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I grind my teeth thinking about the burden she has right now and my behavior for the past month.
I guess this is that come-to-Jesus moment she talked about.
Her cell phone rings and it says it’s Dr. T Lexington calling. I answer.
I fill her in about Jada’s parents and her concerns about talking to her brother.
And then I call the funeral home page she has on the screen and make an appointment for her for Monday morning.
After that, I phone my sister who says she’ll also phone our sister-in-law to be on standby for Jada.
“Austin, are you and Jada a couple?” Adele asks.
“Yes,” I say. “As soon as I tell her that we are.”
“Explain,” Adele demands.
“I’ve been a dick. I’m finished being a dick and now I’m gonna be here for her through this trauma and when I get the opportunity, I’ll be telling her we’re a couple.”
“What’s that gonna mean for-”
“I don’t know anything about what it’ll mean for anything right now. Right now, Jada is the priority. She’s all that matters right now. I’ll figure everything else out later.”
“Good enough. Call me when you have the details for the funeral.”
51
Jada
I wake up disoriented. Was that a dream?
No. No, it wasn’t.
My dad died. My dad died and my mom died. My mom died a long time ago, but it feels like it just happened.
And I’m so numb about it, and so close to being on the verge of angry at Dad, but more than angry, I’m really, really sad.
I haven’t been able to remember much about her for a long time, it’s all felt so foggy – any memories I have of her, but right now I feel like I remember a little more.
I remember her in that floral dress I saw today. I remember her smiling while wearing it, her face under a floppy hat with sunglasses and lipstick on and we were laughing, sitting under a tree on a picnic blanket. And Dad was playing catch with Shane.
Mom had on big hoop earrings. She took me the next day to get my ears pierced and my dad lost it when I came home teary eyed with pink lobes. He was so angry with her for doing that to my ears without talking to him first.
And then she left. She left just days later and no one noticed I got an ear infection because they were still healing and Mom wasn’t there to put the rubbing alcohol on them.
Dad noticed when I started crying about it in bed and he had to dig the earring out of my swollen earlobe while I bawled my eyes out.
He was so angry about that, about my mother piercing my ears and then leaving him, leaving me so I’d get an infection and him having to deal with it.
Pain assaults me. Not physical pain. A pain I can’t describe. A hollowness in my chest, in my fingers. Numbness, maybe. I don’t know.
Why didn’t he tell us?
I’m reeling.
And still… she didn’t die days or even weeks after she left.
What was she doing that two years without us? She didn’t come home for two years. Would she have done it eventually if she’d never been hit by a car and killed?
I’ll never know.
Other memories assault my brain rapid-fire and most of them are of her being sad. Out of order, some when I’m really small, some just before she left. Memories of her sometimes crying. Memories of me trying to talk to her while she was in bed and she wouldn’t answer. Sometimes staring into space when I was trying to talk to her in the kitchen, like I was invisible and she couldn’t hear me. Sometimes she was shouting at Dad and him just staring at the TV and ignoring her. Him ignoring her, her ignoring me. Shane upstairs drawing on his walls or drawing on his skin with sewing needle punctures done in shapes, sometimes words, even though he’d get the belt for it later. Memories of Shane’s arm bleeding because he wrote the word DAM on it with a razor. And when it was angled the other way I knew he didn’t just put a bad word, he put MAD. Because he was angry.
Dad screaming that if she wanted to go, she wasn’t taking us with her off into LaLa land. And him saying something about her taking too many of those ‘damn pills’. Her laughing and saying without the pills she wasn’t happy.
She didn’t say goodbye.
She just left.
And I wanted to go live in LaLa Land, too.
And another memory. Coming home alone after Shane got suspended and I walked in and found Dad sitting at the table drinking booze out of the big bottle and his eyes were red. Like he’d been crying. But I’d never seen him cry and he didn’t say anything, so I thought maybe he wasn’t crying, just feeling sick.
