Into the Tomorrows (Bleeding Hearts Book 1) (4 page)

“
H
e doesn’t love you
.”

She sat in the worn leather chair, reeking of cigarettes and dollar store perfume. Her hair was lifeless and limp, a sharp contrast to how she’d looked when I’d last seen her a year earlier.

I chose to ignore what she said and sat on the plaid sofa across from her. My grandfather was taking his afternoon nap, which was good because I’d need to wipe down his chair and then air out the house. Too bad I wouldn’t be able to remove her as easily as I would her stench.

“What’s wrong, Mom? Joey leave you?” My words were placid, my posture unaffected as I lounged on the couch, angling my body away from hers. “Is that why you’re here?”

She sniffed and I imagined a faint dusting of powder around her nostrils, an image I’d seen in real life too many times to count. “Joey is a nobody,” she said, as if she was trying to convince us both of that fact. “Do you know he hasn’t paid my rent for the last two months?”

She wasn’t even easing it into the conversation this time—her need for money was quick and angled in a way so that I’d feel pity for her.

But twenty-two years of her excuses, her mistakes, had sewn themselves to my bones, hardening my spine and my resolve when I said, “You’re not bumming money from Grandpa again.”

She sneered at me, a curl of her smeared purple lips. The cracks in her face were more pronounced when she did that, from her lips and the lines around her eyes. Life had been hard on my mom—but my mom had been hard on life, too. “You can’t tell him what to do with his money. I’ve got every right to it, more than you.”

“I never said I had any right to it. I pay for rent here,” I said, gesturing my hand to the tiny trailer.

She rolled her eyes; her lashes a hundred spider legs, lumped together and scraping her blue eyeshadow. “I just need my money and then I’m out of your way, dear daughter.” Her tone was layered in acid, a product of years of pushing everyone away and then blaming it on them when they stopped resisting.

“Grandpa leaves tomorrow. He doesn’t have time to entertain you.” I glanced at the clock that ticked above her head, mentally calculating how long we had until he woke up.

“I know he sold the house—don’t bullshit me. He’s got money.”

“That he needs to support himself in the assisted living home.” I wouldn’t let her leave with a lick of grandpa’s money. He’d give in, he always did for his wayward only child. “They’re going to bulldoze this place and make way for something else on his land.”

Finally, I saw a flicker of something in her eyes. They darted around the room, no doubt taking in the mementos along the walls. Did she feel anything beneath her faded leather jacket, beneath the name tattooed on her chest, her boyfriend before Joey’s name in proud black ink?

I often wondered if her heart was made of something else, if it skipped a beat here or there, and in those missing beats were the affections that she should have held for her only child and only living parent.

But as usual, I didn’t give into the thought for too long. It was useless, with her. She’d never change.

“Did you hear what I said?” she asked.

I stood up and moved away, wanting away from the cloud of cheap perfume. “I probably did,” I said noncommittally as I unloaded the dishwasher and placed the cups in the boxes sitting on the counter. The house was a mess of boxes and trash bags. Most of what would go with my grandfather when he was moved to the home was already there, apart from the chair my mother was currently offending with her stench.

“I said he doesn’t love you.”

My hands paused, holding a baby blue teacup that had been my grandmother’s. I asked, mostly to make her repeat herself, “Who doesn’t love me?” But I already knew the answer.

“That boyfriend of yours. Colin. The skinny dipshit with the curly black hair.”

My fingers tightened on the delicate handle of the teacup for a moment before I relaxed them, not dignifying my mother’s ranting with even a look in her direction. “You’ve been around him less than a handful of times, Mom.”

It might have been true, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of being right.

“You’re just like me,” she continued, her voice taking on a darkness I knew to be her introspective voice. “Men can’t love you for long, they’ll only leave you.” She stood up, walked into the kitchen and picked up the blue teacup out of the box on the counter. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as I kept loading the box.

“I’m not like you.” I said it quietly, but loud enough for her to hear. Internally, I screamed it.

“You are. You’re just like me.” She leaned over, twirling the tea cup with her hands. I watched her tremble, waited for her to drop it.

“That was Gram’s cup,” I said. No one drank from it. It sat in the cupboards, only being washed to clean the dust.

She held it up to her face and squinted. “Well, no need for relics.”

I knew she was about to drop it, just because she wanted to, and I placed my hand on the cup, stopping her. There was a panic in my voice thinking of it—of my grandpa’s heartache not having that blue cup in the cupboard beside his white one every morning in the assisted living facility. “Don’t,” I said, a tremble in my voice giving away my vulnerability.

My mother was a leech for vulnerability. When she found it, she latched on—sucked it dry. And I knew, from the way her eyebrows raised as she gave me a speculative gaze, that she had found my weakness and would exploit it.

“Just give me five hundred.”

I had little more than that in my bank account as it was. “No.”

“He doesn’t love you,” she repeated, waiting to see if her words would hit their mark. But I stayed emotionless and idly wondered what that made me. I was more upset about her breaking a teacup than her stating what was very likely the truth—that Colin didn’t love me.

“Why do you care?”

“Why don’t you?”

I sucked in a breath through my nose and parted my lips for it to leave, wishing it would carry away the anger building up inside of me.

“You’re weak.” She was trying to wound me, but she wasn’t succeeding. The truth didn’t hurt—her complete lack of care for her own mother did. She wrenched the cup away from my hands.

Her eyes glittered under the yellow kitchen light. “Four hundred.”

I reached for the cup and she held it up, poking me painfully in the chest with one curved fingernail.

“You’re just like me—you just don’t see it. Better not to let yourself feel for him, Trista.” Her eyes still glittered and her lips curved, so proud she was, for helping harden her daughter to love. “Because he’s going to leave you. They always do.” Her finger moved down and poked me in the stomach. “Just make sure he doesn’t knock you up, like your daddy did to me. Because then you’re only continuing the curse. I named you for it, Trista. Sorrow. It’s your destiny.”

“Give me the cup,” I said, not letting her words lash at me.

“Three hundred and fifty.” She held it up higher in her skeletal fingers. I knew it was only a matter of seconds before she accidentally dropped it, forcing her to forfeit the money and leaving me as the one to explain why my grandfather would never be able to touch her cup again.

“Three fifty,” I agreed, pushing my hand toward her for the cup.

“Write me a check.”

“I have cash,” I said, stalking across the room and into my bedroom. On the bed was my knapsack, and inside was all the cash I had left—cash I was going to use to go to Colorado, to see the boyfriend who probably didn’t love me like he should.

I counted out the bills, smoothing the crumpled twenties, and carried them to the living room.

“Here,” I said, thrusting them at her and yanking the cup from her grasp. She counted the money quickly, licking her finger as she thumbed through the bills individually.

I held the cup, smoothing my thumb over the lip and along the curve of the handle, grateful that my grandfather wasn’t losing it. It was the most expensive cup I’d ever purchased, but also the most important.

When I looked up, my mom was already walking out the door. The squeak of the screen was loud enough to wake my grandfather and the ensuing slam against its metal frame ensured that no one would still be asleep.

I wrapped the teacup in a towel and placed it in the box, all the more worried that since I’d just gotten it back from her hands that it would disappear.

After loading the dishes, I walked to my wood-paneled bedroom and finished the packing I’d started before my mother had arrived.

T
hree years
and fifteen days had passed since Ellie had died. It felt like an eternity.

I placed the sole framed photo I owned into a box and looked at the picture of Ellie and me mid-laugh. My fingers traced her face over the glass and I allowed myself that moment to remember who she was. The thought was better than the one I plagued myself with: who she could have been.

I placed her daisy headband on top of the frame and then covered both with packing paper.

The box was the size of a microwave, but it held just about all my personal possessions apart from my clothing. A couple yearbooks, some movie and concert tickets, her lotion and the frame and headband. The fact that all I had of her was this box made me angry.

The five stages of grief had been just three, over and over. Rewind, play, rewind, play, rewind, play.

Three years later and I was still trying to pretend it hadn’t happened. Three years and I was still so angry, with myself, with Colin. I’d skipped bargaining altogether. There was nothing of me to offer. So now I lived in a perpetual depression, accented only when the wheel of grief rolled around to denial and anger again.

A therapist had told me acceptance would come someday, but I didn’t want to accept that this was my reality, even three years later.

I lived with the ache like it was another limb, because I lost so much of myself when Ellie died that the only thing I had left in its place was the constant aching.

Colin had told me more than once that I was slipping away. He didn’t say what he meant, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out he meant many things: slipping from him, slipping from me.

Three years later, I was still with Colin, but the word
with
was merely a four-letter word, because I wasn’t with him, not physically or mentally. Every day, I was
with
my grief.

About a year after Ellie died, I’d begun writing little poems here and there, nothing noteworthy or even profound. The college counselor I’d seen when I’d requested to withdraw from my classes the following year had encouraged me to express myself, instead of letting everything I was feeling die inside of me.

It wasn’t Dickinson, but it was a small relief for me.

After Ellie had died, I’d failed my finals—that’s what happens when you don’t show up for them. My mother kicked me out and I’d moved in with my grandfather. And I’d turned off everything that reminded me of what had happened. The news, social media, all flooded with the death of a Wyoming student at a party near a Colorado campus had caused quite the sensation, including special segments on the dangers of drugs and underage drinking.

Ellie’s death was used to teach lessons, as if her earthly purpose was reduced to a photo of her with “Student dies from drug abuse.” High school acquaintances lamented her death, changing their social media photos to her face for a week or two before reverting back to their usual: photos of themselves with a giant bottle of vodka, or with a bunch of random people they met at a party. Her death hadn’t meant anything to them, not really, but meanwhile I was mourning the loss of the first person who’d made a choice to be in my life. The one person who had chosen me.

But her death didn’t teach me a single fucking lesson—except that I didn’t know who I was without the
Ellie and
in front of my name.

And now I was packing up my possessions and loading up my car to hit the road.

“Come to Colorado,” Colin had urged. “Let’s fix this, fix us. We can’t fix our relationship in opposite states.”

It had taken months before I’d agreed, and even then I’d acquiesced because my grandfather was selling his home and moving into an assisted living facility. Living with him for the last three years, I’d learned that dying was a slow, defeating business. My grandfather choosing to move into assisted living had been his first acknowledgement of what was coming, the first step to death.

My throat tightened at the thought. And as if his ears were burning, I heard him call my name.

As I left my room, I heard his cough before he said my name, indicating he was in the back of the trailer, sitting at his table in front of the bay window. His hair was slightly greasy, matted to his head. As I walked past his favorite plaid recliner and into the rooster-filled kitchen, I sensed that he was worse than he let on.

“You should’ve told me you were awake, Gramps.”

The hiss of his oxygen machine had been the sound of my home after Ellie had died. I’d moved in under the guise of helping him out as his health took a dive. I’m not sure that I helped him as much as he helped me, however, and now he would be alone again, his wheezing and whistling breaths his only company apart from nurses and other dying people.

“Gramps,” I said as I bent down to kiss his cheek. His cheek was paper-thin and wrinkled. I pulled a sunflower-cushioned chair from the table and sat beside him, pushing away the cigar box he’d placed at the table. “I hope you’re not thinking of smoking these,” I lightly scolded.

He shook his head and coughed into his fist. Then he pulled his button-up shirt away from his body and shook it. His air conditioning had broken a few days before the home inspection, a fact that the new buyer used to leverage a lower sale price. It made me angry just thinking of it.

“Of course not. I just like to smell them.”

I pointed fingers to my nostrils and then to him. “I’m surprised you can smell anything with those tubes up your nose.”

“It’s not a smell that can be dulled by oxygen,” he said, his voice holding the sound of a cold on the horizon. “Up for a cup of coffee?”

“I’ll get it,” I replied, patting his hand and standing. Once I started brewing a pot, I turned to my grandpa and leaned my lower back against the counter.

“Your mom was here.”

I stopped for a second, hands gripping the counter. “She was.”

“I knew she was coming. Just not when. I’m sorry you had to deal with her.”

“She told you she’d come around?”

He stared at the table before looking at me, his eyes saying everything I already suspected. This wasn’t the first time in the last few weeks she’d been around. It was just the first time that I’d been home when it had happened.

“Fucking typical,” I muttered with a roll of my eyes. I reached into the box of mugs and pulled out two, leaving the baby blue one aside.

“Your mother loves you, just not the way you want her to.”

This was not a speech I needed right now. “Gramps, we’re talking about you, not me.”

“I know she wasn’t who you needed her to be,” he began. I heard him sniff, taking a second before speaking again. “And I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you more. I should have been.”

I sighed, shaking my head. My grandpa felt guilt himself, I knew, for not being able to take care of me as his age caught up with him, when my mother would forget about my needs. He was always compensating for her mistakes, as if he’d cosigned the debt she owed to society for procreating. “You were there when I needed someone, gramps.”

I poured the coffee into the mugs and grabbed milk from the fridge. “I want you to borrow this,” he said from behind me. I stirred the sugar into mugs as I thought of what he could be offering me.

Turning around, I saw his hand resting on his cigar box. “No,” I said with a shake of my head. I handed him his cup before sitting in my seat. “I don’t smoke cigars.”

“It’s not cigars.” He pushed the box to me with one wrinkled, bony hand. He lifted the lid, washing my face with the scent of sweet tobacco.

Inside the box were three neat stacks of twenty dollar bills. I looked at my grandpa with a question in my eyes.

“There’s five thousand dollars in this box.”

“Gramps…” I looked from him to the box, felt that clawing sense of wanting to grab the box, but knowing I shouldn’t. The need rose in my throat when I kept my hands still. All I could think about was the fact that I’d just given over half of my money to my mom. “I can’t.”

“You can.” He waved a hand to his living room. “Notice anything?”

Sweeping my gaze over his living room, I took stock of what was missing: all the collector plates that he and grandma had picked up over the years. “Yeah, I noticed last week. I thought you packed them up for storage.”

“Most of them were junk—the ones I’d picked up, of course.” He laughed and then coughed. “But your grandma had an eye for treasure. I sold them a month ago. I need to downsize.”

He didn’t say anything further, because we both knew why he wanted to downsize: to leave as little for my mother and I to go through upon his death. A morbid thing, to be preparing so far—I hoped at least—in advance of your death.

“Save the money, Gramps, I’m okay.”

He shook his head. “Your car is in bad shape. And look at you,” he said with a nod of his head.

“Well gee, thanks.” I glanced down at myself. I’d lost a handful of pounds over the last few years, but nothing drastic.

“Your clothes have holes in them, your shirts have stains.”

“The holes are intentional,” I said with a laugh. “And the shirt’s stained from work. I don’t need five thousand for clothes.”

“You don’t work anymore.”

My cheeks colored at that. I’d recently quit my job at the pet store. I knew I was a shitty employee and the boss only kept me on because he felt badly for me. I had enough pity, I didn’t need it from my job too. “I don’t need clothes,” I finally said.

“Then don’t use it for clothes. Fix your car. Get ahead on some bills. Go back to school.”

I whipped my head up at those words. I couldn’t go back to school—no way—and he knew why. I hadn’t gone back since Ellie died, not ready to face a future we’d planned together, a future that died with her on that cold kitchen floor.

“Go on an adventure then. Do something to make yourself happy.”

“I am happy,” I told him, with an assurance I didn’t feel. “Money won’t change that.”

“Maybe not directly, but the money could buy experience that would make you happy. Life’s too God damn short to be living so sad.” His voice had taken on an edge of impatience and he coughed again into his hand. “Live for tomorrow.”

“Sometimes, there is no tomorrow.” I thought of Ellie, how I’d prayed to wake up from what I assumed was a nightmare. For the tomorrow to carry me from the nightmare.

“Which is why you should live for it. Nothing is promised to you, Trista. Nothing. The world won’t give you the happiness you desire; you must take it for yourself.” He coughed hard once again and I rubbed his back as his eyebrows drew together. When he’d calmed down, he looked at me with tired eyes. “You know, your mom used to study myths.”

I looked at him with a question in my eyes. “Random change of topic…”

He adjusted in his seat, leaning forward across the table to me, and pinned me with his cornflower irises. “You think she named you Trista because she was sad,” he explained. “But I don’t believe that.”

I thought of the story my mother had told me, of lying in the hospital, her body emptied of the love that had turned her bitter. “She’s told me herself. She named me Trista because she was sad.”

“Have you heard the legend of Tristan and Iseult?”

“I saw the movie with James Franco.”

He laughed. “Ah, so you’re familiar with one version of the legend. It is, at its core, a love triangle more complicated than most. Tristan fell in love with his uncle’s bride, and in most versions it’s caused by ingesting a potion that Iseult was directed to give to her husband, but gave to Tristan instead. And as their affair blossoms, they’re all hurting. Tristan, who loves and respects his uncle Mark, is irrevocably in love with his uncle’s wife; Mark, who loves Tristan like a son and loves Iseult as his wife; and Iseult, who has love for both of them, though her heart belongs to Tristan.”

I knew the story, so I just nodded along with him as he mused on about the legend.

“The ending is different in every version, but each one that I know of leaves Tristan an honorable man. He was in a position no man would want, torn between his sense of duty and his love for a woman he wasn’t supposed to have feelings for. I think your mother named you for Tristan, a character complex, but good—deep down.” His hand cupped my chin. “Because that’s what you are, Trista. You’re good, where it matters. But you’re stuck; you don’t know what you need to make you smile.” He looked out the window, his eyes lost to memory. “Go see what’s out there for you—find your happy spot. You’re not Trista the sad; you’re Trista the unknown.”

I listened to him for a while, not disagreeing with him. And then I asked, “What if I don’t know what makes me happy?”

“You shouldn’t know. The best kind of happiness is the kind you unexpectedly find.” He coughed harder this time and my heart clenched a little, thinking of leaving him in a place that wasn’t home. “I have something else, a small something else.”

He pulled down a jar that sat in his window sill and poured its contents onto the table. A couple dozen foil wrapped chocolates spilled across the table, their foil wrapping looking gold under the table’s light. “Remember when you were little, and I’d send you home with a bunch of these?”

I nodded, picked one up, and looked at him. “You and Gram used to give these to me every time I had to go back to mom’s.”

“And each time you missed us, you were allowed to have one of these.” He rubbed his chest, giving me a little prick of panic. But then he smiled and his eyes crinkled. “So you’ll have one of these, each time you miss me.”

“There aren’t enough here. I’ll miss you more than this.”

“Then you’ll have to come back and visit so I can give you more.”

I hugged him hard, feeling his spine press into my fingers.

The following day, after getting him settled in his new home, I’d returned to my car and left for Colorado with his cigar box on my passenger seat and popped a chocolate in my mouth.