“Do you want some medicine?”
Rainbow sat up abruptly. “My god, I can’t even think.”
Angeni started to panic, with flashbacks to the helplessness she’d felt when her mother was shot. Or rather, when she’d shot her mother. She still couldn’t get the language right.
“Should I call someone?” she asked.
Before Rainbow could answer, she opened her eyes with terrifying alarm, looked right at Angeni, and said, “Britt!”
Then she fell forward. Her head would have hit the coffee table if Angeni hadn’t caught her.
A ruptured brain aneurysm, that was what the doctors said. Half the time, they’re fatal. Rainbow was in that half.
Angeni had called Aurora immediately after calling 911. Aurora arrived before the ambulance, and the two women stood there before another dead mother. Rainbow had been complaining of headaches for a few days. Should they have known something this awful could happen? The doctors said they couldn’t have known, but they were so accustomed to carrying guilt that they added this to their load.
The members of Rainbow’s congregation chipped in to pay for a nice memorial service. She’d been cremated, and they spread her ashes at the park where they had done their gatherings. Everyone was so distraught.
After the service, an older woman approached the girls and introduced herself as Cheyenne. She had dark-brown skin, lines etched into her forehead and around her eyes and mouth. Her graying hair was in a thick braid that hung over her shoulder. Angeni remembered Rainbow talking about Cheyenne, referring to her as a wise Sioux elder.
“I know she was your mother, but she also birthed this community,” Cheyenne said to Aurora and Angeni. “I’ve always saidmotheris a verb. She mothered all of us.”
A dozen people had stood up to share words at the service, and all of them said something to this effect.
“She loved this community,” Aurora said.
“Maybe there is a way to keep it going,” Cheyenne said.
But Aurora and Angeni were too grief stricken to even consider what that would mean.
There wasn’t time to grieve properly. They had to survive. They didn’t tell the landlord what had happened, just stayed in the apartment as if nothing had changed. Aurora didn’t know enough to fully manage Rainbow’s clinic, but she tried, for a while. At first, clients continued coming, accepting whatever amateur massage Aurora provided, sometimes buying a painting too. But then their sympathy ran out, and it no longer made sense to keep the clinic. Without the distraction of running the business, Aurora fell into a depression so severe that she appeared catatonic some days. Angeni picked up as many shifts as she could at the natural foods store—both to offset the lost income from the clinic and to avoid being around Aurora. She loved Aurora, but the darkness of those days reminded Angeni too much of her mother.
Angeni made enough to pay rent and get groceries, thanks to her employee discount from the store and the manager giving her whatever expired items they were going to throw away each day. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Aurora said on several occasions. Angeni didn’t know what Aurora would do either. Angeni had learned to survive without her mother because she’d never really had a mother, not in the typical sense. She’d always been on her own in many ways. Aurora had been fused with Rainbow, the two of them closer than any two humansAngeni had ever seen. Angeni considered it her duty to mother Aurora now. Motheris a verb.She owed it to Aurora. She owed it to Rainbow.
In the years since she’d gotten off the pills, Angeni hadn’t thought much about them. But in the weeks and months following Rainbow’s death, they were there again, in the periphery of her consciousness, whispering to her about how they could take away her pain. Angeni smoked weed instead—too much but not enough to affect her daily functioning. Her manager, a guy with straggly hair and an ever-present hemp necklace, was her supplier. Whenever she was short on cash, he told her she could pay him in other ways, and Angeni knew what he meant. He was a nice guy, not a jerk, never mean. He was easy to please. She would go down on him in the back of the store, in his little closet-sized office next to the walk-in fridge, and he would be so appreciative that she didn’t even feel disgusting. She felt pleased, proud.
His name was Ted. He was thirtysomething but had the disposition of a teenager. Angeni lost her virginity to him shortly after her nineteenth birthday. She didn’t tell him he was her first and was relieved he didn’t ask. She didn’t love Ted, she was well aware of that, but she did enjoy sex. It gave her what the pills had—a brief exodus from life, a pleasure that felt almost transcendental. Some nights, they went back to his place, an apartment he shared with two guys who always offered her weed and a pint of the beer they’d brewed in their garage.
For Angeni, Ted was a way out, an excuse not to go home to Aurora and her sadness. She preferred Ted’s old, mushy mattress to sleeping next to Aurora in her dead mother’s bed. Ted took Angeni to backyard bonfires and bar meetups where she got high and drank and flirted with whatever men were there. Ted was never jealous—“I have no interest in possessing you, baby,” he said. It was a type of freedom Angeni thought Rainbow would have approved of. Rainbow had never had a dedicated boyfriend, but it was clear she was loved. The men in her life, labeled as “friends,” were doting and kind. They were all sobbing at the memorial service, as if they all believed they’d lost the love of their life.
Aurora never made Angeni feel guilty about the times she was away with Ted or whomever else. She was only thankful, always promising that she would get herself together “one of these days.” Angeni didn’t know if that was true. All these years, Angeni had wanted a mother like Rainbow. She’d envied Aurora. But now she saw the downside. The loss of a mother like Rainbow was so profound, seemingly insurmountable. Angeni longed for something she’d never had; Aurora longed for something she’d once had. Angeni thought that must be a worse kind of pain.
Painting brought Aurora out of her depressive state. It gave her a reason to get out of bed, and getting out of bed gave her a reason to change her clothes and eat a meal. When there was a job opening at the natural foods store, Angeni convinced Ted to hire Aurora. She wasn’t sure Aurora would be a great employee, but figured she could cover for her when she had bad days. Aurora was grateful for the job, comforted by the fact that Angeni would work alongside her. The world felt terrifying without her friend there.
Angeni discovered she was pregnant shortly after Aurora started working at the store. Angeni wasn’t the type to pay any real attention to her menstrual cycle. She hadn’t realized she was late. She discovered she was pregnant in very cinematic fashion—after feeling slightly squeamish all day, she became overcome with nausea while on a shift and had to run to the employee bathroom to vomit. She knew then, but bought a pregnancy test at the drugstore across the street on her lunch break to confirm.
She didn’t want to keep the baby. At this point in her life, she hadn’t even considered the idea of becoming a mother. It seemed like something far off, if it was going to happen at all. She knew she would never want to be the type of mother her own mother was, and if she had a baby at twenty, that was exactly what she would be.
She told Ted the baby was his, though she had no way of knowing for sure. There had been so many guys—guys she met at the store, guys who came to the store to meet her because they’d heard about her. Ted didn’t seem upset or excited. He took the news as if she’d just told him that she’d rearranged the grains aisle—mild surprise, a tinge of interest. He knew she slept around, but he didn’t bring up the other possible fathers. He wasn’t stupid, just simple.
He asked her if she wanted to keep the baby, and she was shocked by the question. “I’ll support you either way,” he said. The sentiment was sweet, but Angeni’s thoughts weren’t muddled by love for him. She could see that he would never be able to support her.
“I can’t be a mother,” she told him.
“Okay,” he said calmly. If he was relieved, as she expected him to be, he didn’t show it. It truly seemed like he would have accepted whatever fate she’d dealt him.
“I guess we need to find somewhere to, like, take care of it,” she said.
“I know someone who can help.”
