Six Feet Under (Mad Love Duet Book 1)

by Whitney Barbetti

  “My mom and I did. You needed more space, better stuff.” He stepped up to me and covered my one hand with both of his. “You're talented, Mira. I mean it. I don't want you to help me with jobs anymore—not because I don't think you're good. You're damn good. But you're not meant to steal and lie—even though you’re very good at both.” He gave me an amused look. “You're meant to create. And I'd much rather see you spend your hours with a paintbrush in your hands than watch you act a part that isn't you.” He picked up a brush with a fluffy end and opened my palm to rub it along my skin. “I want to watch you create. Will you do that for me?”

  I closed my hand around the brush and slid my fingers along the handle until they met his. “I will,” I promised him as my lips hovered an inch from his. “Thank you.” Those two words were wholly inadequate, but they were all I had to give him. Six was a hundred things, and I felt like I wasn't even ten things in comparison. Why he loved me, why he wanted me to move in with him, were questions I constantly wondered but was too afraid to ask; too afraid to upset the balance of who we were by holding a mirror up and asking him to explain why.

  “Turn on the music,” I said after pressing the softest kiss to his lips. “Let me create for you.”

  What I couldn't say with words, I'd say with paint. And so I began.

  It started with a woman's torso, marked with sets of two punctures repeatedly across her body. Six watched me in silence, bringing me water and snacks, but saying nothing as he watched me bleed onto canvas.

  Shortly after midnight, I started on the serpent. It wrapped around her torso six times, a green boa constrictor squeezing her from belly to neck.

  Around three in the morning, I painted her hand. Six had watched me paint the serpent with great interest, sitting on my stool when I'd needed to stand. He stayed awake the whole time, even as I added the littlest bits of detail to the scales. Then I drew the serpent's head, resting in the woman's hand. She wasn't holding it with fear, but rather she was caressing it. With her other hand, she was holding it close to her body, even thought it was squeezing the life out of her.

  And on the scales of the serpent, a design of repeated sixes, I'd written one word: love.

  When I was finished, dawn was cutting through the front window, pouring yellow light across the cloth-covered floor. I set the paintbrush down and Six took my hand, pulling me toward him. He turned me, so we looked at my painting together, a fusion of greens and blacks and reds, and then he pressed his lips at my ear. “Thank you,” he whispered, sending a shiver through my limbs. And I knew he wasn't thanking me for the painting but thanking me for what I'd shown him.

  28

  November 2007

  Two years later

  “This is weird.”

  “Why is this weird?”

  I sighed and closed the door to the car. “Because we never come here for holidays. This isn’t normal, for us. This is weird.”

  “You’re the expert on weird.”

  I elbowed Six’s arm and my joint met zipper, scraping the skin. I looked up at him with indignation. “You’re the expert on pushing me out of my comfort zone.”

  He looked down at me with those stupidly brilliant green eyes. “It’s Thanksgiving, Mira. There’s nothing weird about it.” He wrapped Griffin’s leash around his arm when she stood on her hind legs, wanting to rush to the door.

  I held up the pie I’d carried from the car. “This pie is made from a box. It wiggles. Your mom is going to be embarrassed you’re her son.”

  Six rolled his eyes at me. “My mother knows exactly who I am.”

  I stopped, and a few paces later, Six stopped too. “I don’t think anyone knows who you are.”

  He took the pie from me and brushed a hand over my hair. “I don’t think anyone knows who you are.”

  You know me best, I thought.

  He angled his head up the driveway to his mother’s front door. “Come on, let’s not keep her waiting.”

  Elaine opened the door before Six could, flinging her arms around her son.

  “Mom,” Six said quietly, squeezing her back. He handed her the pie when he pulled back. “Pie from a box,” he said, his lips lifting a smidge at the corner as he looked slyly at me.

  Elaine grinned up at her son, her smile stretching for miles. “My favorite.”

  Before Six could gloat to me, Elaine pulled me to her, wrapping me in a hug tighter than I was prepared for. Instantly, instead of feeling welcomed, I felt like an enemy. She unhooked Griffin from her leash, and Griffin bounded down the hallway before Elaine quickly followed her into the kitchen, where I heard her quietly admonishing Griffin for leaping on the counter top.

  Six pulled my jacket from my shoulders and wrapped an arm around me, pulling me into the kitchen after Elaine. “My mom loves box brownies, you should know she loves box pie too.”

  I thought of the pies I’d attempted in the kitchen—each one of them worse than the one before. Apparently, Brooke hadn’t rubbed off on me. Not even the visits to her house in the last couple years had helped. I’d barely mastered her pie dough, but the filling was another story.

  Elaine’s kitchen was filled with smells and sounds: turkey resting on the counter as steam billowed off it; classical music playing on an antique radio across the kitchen; the yeasty rolls Elaine placed in front of me; a timer going off at the stove. Six reached into the cabinet and pulled down three plates, as if he didn’t have to give it a second thought. I didn’t know much about Six’s father except that he wasn’t in the picture, so this was probably the first time in a while that more than two settings were needed for a holiday meal.

  Six tucked Griffin into the sun room off the kitchen with a large bone and then closed the glass door, which meant we could keep an eye on her in case she started eating the wicker furniture in there.

  “Do you want me to do anything?” I asked, feeling restless watching Elaine flit from one side of the kitchen to the other while Six set the table with silverware and napkins.

  “Oh, it’s all ready; just relax.” Elaine waved at me with a red checkered dish towel before flopping it onto her shoulder as she stirred whatever was in the pot on the stove.

  Six uncorked a bottle of sparkling juice and poured three glasses before setting the bottle on the table. He looked at me briefly, as if he knew I wanted to drink the entire goblet before anyone else had even sat down. Family dinners made me nervous. Family dinners when I wasn’t actually a part of the family petrified me. But we both knew that juice wouldn’t dull my nerves like alcohol would.

  Bowl after bowl, Elaine set food on the table, while Six carved the turkey. I felt as if I’d stepped into an alternate reality, one where families gathered around a wooden table filled with food to celebrate the holiday. Thanksgiving dinners with my mom had been much different.

  Placing a platter on the center of the table, Six took the seat on my left and placed his hand on my thigh, squeezing it gently. It was as if he’d taken a peek into my thoughts, saw how uncomfortable I was, and was trying to reassure me.

  Elaine lit long candles before taking the seat across from me. Reaching over the plate of turkey, she clasped Six’s outstretched hand. She held the other to me and I grasped it tentatively, just as Six took my left hand in his, bringing it to rest on the table.

  I thought of all the holiday movies I’d seen, with happy people praying before eating, saying words before their food as if it would make a difference to the experience. It baffled me then and baffled me in that moment still.

  I looked to Elaine, who smiled softly at me and Six in turn, and then bowed her head.

  “Let us pause before we eat,” she said, her voice soft and musical, “and think about the ones in need...”

  Six’s thumb grazed my knuckles.

  “…of food and shelter, and of love…”

  “…please bless us all, dear God above. Amen.”

  I mumbled an amen and instantly felt Six’s hand leave mine. I slipped my arm under the table
and flexed my fingers, feeling unsettled still.

  We’d had two normal years. At least, whatever constituted as normal for us. Moving in together had brought us some kind of peace—a ceasefire, perhaps. There were fewer outbursts, more visits to Dry Run, fewer trips for Six, and more time for me to work one-on-one with other women. I didn’t take them in anymore—I didn’t want to develop an emotional attachment as I had with Brooke. But San Francisco was a city full of people looking for someone to help them. Though I didn’t provide shelter anymore, I did provide a means to protect themselves.

  It was a new season of my life. A brand new Mira. I still behaved selfishly, more often than Six liked. But something about the permanence of my home with Six had settled something within me. I couldn’t remember ever knowing any kind of permanence before.

  Six grabbed my plate before I could stop him and loaded it up with everything on the table.

  “Mira, what did you do for Thanksgiving while growing up?”

  I turned to Elaine, my thoughts whirling around my head. Thanksgiving had always been just another day for me: neglect from my mother, canned beans or tuna in the cupboard. As I had grown up, it had still been just another day but the way I celebrated it had changed: booze and smokes and maybe bum an eightball off of whatever dealer I had recently befriended. I might have gone to the corner diner for a fuckload of pie after sunset, because that’s when it was always discounted.

  But I couldn’t tell her all of that. Or, I could. But I didn’t want to.

  “I usually ate a lot of pie.”

  Elaine smiled warmly and picked up her sparkling juice. She never made a comment about the change, from whiskey to something tamer. “Do you have friends? Family?”

  I mirrored her with the sparkling juice, picking it up and taking a more delicate sip than before. “No. Sally makes a really kick ass banana cream pie, though.”

  “Sally?”

  “The diner, the owner. Her name is Sally.” I took a larger sip of the wine, feeling like a total fucking imposter for eating all this home-cooked food when discount diner food would have sufficed, or the takeout that Six and I usually preferred.

  “Oh, I just love pie.”

  “Well,” I glanced at Six, feeling like I was monopolizing the conversation. “I actually made four pies.”

  Her eyebrows furrowed the way Six’s always did. “Four pies? Where are they?”

  “In the trash.” One of the fucking crusts had been pretty good, too. “I’m still learning,” I explained apologetically. I was trying so hard to be normal—by making those damn pies. But they were home in the trash, the middles liquid and the outsides hard. I think Brooke told me that meant the oven was too hot—but I’d followed the damn directions and still ended up with soup for pies.

  “Oh, I’ve never been much of a baker.” She waved her hands in the air. “My talents just never lent themselves to the kitchen.”

  She was trying to put me at ease. “I’m trying.” At so many things. It wasn’t driving me crazy—not yet—but the new season of me was beginning to wane a little. I was restless still. This was the longest I’d gone sober, with nothing to dull the heavy noise that still often surrounded me. It was the first time in my life that I thought toward the future and what that would bring. Normally, tomorrow was all I had time for. But I’d had two years of tomorrows that had stayed relatively the same; a routine. And the routine fit me like a sweater two sizes too small. I didn’t know what the season after this would be, when this was the longest I’d gone as an adult not hospitalized or reliant upon my mother.

  “So you made four pies,” Elaine continued.

  “And Six brought the jiggly one.” I threw a thumb out to him and backed up as he placed the full plate in front of me. Turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, rolls, green beans, cranberry sauce, roasted sweet potatoes and some broccoli salad.

  “That’s a lot of food,” I said, staring in awe.

  “You like to eat,” Six nudged me with his elbow, which reminded me of what I’d told him when he first made me breakfast.

  “You said you don’t have family here, Mira?”

  I wiped my mouth with my napkin and dropped it in my lap. Whenever I visited Elaine in the past, we talked about painting and about Dry Run—she’d never been, but was fascinated by the idea. But maybe there was something about holidays that made people talk about the ones who made them. “The only family I have is my mom, but we don’t exactly talk.”

  “Why’s that?”

  I looked briefly at Six, who was staring at me intently, clearly wanting more insight into my mom. He knew small things, blips in a conversation. But my mom only inspired violence within me, and I was trying to move past that.

  “We don’t have to talk about her,” Six said in a low voice but still loud enough for his mother to hear.

  Elaine looked surprised and opened her mouth to say something, but, wanting to spare her guilt for bringing it up, I said, “My mom has bipolar disorder.” I thought that would explain it enough that it would quiet Elaine. Mental illness was a hard thing for some people to grasp, the fact that someone might need medicine for their brain like another might need medicine for their heart.

  Six changed the subject, asking her about the electrical in her basement—which needed rewiring. They fell into discussion about it, deciding when it would work with Six’s schedule to come take a look at it.

  Something about how they talked reminded me of one of the many Thanksgivings I’d spent with my mom. How different the picture with her had been.

  “Ma!” I yelled from the living room. I was on my belly, facing the television. The picture was grainy, so I smacked the side of it a few times, hoping for it to level out.

  When she didn’t answer, I called for her again.

  Still nothing.

  Sighing, I got up from the floor and trudged down the hallway to her bedroom, my bare feet picking up lint and hair from my mom’s cats. I knocked on her door but didn’t wait for an answer.

  Shoving the door open, I saw my mom first, lying on the bed, wearing only a T-shirt. She had a pillow over her face, one arm hanging off the bed. Cautiously, I walked towards her, seeing her nightstand littered with things I knew were illegal. I picked up a prescription bottle and read the name. It wasn’t my mom’s.

  I looked down at her hand and that’s when I saw the needle in it. Instantly, panic seized my throat.

  “Mom?” I touched her chest, but I trembled so much, I couldn’t feel anything outside of my own body. My eyes roamed her skin, seeing a half a dozen red blisters on her arm, one of them the size of a quarter.

  “Mom!” I repeated, this time shaking her until her hand languidly came up and pulled the pillow from her face.

  Blinking over and over, she stared at me. “What the fuck, Mira?”

  She was fine. My heart galloped once in my chest before it slowly steadied. “You weren’t moving,” I said. “And your arm-” I pointed to the blisters.

  She turned her head and lifted her arm, blinking away the sleep as she stared. “It’s just a few blisters, Jesus. Get over it.” Her arm thumped back onto the bed, bouncing the pack of cigarettes and the lighter nearby.

  I watched her search out the pack and the lighter before she lit one with shaky hands. She closed her eyes after the first inhale.

  One eye opened and trained on me. “What? Did you think I overdosed or something?” Her voice was raw, her lips cracked.

  I just nodded, not sure what else to say.

  Rolling her eyes, she turned to her side and coughed twice. “Well, if I had overdosed, shaking me wouldn’t do jack shit.”

  Unsteadily, she sat up and shook out her arms. “If momma ODs, make sure you toss some ice water on me first.” She put the cigarette to her lips and sucked deeply. “And then,” she said in a high, squeaky voice, “you’ll want to slap me around.” She blew the smoke from her mouth and then rolled her head from side to side. “Don’t try to move me, that’s not going to help.”
>
  She pushed her hair away from her face, blinking at her alarm clock. “Seven? Why am I awake at seven?”

  I gripped my left wrist with my right hand, squeezing the bones beneath my fingers as I stood awkwardly next to her. “The Thanksgiving parade is on,” I said.

  “Sweet fuck,” she moaned, running bony fingers through her hair. “I’ll ask again, why am I awake?”

  I backed up a step. “I thought we could watch it.” Together, I added silently.

  “I don’t give a shit about the parade, Mira. I had a long night! Go!”

  “But I’m hungry.” My voice was soft, because I was ashamed for bothering her.

  “Get some cereal out of the cupboard.” She flung a hand towards me, motioning for me to leave.

  “But we don’t have milk.”

  “Jesus, Mira.” She set the cigarette in an ashtray and grabbed her head. “You don’t need milk to eat it! Just eat and leave me alone!” Her voice roared loud enough to rattle my bones.

  I left her room before she could start throwing things.

  When she came into the living room an hour later, she was wearing her favorite pale pink robe, worn down from age around her shoulders and waist. She wrenched her sash closed as a cigarette hung from her lips and a lock of hair escaped from her scrunchie. When she saw me on the couch, she paused. “Did you eat?”

  I nodded, sitting up a little straighter. I’d brushed my hair and teeth but still looked like a rag doll in last year’s Christmas pajamas, the legs inches too short for me. But her cats had peed in my laundry basket, and it was better to wear clothes that were too small than to wear clothes that stunk.

  “Good.” She continued into the kitchen and I heard the slam of cabinets and the refrigerator. “Mira, go down to the store and get some milk.”

  Milk. What I’d wanted with my cereal. “I ate my cereal dry,” I said, as if it would dissuade her from sending me out to the corner store on Thanksgiving morning.