Pieces of Eight

by Whitney Barbetti

  “Of course it is; I made it.” Look, Dr. Brewer. Just complimented myself. “Try the chocolate one.”

  She peered at it curiously. “I don’t remember this one?”

  That’s because I came up with it myself. “It’s chocolate stout cake with whiskey buttercream.” It was something Six could appreciate, with his deep love for beer and whiskey. “I haven’t tasted them, but Marco assured me they are delicious.”

  “Because you’re an alcoholic?” she asked.

  Say it louder for the people in the back, Vicky!

  “Yup. Totally.”

  Her eyes flicked down me, and she picked up the cupcake, biting into it. “Oh wow. William will love this one.”

  Of course he would. “The third one is the red velvet you requested.”

  “Oh, I can’t eat another bite. It’ll go straight to my hips, and my mother won’t be able to lace up my dress if my hips are giant.

  I wanted to laugh at her. Her hips were about as wide as her head, which was to say they were tiny. “Kids will do that anyway,” I said.

  Victoria shook her head. “Oh, I’m not having kids.”

  “No?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. “I assumed William would want some.” I had to stop myself from calling him Six.

  Victoria lifted one delicate shoulder. “He might. But I don’t.” She bit into the third cupcake. “I had my tubes tied a few years ago.”

  The news surprised me. “Does he know?”

  Victoria chewed slowly, eyes a little wide. She regretted telling me she had her tubes tied. I heard her audibly swallow, and she averted her eyes before saying, “Yes.”

  Liar. I wouldn’t call her out on it, but it still surprised me that she hadn’t told Six and that they hadn’t discussed it at all.

  “What about you? Don’t you have your showing in a few days?”

  I did not want her to go. “Yes.”

  Victoria picked up her water and sipped it hesitantly, as if I’d slipped poison into it. Probably should have. “I’ll see you there.”

  “Just you?” I asked.

  “Just me.” Ugh, hearing her use the word “just” was more annoying than anything else she did. “William has a few last-minute things before our wedding.”

  My sigh of relief was nearly audible.

  22

  Two nights before the showing, Jacob helped me lug my bed up a narrow set of stairs to the landing outside of my new apartment. “Come on, big guy,” I told him as I supported the bulk of the weight and he guided at the top.

  “Big guy?” he asked between huffs. “I don’t have any muscle tone.”

  “I’m glad you said it.”

  Jacob scoffed and let go of the end of the mattress, sending me backwards into the bannister. “Jesus, are you trying to kill me?” I asked him between laughs.

  “You’re calling me a wimp,” he said and grabbed the top of the mattress. He wasn’t angry; he was used to my teasing.

  I waited until we were safely on the landing before speaking again. “When I first met you, I almost asked you where Scooby was.”

  “Scooby?”

  “Yeah, as in Scooby Doo.” It took a minute for it to click and awareness to spread over his face.

  “You thought I looked like a dog?”

  “Jesus, Jacob.” I dug my keys out of my pocket and unlocked my apartment door. “No, you look like Shaggy. Scooby’s sidekick.”

  He brushed his brown and straw colored hair away from his eyes. “I do?”

  “Yes.” I grunted as I guided the mattress into the tiny apartment and shoved it against the wall. “Tall and lanky and a little awkward. Don’t be self-conscious about that,” I quickly added. “It’s quirky. I like it on you.”

  “Where’s the rest of the place?” he asked, spinning around one of the three-hundred square feet I could afford.

  “This is it. It’s a studio.”

  He stepped into the kitchen which was more a cabinet and a narrow stove and mini fridge than an actual kitchen. “It’s tiny.”

  “I’m tiny.”

  “Yeah, but Griffin.”

  I stepped over to the window that overlooked the garden. “There’s space out there. A community backyard, so we all share it. She can lounge out there and,” I pulled open the door off of my bedroom, “there’s access to it here.”

  “Those stairs look a bit precarious. I don’t think Griffin can climb them easily.”

  “Quit raining over my parade, dude. That’s what the regular stairs are for.” But he had a point. Griffin was aging quickly. The studio worked for me and was within my budget, but I envisioned lots of carrying my giant dog up and down the stairs. “I’ll figure it out,” I said, because I had to. Because I wanted to.

  It was my first place since becoming sober. In some ways, Brooke’s home had been a halfway house for me, transitioning me to my own adult life.

  “Where will you paint?”

  “I don’t have much besides my bed and a nightstand. I’ll have plenty of room. Maybe here,” I said, stretching my arms across the wall beside my ‘kitchen’.

  “I can see it.” His hands were on his hips as he gazed around the apartment, taking it completely in. “It’s gonna be great.”

  “There’s the positive thinking I need.” I playfully slugged him in the arm. “Wanna help me get the rest of it?”

  Later, Jacob and I curled up on the end of my mattress with warm mugs of tea, a documentary about whales on the television. Everything was so quiet, even the birds outside had ceased their morning songs. And that was when it hit me. This was a new beginning, after another pause.

  In two days, I’d have my showing. I’d come back here alone, unless one of my friends invited me out. The fact that I had friends, a showing, a place that was my own—not funded by my mother or by Six—hit me then. It’d only taken me thirteen years to support myself.

  I did this. Yes, Six had helped me. But after I’d pushed him away, I could’ve fallen back into indulging in all the things I did pre-Six. I’d had to make the choice not to. And for so long, I thought I’d been helpless to my mind and its decisions, thinking of my body as merely a host for my madness.

  But I wasn’t a host to my madness or a spectator to my own life. All I’d needed was to make the decision to do it, and then actually do it.

  “What’re you thinking about?” Jacob asked, when I thought he’d been engrossed in the documentary.

  Rubbing my lips together, I tried to keep my voice even. I wasn’t in the mood to cry, to lapse into any kind of emotional discharge. “If you’d told me thirteen years ago that’d I’d be here, I’d never have believed it.”

  “I can’t agree with you, because I didn’t know you thirteen years ago.”

  “You knew me ten years ago.”

  “And you’ve come a long way since then.”

  “I used to believe that our present was defined by our past. That the things we said or did the day before colored our tomorrow. That choices weren’t possible, not when you’d made so many mistakes.”

  “Choices were always there. It was a choice for you to stay stagnant and reckless. It was a choice to not choose sobriety.”

  “I know that now,” I said. “But I guess, for the longest time, I was just waiting for my next fuckup. As if it was inevitable and couldn’t be changed. But I made the choice to stop drinking, to stop taking drugs. To stop hurting myself—at least with blades. I didn’t always stick to those choices, and I still feel the itch for them. I think they’re as ingrained in me as a muscle now; but that muscle is slowly atrophying.”

  “‘I never think of what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.’”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Buddha,” Jacob said sheepishly. “He’s a smart guy.”

  “Why do you know so much about Buddha?” I asked. “You use his quotes all the time.”

  “When I was a kid, I was depressed. I didn’t have any external reasons to be depressed: I was privilege
d, I was sheltered. On paper, I wanted for nothing.” He leaned back on the bed, closing his hands over his chest. “My dad was working with borderline patients and learning something called Dialectical behavior therapy, DBT.”

  “What does borderline mean?”

  “Borderline personality disorder. Anyway, one of the more effective treatments was DBT. It wasn’t just useful for borderlines, but people with depression, too.”

  “Huh. And how does that relate to Buddha?”

  “A lot of the mindfulness practice is based on Buddhist meditation. Mindfulness is one of its core ideas.”

  “What the fuck does mindfulness even mean?”

  “You know,” he bobbed his head back and forth. “Like meditation, but you’re focusing on the present moment while still being aware of your thoughts and feelings.”

  “So it’s not like a bunch of machines hooked up to your head, monitoring your brain activity?”

  He laughed. “No. DBT isn’t like that. It’s a kindness, really. Being kind to yourself.”

  I thought of my last appointment with Dr. Brewer. “Like telling yourself you did a good job on something that’s pretty fucking silly?”

  Jacob gave me a weird smile. “Did my dad ask you to do that?”

  “Yeah. So I’ve been high-fiving myself all week for doing stupid stuff, like not burning loaves at work and remembering my keys when I leave the house and not dissolving into a pile of warm goo when Brooke told me she was engaged.”

  “Well, good job then!”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “I don’t think it’s working yet.”

  “It probably isn’t. It’s not instant. But replacing a few of your negative thoughts with productive ones instead might help you adjust your mindset.” He grabbed our tea and set it in my miniature sink. “And it might even help you to stop being so damn hard on yourself.”

  “Sometimes,” I told him, “it feels like I’m talking to a mini-Dr. Brewer.”

  His pale cheeks flushed from that. “I guess I’ve learned a thing or two from him.”

  A knock on my door sounded and my eyes shot to the microwave. “It’s nine,” I told Jacob. “Who the hell would be here?”

  I poked my head outside to make sure Griffin hadn’t escaped or something, but no, she was lounging in a pile of brown grass, lazily trying to catch flies with her mouth.

  “Who is it?” I asked at the door.

  “It’s your mother.”

  23

  After muttering a swear word, I swung the door open.

  She made a small noise in her throat, causing me to lift my head. Oh Christ. I did not need to deal with my mother today, especially after a mind-numbingly emotional week.

  “Mother.”

  She was leaning against the wall opposite my door, petite and elegant despite the slouch. She pushed away from the door and reached her arms out for me. I side-stepped them, closing the door behind me as I stepped into the hallway.

  “Mirabela.”

  “Why are you even here, Mom?”

  It wasn’t the most welcoming I’d ever been, but I wasn’t feeling all that gracious. I’d considered our last phone call our final goodbye.

  She wrung her hands together and I was annoyed all over again that she’d somehow found her way to my house only to stand here and emit her nerves.

  “Go right on ahead. I’m sure you have shit to say and you might as well get it over with.”

  She bristled. “You have every right to be angry with me,” she began.

  “Angry?” I asked. “I am not angry. I’m indifferent.” Which I knew was much worse. “How’d you find me?”

  “I found your last address. Brooke, I think it was? She gave me your address.”

  Yet another consequence of my keeping Brooke in the dark about my mom. She didn’t know I wouldn’t have wanted this.

  “Mirabela,” my mother said again.

  “Just Mira.” Oh, oof. I felt that. “I don’t go by that name.”

  “Mira. I want to apologize for how I treated you, but I’m afraid any apology I offer will be too little too late.”

  “Well, you’re right. So if that’s all you came here to say, you can walk your ass out the door right now.”

  “Will you let me explain?”

  I flung my hand up. “By all means! You’ve searched all over the city for me. Might as well say your piece so I can move the fuck on.”

  She winced but spoke anyway. “When I was fifteen, I was put in a psychiatric ward. I spent one hundred and twenty days in there. I came out changed, but not healed.” She cupped her hands around her purse, clutching it like someone was about to rob her right there in the hallway. “When I became pregnant with you I started behaving like I should. Like an adult.” I refused to look at her. “When you were born, I was so excited. You were beautiful and so precious to me. But then you started crying. You had colic and you didn’t sleep, and suddenly I started to…” her voice trailed off and she sipped her tea. “I started to resent you. I’d gone off my meds while pregnant with you and never went back on them after you were born. I should have.”

  I didn’t say anything; I just kept staring forward at her. The woman of my childhood had looked skeletal, emaciated. This woman had a full face, cheekbones. Now that we weren’t in the gallery, where my emotions had been numbed by shock, I could take her in.

  “I lied to you. Your father was out of the picture long before you were born. But I needed someone to blame, and I blamed you. It wasn’t right. But I did it. I was not a good mother. I left you alone. I ignored you. One time, when you were two or three, I forgot about you for an entire day, because I was so high that I couldn’t think about anyone but myself.”

  I didn’t want to hear this. I shook my head, but she kept talking.

  “When you were four or five, I knew that when you looked at me, you saw who I really was. Children are supposed to look at their mothers with love. When you looked at me, you looked at me with sadness. You were five years old and cleaning up my puke with too many paper towels.”

  I remembered that. Remembered her yelling at me for the waste. Funny that she remembered it was ‘too many paper towels,’ as if that was more significant than the ‘five years old’ part. “I don’t need a recap of how you failed me as a parent. I remember.”

  “When you left the house as a teenager, I was relieved. I couldn’t live with my daughter, my own flesh and blood, looking at me like the piece of shit I was.”

  Well, she had that right. My skin itched. “Can we do this another time?” I asked, exhaling loudly. “I need a nap.” I didn’t. I needed her the fuck out of my apartment.

  She paused, seemed to weigh her options. “I heard about your gallery. Would you like me to come?”

  Everything I did was a choice, and for all I’d improved there were still things I refused. I couldn’t fall over my mother anymore. “Please, do not come. If you feel genuine remorse for the way you treated me as a child, please do not come to my gallery on a night that’s important to me.”

  “I understand,” she said. “I hope, maybe one day we can figure things out.”

  I only shrugged noncommittally. I’d built a graveyard in my heart where my mother was concerned. I couldn’t plant flowers there, not when the ground was still too soft.

  “Goodbye,” I said, and this time it felt real. It felt final.

  On the eve of my showing, I went to Elaine’s home, to soak up one last bit of wisdom before laying my heart bare for strangers to see. I needed to borrow someone else’s mom, to replace the one I’d been given.

  The cab dropped me off and sped away, leaving me walking the sidewalk to her home in the dark. One lone streetlamp flickered at the end of the street, but otherwise the only lights came from inside the houses.

  It struck me then, as I stood in her cement driveway, surrounded by cold air, that I was still very much alone. Six had called me a Cecaelia, half human and half octopus. I knew that octopi were solitary creatures, roaming the oc
ean floor and hiding in rocks and digging burrows. I supposed that was my destiny.

  I wasn’t sad about my loneliness. Before Six, I’d existed by not attaching myself to another person. I knew it was dangerous for me, for my mental stability, because people left me.

  But Six never had. I’d left him. He’d been there through the dark. And instead of pulling me into the light, he’d held me in the dark, letting me choose the light for myself. As much as I had hurt him, he’d stayed there, by my side. He’d promised me we wouldn’t have an ending. But we did.

  I heard steps behind me and turned, slowly, coming face to face with the man himself. It was as if my thoughts had conjured him up.

  “Six.”

  He didn’t say anything at first, just walked into my space like he belonged there. He stared at me in the dark, hands in his pockets. “What are you doing here?”

  I was encroaching on his territory. She was his mom. She’d given him life. But Six had given me the same. And seeing him again, so soon after the last time, when we’d had our cease fire, was digging a scalpel through a gaping wound.

  “I just wanted to see her.”

  “Why?” he asked. There was no malice in his voice, just curiosity.

  “Look, are we going to fight for custody of your mom? Because you’ll win. Note the use of ‘your’ in that sentence.”

  “We don’t have to fight for her,” he said, and sounded as resigned as I felt. “We don’t have to fight at all.”

  I tried not to dissect those words too much. I looked away, up to the moon. I laughed, a choked sound. “I can’t believe you’re getting married in a few weeks.”

  “Is the thought of me getting married really so surprising?”

  I turned to look at him. “Yes. One, because Victoria claims you’re not close to your family. But you are. She doesn’t know about Andra and your mom—yet they know about her? Why? It makes no sense.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “How can you say that? How can you say your mom doesn’t deserve to know the woman you’re marrying? Are you different with her? Is that why she calls you by your name?”