This is why Patricia did her best to raise Chelsea to be independent. This is why she was so hard on her daughter, always pushing her to be strong and resilient and self-reliant. Because someday, everyone has to be.
Patricia laboriously climbs to standing, using the floor and then the wall. She steps out of her bloody shoe and is careful not to slip when she reaches the tile in the hallway. It’s almost funny, the thought of slipping in her own blood and getting hurt even worse, that dreaded broken hip that always seemed like an older person’s problem until her doctor told her she had the beginnings of osteoporosis.
She can’t really look at the wound; ever since the Easter pageant dress, she’s hated the sight of her own blood, would do anything to avoid seeing it. She learned how to flush a toilet while still sitting on it when she was just a girl. The moment she found out tampons existed, she spent what little money she could find on them.
When her periods stopped at eighteen, she thought God had answered her prayers.
He…had not.
And now here she is, limping through her own home, leaving indignant red splotches behind on the tile on her way to paw through her pantry for the first-aid kit. Again.
Back in her room, Brooklyn calls, “Nana, there’s ketchup on the floor, but I didn’t do it, I promise!”
“It’s okay,” she calls back, hating that she sounds out of breath. “Just go back to bed. Nana will fix everything.”
“Yes, ma’am. Good night again! I love you!”
“Good night again. I love you, too.” She says it every night because it must be said, but tonight she realizes that she means it.
When Brooklyn is safely in the closet, Patricia closes her bedroom door. With no way to lock it, she turns a heavy ottoman on its side and slides it across the doorway. She didn’t lock Brooklyn in the closet, but at least this way, she’ll hear a big noise if there’s to be another attack.
She’s glad Brooklyn won’t see what’s next, won’t ask what happened.
If she told her granddaughter what she’d done…
Well, who could believe such a thing?
In the walk-in pantry, she turns on the lights and closes the door, grateful for the privacy. She finds the first-aid kit and cracks it open, wishing for the tough, harsh, stalwart tools of her youth, for the iodine and styptic and firm bandages rather than all of this individually packaged plastic stuff. At least it was enough for Brooklyn’s forehead, which healed beautifully; she barely has a scar now. Oh, to have young skin again.
Patricia slips out of her remaining shoe and, after a look, calls the pair a loss and tosses it in the trash can where Rosa disposes of the dryer lint. It takes an effort to get her leg up on the utility sink, but she does it, cleaning out the calf wound with soap and water with her face half turned away. The one on her thigh just gets a pour of hydrogen peroxide. It’s not as deep, and she’ll clean it more thoroughly in the shower later.
But the one on her calf is a mess. Thank goodness for the odd, floaty distance she has right now. She doesn’t view it as part of her body, but like a piece of bad meat, something inconvenient that she’d rather just see gone. She’s not sure what to do, whether to push it all back in or…
God.
Cut it off.
Cut off the…dangling bits. She’ll have to ask the internet about that.
For now, she braces herself and pours peroxide over it, wincing at the burn. She sprays it with antibacterial cleaner and wraps gauze around it with some sort of springy, bright-purple bandage that clings to itself. The one on her thigh just gets a big, flat Band-Aid. And that’s as much as she can handle just now.
She remembers, too late, that Brooklyn is in her closet, where all of her clothes are. For the first time in years, Patricia must hunt through the dirty laundry and step into a worn pair of pajamas. She hates that the blood will most likely seep through and ruin them. Funny, how at some point her wardrobe rejected comfort for pretense and propriety. Most of her pajamas are beautiful, expensive silk sets, pants and collared tops that feel like butter, shimmering and elegant.
She told herself she didn’t care what Randall thought, that she’d never wanted to attract him sexually, and yet she would’ve died before letting him see her in something that cost less than two hundred dollars, something that wasn’t elegant and sumptuous and well-fitting in the right color palette for her complexion.
When the hell did that happen?
It was all sandcastles built on the shoreline by someone who’d forgotten that sand was just another kind of dirt.
Her next stop is in the kitchen for ibuprofen. Codeine would be vastly preferable, but she’s got a child to care for.
A child who is also a ticking bomb.
With Brooklyn barricaded in her own bedroom, and two dozen stairs between her and the next available bed, Patricia drapes a towel over the living room couch and sinks into a sea of cushions that she’s just now realizing look a lot more comfortable than they actually are. She’s never spent any time sitting on this couch before. She pushes the cushions onto the floor, reaches for the remote control, and turns on the TV, marveling at the hundreds of buttons. Brooklyn always handles the remote, these days; Patricia has an older, simpler TV in her sunroom, but the couch isn’t long enough for her to stretch out on.
Once she’s found some harmless reruns of The Golden Girls, she pulls down the decorative blanket that’s never been used before and carefully pats it around herself. Moving is an awful lot of work, after all, and it’s her house, so she might as well arrange things for her own comfort. She closes her eyes for just a moment, sighing out all the pain, all the tension, all the…goodness, yes, fear, a thing she hasn’t felt in a long time.
Fear, a thing she’s arranged her life to avoid entirely.
Her wounds pulse with each heartbeat as she sinks into the darkness.
37.
The last month has been the longest month of Ella’s life, mostly because she is starving to death. She can’t remember the last time she was this hungry. There were days back at home when she would whine that she was starving because they were out of her favorite cereal and she didn’t want to eat her second-favorite cereal, or because the only apples left in the crisper were slightly bruised.
That was nothing compared with this.