Skies of Fire (Chapter 5 - Ava)
Volcanoes, ash clouds, and earthquakes. As Earth crumbles around them, two unlikely allies must rely on one another to survive or perish like the rest of the world around them.
Chapter 5 - Ava
Mavey’s shallow, rattling breaths fill the double-wide trailer, and as I lean against the doorframe of her cramped bedroom, I stew, knowing that in a matter of hours, she will be gone.
Blair, her hospice nurse, checks her vitals, but it’s only a formality. Mavey is dying, and if her steady decline in the past twelve hours is any indication, she won’t last the night. It’s all I can do to hold back the tears pricking my eyes since I walked in and saw that concerned look on Blair’s face. Not concern for Mavey, but for me.
We’ve been preparing for this for weeks. Cancer’s a bitch like that–inching into our lives more and more until it’s a heavy storm cloud that fills every room and weighs down every conversation. Still, seeing the woman who took me in when I had no one–who raised me when she didn’t have to–lying like this might be the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to stomach. And strangely, the most relieving.
No more pain. No more fretting. No more holding our breaths, wondering if she’ll never wake up again. Blair turns the lamp on Mavey’s bedside table off, leaving her to sleep in the moonlight filtering in from the window. Blair’s about to close the drapes when I step inside.
“Leave them, please.” I glance at Mavey. She looks thinner than I realized in the shadows of night. Perhaps it’s because in seeing her daily, I haven’t noticed her gradual change in appearance. Or, I simply didn’t want to. “She loves looking at the moon.”
Blair doesn’t bother pointing out that Mavey won’t be awake to see the moon tonight, but I can tell she understands, and she looks back down at her patient, brushes a gray strand of hair from her brow, and then Blair collects her things from the room.
I don’t know if hospice nurses are supposed to be so kind and attentive–to look at their patients with affection–or if it’s because loving Mavey is so easy. Her dry sense of humor and bristly exterior, trying and failing to hide her larger-than-life heart and unconditional love she exudes in all she’s ever done.
Blair became an honorary part of our little family the first time she ever stepped foot through the trailer doors, whether she wanted to be or not. Mavey saw to it that Blair was teased and fussed over as much as I’ve always been, even when all Mavey could do was hound the nurse for not eating enough or drinking enough water from her bed.
Blair’s features soften as she steps out of Mavey’s room and looks at me; that’s how I know this is the last time she’ll have to make a trip out here, at least to ensure Mavey is comfortable.
She lifts her hand and squeezes my shoulder. The faint scent of her floral shampoo fills my nose. “She doesn’t feel any pain,” Blair promises. Her eyes are red, and I know it’s from the long day she’s had, driving from town to town to check on her patients after the earthquake earlier today.
“Thank you,” I whisper, grateful to see the furrow smoothed from Mavey’s brow.
She glances into the small bathroom behind me and around the living room, cluttered with clean laundry I haven’t had time to fold and the discarded medical supplies and equipment no longer in use. “Are you going to be okay out here all by yourself?”
“Of course,” I promise. “I’m always out here with Mavey by myself.” But I know that’s not exactly what Blair means. “I promise.”
She glances at the old Formica island in the kitchen. “I left a few–”
“I saw the brochures,” I say before Blair can coerce me into another support group. “But . . .” I shake my head. “I don’t know how long I’ll stay here once she’s gone.” And that’s the truth. There will be nothing for me in Sonora anymore–nothing but painful memories.
Claire shifts her medical bag from one hand to the other. “Where will you go?” she asks, not as a nurse but as a concerned friend.
“I’ve thought about a dozen places,” I admit. “But every time I think there might be a good place to start over–like New York or Florida, where there are more job opportunities–everything gets worse.” And saying that out loud only makes my heart hurt more and fear prickle the edge of numbness, knowing I’ll be in it all alone now.
“Well,” Blair says and glances at Mavey, “there are people you can talk to while you’re still trying to decide. And”--she shrugs, a small smile curving the corner of her mouth–“you could always look into nursing. I’ve seen you with Mavey for weeks now. Nothing makes you squeamish–”
“Ha!”
“I’m serious. And even though I know you don’t want anyone to know how sweet you are, you’ve let it slip a few too many times for me to ignore. Seems you and Mavey aren’t as different as you like to think.”
Blair’s form blurs as tears burn the backs of my eyes again. As if she can sense it, Blair continues toward the door.
“Get some rest, Ava,” she says, her last order of the night. With that, she steps out into the night, leaving me in a suffocatingly quiet, dim-lit trailer with the only person in the world I have left dying right before my eyes.
Wiping the tears from my cheeks, I walk into Mavey’s room and pull the kitchen chair Blair had shoved in the corner closer to Mavey’s hospice bed.
“So,” I breathe, sniffling as I sit down. I take her cool hand in mine and stare at it. It’s frail, just like she is, and her skin is so thin the veins in her hand bulge. I frown. “You would have a fit if you saw how long your fingernails are.”
Before I know what I’m doing, I walk into the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet, and grab Mavey’s fingernail file and clippers.
“Julio called me today,” I tell her and head back to her bedside. Mavey’s shallow, rattling breaths are my only response. “I didn’t answer–well, he called while I was at the diner, but still . . . I haven’t called him back.” Gently, I lift her hand into mine, pull a tissue from the box on her bedside table, and flatten it beneath her hand before I start to clip.
“You used to do this for me,” I remember with a smile. “You wanted me to feel pretty on the days that were the roughest.” Growing up without a mom made the whole girly thing difficult. I had Julio, and he was a farmworker. He was always dirty, we were always poor, and we never had nice things, let alone girly things.
Tears fill my eyes this time until I can no longer see. “I know you’d want to feel pretty right now, too.”
Hastily, I wipe the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand and focus on her nails. When I finish clipping, I file the edges to smooth them, and suddenly I’m grinning. “I’m going to paint them pink,” I tell her. “Fussy Flamingo, your favorite.” It’s the color she always wanted to paint mine, even if I can’t stand a single shade of pink. Of course, Mavey never painted her fingernails at all, and that makes me smile even more.
“Do you remember the time you took me to Walmart to buy my first bra?” I snort a laugh, remembering that day–how embarrassed Mavey was when she had to ask a woman who worked there for help since she had no clue what she was doing. Mavey was a spinster. At least, that’s what she called herself. She was a tomboy. A gardener who preferred her flowers and vegetables more than going to church or into town unless she had to. Over the years, she’d forgotten there were training bras, or maybe she’d never needed one and tried to buy me an underwire A-cup when I was eleven. It just didn’t feel right.
Gruff as she was, though, Mavey always seemed to know when I needed her. She had a way of appearing in my life, like an angel, even if I wasn’t sure I ever believed in them.
Whatever Mavey’s reasons, she always kept to herself, save for when it came to an orphaned little girl. I think it’s because she lost someone very dear to her before I met her, and she couldn’t bear to be around people–to form any more relationships for fear of what might happen. But for some reason, she took a shine to me. Or, rather, she pitied me, knowing I had lost my mother and lived with my drunk uncle in the trailer next door. When he was arrested after the accident, she adopted me–didn’t even think twice about it. And it’s been the two of us ever since. Her, the mother and grandmother I never got to have, and me, well, I was the lucky girl who got to be Mavey’s everything.
Nostrils flaring with burgeoning tears, I blink them away, blow the file dust from her hand, and analyze my work. The tips of her nails are square, the way she likes, and the ends are flush with the tips of her fingers.
“It’s nice to see they are still clean,” I tell her, and rising to my feet, I head back into the bathroom to search the drawers for the horrible pink nail polish I know is in here somewhere.
I try to be quiet as I rustle around in the cupboards, even if I know it doesn’t matter; Mavey is on enough morphine; she’d sleep through the end of the world without stirring. After the big earthquake today, there’s an immense sense of comfort in that.
“Ah-ha!” I grin when I find the bottle, and whipping a rogue tear from my cheek, I walk back into her room. I re-situate myself beside her hospital bed and can’t help my grin. “Oh, to see your face,” I tease her, but it takes all the elbow grease I have just to open the damn bottle that’s been dried shut for years. When I finally break the seal and pull the brush out, it’s thick and gloopy with old paint. It makes no difference, though, and I start with her pinky finger.
“I don’t think I can go to Julio’s,” I confess, my thoughts drifting back to my uncle. “I know it’s the easiest thing to do, at least until I get my life on track, but I don’t know if I can handle dealing with the past on top of everything else. Not yet, at least.” I’m not sure there’s ever a good time to reunite with the man who single-handedly ruined your life, anyway.
Though I’ve never been great at coloring within the lines, let alone painting fingernails with any sort of finesse, I take my time, determined to make them look as good as I can. My mind drifts to after. After Mavey is gone. After there is nothing left for me here. We knew it was coming, and even if I have little to no money saved, it’s a lot easier to care for my own needs when I don’t have to worry about Mavey’s too. I’m twenty-five. I’ll figure it all out. Still, my chest squeezes, but I straighten and clear my throat as if it will chase the emotions away.
When I’m finished painting Mavey’s pinky and ring finger, I pull back and assess the damage I’ve done. “Absolutely horrendous.” I scoff at my lack of ability to do even this, but shrugging, I continue to paint the others. “I think we can safely cross a nail salon job off the potential career list.”
As the moon rises higher in the sky and the shadows move through her room, my eyelids grow heavy. When her fingernails on the one hand are the color of the wild freesias that grow by the front steps in the springtime, and I’ve cleaned up the paint on her cuticles as best I can, I cap the polish and set it on her bedside, suddenly exhausted.
“You won’t be too sore with me if I don’t do your other hand, will you?” Mavey responds with another rattled exhale in her blissful sleep, and I study the profile of her face. Strong features–Roman in a way that makes me wish I could see what she looked like in her youth. But she never had photographs. I didn’t realize how strange that was until I went to summer camp, and the girls all had photos of their families, friends, and pets. That was the first and only year I ever went to camp. I wasn’t the most popular kid in town, especially after Julio killed one of the town’s most beloved school teachers. Having the same blood running through my veins as Julio made me tainted, made me trash to everyone but Mavey.
Carefully, I take her hand in mine, avoiding her drying fingernails, and trace the veins in her hand. I try and fail not to return to the fact that Julio might be my only option left. The only family I have left.
“I’m going to miss you,” I confess. I’ve thought about it a million times, but Mavey was never one to get sentimental, and I was grateful for it.
Kissing her hand, I let the tears fall because I know I can’t stop them. I don’t want to stop them. I’m so tired, and part of me wishes I could crawl up there with her, fall into a deep sleep, and never wake up again. It would be a kinder fate than whatever’s left of this cruel place. Where people are hateful because they can be. Where you can’t earn a decent wage and access the healthcare you need without running yourself into the ground to get it.
Resting my forehead against Mavey’s hand, I let the sound of her rattled breaths, and my sobs, fill the space until I can no longer keep my eyes open.
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