Bring me home

Don’t call. Don’t call. Don’t call.

Shea twisted and squeezed the small leather book in her grip.

For the love of God, don’t call.

She slouched in her chair; her phone sitting face down on the glass table in front of her.

It’s probably not her number anymore, anyway.

She tossed the black notebook onto the table next to her phone before springing to her feet.

I need some air.

Her hand settled over the familiar pain in her left hip. She felt along her chair back until her hand rested on the antique brass handle of her cane. She sighed.

“Another cane day,” she said into the empty room.

Shea was seventeen when the pain started — sharp and infrequent at first, easy to ignore. After a few months she told Miss Avalene it kept getting worse.

“You still have to do chores, lazy child.”

Shea’s foster mother squinted at her over her wire glasses and sighed. “Come, let me look at you.”

Miss Avalene lived like she was still in the hills on her father’s chicken farm back in St. Lucia. Even though the grey that started at her temples had long overtaken her hair, the disciplined woman worked each day as hard as she did to get off the island.

“I’ll rest when God brings me home,” she’d say when Shea asked why she never took a day off.

Where’s that coat?

The evenings were colder this September than Shea remembered last year. She shifted her weight onto her cane as she slid her feet into her sneakers. Bracing herself on the door handle she slid her left arm into her jacket sleeve, then switching to her right. She braced herself for the frigid air as she pulled open the heavy door of the Oakwood bungalow Miss Avalene left her.

Shea knew Miss Avalene wasn’t her real mother, but the stoic woman kept close anything she did know about Shea’s birth. Eventually, Shea learned not to ask. At fifteen, when Shea got a summer job cleaning at St. Joseph, Miss Avalene let slip that was the hospital where Shea was born. Shea barely reacted; she knew that was all she was going to get.

C’mon Shea. Keep moving.

The tip of Shea’s cane clicked against the cracked cement. She struggled to pick up her gait against the desperate urge to turn back.

Five more blocks.

Shortly after Shea’s nineteenth birthday, Miss Avalene started slowing down. Her eyes dulled and stared out from deep sockets at Shea. Her skin’s lustre became dull and grey. Shea begged for the stubborn woman to visit a doctor.

“Wat a go do dat fuh?” She snapped. Shea bit her lips shut. Miss Avalene must have been livid to let herself slip into creole. But it wasn’t long before she was too weak to protest.

“These doctors just want to make you sick,” Miss Avalene looked smaller than Shea ever thought possible. “Look at all these machines they got on me.”

“Stage four leukaemia. Three months, if she’s lucky.”

Shea’s right hand tightened into a fist. She remembered the blood rushing to her ears, the ringing, the spinning feeling. Her body was numb. All she could do was blink as the doctor shook his head.

“We’ll move her to palliative care at the end of the week.”

Shea pulled her jacket collar tighter around her throat. She blinked the tears from her wind-burned eyes. She stopped. Resting on her cane, she stood on the sidewalk outside Miss Avalene’s favourite market. It was owned by a family from Soufriere, and Miss Avalene insisted on walking the extra ten minutes to shop there instead of the grocer up the street.

Three months had passed since Shea buried the complex woman. Shea was her only heir, getting the house and about $20,000.

The storefront was dark even though it was only 8pm. Shea limped up to the window. She put her hand up to the glass to see inside.

Empty.

Shea crumpled. She tried to breathe in, but a wail escaped from her throat when she parted her lips. And that was it. Collapsed on her knees on the dirty cement on Eglinton Avenue, Shea stopped fighting. She screamed into her hands, letting her cane drop to the ground.

“You couldn’t just go to the doctor like I asked,” Shea shouted, slamming her fist against the glass.

“Now look, I’m alone.”

Shea reached in front of her for her cane. Trails of blood ran down from her knuckles to her fingertips. She planted the cane and pulled herself to her feet.

Okay, let’s get you back home.

Shea flung the bungalow door open.

Miss Avalene wouldn’t want you to call.

She snatched the little black leather-bound book from the table. She flipped it open to the earmarked page.

Ernestine Joseph. Shea’s mother.

She leaned against the chair as she carefully dialed the phone number Miss Avalene scribbled in her address book. She hesitated for a moment, then hit dial.

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice.

“Mom.” Shea whispered.

“I ain’t nobody’s mom. Don’t call here again.”

The line disconnected.

I shouldn't have called.

Shea stared down at the phone in her hand. The blood from her ravaged knuckles thick and dark.

I wish you were still here.