I looked around at the open photo album, the crushed cigarette butts that she’d sworn up and down just two days ago that she no longer smoked, the faded, Mickey Mouse drinking glass that had once been Jon’s. I counted five butts in the plastic Waikiki ashtray with the hula girl painted on it, and at least two more in the bottom of Mickey’s glass.
The only thing I didn’t look at was the television, where the familiar voice of my father could be heard amid kid laughter and cheers.
The birthday video.
I had been four. That was right before dad’s MS had been diagnosed, before he started losing weight, before he gave me the ceramic dolphin music box and promised he would never leave me. The day after he died, I smashed the box to a million pieces on the curb outside of our house. The next day, I moved out. I had been seventeen.
“Mom?”
A muffled voice emerged from against my mother’s arm.
“You are an evil, evil child.”
“You going to church? Aunt Carol's coming, remember?”
“I don’t belong in church.”
“Sure you do.” I patted her back. “Where else does an old drunk go for repentance?”
My mother, Mia Taylor, raised her head. Bleary-eyed and pale, dark circles under her eyes, she looked old to me suddenly, in a way that brought a rush of what felt oddly like anger.
She also looked hurt. “You are evil. Did you bring coffee?”
“Yup. With the requisite sugar fat explosion, dunked in chocolate-flavored lard...your favorite.”
She was already reaching for the bag, her eyes faintly quizzical, like they always were when I cracked one of my dumb jokes. She unfurled the crinkled paper and peered inside.
Her voice grew timid. “Will you go with me?”
I failed to completely stifle a snort.
“Come on, Mom. Conversion? This early in the morning? I’m way too young to fear death that much.”
As soon as I said it, my eyes made contact with the television.
There, my father held me in his arms, beaming so wide, his eyes so shining that I couldn’t help but feel him, hearing his laugh through the middle of my chest. Only after I could breathe again did I look at my mom. Her deer-like eyes were wide as she munched on the edge of a donut, chocolate frosting coating her small fingers.
“You’ve got to get past this,” I said, hating myself for saying it, knowing how often I’d said similar things, bludgeoning my mother with them, who despite all her apparent frailty was the more resilient one.
It was me who covered myself over in sharp laughs and dismissive shrugs.
Or, in the words of the boyfriend before Jaden, a Puerto Rican from New York, I was “a cold white woman, made of ice.”
A faint nausea rose briefly, a pulse of warmth.
I disagree, a voice said.
I jumped violently, enough to make my mom look over.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
She never seemed to hold a grudge over my cracks. She was a better person than me.
She patted my leg. “Are you okay, Allie-bird? You look like a goose walked on your grave.”
I forced my eyes to the television, watched my dad lean down to help my four-year-old self blow out four pink candles on a cake with white, fluffy frosting. Four-year-old me looked up at twenty-eight-year-old me and beamed, wanting to be my friend.
But watching my younger self wrapped in the gnarled, work-worn hands of my father, I felt nothing but envy.
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic
2
AWAKE
I hunched over an espresso maker, trying to get the metal coffee filter with the pressed coffee crammed inside to fit in the groove. I got it hooked somehow, managed to turn the handle a quarter turn, but it stuck there and wouldn’t budge.
In the background, I listened to the television over the bar. There, our recently-elected president spoke over the flash of cameras and odd cheer or laugh from the crush of reporters ringing him like fans at a rock concert.
The media used a parade of what my grandmother would have called “dimestore words” whenever they described President Daniel Caine. He was never just President Caine. He was “charismatic, bold in speech, forty-something President Caine exuding reassurance, his dark chestnut hair shining as he speaks from the White House lawn, the flowers of overhanging trees blending with the honey-blond of his wife’s hair. We only wish we could show you his real appearance so you could see how presidential he truly looks...”
That kind of thing.
Refocusing on the espresso maker, I finally got the filter off and hooked on the machine. Clicking it on, I waited for the red light, glancing up at the line of blue suits on the television. I noticed the scarf at the blond woman’s throat, the flash of teeth as the man’s avatar rocked his head back in a laugh.