past me and flops down onto the sofa.
The carpet, while faded, looks clean, so I kick off my shoes before padding across it to join her on the couch.
She flings one of the sticks at me before grabbing the remote.
“Do you…have homework?” I dare to ask, and she scrunches her entire face at me.
The smile I crack restores a small part of the goodwill I lost back at the hospital.
Connie and I barely spoke on the short drive to her apartment, hardly acknowledged that we were parting ways until after I get back from Atlanta for Thanksgiving, in part because she was visibly agitated when I let the nurses know that she would be continuing treatment.
Like my vested interest in her was inconvenient, rather than a god damn blessing.
“No,” Carmen says flatly. I study the slump of her shoulders; something about her feels deflated. Fresh off a conversation with her friends, she’d been lively. Snarky, sure, but in better form than she is now. Since we pulled up to her house, it’s like all the air has slowly leaked out of her.
“You know,” I start to tell her, glancing up at the popcorn ceiling. “I had a pretty shit day.”
She smirks. “I had a shit day, too.”
I flare my eyes at her. “Okay, don’t do as I do, little bird.”
Eyes rolling, she lets her head fall to the side and continues her scroll on the glowing TV.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Nope.” Still, the click of a television show carousel, the beat steady. I can tell she’s not even really looking for anything.
I nod, lips pursed as I scramble for something to do or say, thinking back to the shenanigans Clemmie and I would get into on the hard days.
We were only a little older than Carmen is now, I realize, and the thought of us painting ceramics at her mom’s kitchen table pulls a smile to my face.
I leap up and she startles, watching me as I rifle through her cabinets until I find some plain mugs.
“These special?” I ask, holding them up for her to see. She squints, studying them for a long moment.
“No. Dollar tree,” is all she gives me. “We don’t have a normal coffee maker, so—”
“Come here,” I call to her, layering paper towels on the table before setting them down.
The random set of acrylics I found in the donate box yesterday just so happen to be the perfect palette for some fall themed mugs, so they join the impromptu craft station I’m designing, filling a few glasses with an inch of water.
I feel deep into the recesses of my bag, hoping I accidentally left some cheap brushes in there and find nothing but my reliable, expensive Windsor & Newtons.