Jade’s mother was beautiful, even in death.
She sat down next to her on the cot, putting her hand to her mother’s high-boned cheek; her skin, which gleamed white even in the dim light of the room, had already grown cool. Her mother’s long brown hair waved in a gust of wind blowing in through the open window, liberating several of the strands of tinsel her mother had tied into her hair to sparkle in the beam of light that played over her while she was on stage. The sheet, threadbare and unwashed, was balled up at the foot of the bed. Jade leaned over her mother to grab it, before pulling it over her body, which was as stiff as the mannequin that stood in the corner of the room, showing off the Wonder Woman costume—complete with tiara—that her mother would have worn for her first set.
She reached over to the nightstand and grabbed her mother’s emerald bandana—the one that matched the color of her wide eyes, now closed forever—rescuing it from the company of the empty pill bottles and half-smoked cigarettes clogging the glass and used it to dab the tears that welled in the corner of her eyes. It made her angry with herself to cry—she had made a promise that she would not—but she was powerless to stop the tears. The more she wiped them away, the faster they fell, trickling down her cheeks and past her nose until they seeped, salty and warm, into her mouth. Her shoulders quaked. Her chest heaved. Her abdomen quivered. The sobs started quietly at first, but built quickly, increasing in both force and volume, until her entire body was a great convulsion of grief.
Resistance was futile; she gave up trying to stop the outpouring of emotion and let it overwhelm her. She slumped down, ending up next to her mother on the cot, in closer contact with her than she had been in the entirety of her memory. Jade’s first instinct was to recoil from the intimacy of the moment, but some force more powerful than instinct held her there, soaking up what was left of her mother’s body heat and inhaling the last vestiges of her cheap perfume.
After a time, the tears dried up, the sobbing ebbed and then ceased altogether, and her breathing quieted, but she remained where she was, lying on a thin slice of the worn mattress with her head stuck between her mother’s hard shoulder and the sharp edge of the nightstand. It wasn’t very comfortable, but she had suffered so much discomfort in her life she just ignored it, thinking about what life must be like for girls whose mothers weren’t OxyContin addicts. But, having known nothing else, her imagination sputtered and her focus turned to the contingency plan she had been formulating for years.
Jade had always known she would come home one day to find her mother dead, and so she had planned for that eventuality, much like a squirrel caches nuts to keep it sustained through the long winter it knows is coming. But it was one thing to plan something for years and another to execute it, even if she had been practicing on a regular basis, going to the point of stealing into the pawn shop next door and rehearsing with the snub-nosed revolver from the shoebox underneath the cash register.
It would be easier—and certainly a lot less complicated—to leave town without killing the man who had snuffed out her mother’s life, but she had been thinking about it for so long she couldn’t stomach the idea of letting him slither away to ruin some other girl’s life. She would proceed as planned.
Her stomach rumbled. She got up and walked over to the mini fridge sitting atop a milk crate full of stiletto heels. A jug of curdled milk, a trio of Wasatch lagers—her mother’s only connection to the city of her birth—and a tub of leftover General Tso’s chicken were the only occupants. She wolfed the food down, oblivious of the mold that spiked feather-like from the sides of the container. After cracking open a can of beer, she washed her meal down, and then threw the empty can into the corner where it joined a dozen others. She didn’t like beer, but it was the only thing to drink other than the brown water that leaked out of the faucet in her mother’s bathroom.
She went back to her mother’s bed, noticing her cell phone sticking out from underneath the pillow. Flipping through her mother’s text messages, she found the one she was looking for. It was from Tre, the disgusting parasite of a human being she loathed with every fiber of her body. She thumbed a short message, hit send and got up to stand in front of the window to wait for the reply.
It was January, and even in southern California the darkness had come early. Jade had spent so much of her fourteen years in darkness she’d come to like it. There was something comforting about the dark, something that made her less ashamed of her life.
