Landslide (27 page)

All her legitimate fears and worry about my safety were completely overshadowed by the unthinkable idea that I wouldn’t remember something so important to her as a promise to not willingly risk my life like that and leave her, because I’m the only one she has left, and after Holden and all she and I have been through together, she can’t handle the day to day stress of worrying if I’m alive or dead etc., ad nauseam.

It was all about her, like I wanted it to be, and I just calmly toweled off and continued to play her like a fiddle until I fanned the flames high enough for her to get so scared and hurt, she was the one who cut ties. Exactly like I knew she would. It was a brilliant stroke of sadistic genius though, if I do say so myself, punctuating my final words to her the way I did. She’d gotten
really
teary again and said, “I’m serious, Cole. If you do this, this is goodbye forever. I don’t even want a letter. I just can’t do it.” My response was, “Well, if that’s honestly what you want, then I guess there’s really nothing left for me to say. Except, you know, g’bye, hun.”

She hung up on me after that. Of course, I broke the bathroom mirror with my fist and it took upwards of fifteen minutes to get all the shards out of my bloody knuckles afterwards, and I had essentially torn myself apart right along with razing her to the ground, but still. I won. The play ended the way I designed it to because I’d controlled every moment of it.

Behold, the puppet master.
 

Why, thank you. Should I bow?

Nah. You’re good.
 

I have no doubt that she didn’t really mean most of what she said, but as far as I’m concerned, she still told me she never wants to hear from me again and that means I’m off the hook. I’m just giving her what she said she wants, like I always have. I’m making it easy for myself to do this time too.

Although I lied about already signing up, I got back in my car when she was as destroyed and broken as the mirror and I drove back to Vegas, turning my lie into truth without even stopping at home to change the clothes I’d been wearing for almost thirty-six hours. The night before I leave for basic training though finds me having myself a little bonfire. And not a symbolic burning either, like the previous one was. This one is real and hot enough to make me sweat on a cold, November night that threatens improperly cared for plants with frostbite before morning, in addition to being able to inflict third degree burns if I were to reach out and touch it.

See, I’m not a complete moron, and I’m not unfeeling. Decimating the girl I’ve loved my whole life came naturally, maybe, but it wasn’t easy and a very small part of me wanted to make allowances for what she did because it was unintentional—well, leveling me the way I did her was anyway. And that’s where the difference is. She made a choice, drunk or not, and then wanted me to be sympathetic and sympathy is just honestly not something I can drum up this time. I’m not super human. I’m flat-out tired and I’m done living in the subtext. I’m also fed up with putting myself through the hellish turmoil involved in cleaning up after Holden just so that I can maybe have a chance at an honest to God relationship with the girl I love sometime in the vague future.

However, for the
barest
, most fleeting of moments, I was tempted to try to find her—just to see her one last time—and had I done that, I know without a doubt that I wouldn’t have ever left. So instead, I wrapped the pain and anger around me like a cape, hugging it tight so that I could have the strength to make my getaway clean and not look back.

And because of that one moment of temptation, I know I have to rid myself of Erica once and for all. It’s become a matter of survival of the fittest now and burning things like her letter, pictures, and even my cell phone that has been shut off since the moment I heard the click, but still holds her number and address in it…permanently jettisoning all these things into a cleansing fire will help cure me of what I’ve come to think of almost as a disease. It’ll aid me in staying healthy and sound by preventing me from taking her and my dreams of what could’ve been with me. Basically, burning the past and everything I will never have is my way of inducting the new age of living only for myself, and it will dawn with a bugle playing Reveille.

On a long-suffering sigh I look to the heavens and its landscape of twinkling stars. There’s only one thing left to toast and my trembling hand seems to be having a tremendously hard time letting go of Erica with daisies in her hair. If I do this, I won’t have a single thing left except what I buried in the sand hundreds of miles away, and I have no intention of
ever
going back there to dig it up. She’ll be gone. For good.

Come on, buddy, you can do it. You don’t even have to watch it go up in flames. She’ll never be yours now and you know it. Not anymore anyway. So, just close your eyes and let go…

25

“Try”

—Erica—

“Well, here she is! How was your Thanksgiving dinner, Hazel?”
 

“Hazel? Why, my eyes are blue, aren’t they?”

“Yes, Grandma, your eyes are blue, but your
name
is Hazel, remember?”

Dottie, the nurse on duty, shakes her head and gives me a compassionate smile. Looking into the milky white opacity of my grandma’s cataract eyes makes it hard to keep the tears from trickling out of mine again, though.
 

I was just about to end my second year of college when my grandma started getting confused and forgetting things. At first it was just little stuff, like, she’d put the sugar jar in the refrigerator instead of the cupboard where it’s been kept for my entire life, or she’d go to the store and leave what she bought in the car. However, it progressed quickly. She began forgetting the answers to things she’d just asked, like where she’d set her glasses down only to be told she had them on already, and not five minutes later, she’d ask again.

Not even midway through my junior year though, I left the few friends I’d made and my new boyfriend of two weeks to move back home when I got a call from one of our neighbors explaining that my grandma had gone for a walk at eleven at night in her bathrobe and set off their home security alarm when she tried going into their house instead of her own. That was a little over five years ago. At least her Alzheimer’s hasn’t made her lash out or prone to random fits of anger like I know it can sometimes.

Although for her safety and mine, I had to put her in a nursing home a year and a half ago. It was absolutely, truly, the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever been through; she told me she understood and that it was best for both of us, but the morning I moved her in, she’d completely forgotten everything and didn’t understand why some of her things were in a foreign room. I had to watch her beautiful, confused face fall with understanding and tears for the second time as I relived for her the acrid incident that prompted me to remove her from her home…that she’d gotten up in the middle of the night and decided to start cooking fried chicken, except there was no chicken and she forgot what she was doing and went back to bed, so the Crisco in the frying pan caught fire. As did our house.

The entire house didn’t burn to the ground, but the smoke detectors upstairs didn’t go off until the whole kitchen was ablaze and by the time I heard them and got her and myself outside to safety, the side of the house the kitchen was on was being devoured by angry, unrelenting flames. My bedroom was directly above the kitchen. For a very short time afterwards, I had very mixed, victimized feelings about it and more than once or twice, I caught myself wishing that I’d never heard the high-pitched screeching warning me of imminent danger. My life just seemed like such a complete waste of time in the first place, and then this happens… I lost just about everything that ever meant anything to me because what wasn’t destroyed in the fire itself was a victim of water damage from the fire hoses. I felt like a failure and I didn’t want to even try to not be anymore.
 

A single afternoon at a park convinced me to keep going. Something blowing in the spring breeze that day was whispering to me that I wasn’t done; that my life would have a purpose and I hadn’t even scratched the surface of fulfilling that purpose. It told me that win or lose, I had to pick myself up and keep trying.
 

Then I met Greg, and starting over didn’t seem like such a bad idea. He was at the nursing home I’d just moved my grandma into a few towns over from where I grew up, and he was helping his sister get their father settled temporarily, as their father had had a stroke and she just needed some time to make her house safe for him to live in with her and her family full-time. Greg and I met in the rec. room one afternoon when I was waiting for my grandma’s sponge bath to be finished up, and he was doing a lousy job of supervising his nephews while they annoyed old people by banging on the piano keys and rolling the checkers all over the walls and floors like race cars. Actually, no one could keep those hellions in line and I’m sure he’d realized it long before that day and had just given up trying by then.

In any event, our first date was him taking me for a pudding cup in the cafeteria. He was about ten years older than me and although it really does sound like a lot, he made me laugh and when I was laughing, the years between us didn’t bother me. What did is that he was ready a lot faster than I was to take the next big step in his life. Marriage and kids. We’d been seeing each other for hardly more than five months when we decided to go our separate ways.

Very non-theatrical is the best way to describe his proposal and our subsequent break-up. It wasn’t anything like the movies—I mean, not even a little bit. There was no getting down on bended knee or even a teeny popping sound with the question; it was a discussion about what we each want out of life. He wanted to get married and have children. I didn’t. Plain and simple.

He was a nice man, we had things in common, I enjoyed his company, and he treated me well. He had a good, steady job and could provide a more than decent life for me, the sex wasn’t the best, but it certainly wasn’t the worst. He said he loved me and I believed him; however, family life just isn’t what I want for myself anymore. I wasn’t even twenty-four yet, I was still trying to finish nursing school, and I had become used to doing things on my own and, for the most part, being alone—
not
being accountable to anyone for anything. Except my grandma, but that’s a whole different kind of accountability and she’s the one person who’s never left me so, I haven’t left her.

Until now that is.

In the beginning my grandma would get me confused with her little sister who drowned when she was only six, but she hasn’t recognized me or my middle name’s namesake in close to seven months now. As I saw two days ago and again today though, she’s beginning to not remember her own name either. It makes it easier to leave in some ways and in others, it’s just that much harder.

During the time my grandma has been in the home, I’ve been here at least once a day whether it was morning, noon, or night, and I’ve sat by her side, read to her, painted her nails, and brushed her hair out for her and pinned it up how she liked wearing it when she used to be able to do it herself, and I’ve become somewhat close to a lot of the nursing staff over the months too, although Dottie is my favorite. She’s a rather buxom black woman with a servant’s heart who volunteers in the nursery at her church and helps some other members of the congregation run a soup kitchen for the homeless and those in need. She’s in her early fifties, widowed with no children, and even though she’s from right here in Riverside County, her words come out with a southern accent sometimes. Dottie is the person who started her shift one day last month by slapping the job section of the newspaper down in front of me and my bowl of lime Jell-O, and thus proceeded to convince me that it’s time for me to start living my life someplace where people don’t come when theirs are almost over.

I remember teasing her when she told me I needed to “find a good man, settle down, and have
loooots
of babies.” She’d been reading
Gone With the Wind
to Mrs. Truax again. I reminded her of that story not being the happiest, what with a war going on, a kid breaking her neck and a pony being shot because of it, not to mention the fire that burned down Atlanta and Scarlett’s home. She’d shooshed me and said, “Oh, you know I only read the good parts. Can’t stand me all the ugliness and drama in most stories nohow.” From that day on, she brought the newspaper with her to work and when I inevitably came to sit with my grandma, she would already have at least two or three potential jobs for me to look into. I didn’t have the heart to tell her finding a job is easier done online now, but wouldn’t you know it, the one I ended up applying for and have all but in the bag now came from a lead she found.

If I get it, I’ll be a labor and delivery nurse in a smallish mountain community hospital, and if I don’t get that position, the hospital has two less desirable positions open on the internal medicine floor that I would probably have no problem getting either of,
and
, the high school up there needs a new nurse too. I’ve already been informally offered that one, but everything is pending what happens with interviews and with the hospital positions. The salary for each of the four jobs is just enough for me to support myself if I'm careful. It’ll mean I can live a life without continuously needing to dip into my grandma’s funds, even though it’s only a matter of time before what’s hers becomes mine. I just don’t feel right about not supporting myself 100% so, I want a job that will enable me to do that. It’s the perfect win-win scenario if you don’t take into account that it’s roughly an hour and a half away. That is, if the traffic isn’t bad getting up or down the mountain or if it isn’t snowing or something. So, suffice it to say, none of the jobs are ones I can commute to and the main reason for why I’m moving the day after Thanksgiving.

The nursing home serves two Thanksgivings…one actually on Thanksgiving, and one the day after for family members who want to spend the holiday at home
and
with their loved one who isn’t able to care for themselves any longer. This of course means I’ve downed far too much stuffing and pumpkin pie in the last two days, but that’s okay. I’m looking at the weight I’m sure I’ve put on as insulation for keeping warm during the cold, winter months and the snow they’ll bring, neither of which are anything close to what I’m used to living in.