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“I dreamed about my mother.” Jude’s fingers stopped for a second, then continued on their trail back up my arm. “It’s the second time in recent weeks I’ve dreamed about her.”
“What is it that troubles you?”
I flipped over. My hand caressed the bare skin of his chest in the dark. I refrained from touching him, curling my hand between us instead. As much as I wanted to touch and caress him, I wouldn’t do that and tempt him. It was only cruel when he couldn’t get pleasure from me if I did. It was all so fucking frustrating.
My mind drifted back to that dream about my mother.
“Everything troubles me. You said that…when we were in her gallery at my house, you said that she’d gone mad. How did you know?”
His hand had continued its journey around my back, making lazy circles between my shoulder blades. We were pressed close, the warmth and strength of his body cocooning me in safety.
“I’ve been alive a long time, Genevieve. A very long time. I’ve witnessed a devastating amount of pestilence, plagues of all kinds. They come, they go, they mutate and come again.” He coasted a hand up my spine under my hair and wrapped my nape. “But the disease of madness is the same, never changing, a pattern from order falling into disorder, from constancy into chaos. Your mother’s paintings didn’t simply evolve. They illustrated her descent from lucidity to desperation to insanity. I don’t want to hurt you, but the evidence is quite clear.”
I knew he was right and couldn’t be angry at his open observation.
“She left us, you know. Dad and me.”
He didn’t respond, just continued to soothe me with his trailing fingers, waiting for me to continue.
“It must’ve been madness that made her do it, because I know she loved us. I know that. She loved me. But just…not enough.”
Jude’s roughened hand brushed the hair away from my cheek, where his fingers curled along the side of my neck, thumb resting in the crook between ear and jaw. He didn’t offer condolences I’d heard all my life, likeit’s not your faultorthere’s nothing more you could’ve doneand other phrases I despised.
“How did she take her life?”
He knew for certain that she’d died by suicide without me ever having to say it. I felt the rope binding us to each other tighten a bit more. Our mothers ending in similar fates. My hand found its way to his bare chest. He tensed.
“The river,” I answered bluntly. “She didn’t leave a note, unless you want to call her version of ‘The Young Martyr’ a suicide note. The day she completed it, she drove out to the Mississippi River bridge and jumped off. There were witnesses. One of them had videoed it with his phone and posted it on Facebook of all things.”
Jude’s thumb stroked down the length of my neck, still soothing.
“Did you see the video?” he asked, knowing I was struggling to share this part of my life but needed to do it anyway.
“Yes. My dad had hidden it on a flash drive in her jewelry box that he’d stored in the attic. FB had pulled it down once it was reported, but he’d kept a copy.” I swallowed against the memory. “When I was thirteen, I went searching for things of hers, needing to remember, needing to touch her. I watched the video only once and never again. Once was enough.”
The video began where she was already leaning out from the bridge’s railing, holding on with one hand. Still in her everyday painting garb—bare feet, jeans, and all. Her sun-gold hair had pulled from its knot, whipping wildly in yellow streams as if the wind wanted to take her with it.
People shouted. In the distance, sirens wailed, trying to get to the scene before the desperate woman clinging between life and death made an irrevocable decision.
Someone shouted,“Lady, don’t do this. It’s not worth it.”Her face snapped back to the speaker, somewhere near the guy with the phone.
Haunted eyes of a ghost stared straight into the camera. A sorrowful smile spread across her face before she said her dying words.“Yes, they are. They are worth it.”
Then she let go. Someone screamed, but she was already gone, disappearing beyond the lens into the muddy depths of the churning river. I never understood her last words, and apparently never would. For who was there to explain them?
Jude’s voice rumbled close to me in the dark. “Despite this tragedy, this loss, you have done more than survive, you have flourished. She would be proud of the woman you have become.”
When Jude called me a woman, something inside always stood straight up at attention, wanting to be everything he saw in me and more.
I didn’t want to talk about my mother anymore. My hand was making its own journey across the hard planes of his chest. I trailed an index finger along the ridge down the middle, wishing I could see the beautiful swirls of ink. However, the darkness made me brave. I’d never touched him quite like this.
“Genevieve.”
A warning, low and deep. Oh God, that voice. My fingers splayed across the ridges of his abdomen, tight and tense at the moment.
“Genevieve, what are you doing?”
“Exploring.”
