It’s destroyed now.
Unable to reach what’s left of the shiny surface, Brooklyn arches her back and strains toward it, hands in claws, grasping for what Patricia well knows are shards of glass. But Brooklyn can’t see that, apparently can’t feel the pain of the gashes and bruises painting her forehead. As she wrestles her granddaughter away, Patricia lashes out with one foot and kicks the mirror over, hard. It slams backward into the wall, shattering utterly, and tumbles sideways, all the glass falling onto the once-pristine white carpet.
Brooklyn’s body goes limp in Patricia’s arms.
There’s a soft intake of breath, a measuring gasp, and then a shuddering sob.
“Mommy! Mommy, it hurts! Oh, Mommy! The monster got me! Help!”
Patricia pulls Brooklyn against her chest, cradling her, trying so hard not to touch the red flower of her forehead.
“Shh, sweetheart. It’s Nana. Nana’s here. There is no monster. You’re safe now.”
Brooklyn writhes in her arms, turns to look at her in utter horror. “But where’s Mommy? She can make it better. Mommy won’t let the monster hurt me. Neither will Ella.”
Patricia snuggles in closer, stroking the girl’s back, which is now sweaty and cool as the fever breaks. “Mommy and Ella are gone right now, but Nana is here,” she croons. “Nana can keep you safe. Nana will make the monsters afraid.”
She can feel her granddaughter considering this, can sense the moment she must accept reality. Brooklyn softens, snuggles down, sighs. It’s telling, how long it takes the poor child to realize that Nana is all she has. It feels like Brooklyn…just gives up.
“Did I fall out of bed?” Brooklyn asks, reaching one hand up to touch her forehead.
Patricia recognizes an out when she sees one. “Well, that’s my fault for having such high beds. Let’s go get you cleaned up, shall we? You’re definitely going to need more jelly beans.”
Brooklyn stands up, leaving a perfect red handprint on the carpet that she doesn’t even notice. Standing up is a bit of an ordeal for Patricia right now. Her legs are bloodless and wobbling, and she’s still in shock from what she saw. The mirror—hideous, awful thing—is on the ground now, and it looks like a crime scene on one of those dark FBI shows on TV, a jagged, gory mess in the middle of her pristine white closet. She is not sorry to close the door just now.
In the kitchen, she installs Brooklyn at the table with her tablet and remaining jelly beans and goes to the pantry for the first-aid kit. The resilience of children is amazing—Brooklyn just shoves her sticky hair out of her face and goes back to her show while Patricia cleans her off with wet paper towels. There are flinches, winces, an occasional gasp or whimper or angry, “Ow, Nana!” Once she can actually see the wound, Patricia is beyond grateful to find that it’s not actually that bad. She was worried stitches would be required, but from what she can tell, there are just a few cuts. It’s a miracle, really. It reminds her of the time Chelsea fell off the monkey bars at a fast-food playground and busted her chin in the pine bark nuggets below. Lots of blood, lots of tears, but then it was solved with a bandage and the application of a strategic strawberry milkshake. Brooklyn desperately needs a shower, but otherwise, she seems just fine.
“Nana, what can we eat? I’m hungry!” she says as if she doesn’t look like something from the final scene of Carrie.
Glad for something to do that doesn’t involve blood, Patricia goes to paw through the bags she dropped when Brooklyn attacked her. There’s nothing good here. Ah, yes. She threw all the snacky things a child would enjoy over the fence.
“If you’ll run outside, you might find something nice in those bags,” she says, pointing to the sacks splayed out in her knee-high grass, their cheerful colors promising sugar and salt. “But do bring in all the bags and their contents, please, not just your chosen snack.”
Brooklyn stares outside, and when she sees the bags, she lights up like the Fourth of July.
God, has July already passed? It must’ve.
How could anyone celebrate something like that these days, gleefully running the grill and shooting off fireworks when mosquitoes live outside and random people are attacking strangers?
It’s funny how strangely time runs during a pandemic. When Covid hit, they lived here in luxury, ordering everything online and giving in to every indulgence. She even sent over Easter dresses for the girls, knowing full well they weren’t going to come over for their usual brunch but unwilling to deny herself the joy of the selection process. This year, she missed Easter entirely. They were in California. The hotel maid left beautiful chocolate eggs on the bedside table. She didn’t think about Chelsea and her girls for days on end.
Perhaps she is not the best grandmother.
It doesn’t matter now. The child, at least, is happy at her task.
Brooklyn lopes outside—and why not? She’s already got the Violence; she can’t get sicker—and runs in with the bags bumping along behind her.
“Can I have the puffs, Nana?” she asks, holding up an orange bag of God only knows what.
The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. Patricia puts up all the groceries, lugs the broken mirror out into the garage, cleans up the shards, and hunts through Rosa’s cleaning supplies for something to spray on all the bloodstains. In a stroke of genius, she encourages Brooklyn to go for a swim, which should wash away all the blood without any sort of disagreement over bath time. When Brooklyn asks her to swim, too, she barely puts up a fight before she’s pulling on an old maillot and wading in. Sure, it’ll wreck her hair, but who’s going to see it? Brooklyn can’t touch the bottom of the pool on her own, and Patricia isn’t willing to have another cardiac event today.
That night, full of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for the first time in decades, Patricia realizes that she is bone-tired. Panic, action, swimming, cooking, keeping up with Brooklyn in general—for all her claims of being busy in the past, she was actually very busy today, and it feels decidedly different.
“Let’s go to bed now, dear,” she says gently.
Brooklyn frowns from the couch, where she’s sprawled with her tablet, already half asleep. “But I’m so tired. I want to sleep here. It’s comfy.”
Patricia’s instinct is to sharply remind the child that she shouldn’t have her feet on the couch in the first place, and that children take themselves to bed when bedtime is declared. But something about the constellation of bandages on that tender little forehead weakens her. She leans down and remembers to lift with her legs as she pulls Brooklyn against her shoulder—God, the weight of a sleeping child, so heavy and soft and warm and tender and stubborn—and carries her down the hall.
“Let’s just get you upstairs to your cozy bed.”