I never wanted to say goodbye to her, and I sure as hell never wanted it to be like this. She was meant to be around forever because nothing could defeat the power and strength of Maude Crew. When the doctors had updated us two hours ago on her condition, all the medical information they’d relayed had fallen on deaf ears, apart from their opinion that it was almost time…
I was going to have to say goodbye to my best friend and my rock. Before that, though, the priest from the church she went to was giving my grandmother her Last Rites.
I’d had a choice – be here or stay away and come and say goodbye afterward. I’m not going to lie, I’d been leaning toward the latter, but then I’d asked myself ‘what would Maude do’ twenty minutes ago and I knew she wouldn’t have missed it. She’d have wanted to be there for the rest of the family and to say goodbye to me properly. I might not be religious, but she was, so this would mean something huge to her. I couldn’t let her down.
So here I was. Listening as she was given her Last Rites. Looking at the body of a woman who was too frail to look like Maude, but who was my larger-than-life grandmother no matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise. I listened as she was given the final blessing, silent tears streaming down my cheeks.
I couldn’t let her go, I couldn’t even bring myself to say the word goodbye like everyone else was. One by one, they all went up and kissed her, whispering to her as they let her know she wasn’t alone.
I wanted to be strong and do it, too, but instead I sat there numbly staring at her face, only just aware of people moving about around the room.
But then the most beautiful sound filled the room, the unmistakable opening notes of Tears In Heaven coming from right next to me. Slowly, I looked to the side and saw Jarrod sitting on a chair beside me with his guitar, and then he started singing my grandmother’s favorite song. The guitar playing itself was flawless, but the way his deep voice carried the lyrics… there were no words for it.
Halfway through it, I had a moment of hope, something out of Hollywood, that she’d hear him playing and wake up. Even after it ended, I kept looking from the monitor beside her to her eyes, begging silently for her to just wake up.
I begged anyone who was listening for that miracle.
I begged even as Jarrod said to her, “I promised I’d sing it for you, Maude. I hope I did it justice.”
I begged even as we sat with her for two hours, still letting her know that she wasn’t alone.
I begged even as I kissed her goodbye and lay my head next to her hand on the bed.
Miracles happened, and Marianne Crew was too strong to give in.
Jarrod
12.43am
Katy was finally asleep, so I picked up my guitar and walked back down to Maude’s room.
Opening the door, I pulled up a seat next to her bed and started strumming on my guitar again. I’d been listening to the song for two hours now and I could see it being played in my head, so I hoped I could do it justice for her.
“Katy told me this was a special song for both of you, beautiful girl, so I figured I’d keep you company.”
And then I closed my eyes and started playing Cheer Down. I can’t say I was even close to Harrison or Clapton when it came to playing the guitar, but the lyrics to both songs were more important than anything. I could picture her nodding her hair, her big hair not moving with it, and saying it was the happiest moment of her life. I got what the lyrics to the song meant, and to me they were perfect for the relationship she had with her granddaughter.
When I got to the end, I went straight into my favorite Clapton song, Running On Faith. Right now it was the only thing I had - faith - so singing it was also my plea for faith to help us.
Unfortunately, the type of faith that I’d been thinking wasn’t to be, so instead I had to have faith that she was at peace and knew I’d keep her daughter and granddaughter safe and happy.
I sat with her in silence for twenty minutes once I was done, until a nurse came in to check her over. Giving her a smile, I walked back out and down the hallway to where Katy’s room was. There hadn’t been any need to keep her in the ICU after they’d come to their conclusions, and the family knew she wouldn’t have wanted it to be like that anyway, so they had moved her as close to her granddaughter as they could. If you asked me, it was still too far, but while we’d been in with her earlier they’d moved Perkins off the ward, so that was something at least.
Getting back into the uncomfortable recliner beside her bed, I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t switch off.
That’s why when I saw a doctor running down the hallway with two nurses behind him thirty-three minutes later I knew she was gone.
Katy was going to need me to be strong for her, so I spent the hours between then and when she woke up and heard the news letting it all out and getting myself together to be her rock.
Nineteen
Jarrod
Five days later…
I was just putting the cufflinks into the holes in my shirt and looking at the time on the clock in Katy’s bedroom when she got home. All she’d said as she left this morning was that she and some of the ladies were going to get something for Maude, nothing more than that. Seeing that we only had twenty minutes left until we had to leave, she was cutting it close.
And then she came up the stairs as fast as her bruised and battered body would allow, her arm still in a sling from where the bastard had dislocated her elbow. She was healing, she was alive, but physically and emotionally she was still very broken. The day that Maude died, I’d told her that I loved her and I was going to get her through this. After hearing her say she loved me back, even as she her heart was breaking over the loss of her best friend and grandmother, I promised her I’d get her through this and she’d given me that burden to shoulder for her by assuring me that she knew I would and could. Any man who loves his woman as much as I loved mine would move mountains for their woman, but her belief in their ability to do that was worth more than any word would ever be able to describe – and she’d given me that.
So, day by day, I was working at fulfilling that promise, even if it took the rest of our lives.
Throwing her purse onto the bed from the doorway, she walked quickly to the closet and pulled out a black dress.
“I need help,” she begged as she carefully pulled the sling over her head with a wince, panic now taking over. “I can’t get the zip on my dress done up with a bum arm. God, I can’t even get dressed or undressed in under an hour because of it.”
It was a slight exaggeration, but only by a few minutes.
Walking calmly over to her, my lips didn’t start twitching until I got to her. Seeing what she’d done from a relative distance was one thing, but it was a whole other thing up close.
“Don’t say a word,” she warned as I carefully pulled her top over her head and then gently moved it down her bad arm.
“I wasn’t going to say a word.” That didn’t mean that I didn’t have at least seventy of them to hand, just in case.
“It’s for Maude.”
* * *
Two hours later…
We’d driven to her parent’s house first, my family meeting us there before we set off for the church. It was only meant to be five cars that left the Crew’s house, but after I pulled up, car after car pulled up on the sidewalks around us.
When they’d gone to her apartment, they’d found a letter she’d written with what she wanted today to be like. In it she’d told them she didn’t want a funeral cortege, and that they were to do it, leave, and then have a party to celebrate. If they went against that, she would “haunt them and fuck up their hair every day for the rest of their lives”.
It wasn’t until we drove through town toward where the church was at the far end that we realized that almost every resident had come out to bid her farewell, all dressed in bright colors, standing with their right hands over their hearts and their heads bowed. There were banners with sentimen
ts like ‘Gone but not forgotten’, ‘The higher the hair, the closer to heaven’, ‘Miss you, Maude!’ and finally a huge banner that read ‘We’re glad you had so many best moments of your life. Loved you here and we’ll love you in heaven’.
Seeing it, Katy drew in a shaky breath and reached for my hand, holding on as tightly as she could as she watched people in the distance bow their heads as the first car carrying her parents reached them.
“She would have fucking loved this,” she croaked. “Especially that sign about the hair.”
Speaking of…
As we parked up in front of the church and got out of the vehicle, I looked at all the women from our families. “Are y’all sure about this?”
“It’s what she would have wanted,” they all said at the same time.
They were absolutely right about that. Somewhere up in the sky right now, Maude Crew was probably grabbing onto someone’s hand and laughing her ass off at the bouffants that every woman walking into the church had done to their hair.
* * *
I was playing Tears In Heaven again, this time as I stood beside her casket as it was lowered into the ground. All around me were huge bouffants swaying from side to side as every female who’d attended the funeral – including my Aunt Rita who’d extended her stay to say goodbye to a woman who’d made a huge impact in only a matter of hours – got caught up in the song and swept away by the words.
Beside them were the male attendees – all with their hair at a normal height – who were openly crying.
That’s when I knew, somewhere up in the sky right now, Maude Crew was definitely grabbing onto someone’s hand and laughing her ass off.
Twenty
Katy
Sixteen months later…
In the grand scheme of things sixteen months was nothing, but yet so much could happen in that nothing period of time.
It had started with Shane being charged with a long list of things including (but not limited to because he was a bad bastard) murder, attempted murder, assault, breaking and entering, and kidnapping. It had taken a year for him to be tried and sentenced, but he was finally behind bars and unlikely to get out.
The judge had felt strongly about the fact he’d inflicted injuries on a terminally ill woman which had led to a slightly more premature death and had then kidnapped and threatened to kill a one-year-old while the woman in question lay dying only feet away. He’d also taken offense to the fact that he’d done his best to inflict life altering injuries on me seeing as how he’d told the jury that he’d felt something pop under his hand while he was choking me and had assumed he’d broken my neck so I’d be “too paralyzed to go after him”. What he was too stupid to know was that it was only my larynx moving under his hand.
It turned out that he’d been the one breaking into my house, too, looking through things to find a thumb drive that had a recipe for a new type of LSD that Effie had stolen from him. Duke had bitten him on one occasion – the time when I’d found blood on him but couldn’t find any wounds – and after that he’d taken to locking him in the kitchen. That would be horrifying if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d bragged to DB and Garrett about having a protective body suit that he’d used after the bite because he wasn’t “a fucking idiot” - something which evidence proved he actually was. Apparently, he broke in wearing it with a t-shirt of mine tied around his wrist confuse him, and would then push him through to the kitchen, locking him in.
The whole case had left me with anxiety and I had PTSD nightmares from the assault, too. It had taken a year of therapy to help me learn to live with the PTSD, but the case had made the nightmares come back, and the anxiety that followed them was almost crippling until I was prescribed Paxil and given a prescription for Xanax if I needed to take it. So far I hadn’t, but it helped to know it was there if it became too much.
My inability to organize my things in a way that appeased my OCD at a time when I needed that order and control the most had also fueled part of my anxiety. I’d shuffled things around, tried different tactics for the order I put them in, shuffled again, taken shit out of all of my shelves and moved it around, but none of it had been right. One night, after a particularly bad day, Jarrod had told me he’d fix it and to trust him to do it right. The next day I’d come home to Isla and Luke’s twins working away in the living room, and immediately what they’d done soothed the rough edges inside me. The order wasn’t something I would have thought of, but it was perfect.
They’d enjoyed it so much that they’d continued to come over with their parents and had organized my bedroom, Elodie’s bedroom (who we still had for a week every three weeks), and the rest of the house. Through this, we became close to Luke and Isla, and I owed their twins a huge debt of gratitude. On the flip side of this, Isla said they owed me a huge debt of gratitude because the twins loved doing it and had calmed down, which was hilarious. But my anxiety became more controllable thanks to what they’d done, and that meant I hadn’t had to take the Xanax for it – something which meant a huge deal to me. Then Jarrod had moved in and the twins had begged to come back to help merge our belongings together, so even that had been a relatively stress less event.
The other big change for my family was that Effie had turned up at my parent's house the day of Maude’s funeral looking broken and devastated. She’d told the family that she was going to get help and had apologized to all of us for what had happened. Unfortunately, even for Leo and Neo, it was too little too late. It wasn’t just that we’d lost Maude months earlier than we were going to, it was so much more than that. As if the death of an amazing woman wasn’t enough, she’d taunted Shane with the fact she’d hidden the drive in something we had and he’d never get it back, and she’d put her daughter in danger, an innocent one-year-old who’d had the fortune of having a family who’d loved her when her mother hadn’t. Apparently she’d gone to rehab and was back at school studying for something, but I had no interest in what she was studying for or what she was doing anymore.
Last month, on the day that Perkins had finally, fucking finally, been sentenced, Jarrod had given me an envelope with printouts of our tickets to Jamaica. Ren had given us both eight weeks off, so we flew into Kingston, stayed a week, traveled to a place called Discovery Bay, went to Negril, traveled to Montego Bay but only stayed two days because of the tourists, then we’d driven to Ocho Rios staying outside it in a rented house for three days, and had then driven back to Kingston via Fern Gully. Last night we’d been up at a place called Strawberry Hill, and in a couple days we were going to the Blue Mountains for three days. After that we had a list of places we still wanted to go to, and we had the time and a car so we were going to try to see as many of them as we could.
It was a whirlwind of activity and excitement, and I was loving every second of it. That said, even with every beautiful part of Jamaica that I’d seen so far, I felt most at peace and comfortable in Port Royal. We’d made it our base and because the owner of the hotel we were staying in was a friend of Gloria’s twin – who didn’t have anything bright pink on whenever I saw her, and in fact looked fucking phenomenal in everything she wore like her sisters did – they held a room for us to come back to whenever we needed it. We also spent a lot of time with Rita whenever we were in Kingston, and I’d finally gotten to meet her daughter. All I could say was that she looked exactly like her mother and had a personality similar to Maude’s – I wished Rita the best of luck with that.
And I needed it badly.
I’d sat on the shoreline of Kingston Harbor last night, trying to hear the bell that had been in the city before it was swallowed by the sea. Many of the residents swore they still heard it ringing under the water some nights, but so far I hadn’t been able to. While I’d been sitting there, I’d thought over some of the stories I’d read about the earthquake that had taken half of the city in 1692, and I thought about three of the graves in the church's graveyard here.
An archaeological team had found the bodies of
two children while they’d been on a dive years ago and had buried them together at the church. There were claims that they’d found them wrapped around each other, but only the people who’d brought them to the surface would ever know the truth of that. Regardless, they now had a beautiful headstone and a grave that was looked after by many of the residents of the city, and it had been decided that all the other bodies still underwater in the city would remain there, using the remains of it as their graves.
There was also the grave of a man who’d been sucked down with it when half of the city collapsed into the sea, but through some miracle, the suction that had dragged him down had broken and it was said he was “spat up, back onto the land”. There was a museum with some artefacts from dives to the remains, but it was the counts of the tragedy and the graves that had the most impact for me because it was a catastrophe and act of nature that had ugly results, ones we couldn’t see up on land, but miracles had happened out of it.
There was also the fact that Port Royal was now joined to Kingston by a long highway called the Norman Manley Highway, which had been built to allow traffic from the airport to get into the city. Originally, there had been small islands dotted between them, but it was claimed that they’d sunk ships between them and covered them in rocks, sand, dirt and tarmac to create what was once known as the Palisadoes.
The whole area had me hooked, and it was crystal clear why the Klines felt the way they did about the place. Maude would have loved it, even though in the heat and sun her hair would have wilted.
This morning Jarrod had brought me out to an island called Lime Cay. We’d woken up and caught a small boat out here, enjoying the peace and quiet of the short ride and island once we’d arrived. At the weekend, it was surrounded by yachts and boats with loud music, lots of alcohol and laughter, but right now it was deserted and we had it to ourselves.
Talk Flirty To Me: Cheap Thrills Series Book 4 Page 21
