Page 31 of Riot Act
Lord above, help me survive this woman. “What are you talking about?”
She smooths her hands over her loose grey linen pants. With her elegant white blouse and the little navy-blue scarf tied at her neck, she’s a picture of effortless grace, just like she always is. Heaven forbid she might actually be caught still drawing breath and in a hospital gown. “When poor Peter told me about what happened last night, I knew to expect you. I thought we could go to lunch. Make the most out of the visit. I assumed you’d show up promptly at one, so I refrained from breaking my fast. The nurses have been fussing over me, trying to make me eat for the past hour and a half, but I told them no. I had to wait. Aren’t they just darling girls, Pax? So thoughtful. So caring. Impossibly friendly.”
To her, maybe. She must be paying the hospital handsomely to put her up like this. I’m just an inked-up piece of shit with a perma-scowl who looks like he’s spoiling for a fight. Meredith’s impossibly friendly girls will no doubt be suspicious and scathing when they interact withme.
“I was thinking we’d go to that one place. What’s it called? Harry’s?” she says, getting up and looking around the room for her purse. I try to remember the name of that woman who called me in Corsica and told me that my mother was dying. Far as I can tell, she was lying, because Meredith seems A-okay. A little thinner than usual, I guess. Her skin looks a little…papery? But other than that, she’s sharp as a fucking tack, well enough to wear four-inch heels, and her no-nonsense attitude is in perfect working order.
She finds her purse and loops the gold chain strap over her shoulder. Then she looks at me. “Well? Are we going to go or not? I’d hate to have to repeat myself, but I really am rather hungry, sweetheart.” She cups a devilishly cold hand to my cheek. “And while Harry’s is hardly a New York standard eatery, I assume they’ll still be busy at this time of day? I’d hate to inconvenience them by showing up right at the end of lunch service. I’m sure they’ll want to give the servers time to set up for dinner service.”
See, this is the trouble with Meredith. The trouble with being angry with her specifically. She does the shittiest, meanest, most careless things, and then acts entirely like herself—charming, sweet, engaging, and innocent—and you forget why you’re mad at her. I’m wise to her tricks, though. It took me years, but I finally figured out that the only way to deal with Meredith without feeling like you’ve been cheated out of some very justified emotions is to be direct as hell with her.
“We’re not gonna go and eat steaks, woman. You’redying.”
She straightens like she’s just been hit with a fifty-thousand-volt charge. Her pale blue eyes, as cold and distant as drifting icebergs, cut into my skin like scalpels. “I’m sorry. I fail to see the problem. Do restaurants in Mountain Lakes discriminate against patrons with terminal illnesses? Or can dying women not eatsteakin particular? Because if that’s the case, darling, I’ll just have the chicken.”
Of course she was going to act like this.Dying? No big deal. Don’t make a fuss, darling. The staff are watching.I want to shake her, so that she drops the bullshit and unleashes the river of emotion charging beneath her stoic façade. I want to see her sob at the unfairness of it all. I want to see her bargain and plead. I want her tofeelsomething. Only thing I’ll accomplish by shaking her is getting tossed out of the building again, though. There is no deep river of emotion crashing against the mile-high walls my mother has so expertly constructed. If I dug down deep enough, I might discover a weak, pathetic trickle of emotion, but nothing more. Meredith did a bang-up job of damming her feelings away back in the late eighties. To elicit more than faint disapproval from my mother, a person would need a degree in psychology, a degree in archeology, and the proper excavation equipment to dig downthatdeep.
“All right. Fine. Have it your way. Let’s go to fucking Harry’s. Eat the steak. Eat whatever you fucking feel like. I don’t even care.”
She steps closer, chucking me under the chin like I’m five years old. “Y’know. I might even have a glass of wine, I think.”
Any normal parent might have chided me for the profanity, but not Meredith. She’s never once curbed my language. I think it’s because she never reallyhearswhat I’m saying; she’s far too busy thinking about what she’s going to say next.
Harry’s is despicably busy, even though it’s late in the afternoon. Meredith pecks at a berry salad like a bird while slamming back three glasses of red in quick succession. I’m impressed by her stamina given her prognosis. I order the most expensive steak on the menu and order a hundred dollars’ worth of sides, and then I do not touch a single morsel of the food. Couldn’t eat it if I tried. The slab of meat (extra bloody, I ordered it blue), and the broccoli, potato gratin, mac and cheese, and the three different side salads are a pagan offering to the witch sitting on the other side of the altar-like table. One I hope that will satisfy her before she feels the need to ask me if I’ve developed an eating disorder on my European shoots. I’m eighteen, for fuck’s sake. I’m a runner. I’m packed muscle from head-to-toe. I’m about as far as a person can get from wasting away from bulimia, but Meredith read an article inHolistic Healing for Empaths Magazine, and she’s been obsessed with the idea that I have a negative relationship with food ever since.
We sit in silence. I mark the passing minutes by the steady lowering of the wine level in Meredith’s glass. When she flags down the waiter, pointing to her glass, asking for yet another, I snap. I give the waiter a foul look that perfectly communicates what will happen if he dares bring another bottle of wine over to top off this mad woman’s glass.
“Oh, really, Pax. Do you have to be such a brute? I’m an adult. I can make my own decisions.”
I thought she looked fine back in the hospital but out in the wild, without the warm, expert lighting she probably curated back in her private room, the cracks are beginning to show. She looks tired. Her skin is sallow grey, and the usually sharp edge to her gaze is nowhere to be found. She’s a close approximation to the powerhouse woman I grew up with, beautiful, but obviously weak in a way that’s tough to pinpoint.
“We’re going back to the hospital,” I snap. “Now.”
She throws down her napkin on the table, looking away in disgust, and the hollows of her cheeks make her look like a chic, well-dressed skeleton. “I never thought I’d see the day when my own son turned against me,” she mutters.
“Oh,please. Stop being so dramatic. You’re sick. Drinking the bar dry isn’t going to make you feel any better.”
“And how would you know? Have you had Leukemia before? Are you speaking from your vast well of knowledge on the subject?” Her eyes glitter with a cold, detached anger. “I’m sure you didn’t know a single thing about Leukemia before that stupid woman broke patient confidentiality.”
“You’re right. I didn’t. Ishouldhave, though, shouldn’t I? Because you should have told me what thefuckwas going on.” The words rip out of me like bullets. They have little effect on Meredith.
“Don’t be so silly. What would have been the point? You know,Ihad to watchmymother die. Slowly. Painfully. It was awful. I would never want to wish that kind of pain on anyone.” She lifts her empty glass to her lips and tips it back like she’ll be able to manifest more wine by sheer force of will alone. Sadly, her plan doesn’t work out.
“Try the water,” I tell her. “Y’know.What Would Jesus Do.According to your book, he’d wiggle his fingers over his sparkling Perrier and turn it into a nice Shiraz.” I know I’m picking the wrong fight here, but I can’t stop myself. I want to irritate the shit out of her. I want to fuck with her. If I can make her a fraction as angry as me, then I might be able to breathe again. Maybe.
Just as I knew it would, the comment elicits a strong and immediate reaction. She slams the glass down with a thud. “It’s notmybook. The Bible belongs to every human being who has ever or will ever live. Jesus turned water into wine as a demonstration that he could perform miracles—”
“I seem to recall that he did it because he was at a wedding and they’d run out of booze.” I tear apart a bread roll, ripping it into pieces, then I shove one of the mangled quarters into my mouth. I chew with my mouth open, staring her down.
Meredith fumes. “I shouldn’t even be surprised by this kind of behavior, coming from you. But you know how I feel when you disrespect our Lord and Savior. It upsets me—”
“Better get you back to your room before you blow out an aorta, then.” I jerk my head at our waiter as he passes by our table. I must have terrified the shit out of him with my dark look, because he already has our check printed and ready to go in a billfold in the front of his apron. He drops it gingerly at the table, grimace-smiling and thanking us for being such wonderful guests while hastily backing away like he’s afraid of losing a hand. I’ve made more than one scene at Harry’s in the past.
Dumping a wad of cash into the billfold, I laugh menacingly when Meredith rolls her eyes, snapping her AMEX back into her Louis Vuitton wallet. She’d only shoo me away if I tried to help walk her out of the restaurant, so I don’t even bother offering. I grab my backpack from the back of the seat next to me and head outside, taking the opportunity to spark up while she goes through the rounds of saying goodbye to the bartenders and the wait staff, the hostess and a whole slew of other people who are likely glad to see the back of her.
I’m down to the filter when Meredith emerges from the restaurant, dabbing delicately at the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin. Wafting her hand in front of her face, she opens her mouth, about to launch into an anti-smoking diatribe, but I cut her off. “Don’t. Just fuckingdon’t.”
We sit in silence in the car, and when we reach the hospital, we ride the elevator up to the second floor in silence, too. Meredith stops to chat with every single doctor and nurse we come across, and the fuckers fawn over her like she’s some kind of A-list celebrity. The coppery tang of blood coats my mouth as I chew on the inside of my cheek, bouncing on the balls of my feet, waiting for the gauche, never-ending parade to be over.
