What She Left Us

Copyright ©Stephanie Elliot 2013

Jenna
hooked her fingers through the crocheted blanket that had been at the bottom of
her mother’s bed for as long as she could remember. As she always did when she
was nervous, worried, preoccupied or consumed, she rubbed her index finger and
thumb together in between the holes of the blanket until the pads of her
fingers went numb. Jenna remembered holding onto the blanket the year Courtney
was born, she remembered when Courtney was a baby and had thrown up on the
handmade blanket. There had been rainy summer mornings when she and Courtney
had used the blanket to make forts in the living room, while
Sesame Street
played on the TV and her mother made cinnamon pancakes on the stove. This very
blanket had kept them warm on cool fall evenings while she and Court drank
apple cider on the backyard deck.

She
wondered why Courtney hadn’t taken the blanket back with her to college. Maybe it
held too many memories? Jenna moved her fingers along the silk ivory edge of
the blanket, smoothing it across her cheek, wondering what memories it had held
for her mother.

Her
mom. The reason she was here. She knew she had to do this. It had been five
months already. Enough time. Or maybe not, but it had to be done, and there was
no one else to do it. The downstairs was practically emptied out, cleaned up of
all the memories, swept away of framed photos and mementoes. Jenna had taken a
few pieces of furniture she wanted for her tiny apartment, but the rest would go
to Goodwill.

Jenna
glanced around her mom's room and then sneezed. The room was dusty and stale,
not like old-lady-mothball stale, but nothing like her mother. More like a
hotel room that hadn't been aired out in a long while, a room that needed fresh
air and clean linens. Jenna wanted to remember what her mom smelled like. She
knew if she opened the closet she’d get a whiff of her perfume,
Beautiful,
that still clung from her clothes, and then it’d be all over, she’d lose it for
sure, and she had a whole lot of work ahead of her. The dressers needed to be
emptied, stacks of papers in the closet had to be sorted through, and
eventually, there was a whole basement that had to be cleaned out. Jenna needed
to go through boxes upon boxes of items. She was in no frame of mind to unearth
the history of her family.

She
grabbed her cell phone and hit speed dial. After two rings, Courtney picked up.

“Hello?”

“Did
I wake you?” Jenna asked.

“It’s
ten o’clock in the morning, what do you think?”

Jenna
really didn’t know how to answer, because after all, it
was
ten o’clock
in the morning so she waited for her sister to reply.

“Of
course you woke me up! It’s Saturday!”

“Sorry,”
And then Jenna asked, “Can you talk?”

 “Just
give me a sec.”

After
a minute of rustling from Courtney’s end, she heard a door slam, and then she
was back on. “What’s going on?”

“I’m
at Mom’s.”

“Yeah?”

“Well,
it’s just, kind of hard being here alone. I keep thinking about when we were
kids, and about times when we were all here together… ”

“Look
Jen, I get it, I really do, but I told you I couldn’t be there. I’ve got a
paper due, and… ”

“No
it’s fine, I guess I just needed to talk to someone.”

“Wait,
why isn’t Darren there?”

“He’s
busy today.”

“Well,
yeah, me too. I told you I had a soc paper due.”

“Sorry
I bothered you.”

“It’s
all right. I’ll call you next week, okay?” Courtney said, “After I get my paper
done.”

“Sure.”

“And
don’t worry about it, you’ll get through it. It’s all just stuff anyway. It’s
not Mom. Think of it as just junk. Imagine all the crap isn’t hers.”

But
it is. It’s all hers.

“Maybe.”

“It’ll
be all right,” Courtney said softly into the phone.

“Okay,
then. How’s school?”

“It’s
fine, really busy. Look, I’ve got to go.”

Jenna
hung up the phone and felt the onslaught of tears coming. She didn’t know how
she was going to get through the task that was ahead of her, without Darren,
without Courtney. And the fact that Courtney was so disengaged about the whole
process infuriated her. After all, it was her mother too. Just because Jenna
was the oldest why did it mean she had to deal with all the bullshit.

Despite
it all, Jenna missed Courtney, and her pissy attitude. Jenna didn’t understand
why Courtney was being that way. So, so not like Courtney. She missed Darren
too. And most of all, she missed her mother.

Jenna
sat on the bed and poked her fingers through the blanket over and over again,
and let the tears come.

Courtney
hung up with her sister and slumped against her door. It was still quiet in the
dorm hall, because, after all, it was only ten a.m. on a Saturday. She was
thankful for this as she began to cry silent tears.

She
hadn’t wanted to come back this year, but she’d committed to being an RA, which
covered her room and board. She didn’t want to be away from her sister, didn’t think
the two of them could handle being on their own. She felt bad about not being
there to help Jenna with the task of cleaning out their childhood home. Why
hadn’t she helped her over the summer? She, Jenna and Darren could have gotten
through the whole project in a couple of weekends, and probably pretty easily
with a case or two of beer to numb whatever feelings might come their way
during the process. She felt horrible that Jenna was there doing it all on her
own. And where the hell was Darren? Why wasn’t he there to help her sister?

And
what was worse was that she knew her mother’s belongings weren’t junk. She
didn’t know why she said that to Jenna. She wanted to be there. But she felt
like she might lose it, fall apart at the memories. She didn’t want to look at
all the memories of her mom and remember that this was the outfit she had worn
to Courtney’s high school graduation, or here was the pair of yellow high heels
she and Jenna used to wear during dress-up. Courtney didn’t want to rehash all
the memories that she had tucked inside. She didn’t want them spilling out into
tears. She wanted those emotions kept in, didn’t want to share them with
anyone. They were too painful, too private.

Courtney
hoped that Jenna would understand, that she would forgive her for not helping.
Besides, Courtney couldn’t worry about it now. She heard bickering outside of
her room and went to see what was going on. There were two hungover freshmen
coming out of a room down the hall wearing nothing but their bras and boxer
shorts. She quickly wiped her tears from her face and addressed them.

“Bren!
Angie! Get back into your rooms and put on some clothes!”

She
didn’t know how she was going to make it through a year as a Resident
Assistant. How was she going to pretend to be a mother to forty-eight college students,
when she herself didn’t even have her own mom anymore?

“Can’t
take your call. Leave a message.”

Jenna
clicked her cell phone to off. Hearing Darren’s voice caused that reaction she was
all too familiar with – the one where it felt like she might sneeze, where her
nose would begin to tickle but then tears came instead. She pinched her
nostrils closed tight to stop the onslaught. She was so tired of crying. That’s
all she’d been doing for so long. She needed a change. She needed to get away –
find a place where tears didn’t happen every single day. She cried when she was
at her mom's house. She cried when she was at her apartment. When she thought
about how much she missed her mom, she cried. Thinking of Darren made her cry
all of the time. Not thinking of Darren made her cry all of the time.

Life
made her cry practically all of the time.

The
first time she saw Darren, she wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. She was, in
fact, searching for someone to save her mother’s life in those immediate
seconds. He was the EMT who had responded to her 9-1-1 call the night her
mother had what she had thought was a heart attack. Darren and two other EMTs
rushed into her mother’s home and took over the situation, assessed her mother,
checked her vitals, gave her oxygen, and determined she wasn’t having a heart
attack at that moment. Then, when they decided it was safe and her mother would
not have to be admitted to Central Medical, the other two EMTs left in their vehicle.

By
then, Jenna had calmed down enough to fill out paperwork, and she realized how
handsome and attentive Darren was. She noticed his cool, kind gray eyes and the
height of him, and could tell through his blue uniform shirt that he was very
muscular. She answered his questions about her mother’s health, and her recent
complaints and pains. They spent two hours drinking Diet Coke and talking in
the cozy kitchen while her mother slept peacefully in her bedroom. Jenna told
him about how she planned on getting her master's in environmental studies. He
told her that wanted to become an air medic and he had recently applied for a
rigorous training program that only a few are accepted into. They talked about
mutual friends and places they had been, places they wanted to go, and family,
and Jenna thanked him so much for being the one to come help her mother.

She
walked him to the ambulance late that night after Darren insisted on checking
on her mother one last time before leaving. When he asked her to meet him at
The Haven the next night to see one of the local area bands, she agreed.

That
had been two years ago.

Two
years and an engagement ago.

And
now, he wasn’t answering her calls.

Sudden
didn’t cover it. One minute she was there. The next, not. There was no
immediate explanation except that her heart had stopped. That’s all they could
give Jenna. Jenna and Darren had been knocking and knocking and finally, when
her mother didn’t answer, she let herself in with her key. The three of them
were planning on going to dinner.

In
all her life, Jenna had imagined the worst possible scenarios she’d ever
encounter, but never did she expect to see what she saw when she and Darren entered
her mom’s house that evening.

A
scream escaped Jenna’s lips and she backed out of the door into the light of
outside, into life, to the world of living and breathing. Darren had run to her
mother's lifeless body to see what he could do. He said she was already gone.

Afterwards,
she desperately wished she would have gone to the floor and lay by her mom,
even though she was already dead. She wished she had lain by her side, touched
her hair, whispered in her ear that she loved her and she was with her. She
wished she hadn’t run outside and cried, that she hadn’t been scared of the body
on the floor. That was what she regretted most – that she didn't spend time
there on the floor with her mom, stroking her hair, kissing her face, telling
her that she loved her. And she regretted that she didn't tell her mom that she
would take care of Courtney.

Jenna
and Darren had to tell Courtney. It was late April and Courtney was finishing
up freshman year at NPU. They drove up together and when Courtney saw them when
she opened up her door to her dorm, she knew. She knew.

The
looks on their faces said it all.

“No.”

Jenna
and Darren reached out for Courtney and she fell into them.

Now,
five months later, the autopsy report was in. Initial findings indicated her
heart had given up, a classic heart attack, but why? There had to be something
more. Her mom had been relatively healthy. Didn’t smoke, only drank the
occasional glass of wine, went for daily walks, wasn’t overweight.

 Jenna
had been alone in her apartment when the letter came. Because that’s what she
was now.