Photograph by Amy Hart
At the hospital, I perch in the corner of the window ledge. The lines from the radiator leave raw indentations in my upper thigh. I shift my weight a bit to push the flesh down harder, feel the skin press deep into the ridges. Mémé’s positioned high north with Dad and Uncle Joe on either side of her, but I don’t complete the compass. Dad’s been crying since the doctor left. He’s draped across her like one of the Afghan throws she used to knit. Uncle Joe is yelling at Dad to stop blubbering. He’s singing the usual tune about me putting her back to bed that night. He’s been at this every day for a week, since the minute we stepped out of the ambulance. I try to camouflage myself in the window, pretend I’m a reflection.
“Who puts an old lady back to bed when she’s bleeding?”
Uncle Joe turns to look at me. I can see the red of his nose, the spray of saliva that landed on his lower lip which juts out from his underbite.
“I cleaned her head, first.”
My voice feels far away. I lean into the window, wonder how much force it would take to shoulder my way through it.
I usually heard her when she fell, but this time the thump blended in with the grandfather clock. It has a heavy, steady tick that feels slower than a second. It’s just a cheap imitation grandfather clock. Mémé got it on layaway after I saw one in my friend’s house and told her I thought it looked fancy. Fancy and Something I Want is Mémé’s perfect intersection of desire. It seemed like the kind of thing Certain People would have in their front hallway, and Mémé and I are always trying to find more ways to be like Certain People.
I thought the pendulum swinging made the tick. Mémé thinks it’s funny I always want to know how things work. Dahlin, that brain of yours is a hoot! I watched it once for a whole episode of Wheel of Fortune, my face inches from the glass casing, and the sound never lined up with the sway. Just a slight little mismatch, like the dubbing on Kung Fu movies.
Ti (sway) ck.
T (sway) ick.
Tic (sway) k.
I listened to see if the thump came again, if maybe it was a house noise, like when the heat does a shudder or the icemaker on the fridge goes berserk. I waited through ten ticks, then twenty, but I didn’t hear it again. I tried to pull myself out of the corner of the bed, but the weight of the water swallowed me back in. That’s how I knew she was missing. You only get trapped like that when the weight is out of whack.
It was fun when she first got the waterbed. I scrambled around on all fours watching the water mounds pop up when I moved. I was excited to have something to brag about at school, but Jimmy Meyers told me about people getting trapped in waterbeds and suffocating, and then I couldn’t sleep.
When I told Mémé she called me a worrywart, but we started going to bed with QVC on. That way I could fall asleep thinking about Diamonique Jewelry and shipping and handling charges instead of suffocating. Dad always says I’m too old to sleep with my grandmother, but Mémé says it’s better than a 16-year-old girl having to share a room with her father.
The day I was born, Mémé thanked my mother for giving her a girl. Mémé only had two sons. She had a daughter once, in between Dad and Uncle Joe, but she died before she was two. Nobody talks about her. I think her name was Susan. Nobody talks about her, but there is a black and white baby picture of her at the top of the stairs. She looks like my dad. Mémé and Mom used to always fight over me, over who knew what was best, or what clothes I should wear, and whose house I should stay at. Mom said Mémé was always acting like she loved me best. In the end, I guess, she was right, because Mom left with her boyfriend when I was 10, and she has a new family now.
Mom never used to let Mémé take me to pageants and modeling calls, but Mémé says that was before I became a woman. I knew the other girls would have proper headshots, done by photographers with studios in Portland. Mémé says Glamour Shots at the Auburn Mall will do just fine, that I don’t need any help being the most beautiful girl in the room. She held the pile of outfits across her forearms, draped like a ballgown. If Papa was still alive, he would have cut the credit card up again when he saw what she spent. (Chrissake, woman, that girl’ll break us!)
“We probably don’t need all these, Mémé. I just need one picture.”
She shook her head so hard her earrings knocked against her jawbone. She put the long, thin Virginia Slim between her lips as she shoved the clothes over to me.
“You’ll be makin’ us this money back in no time. You’re a hot ticket, face like that. Now get dressed.”
I slid the silk blouse over my head and was careful to tuck the tag into the back of the collar, just in case Mémé had a change of heart. In the new clothes I looked like those children’s games where you match different faces and bodies together to make a ridiculous monster. My hair was still in rags from the night before. Mémé’s been curling my hair with rag strips since I was small, because I liked the way Shirley Temple’s hair bounced when we watched The Little Princess. It pulls when she wraps them around, and even worse when she takes them out (You have to suffer to be beautiful!), but it does make the best curls. Dad says I think I’m a little princess, and I do, but not how he means. I want to be remembered by a long lost relative, lifted to a new life where we’ll read books by the Brontë sisters and Kurt Vonnegut, and have real bookshelves instead of the magazine rack next to the toilet full of The National Enquirer and Reader’s Digest. Dad says I think I’m better than them, but Mémé says he’s just jealous because I’m like filet mignon when the rest of them are Salisbury steaks. He says the way Mémé fusses over me made me too big for my britches. Once when he said it, I told him what we learned about homeostasis in AP Biology, about how nature finds a way to balance out things that are uneven, but he didn’t get my point which is probably a good thing.
“Babe, you dressed?”
Mémé’s voice summoned a lump of guilt that lodged in my ungrateful throat. She slid the curtain to the side without waiting for an answer. She immediately started pulling at the rag curls, untying and stripping them out. I flinched, involuntarily pulled my ear to my shoulder.
“Stand up straight, Becca Lynn! You think Cindy Crawford can’t handle getting her hair done?”
The cigarette bounced around her lips. I wanted to reach out to catch it each time it teetered on the edge. I straightened my shoulders and trained my eyes on the reflection. Mémé says girls should never have their hair shorter than their shoulders. Even in curls mine nearly reached my waist. My eyes drifted to the mole on the corner of my chin. Mom always said it ruined my face. I touched it with my fingertip, felt the raised edges. Mémé paused when she followed my finger in the mirror. She halted pulling, leaned in with a whisper.
“Gives you character.”
She planted a quick kiss on my cheek before resuming her work.
It was better last week when the hospital bed was laid flat. With the bed raised and all the pillows behind her she looks like one of my porcelain dolls. When she was laid flat it was easier to ignore the tubes and the pumps and the streak of white hair just above her left eyebrow. She never used to let it get white. There’s been a box of Havana Brown hair dye under the sink for ages. I wish I had brought it with me, combed it through her hair one night when the cool nurse was on. Sometimes she lets me help her with Mémé’s sponge bath. I like slotting Mémé’s fingers into the gaps between my own, adding a little Skin So Soft to the basin. Makes her smell like her again.
The doctor arrives in the doorway. He looks like he’s done something wrong.
“I don’t mean to rush you, but I wanted to check back in and see if we’ve made a decision?”
I slide off the radiator, try to move past Uncle Joe without attracting any attention. Dad grabs me, holds onto me with his face in my ear. I can’t really hear the doctor over his crying. I wish he’d pull the spittle in from the sides of his mouth instead of letting it dribble out the sides. I do a little quick suck in of air, like I’m showing him.
I try to look at the wall behind Mémé and not the bandage wrapped around her head from where they drilled the hole to let the pressure out. They said it took hours for that pressure to build up. I look over to the clock, focus on the red second hand. It ticks even louder than the grandfather clock. Sometimes the red hand looks like it is doing a double take, and I wonder if that means it loses time. I wonder if it kept doing that, would we move back a step, and then maybe another. Back a tick. Back a thump. It wasn’t more than a minute or two between the thump and when I checked on her. I wasn’t counting, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute.
I moved from room to room, hallway first. Hello? Mémé? Light on. Living room next, reaching around and flipping the switch before I went in, in case she’s standing in the dark like she does sometimes. I hate to be startled, even when I know it’s coming. I went in the bathroom last. That means I must have walked past her twice. She was coiled in front of the sink the way the dog used to do at the foot of her bed. I felt bad moving her, because she looked so comfortable, but I knew she’d be sore if she slept on the floor again. I pulled her nightie back down over her knees before I woke her. She muttered a little, but I couldn’t make it out. I counted her up, 1-2-3, and she rolled onto her knees and draped her arm around my shoulder. I didn’t notice the blood until I helped her into bed and smeared a bit on the pillowcase.
“Thank you, baby, thank you. Thank you, baby.”
I sang it back to her.
“Tha-a-nk you bay-beee.”
She loves it when I do that, so she laughed with her eyes closed. There was going to be a proper egg on her head tomorrow. The last one was only just losing the dark tinge around the edges of the yellowing bruise.
I didn’t mean to upset her. I thought she’d be proud that Mr. Johnson thinks I’m smart enough to get into Brown.
“What happened to UMaine? State school not good enough for you? What about modeling?”
I tried to tell her I want to be an architect, tried to tell her about scholarships and the fast train from Providence to Portland. The words bounced off her like a forcefield. She intercepted them with that tone of voice she usually saves for Uncle Joe.
“You think it’s easy spending all my time and money tryin’ to get you some big break? So you can what, run off and forget about me once you have money of your own? Don’t think I don’t know you’re just waiting for the minute you can get away from here. Don’t think I don’t know what you really think of your old grandmother.”
Her voice was a low growl. The words smacked against my exposed flesh.
“Get me my pills.”
Dad told me to throw out all her pills, but she said to hide one bottle and keep it somewhere safe. She said she might need it for an emergency.
“But, Mémé—”
“It’s an emergency!”
It didn’t look like the other emergencies. Pulling at the carpet with the stubs of her fingernails, that noise she makes when she’s talking and crying at the same time, like there’s someone choking her and she has to push extra hard to get the sound out.
“I swear to God, Becca. Please. I swear. You don’t understand what it feels like. Like my skin’s in a shredder.”
I reached up and opened the cabinet door, pulled out the box of Oatmeal Creme Pies. Only Mémé and I like Oatmeal Creme Pies. I fumbled around at the bottom of the box and pulled out the pill bottle. Mémé softened immediately, her voice a coo.
“And a Pepsi, babe.”
I filled the red solo cup with ice and poured the Pepsi over it, stopping several times to let the foam rise and settle. The pink ones aren’t as strong as the blues. It was worse when she was taking the blues. Mémé reached for the cup and let her fingers brush against mine in the exchange. She placed the pill in the back of her throat and took a long drink. I folded the paper towel neatly into four, creating a perfect square, and placed it on the table in front of her. Mémé set the glass down on the makeshift coaster, and I watched the sweat drip slowly down the side of the cup. She lifted out another cigarette and I took one too. I waited for her to chastise me, but she leaned forward and lit mine first.
I expected a flatline sound when they pulled the plug, like on ER. Something to warn us that the up, up, dow-w-w-n of the breathing machine wasn’t breathing anymore. Instead, it’s quieter. The quietest that room has been since they first wheeled her into it. I brought the lilac bedspread from the house, and once they took the tube out I put on her Iced Amethyst lipstick. Dad sits up north with Mémé, now. He isn’t crying anymore. I thought it would be fast, but without the machine noises and the nurses coming in and out things seem to stop altogether. The red second hand is still dancing, still freezing time in place, taking it back a step and holding us there, then letting us move forward for a minute or two. I stop watching the clock after the first 30 minutes.
I tell Dad I’m going to get everyone coffee, and he waves me off without looking. There is no Pepsi in the vending machine, so that really takes away the ceremony of it all. I settle on a Vitamin Water because she loved those too. I feed a dollar bill into the slot and watch the long spiral twisting slowly forward until it throws the bottle off the shelf. I jump when it lands because I hate being startled, even when I know it’s coming. I pop the pink pill in my mouth, bite it. The bitterness shocks me and I gag, suck down three more gulps to hide the taste. When I get back nobody asks me where the coffee is.
I find my spot back on the windowsill and hug my knees to my chin. She looks good without her glasses. I wish they had let me change her clothes but at least the blanket covers up the hospital gown. I feel my arms slide down my legs a bit until they hang in a pleasant kind of heavy. The right one dangles, sways in time with the tick, tick, tick. I give it a hint of momentum and watch the pendulum swing a little higher. Her face has a soft edge, like she’s been painted with watercolors.
I close my eyes and she’s on her cruise ship in a black velvet evening gown. She smokes her Virginia Slim on a deck damp with fog, and I like the way the smoke dances around with the light from the boat behind it. In her other hand, she waves a pink Lotto ticket. I ask her what numbers she picked and we laugh, because she only ever picks the same numbers. (They’re lucky this time, girl, I can feel it!) My hair is curled tightly, and I do a tap dance for her, flick my hands out wide in a tah-dah. She’s not watching because the breeze nicks her ticket and she is reaching for it over the rail. When she slips, I think, catch the dress, but I grab the stub of her heel instead. I hold the empty shoe aloft when I call out for her, but the wind answers me, “Thank you, baby. Thank you.” I sing it back, “Tha-ank you, bay-beee.”
Bethany Waterhouse Bradley is American Irish, born in Maine but living in Belfast for 20 years. She has published a volume of academic work and served as an editor and reviewer in sociology, psychology and social policy journals. Bethany has just completed her first novel, Emerentia. She was a member of the 2024/25 Accidental Writer’s Circle and a finalist in the 2025 Novels in the Pipeline. Bethany is currently undertaking an MA in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast.