Playing with Fire

“Get out of here, you Devil’s child! Get out of my house! Out of my life!”

I stopped dead in my tracks.

“Look at your face!” she hissed. “Monster.”

I patted my face, realizing that sometime during my efforts to unlock the bathroom door, I’d discarded my ball cap. “The Devil has touched you, and now you are marked. Ugly and tainted, inside and out. You’re here to take my Courtney, aren’t you?”

“Grams, no. You don’t know—”

“I do know.” Her voice was low. Eerily calm all of a sudden. “Grace. Gracie-Mae. Quite the nuisance you are, Gracie. You were the reason she ran away. Did you know that? You were too much. Too loud, too whiny, too demanding. When she gave you to me, I looked at you and all I thought about was that I’d got myself a raw deal. A granddaughter for a daughter. I never wanted you. You took her away from me. You.” She pointed a shaky finger at me, her nostrils flaring, her lips turning blue, along with her ever-paling skin in the cold water. She was going to catch pneumonia, and I needed to get her out of there, but I couldn’t stop her stream of words. “You no-good Devil’s daughter! My only consolation is, God has already done the work for me. Punished you with this face. Paid you back for all your sins!”

She tilted her head up to the ceiling, smiling, as if touched by an invisible ray of sun. She pressed her eyes shut, a bitter chuckle leaving her mouth. “They all think that you did it. All of them. No one knows our little secret, Gracie-Mae. No one knows what I did that night.”

There was a loaded pause before she went in for the kill.

“I did it on purpose. Left the cigarette next to my nightcap and let it catch. I didn’t want to live anymore. Didn’t want you to either.”

A feral scream tore through my throat. I launched at the old lady, gripping the hem of her dress and hurling her out of the bathtub, dragging her out to the hallway and into her room to dry her up. I dumped her onto the flowery linen of her bed like a sack of potatoes, throwing a towel over her and patting her dry. She fought me, but I still took care of her.

Me and my ugly face.

Me and my dead mother.

The broken flame ring seared my skin, and I wanted to dump it on the floor and stomp on it a thousand times. Grandmomma was wrong. It never granted me any wishes. It just reminded me that I was an unwanted child.

Grandma Savannah blamed me for all of this. For Courtney crumbling down. For the Shaw household following in her footsteps. I was the responsibility Grams had been saddled with, a dead weight, someone she wanted to get rid of.

We wrestled on her bed, me on top, tears blurring my vision. I was almost done drying her up when I felt a strong hand on my shoulder.

“Go, Tex. I’m taking over.”

“But I …”

“Go.”

I turned around, running away, not daring to look him in the eye and see what was there. Everything about me was complicated and disheartening, and I wondered, for the millionth time, why West had stuck around when he could have had something so much better with any of the beauties who worshipped the ground he walked upon.

Selfishly—oh, so selfishly—I locked the bathroom door and took a shower, ignoring the filled bathtub not a foot away from me. There were soaked towels on the floor, toothbrushes, and soap scattered everywhere.

I focused on scrubbing every inch of myself clean under the scorching water, shedding the god-awful day from my body—my ugly, scarred face included.

Then I tiptoed to the hallway. I heard West behind Grams’ door, soothing her quietly to sleep, an unwarranted arrow of jealousy ripping through my heart.

I should be the one being comforted in his arms. He is mine.

I slinked into my room before the urge to start a catfight with my elderly, Alzheimer-suffering grandmother overtook me.

I put my jammies on and collapsed on my bed, staring at the ceiling. The tears ran freely down my cheeks. For the first time in years, I didn’t try to stop them.

After Grandmomma’s soft snores filled the hallway, I listened as West stomped about the floor. I heard him cleaning up the bathroom, mopping the hallway and the stairs, and going down to the kitchen to brew some coffee.

Listening to him living, breathing, existing in my realm by my side, was reassuring. He was a godsend. I couldn’t have handled Grams on my own tonight.

Eventually, it sounded like he ascended the stairs, put the two mugs of coffee down on the floor outside my room, and pressed his forehead against the door from the other side.