Page 16 of The Lipstick Flip

“And why the fuck can’t he just act like a normal person? Why does he have to squeal and jump in the air and—and be like that? Jesus fucking Christ, it’s like he wants people to see him. And I’m the bad guy. I’m the bad guy because I just want to do my thing and not have every fucking stranger in a ten-mile radius staring at us. I’m the piece of shit because I just want to be normal.”

Nobody said anything back. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it was better that Si was downstairs. Because as soon as I finished, the anger drained out of me, and what came after it was the old shittiness.

They were teenagers. Noah was right. Why the fuck did I care so much?

I headed back downstairs. I tried to push Noah out of my mind. I tried to focus on the house, how things were coming along.

It was a beautiful house—or it would be when Si and I were done. It was an old Craftsman, and Si was the perfect one to help me restore it because she had an old Craftsman of her own. Pocket doors, the kind you didn’t see anymore. Crown molding. Original wainscoting. Built-in cabinets. The kind of stuff that gave the house character. That made it feel like a home.

Jonathan had wanted to buy us a new house when Noah and I got married. Fuck, Jonathan had wanted to build us a house. Preferably in California, but if not there, then he’d settle for here. And instead, Noah and I had talked about our plans. Things had been going so good with Si. And I wanted to add to it, do my own thing. Restoring historic homes was something nobody offered in Wahredua. Sure, there were people who could come in and do the job—people like Si. But it wasn’t the business. And Wahredua was growing. People were moving here, and some of them had money. There were lots of old houses that needed to be touched up, and some of those people with money wanted them to be done right.

And then the divorce.

Or not, as it turned out.

One thing, at least, had come out of this fucking disaster of a night: playing along with Noah wasn’t going to work. We’d gotten divorced—kind of—for a reason. And I wasn’t self-destructive enough to put myself through it again. Maybe if I talked to a lawyer tomorrow, we could get ahead of Noah, find some sort of way to make a claim on the house before Jonathan brought in the heavy hitters.

“Si,” I called as I headed down to the basement. “We’ve got to talk.” My boots thumped on the stairs. The furnace rumbled. “Things are seriously fucked up, and I don’t even know where to start. Remember that phone call I got yesterday—”

As I followed the stairs, the basement opened up in front of me. A tool bag. The work stool. Si.

Si on the floor.

Blood on the floor.

“Si? Si!”

I skipped the last two steps. My knees hit the concrete slab.

She was still breathing. Her eyes were half-closed. Her lips were blue.

I pulled out my phone and called 911.

6

They let me sit in the ICU because I told them Si was my mom.

She didn’t have anyone I could call, not unless you counted some people from NA. So it was just me and Si.

It was sometime past midnight. I couldn’t really add up all the hours between when I’d found Si and now, sitting here. There’d been the ambulance. The wait in the ER. Conversations that were recorded in my brain like they’d been shot under bright lights, the volume turned all the way up so I could barely hear what everyone was saying.

And now this. Quiet hours. The hum of machinery. Occasionally, a footstep, a low voice, the sound of a drawer on a bent runner. The overhead lights weren’t off completely, but they were turned low so that patients could sleep, and the papery curtains provided the illusion of privacy. There was a little nightstand kind of thing next to the hospital bed, and on it, somebody had put a plastic flower in a plastic vase. It was blue, the only spot of color against all the browns and beiges and creams. Si said blue was calming. She painted her bedroom blue. For a weekend. And then she said it made the room feel small, and so we painted the whole thing white again, and it took three coats.

I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them again, I was staring at the vinyl flooring. It was clean, no dust bunnies, nothing to make you think this place had problems. But little divots marked it, showing where things had fallen, where people had dropped things, where someone had fucked up.

Si’s eyes were all the way closed now. Her short hair stuck up on one side; that was the side where she’d been lying when I’d found her. It was like a kid’s hair, like she’d fallen asleep on the sofa and someone had carried her to bed. Her lips weren’t blue anymore, but they’d shaved the side of her head, and her face was the color of fresh plaster.

We’re hoping the ventilator will be short term, the doctor had said.

We’re going to try a medically induced coma, the doctor had said.

It was a heart attack, the doctor had said. But the real problem was that Si had hit her head. The words were traumatic brain injury and intracranial pressure and standard practice. And she’d asked me if I needed to talk to someone.

I slouched lower in my chair. I leaned my head back. I closed my eyes. The need to get…out. For a way out of this feeling. For a door I could throw open so I’d stop feeling like this.

I settled more firmly into the chair. I wrapped my hands around the arms.

Call Ed.