BY CHRISTINE HEUNER
Copyright is held by the author.
TODAY, AVA, the granddaughter I love best, comes down to visit me in my basement bedroom as she often does. She sits down on the chair across from my bed. It’s a folding chair with three of my robes hanging on it. I tell her to put the robes on my bed where I’m sitting, but she sets them in her lap like a big pet and plays with the belt on the pink robe.
“Are you OK?” I ask.
Ava flips her hair over her shoulder. It’s darker than last week, almost black; her bangs are short and tip at an angle to the left. I can see her eyes much better now, the flecks of gold among the green. She says, “Not really, Grandma.”
“What’s wrong, Sweetheart?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady and not pushy. Her father and my eldest son, Danny, always says I’m too pushy.
Ava shrugs and tilts her head to one side. Presses her lips together. “I just got home from counselling,” she says, tying the fuzzy pink belt in a knot.
“What do they do in counselling?” I ask. “Is it something with college?”
I know I’m probably wrong in asking this question since Ava has told me she has no plans to go to college.
“No. It’s . . . It’s not counselling at school.” She pulls the belt tighter. Then she puts it down and looks at her nails, the chipped purple polish. She turns to me, not smiling. “Can I tell you something, Grandma?”
“Of course, Sweetheart.” My heartbeat climbs. It’s exciting to be let in on secrets. No one tells me anything now.
“I go to counselling to talk about my feelings and all that. I’ve been going for about a month now, Grandma, since . . .” She sighs and picks at her nails. “I had this friend who died. She was out at a party and the story is that she got in the car with a drunk driver and there was a bad accident and she died.”
“My dear God,” I whisper, bringing my hand to my mouth. I make the sign of the cross on my chest.
“She . . . the thing is, Grandma, I was supposed to go to that party. I was supposed to be in that car, and I know — I seriously know — that my friend was drunk off her ass when she got in that car.”
“That’s just awful. Awful, Ava. I wish . . . What does this counsellor say?”
She sniffles and touches a knuckle to her nose. “What do you mean?”
“What does the counsellor tell you to do?”
“She says I should keep talking to her, and other people, too. She acts like she’s the answer to all my problems.”
“So, you talk and she just listens?”
Ava nods and picks at her nails again. “Yeah. She talks a lot, too, but she mostly listens.”
“I wish I had someone who would do that for me.”
She looks up and tilts her head. “But I listen to you, Grandma.”
When I don’t answer, she leans forward and stares at me. Her uneven bangs make her look much younger than her 16 years. “Wait,” she says. “Don’t I listen to you?”
“Of course you do, Sweetheart. Of course you do. It’s just that sometimes I don’t want to tell you about the scary ideas in my head. That’s all.”
She squints. “What scary ideas?”
“The ones that keep me up at night. I had a bad night last night, and —”
“You can tell me, Grandma,” Ava says, her face set in the kind of determination she used to show when she wanted to go to somewhere like the park but was outvoted by her cousins.
“Well, I . . . It’s hard, Ava, but sometimes I wish I could go away forever. I’d like to disappear or return to meet my maker, and be with Grandpa again. I think it would be easier for everyone if I was gone.”
Here’s what I don’t say: I’ve committed the sin of getting old without their consent. Now, I have to wait around until I die, until I’m no longer a burden to them.
“Grandma,” she says, her dark eyebrows pinched. “You can’t say that. I mean . . . you can’t . . . I don’t know. Don’t think like that.”
The truth is I’ve lived past my expiration date. My 86-year-old body hurts all the time — my right hip, left knee, both my shoulders. My back aches like my spine is on fire, a low burn, but still painful. There’s nothing left to do but sit, just sit here in this basement in Danny’s house in Tom’s River at the Jersey shore. I watch TV and do my Word Finds and colour in the cartoon-character books my grandson Kyle buys me at the dollar store.
I hate to admit that I have thought about ending it all, but it’s more like the way my mind clings to what-ifs. It’s not something I’m going to do, and I wouldn’t even know where to start. I can’t imagine there’s a painless way out of life, especially when you come into it screaming. And this is all just crap to say because you can’t go to heaven if you off yourself.
“Grandma?” Ava asks, leaning her head toward mine gently. She’s so close I can see her sparkly eyeshadow. “I asked if you’ll let me get you some help.”
“What kind of help could you possibly give me, Ava?”
“I could get help. You know, find somebody to help. I can ask my counsellor —”
“Oh, no,” I say, my voice firm. “I don’t need to see anyone.”
“Everyone needs help sometimes, Grandma. And you’ve been through a lot with Grandpa . . . I’m sorry. I don’t want to make it worse.”
When I grew up, asking for help was as likely as walking up to a stranger and asking for sex. My God. It was better in those days when we kept our lips buttoned up. At least your feelings could kill you slowly without you having to think about them all the time. The more I think about them now, the more people on the TV push each other to talk about their feelings, the more I want to vomit. I don’t even want to think about my feelings.
And say I do talk about my feelings. Say I do. Then what comes from that? What happens next? Idle chatter will bring Jerry back from the grave.
I’m tired but can’t sleep for more than a string of a few hours, a string so easily broken. I learned to sleep through Jerry’s snoring, but now I can’t sleep through a barking dog or garbage truck outside. I swear even the growing weeds wake me up.
I’m hungry, but there’s nothing much I want to eat. Mostly, I eat the sweet stuff — waffles with syrup, ice cream bars, coffee cake — and no one tries to stop me. I suck on peppermints nearly all day long.
I’m lonely, but when you live as long as I have, and outlive almost everyone you love, it’s impossible not to be lonely. Loneliness is a cluster of dead flowers with droopy necks, crispy leaves, and rotted stems.
What I worry about most is that everyone will stop loving me.
To make Ava feel better, I say, “We’ll see about the counsellor. Down the line, we’ll talk about it.”
***
Ava comes down to my room the next day with papers in her hands. I’m glad to see her nail polish is gone. Her nails, trimmed low, look clean.
She shakes the papers like there’s breaking news on them.
“I have a counsellor you can see, and she takes Medicare!”
I stare at her before asking, “How do you know I have Medicare?”
She sighs and shakes her head, as if I’m a child. “Old people get Medicare. Everyone knows that.”
“What if . . .” I touch the loose hair at the back of my neck that has fallen out of the bobby pins. I need my hair cut, and a permanent, too, but don’t want to ask anyone to take me to the beauty parlor.
“What if what?” Ava presses, her voice rising.
“What if I don’t want to go?”
“But you said —”
I reach out and touch her hand. “Things are fine. I’m OK.”
She stares at me so hard I feel scolded. “But you could feel better than fine and OK. Life could be better for you.”
“Oh, Ava,” I say fiddling with a bobby pin. “When you’re my age, life doesn’t get better.” It’s like going down a staircase, down, down, down until you’re in a basement like the one where I’m living because I had to sell the four bedroom in PA after Jerry died, the home where we raised our three boys.
But this is a nice basement, though. Warm and comfortable, it has one window that offers a view of the shrubs. I like the shrubs. They flower pink in the spring.
“Well, maybe I shouldn’t try either,” Ava says. “Maybe I should just be fine and okay and forget about my friend dying and Mom leaving us for that fucker in Red Bank.”
I should tell her not to cuss. I refused to accept foul language from my own children. But a grandma can skirt the rules whenever she wants to. And Ava is being sincere with me, showing me what’s real inside of her.
“You have to keep trying,” I say. “You’re young and beautiful, and you have your whole life ahead of you, Sweetheart.”
“What about you? You’re not going to die soon, are you?” She doesn’t look alarmed. It’s a simple question.
“Not that I know of. But I have more days behind me than ahead of me, that’s for sure.”
“Let’s . . .” She picks at her nails. “Let’s not worry about anything now. You don’t need to decide anything yet, OK, Grandma?”
“OK.” I’m relieved she doesn’t push me the way Danny does. He’s a kind man, Danny, but when he’s mad, watch out!
“Hey, let’s get a pizza,” Ava says, smiling. “With sausage.”
Oh, I do love sausage pizza. It’s a sort of consolation prize, and I take it.
***
I know that after age 80, something disastrous will happen to your body — I’ve seen it on the news — so it’s not a surprise that I feel a lump in my breast, and it turns out to be cancer. It’s Ava who steps up, taking half-days off of school to get me there. She talked to the principal who gave her the okay as if he’s some big official like the Pope.
With every test, I wait in the hospital lobby until Ava parks the car and gets me a wheelchair. Then she pushes me down the hall and apologizes because the wheelchair is tough to maneuver. “These don’t have power steering,” she says and gives a little laugh.
When I’m done with the tests, Ava is always sitting in the waiting room, reading a book. She never shows me the book covers. “Another silly romance,” she always says, tucking the book in her bag.
One day, after the third test, it’s late and we go to the diner to eat. Ava makes her way through a huge salad, but I can’t eat more than one of my pancakes.
At the cash register, there’s lollipops, the tiny ones. I take three of them — I don’t want to be too greedy — and tell Ava to grab a few herself. “Get the red ones,” I say.
On the drive home, Ava says, “It’s a lot what you’re going through. Maybe you’ll see a counsellor this time.”
I’m sucking on a cherry lollipop, which I pull out of my mouth and say, “Maybe. Down the line.”
“Jesus, Grandma,” she whispers and merges into the lane, racing to beat an approaching car.
I want to say, “Slow down,” but I know she’s angry, and I don’t want to get yelled at.
***
It takes a few weeks to get all the test results back and see another doctor who says, “the cancer is early,” but she adds that it has spread somewhere else. I think they’re called the lift nodels (or some such). The doctor shows me a picture from the Internet and the nodels are gathered under my armpit like the poisonous tentacles from the jellyfish we used to see all the time on our family trips to Seaside Heights.
Ava wheels me out of the elevator to the lobby with a swanky gift shop that has all kinds of scarves wrapped around the heads of mannequins in the display window. My throat tightens, and I touch my hair. I imagine clumps of it falling out, gathering on the tile like dust bunnies.
I say to Ava, “Maybe I’m ready for that counsellor.”
She stops the wheelchair and faces me. “You mean it?” she asks. “For real?”
I nod and wish I had a lollipop to suck on, but I gave my last one to the woman at the front desk who said, “You made my day.”
After Ava helps me into the car and gets in the car herself, she says, “Let’s go for a coffee.”
I never turn down a cup of coffee, not even if it keeps me up at night.
Who cares what keeps me up at night?
***
So now I sit in the counsellor’s waiting room in a seat that hugs my hips. Jerry would say I’m silly to be here.
Ava sits beside me. She promised to come to this appointment with me, and she’s good to her word.
“It’ll be OK, Grandma,” she says touching my shoulder. “I love you.”
Before I can reply, the door opens. A woman with her hair in a tight bun and glasses that make her look like a smarty pants stands there smiling.
“Hello, Mrs. McBride,” she says. “I’m Lisa Chalfont. Ready to come inside?”
It’s like she’s inviting me in for an event, a party or some such, and, with Ava’s help, I work myself out of the chair. I take my cane and walk toward this Lisa Chalfont.
Before I enter the office, I turn to Ava.
“I’ll be here when you’re done,” she says. “Then we’ll go for a coffee.”
I know she’ll get me a doughnut, too, the pink iced with the coloured sprinkles like
confetti.
Oh, how I love Ava to bits. It’s a blessing, this love, but sneaky too because I’m here where I don’t want to be.
My heart kicks as I walk into Lisa’s office.
But a surprise catches me. I’m ready to talk. The words are already on my tongue.
***
Like what you’ve read? Tip the author.
Christine Heuner has been teaching high-school English in New Jersey for nearly 25 years. She is the author Fifty-Four Holly Lane, a novel published by Blydyn Square Books (2022). Her short stories have appeared in Narrative, Philadelphia Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine, CommuterLit, and elsewhere. They are available to read on her website: christineheuner.com.
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