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I nodded and it took a few more minutes for Grams to convince me to let her go as I had clasped my fingers onto her nightgown. I did let her go, believing she wasn’t leaving, and Grams built the fort. The same fort she built for me whenever the nightmare taunted me.
One by one, each and every stuffed animal I owned was placed on the bed, creating a wall between me and the world that scared me.
“We’ll sew tomorrow,” Grams said. “You and I. Doesn’t that sound fun?”
“I’m not good at it,” I whispered as I snuggled deep under the quilt she had made for me. “My stitches are all wrong.”
“Life isn’t about perfection. It’s about spending time with you.”
I was never good at sewing. Stuck my fingers more than I completed a straight stitch. But Grams was forever patient. Forever understanding. Forever there. And because of her faith in me, I always sat still as we worked on a massive quilt together. I cherished that time together. I was hers and she was mine and somehow I belonged.
She opens her eyes and I freeze, praying she doesn’t see me. Praying that she closes them again and drifts back to sleep. But she blinks. Again. A few more times. “Abby?”
My throat locks up and the emotion overwhelms me to the point that tears fill my eyes. “It’s me.”
Her head moves as she looks about her room. “Did you have a bad dream?”
“Yes.” A terrible dream. One that included drug deals, getting shot, making friends and losing friends, falling for someone and letting them go.
“Is your father home?” Grams’s mind, when it decides to function at a reasonable level, resides where she is most comfortable, with me at eight and Dad still taking care of both of us.
Grams hated what Dad did for a living. Every night when Grams tucked me into bed, she told me I would grow up to be better than him. Guess I’m a disappointment.
“No, Dad’s not home yet.” Not ever. The judge seemed pretty serious about that life sentence. “I think he needs to work late tonight.”
“He’s a complicated man,” she says like she believes she has strength, but Grams has none. She lost the ability to stand on her own months ago and can only sit up for so long before shaking. “I hoped when he brought you home that he’d make some changes in his life.”
I remember Grams before her skin was thin and wrinkles covered so much of her face. Her skin is translucent now and her eyes don’t look quite right in her head. The past five years have been brutal, for both of us. I sit on the edge of the bed and tuck her hair behind her ear. “Do you remember when we used to dress up and play tea?”
My best dress, she’d curl my hair, we both wore white gloves.
Grams grants me the same smile she gave to me every morning I woke and every night as I went to bed. “Want to invite your father to tea again? He looks nice when he dresses up.”
The memory of my father bringing home a tux and a “fancy” meal for me and Grams for my seventh birthday is a hug and a knife to the chest. “He told me to take care of you.”
Grams’s eyes flutter as she places her hand over mine. “It’s what he said to me when he brought you home. I’m glad he found you.”
“I’m glad he did, too.”
She closes her eyes, and this time as she sleeps, Grams doesn’t drag in shallow breaths, but deep air through her nose. Eventually, enough time p
asses that her eyes flicker beneath her closed lids. That moment was a gift. A rare gift. The time period may be off, but she remembered me.
Grams is the only person left who knows me, the real me, and when she forgets, I wonder if the only good things about me will die along with her already fading memories.
Logan
I enter through the back door then lock it behind me, thinking of how Abby was barricading herself in when she walked in earlier. Abby, since I met her, has always been larger than life, that unattainable creature that only exists in myths that pretends to be flesh and blood like the rest of us.
But if seeing her in a hospital bed didn’t convince me, then watching her when she returned home proved Abby’s fragile. Possibly more fragile than anyone else. It’s not the ones that know how to ask for help that can shatter, it’s people like Abby who are made of glass and carry the world on their shoulders that are going to break.
Nate lifts his head from a novel and nods as I stride up the stairs. Her grandmother’s door is closed and a light shines from beneath Abby’s at the end of the hallway.
Isaiah and I had a long talk this afternoon and neither of us is happy. What’s going to happen next depends on Abby’s answers to conversations she’s not going to want to have. I lightly knock on the door and at her answer of “Come in,” I open the door.
First thing I notice is pink wallpaper and the next thing I notice—bare skin.
Blood flow in my body redirects south and I can’t stop staring at the curve of her naked back. Abby’s dark hair is wet, making it longer and black. She eases a tank over her head, then pulls it down until that delicious skin is covered.
