Page 36 of Jagged Line Paradise

Her liver is failing. Sometimes it seems she’s closer to death than she is to the top of the donor list. I suppose it serves her right for all the abuse she’s done to her own body over the years—but knowing that doesn’t make it easier to take care of her.

The last year with her has been hard—harder than I could’ve anticipated. I didn’t move back to the trailer with her because I wanted to care for her. Maybe that makes me a bad daughter to admit it, but it’s true. She put me through hell as a child and didn’t get a whole lot better as the years passed.

After my divorce, though, I didn’t have a choice. I had nowhere else to go when I finally realized how toxic my relationship with Anthony was—I left him, and it left me broke and basically homeless. I did care about him in a certain kind of way, but I held onto hope that he would change his ways and love me the way he pretended to for far too long. But at least I don’t have to watch the drugs slowly kill him anymore; instead, I watch the long-term effects of alcoholism slowly kill my mom.

Either way, I feel like I’ve been watching death for a decade. If the Canyon Carver had succeeded in killing me all those years ago, I wouldn’t have had to face all of this.

It’s all just so exhausting.

I suppose it would be easier if I could snuff out my sympathy all together, if I could hold onto the passionate hatred I had toward my mom when she was still drinking every day. She’s not anymore, though—her illness forced her into sobriety. She couldn’t even get onto the transplant list for a new liver until she was six months sober. She’s eleven months sober now and nowhere near getting a call.

I think she’s gonna die like this, sick all the time and denied the pleasure of her favorite poison to drown her pain. For her sake, I hope it happens sooner rather than later because she’s suffering, and I’m forced to suffer with her.

Everything feels like suffering now.

“Avalon.” I hear her call for me just before the sound of her vomiting.

I squeeze my eyes shut tight and take a deep breath, then another, before forcing myself back to her room.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she says as my eyes fall on the contents of her stomach puked all over the bedspread.

“It’s fine, Mom.”

This has happened often enough that it’s become routine—strip the bed, change the sheets, bag the soiled set, and plan to head to the laundromat later. I help her out of bed, and I get her to the folding chair jammed between the bed and the wall, which only barely fits in the gap.

“Were you painting?” she asks as I pull the sheets from the bed. “When will you show me what you’re working on?”

“It’s not ready yet.”

“That’s what you say every day.”

“And every day it’s true.”

“Are you selling anything?”

I force a smile to my face. “Yeah, Mom. I’m selling.”

It’s a lie.

I’ve sold one painting in six months and the meager profit was hardly worth the effort. Still, I keep trying—foolishly, I suppose. I wouldn’t dare tell my mother how I make money to pay the bills.

“That’s good, baby,” my mom says with a smile.

Those smiles were rare when I was growing up, a precious commodity. But since she’s sobered up, the smiles have almost become commonplace, a show of pride in what I’ve accomplished. She thinks her successful artist daughter loves her so much that she moved home to care for her. She doesn’t know—and doesn’t need to know—that I probably wouldn’t be here at all if the divorce hadn’t happened.

I’m not a terrible person, really, I’m not.

It’s just that I can’t seem to let go of the past. She was cruel and neglectful when I was growing up in her care. All the smiles in the world can’t make up for eighteen years’ worth of heartache, loneliness, and disappointment. I guess I can’t blame her for the last ten years of the same. I guess that’s on me for choosing to stay in Sunrise Valley when I had the opportunity to leave. Life hasn’t exactly turned out the way I would’ve hoped.

But I’m alive and I have my paradise sunsets.

I’m generally happy…I think.

Aren’t I?

I finish bundling up the dirty sheets and place a fresh set on the bed. This particular fresh set of soft blue sheets reminds me that I need to visit Robbie Mack this week. He gave me a few sets of bedsheets a few months back when I told him about the high turnover rate given my mother’s illness.

I’m grateful for the extra sets, though they weren’t exactly a donation. I do my job and he pays me—the sheets were just an added bonus for a weekend that was particularly taxing.

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