Page 56 of Sweet Chaos
That’s what I was hoping when I stopped outside her closed bathroom door. Same drill. Deep breaths. Inhale. Exhale. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my arm. The collar of my black Henley was choking me.
Fucking hell. I opened the door and stood in the hallway, my feet rooted to the spot as I tried to process the scene in front of me. At first, I was too shocked to register what I was seeing.
A sea of red.
So much fucking red.
Her dress. The blood on the white tiles. The bathwater. Her lipstick.
She was wearing a dress in the bathtub. Lips painted red. Nails to match. Her skin was ghostly pale, stark against her jet-black hair.
And the blood… it was everywhere.
Bile burned the back of my throat. I leaned over the toilet and vomited until there was nothing left in my stomach.
As I straightened up, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, my eye caught on her phone. Lying in a pool of blood that had dripped from her wrist. Next to an empty bottle of Jack Daniels.
Without stopping to think, I scooped her up in my arms and carried my dead mother down the hallway and to her bedroom. I didn’t know why I didn’t leave her in that bathtub. I left a trail of red water from the bathroom to the bedroom and laid her down on top of her dusty rose bedspread. It was the cheap silky kind, like her dress that clung to her gaunt frame.
Mascara tears trailed down her cheeks and I returned to the bathroom and grabbed two cheap, thin towels, lathering one up with soap and water. I scrubbed her face clean, erasing every trace of makeup like it was my sole mission in life to peel back the layers of artifice and reveal her naked skin.
Why had she put on all that makeup? Like she’d put time and effort into her appearance before she slit her wrists. Vertically, not horizontally.
She knew I’d be the one to find her. She fuckingknewit would be me.
When I was a little kid, I thought my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. She taught me to dance. Slow dancing of all things. I used to lead her around the kitchen or the backyard of whatever place we lived in. Her hand in mine, my arm around her waist like I was a man and not a little kid, and we were two people from another century. I’d spin her out and reel her back in, embarrassed but secretly proud that I was so good at slow-dancing. It used to put a smile on her face. It brought her joy and that had made me feel like a fucking king.
Rae St. Clair used to be pretty before all the hard living caught up to her. She used to have dreams. I didn’t know what happened to them. Or to her. Life, I guess.
Sliding my phone out of my pocket, I replayed the voicemail she’d left at two in the morning when I’d neglected to answer, and I stood in the bedroom with my dead mother, bloody bathwater dripping onto the floor, leaving a puddle at my feet as I forced myself to listen to every word again.
“Wayne left me, baby. He promised he’d stay. I really thought he would be different. I wish you’d pick up the phone. I want a chance to tell you things I should have said before. I’m just so tired, baby. So weary, you know? I know I screwed up. I know I wasn’t a good mother, but I wanted to be, I really did. They all tried to talk me into giving up my babies, but I wouldn’t, so I ran away from those hypocrites and I never looked back. They called me the devil. Well, let me tell you, that Baptist minister was no saint, was he?
“I love you so much. You were my first love and I guess you’ll be my last. Hope you always remember that. Even though you’re all grown up now, you’ll always be my baby boy. It wasn’t all bad. We had some good times too, didn’t we? And look how far you’ve come. And your sister, well, I guess I was jealous of her--I still am. My own daughter. Imagine that. She was the beauty. Turned all the boys’ heads. When she got to be a teenager, men didn’t notice me anymore like they used to. They all wanted Remy, didn’t they? And I never wanted to believe that about Russell… I’m sorry. I just didn’t.”
She was crying, her words garbled by tears, and I heard the sound of running water in the background. She was pouring a bath, the bath that she was going to die in. “Truth is that I always loved you the most. And I guess that’s a terrible thing for a mother to admit. Your sister got so high and mighty, thinking she was better than me. And you… you always chose her over me. I guess I just wanted you all to myself. I hope you can forgive me someday. Goodbye, baby.”
Forgive her?
Son of a bitch!
I hurled my phone across the room. The mirror above her dresser shattered, a kaleidoscope of cracks distorting the image of the woman lying on the bed.
“No!” I roared, driving my fist into the drywall. “You don’t get to do this to us. You don’t fucking get to do this.”
I kept punching the wall, the skin over my knuckles busting, blood dripping onto the parquet floor. The plaster cracked, the wall riddled with holes and still it wasn’t enough. I wanted to tear down the world and set it on fire.
My chest heaved as I swept my arm across the dresser, sending makeup and perfume bottles flying. I tore up her room, upending furniture, the cheap wood splintering as it crashed against the wall, and when there was nothing left to destroy, I sagged against the wall, and slid down it, my ass hitting the floor. Dropping my head in my hands, I sat on my mother’s bedroom floor, amidst the wreckage, the weight of her love a burden that squeezed all the oxygen out of my lungs. I rubbed the blank space over my heart to ease the ache, but it didn’t help.
You call that love? What you did, what you havealwaysdone to me, is not love.
Her love was sick and twisted. Every single shitty, soul-destroying thing that had happened to me and Remy growing up was because ofher. Our own mother. The person who was supposed to protect us from the big bad world when we were too young to do it for ourselves had brought trouble to our doorstep and robbed us of a childhood.
Now she’d taken the easy way out and once again, she’d left me to clean up her fucking mess.
I lit a cigarette, clamping it between the fingers of my fucked-up hand—the cuts raw and bloody—and took a drag, filling my lungs with nicotine and tar. After I smoked the cigarette and ground it out on the floor like the classy bastard that I was, I retrieved my phone. The screen was cracked but it still worked.
My thumb hovered over the green call button. There was the only person I wanted right now. I just wanted to hear her sweet voice. No lies, no empty promises, no cunning or manipulation. Honest and true and brave.
