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Sometimes, Camila kind of wants to pull out the garbage can, into the back garden, and scream into it for about an hour. Maybe she’s exaggerating. Maybe she’s not.
She’s spent her life trying to protect Luz from what you realise when you peel back the layers. She’s done things that she regrets, things that she’ll take to her grave, things that got her knuckles bloody, things that should have, things that have gotten her branded as a whole variety of cruel nicknames. It’s all about being a mother, it’s all about realising that there’s a beating heart that relies on yours.
It’s about learning that even if you want to walk out and throw yourself in the creek that runs behind your house, close to that weird abandoned one that you swear you see silhouettes in the cracked windows of, you can’t do that because you’re forty-five and not fifteen.
But she’s so, so tired of making choices that she thinks are good, or at least ones that she can defend in a court of law, if it comes down to it.
Manny, to her, is:
- her husband
- Luz’s father
- her first and last boyfriend
- the man she married
- the man she watched die
- unfortunately, the direct cause of a lot of her frustrations
Luz constantly told her how she’d get along with Eda, so she doesn’t know how to feel when she says that she’s surprised that she does, but she ends up spending a lot of nights sitting in Eda’s kitchen, learning about what you cook on the Boiling Isles, and hearing stories about Luz wrestling with King for stuffed toys. It’s nice.
It feels a little like before Manny died, like when they’d laugh about Luz’s little schemes, when they’d be on their knees, scrubbing crayon off the walls because her parents were coming for dinner, and of course, it was right before Thanksgiving that Luz decided to redecorate.
Eda doesn’t pressure her, doesn’t push her into saying things that she doesn’t want to, doesn’t demand that she supplies it herself, doesn’t treat her like she’s going to break into pieces if Eda accidentally uses the word dead about something that’s not even a person; something like a houseplant that died of thirst. Eda doesn’t use euphemisms; Eda doesn’t skirt around the word. She just picks up the pot, and that terrifying feathered worm thing owl house guard child son god (??) Hooty is already curling around her waist, trying to eat it, while Eda’s announcing that she’s a mass-murderer of gifted plants.
It's nice, and it’s something that she didn’t realise she’d been missing until she met Eda. Her colleagues don’t talk about Manny, and get quiet when she mentions him, and she’s sure that it’s well-intentioned, but she doesn’t even talk about him around them because they never got to know him and all she can think about is how they should have.
How she’s never seen someone lit from within quite like him, and his smile at everyday things like gas being on sale or Camila getting off early and asking him if he’d like to go drive to a crappy diner after picking up Luz was like he won a contest.
She thinks that she could talk about Manny with Eda, and the thought slides into her mind with as much ease as Eda’s slicing through something metallic and scaly, with the same smoothness as Eda’s raspy voice as she’s giving instructions on how Camila can replicate her, even though Camila’s never seen anything this iridescent that hasn’t contained a potent neurotoxin.
It’s kind of just a thing that happens, a thing that she thinks about. It’s not some grand revelation, it’s not followed by dramatic music. It’s just there, just like Eda is. Just like how she’d expected Eda to fight her, to be stubborn like Darius was when she brought up shared custody between the Human- and Demon Realm. Of course, he eventually agreed, but he’d had to fold his arms over his chest and give her a glare that said that he didn’t approve, first.
He had to be a smug little prick, a petty bitch. But she’d ended up winning, because later that night, he crept across the living room to inquire about her casserole recipe.
Now, she’s pouring (ha) through Eda’s arsenal of alcohol, and Eda’s either humming in approval or aggressively shaking her head each time her fingers ghost against a bottle. After a couple, Eda, considerably drunker than Camila, blurts it out.
“Did you watch your husband die, Camila?”
Camila has spent a lot of nights crying. She’s spent a lot of nights on the bathroom floor, asking a God that she knows isn’t listening and doesn’t look like her why she’s there, why this is happening to her. She’s spent a lot of mornings sitting on the edge of her bed with her head in her hands, spent a lot of afternoons pinching the bridge of her nose as she pours over bills at the kitchen table.
Bills that she’s going to shove into an oil drum out back and burn, so Luz doesn’t find them, because she’d started to read and she’d started to understand the concept of a medical bill, of being in debt to someone. Of losing houses and assets and custody. It’s because some prick at school told her, bullied her about it.
Camila doesn’t support attacking children, but she does support thinking about throwing herself across the hood of her car when she’s casually mentioning to the brat’s mother that maybe she should take a little chat with her mistake of a son. Maybe she says something about how she should have swallowed, maybe, maybe. Maybe she says it under her breath in Spanish and gives the racist fuck a reason to stare, maybe she yells it. She’s the only one in the parking lot, aside from the whore, so she doesn’t really give a shit about what she does because she’s already going to get in trouble so she might as well go for a homerun.
A couple of years later, the same woman asks if she’s considered dating again, because her brother just divorced his wife. Camila very pointedly doesn’t mention that she’d seen on Facebook that the brother was in his fifties and his wife graduated from high school six years prior. It’s the kind of stuff that you yell at car windows when you want someone to come out and fight you. It’s the kind of shit that you want to leave to marinate.
She buries herself in her work because she doesn’t have to think about finding her husband dead when they were on their way to Target when she’s cleaning out an abscess on the ass of a shih-tzu.
Camila ends up, in the middle of the night, sacrificing the version of her that spends more time crying than smiling, slashing straight down at her while she sleeps. She does it because that’s how her feet are going to keep hitting the floor, and she’s got Luz sleeping just a couple doors down, so she doesn’t have a lot of options.
She has a lot of bills that she hasn’t paid to the degree that her immediate action is required, and she’s lost her keys three times that week, just because she’s been out of her head. She goes back to work, she works a lot, she finds the passion in her work that had been boiled away with copious amounts of family medical leave, complaining about movers chipping their heirloom furniture but not having the emotional wherewithal to lodge a formal complaint.
She tries to be a mother, she tries to be Luz’s friend, she tries to be everything all at once and it turns out that she’s just good at being a whole lot of nothing.
Eda Clawthorne spent most of her life running.
She doesn’t know how to swim; but she can sprint. Camila does. Camila can get through deep waters without drowning, while Eda weaves and bobs around the ravages of time—but while it’s threatening to rush up and claim Camila’s lips, Eda’s grazed, too. After all, one of the core tenets of knife-fighting is to accept that you’re going to be cut no matter what you do.
At its essence, motherhood is all about sacrifice.
She moved cities. She moved near the beach and yet had not spent one day on it. Just a ton of money to cry for weeks. Her daughter took to running, in those first few weeks. Splashing in creeks that Camila would chide her for, just because she ruined her clothes and she’d already got so much damn laundry (she regrets that).
Luz looks just like her father but she’s taken after Camila. There’s a familiar tension on her face, and she knows that her little heart will break like Camila doesn’t allow hers to, if she’s locked inside a cage of an adult’s grief.
You’ve gotta get out all that rage. Luz took after her mother, not her father. Shit.
(I wish I gave you something better. But I don’t have much to give.)
When Manny dies, she knows that her daughter is the greatest gift he ever gave her. And she insists that Luz will be loved, even if it kills her.
When Camila meets Eda’s bloodshot eyes and shaky hands for the first time, she knows that she’s found a kindred spirit, through and through, cutting right down to the damn bone.
Camila is keeping a secret. She’s sucking on it like the lozenges that she gives Hunter for his wrecked throat, but it just won’t get smaller, regardless of how much she screws up her face and furiously sucks her lips together. She’s passing it back and forth between her teeth like, like a ball on the field between the legs of a bored player.
It’s not a happy secret, like Manny’s diamond in the red velvet box in his sweaty pocket, the box that she still keeps somewhere in the basement, because she’d kept it at the bottom of her closet at first, but then she found it when she was looking for shoes that were nice enough to wear to a funeral. It’s a cartoon piano suspended above her. It’s a manhole that’s been abandoned by the city and is threatening to collapse beneath her feet. It’s her shadow, and it singes the concrete as she walks across the parking lot.
It's the sad clink of an empty glass on an evening in August. It’s a nap in the passenger seat from which she will never wake. She’s keeping secrets, hoarding them. You can find it amongst yellowed mountains of books in a basement. It’s not a promise. It’s not a confession. She’s keeping secrets. From her daughter, from her mother when she sends letters. From everyone.
Eda Clawthorne is the one who pries it out of her, who goes at the old house with a crowbar until she manages to peel the boards off the windows.
It’s fitting, when Camila gives it more than a second of thought—and she’s not talking about that damn portal that was built out of a dead man’s love for a woman who shared Eda’s face. Eda’s just stubborn, and Eda’s loved and lost, too. They’ve got shared experiences, and a similar taste in liquor, once Camila goes through the trial and error of figuring out what will and will not kill her in Eda’s liquor cabinet.
Eda’s sitting on the kitchen table, waiting for her, telling that she can take all the time in the world if she wants to. That she could walk away, and they’d never speak of it again. It seems fair, after all. Eda was the one that asked her if she’d watched her husband die.
She turns around, her fingers around the neck of a bottle that’s glowing green, but Eda’s nodding in the way that Camila’s learned means it’s okay, that some poor human bastard drank it before her, and didn’t die. She’s also got tequila in her duffel bag, but she’s seen what Eda does to tequila.
And she wants it for later. She wants it for when she’s trudging through waist-high water.
She met Manny through glorious happenings of happenstance. So-to-say, at a terrible college party in the nineties. He was a friend of a friend, who was crouching in the back of the living room and trying to make an alliance with the host’s cat. In all honesty, even though Allie gave Camila the best thing that ever happened to her, she doesn’t speak to her anymore.
It turns out that she voted for the unholy Cheeto, and that’s the kind of stuff that just leaves an awkward tension that she really doesn’t want to slice through, especially not since that Allie still says happy birthday to her on Facebook.
Camila’s never been able to say no to things, especially not to free alcohol—even if it’s the kind of crappy boozy punch that’s going to give even the strongest attendees a hangover to remember. It wasn’t a costume party, but she’d found herself sitting on the couch and allowing her much lighter-skinned classmates to climb all over her and try to match their foundation to her.
They were saying something about trying something that they’d seen on TV, and that she had the perfect heart-shaped face. She just thought about how that mascara was absolutely older than three months, and that it’d give her eyelash mites or some shit. And Manny was just across the room from her, slowly stretching his hand towards that damn cat, the mean one that always hissed at her and frankly hated anyone that wasn’t Allie.
An hour later, she’s somehow drunker, and sitting on the porch. And she’s thinking about the fact that Manny’s old high school varsity jacket did nothing to hide the swell of his biceps, or how she doesn’t think he’d had rippling abs, but she kind of liked it better that way. So, she ambles back inside. And she finds him, with Allie’s cat stretched across his thighs, sitting on the couch that’s shoved into the corner so everyone that’s not them can shake their asses.
And she sits down, next to him, without asking, and laughs at something only she thinks is funny—and that’s the fact that little furry devil is lounging against his thighs like it doesn’t go for the eyes, and he’s scratching its belly.
Eda shots straight liquor better than her (rude) and knows how to keep her secrets in a way that Camila’s never become fluent in (ruder). She grew up in a family that told each other everything, and it’s obvious to her without having to ask that Eda didn’t. Eda’s truth is flexible, something that she can shape with her hands. Camila’s is iron-clad, even if it’s obscured by smoke. Even if it’s tarnished and really needs one good round of elbow grease and polish, it’s got a shape and it’s not going to adhere from that, even under the steady rage of the hammer.
Eda’s moved to mix something on the stove—some kind of potion that her and Hunter were working on, and she’s waited up all night to make sure that it’s still looking good. But of course, it is. Because even though Hunter might make a couple of mistakes compared to someone who’s lived off selling them illegally for decades, Eda’s patience is unwavering, as is her hand on his shoulder as she guides him through the proper technique.
She doesn’t yell, she doesn’t even raise her voice. And that’s all good, because otherwise, Camila would have to kill her. And Camila knows that Luz really, really wouldn’t like that. Depending on the degree of the offense, maybe she’d just beat her really badly. She’s got her bat with her.
But even though Eda’s stirring, she’s still listening. She makes sure that Camila knows, by the small, noncommittal noises that she makes every now and again, the little hums that follow a lull in the conversation, the ones that encourage Camila to continue leading.
It’s something she didn’t know she’d lost until the moment where she had it again. Manny and her always had a quiet kind of understanding; they wouldn’t have to say anything, he’d just lean his head against her shoulder or slip their fingers together and squeeze, and she’d keep talking, even if it was hard. She’s good at hard. She’s gotten really, really good at hard. So, she doesn’t shy away from it. She never did, but especially not now.
She faltered for a moment, but the coast is clear because she’s made it so, and she intends to keep it that way. She didn’t think about it, until now. She didn’t miss it, until now.
Manny, to her, is:
- dust on her conscience
- the best view
- a pair of lovely eyes
- back to square one
- a pair of untied shoes
Here’s the thing with watching someone die.
It doesn’t happen all at once, like in the movies.
And that’s so, so much worse—at least if you’re asking her. And you are. This is the story that she’s telling. This is how she’s going to tell it. Cancer’s a thief, a bastard, a parasite; there’s nothing but clumps of malignancy standing between her and having a husband with a beating heart. It’s the kind of shit that when you think about it for too long, you have this horrible intrusive thought to crack open your beloved husband’s chest and get to digging.
Of course, she doesn’t do that. But she does hang a sandbag up in the garage, and she does go to town on it. She parks the car outside, which is fine, anyways, because that’s what the pamphlets recommend. In case you suddenly need to rush to the ER; the couple of seconds that it takes for the garage door to open can mean a lot more than you’d like or be comfortable admitting.
Here’s the thing: she’s not just talking about how the symptoms got worse and took him away from her. She’s talking about how the things they used to manage it—the opioids, ingested, injected, the goddamn fucking fentanyl patches that always scared the shit out of her when they fell off and lingered in the bed—and how, even though there was no way in fucking Hell he was going without, she was aware, with each dosage, she was helping him slip away from her.
Sedatives. Analgesics. Bog-standard Tylenol and Nyquil. Opioids that came with pamphlets on how to prevent crackheads from stealing them, because fucking of course they did. Camila always thought that she’d love the plausible deniability of some poor soul on bath salts or meth or bath salts and meth breaking down the door so she could crack Luz’s Little League bat over his head. It’d be cathartic.
Two weeks after Manny died, her sister took to a rage room where they screamed, smashed plates and printers and chairs and those little orange prescription bottles that she’d brought while listening to Papa Roach.
It’s a memory she holds very, very dear to her heart.
Another thing about watching someone die is the simplicity of it. At least, how Manny died. It’s not a swift intake of breath on the highway and an incoming semi. It’s not a gasp after almost drowning, it’s not a flicker of lightning, it’s not the wrong place at the wrong time, poor dear. It just is. He’s still there, sitting on the couch, but he’s also not. You know that you’re living on borrowed time, and you can’t even take advantage of it.
Camila will be completely honest. She wanted to have more sex. Simple as that.
Everyone told her that she wouldn’t be thinking about the sex, but she was. She was thirty-nine, and she wanted to fuck her husband. But she couldn’t, of course she couldn’t. She’s not even sure that Manny could get it up, let alone satisfy her in the way she’d become accustomed. Too accustomed. She was thirty-nine, for crying out loud.
She was still so young, compared to her mother when her father died. Her mother, who told her that she didn’t think of such things. Of course, she didn’t. It’s a different situation.
Eda doesn’t tell her that she’s so strong, and Eda doesn’t say that she’d never be able to do what Camila did. And that’s not a knock on Eda, in fact, Camila really, really likes that Eda doesn’t say any of that shit, because she knows it’d be a bullshit platitude. It’s something that people say when they feel awkward, when they don’t know anything better to say.
Even though Camila knows that’s not true. Even though, rationally, she knows that most people have good intentions. She’s a petty piece of shit, and she has all this anger and nowhere productive to throw it, so she’s going to be angry at the Allies of the world.
The half-acquaintances who come out of the woodwork to say how sorry she is, and heap praise on how strong Camila was, how strong Camila is but she was nowhere to be found when Camila was crying on the porch because her husband had pissed the bed again, and it was in the middle of the night, and he wasn’t even aware that he’d done it, and he was dying, and all Camila could do was put her head in her hands and think about how badly she wanted a fucking cigarette, but she’d ran out and she couldn’t go to the gas station because her husband was dying and she didn’t like Luz being alone home with her dying dad.
Shit.
Eda’s good at walking around the pieces of glass that Camila throws on the floor as a challenge. Eda makes it look graceful, like a goddamn fucking ballerina. She doesn’t say that she wouldn’t know how to deal with it, that she wouldn’t know what to do if Raine got sick like Manny died, if Raine died like Manny died. It’s all unspoken, sure, but Eda doesn’t say it aloud. Instead, Eda finishes up the potion, and starts mixing alcohol instead.
The glass that Eda hands her looks like a blue lagoon just because it’s a slightly toxic blue, but it smells like straight whiskey cut with paint stripper.
“I’m pretty sure that humans can digest this,” Eda says before she can ask, “Or at least, this one guy I met the casino could. But he was also a weird human. So…”
Eda shrugs.
After a moment, Camila brings it to her lips, breathes in and necks it. Whatever the hell it is, it’s delicious and when Eda asks her if she wants another, she readily accepts without even thinking that Eda hasn’t made herself one yet.
She can still taste him in her rage, feel him in the sweat between her thighs.
She read the story of someone on Reddit (sue her), who’d been asked if they could choose anyone in the world to fuck, who would they choose? He’d answered that he’d choose just one more night with his dead wife, and he’d said something that’d stuck with her: the problem about finding the one is that they can die early, leaving you wanting and waiting.
Nine months after Manny died, Camila had gone to the kind of crappy bar that she hadn’t set foot in since before Luz was born. She used to love going to them, used to love climbing up on tables in the kind of heels that broke ankles and bobbing her hips to the kind of raucous ranchera that made the apartments above the bar really, really cheap.
She’d wanted to have a terrible hook-up, that’s the honest truth of it and she’s sure that Manny would understand. For fuck’s sake, he’d wanted her to fucking remarry. She’d whacked his shoulder and told him, while swatting at her eyes, that he could go fuck himself because that was never happening. But she ended up having sex with Juan, and he wasn’t terrible but he wasn’t Manny, either, and that’s when she realised that she was up a creek with no paddle.
She’s forty. She doesn’t believe in any of that purity bullshit. She wants to meet Manny in the shower for a second, an hour—and she wants him to be aggressive, she wants to be aggressive right back. She wants to bite at his upper lip, she wants to mark her territory all over his body.
She’s never going to get to do that, and she can’t even talk about it because then someone’s going to go along and say that she’s disrespecting the dead. What the fuck do they know? They probably didn’t even know Manny, but the words still sting. Still makes her wonder whether she’s the strange one, and it’s not just that everyone else is afraid of speaking what’s on their mind.
Sometimes, it feels like people are trying to pry the truth out of her with a crowbar, like taking the boards off the dilapidated house that she’d bought without hesitation because it’d been the one option that they could afford. They’d had termites, rats and a possum that tilted its head at her like a cat when she toed open the cabinet under the non-functional sink and found it.
As if it was challenging her as to whether she would scream. Ha. She’d done her fair share of screaming already and wasn’t interested in making her poor throat suffer more just because she saw a marsupial.
She made it into a game with Luz—find and befriend anything that’s not a cockroach, and help me put down glue traps and then not glue traps because Camila read an article about how they’re cruel so she’s buying fucking ethical fucking traps to get rid of her pests and then she’s gathering up all the still-living pests and driving them to fuck off nowhere, releasing them and hoping that they don’t come back like an absolute fucking idiot just because she doesn’t have the balls to cause more suffering.
She’s a vet, she tells herself. She cares about animals. It’s natural. But she’s still driving a trunk’s load of rats out to a field after dropping her husband off for another dose of the chemicals killing him quicker than the cancer, and she feels like such a fucking idiot.
Even years later, she still feels like such a fucking idiot and she doesn’t know why. She moved into a shithole because it was that or nothing. She did it because do or die. She came to Connecticut for one thing, an itty-bitty one thing: try her darndest not to become a widow. But she’d learned something, within a week, before Manny had even come down to join her because she wanted to kill the roaches before that; and that is that one thing quickly becomes two, then three, then more.
Her list grew. In the hallway, there was a bulb that’d been flickering for ten years, so she thought that she’d drive to the hardware store and fix the damn lightbulb because after three days, it was unbearable and she thought she might break it with Luz’s bat. And not become a widow. Two things. Simple.
She drove to town, found a damn hardware store, bought a damn lightbulb—one of those new LEDs that weren’t supposed to randomly fuck up as much, stood on a couple of boxes and tried to screw the little bastard in. But the wires weren’t connecting, and suddenly, the whole fucking thing went on the fritz and she had a new thing to add to her list. Rewire the fucking ceiling. Okay, she could do that.
And she wasn’t obsessing, and she wasn’t trying to ignore anything. She wasn’t trying to forget about anything, just trying to make this hellhole into something liveable for her family. Simple. Matriarch shit. Motherhood is all about sacrifice, inherently.
She went to the attic, because that’s where the internet had told her to start with rewiring the ceiling, and with a flashlight between her teeth, had realised, to her utmost delight, that there was a black mould racing to kill Manny before the cancer. Motherfucker. Kill the black mould, rewire the ceiling, fix the fucking lightbulb, exist.
When Manny walked through the door and Luz was showing off the house, Luz pointed to a tarp in the hallway and said how Camila had wanted to make it a gallery wall of family photos, but she’d torn the whole place apart scouring for mould, and they’d learned that the doorbell randomly rung when it rained. The next day, Camila learned, through finding cement in the attic, that fucking apparently, cement could expire.
Buy new cement, fix the wall that she ripped apart, take care of her child, take care of her husband, clean out the pipes for the bathroom and the kitchen because it was a roach orgy in there, sue the realtor, keep out the pests, drive the pests out of town and into a random field, kill the black mould, rewire the ceiling, fix the fucking lightbulb.
Notes from Camila’s notebook, amongst lists about groceries and people to call after your husband dies:
I thought about what you would look like having an orgasm. I wonder if I would live forever in your absence, I wonder if this is purgatory. Absence makes the heart stronger, they say.
Full of shit.
I savour every moment in the back of my mind where we were both present, and I wish that you didn’t disappear right beside me, leaving me on unsteady legs like a fawn still drenched in afterbirth.
Here’s something that she’s struggled to talk about for a long time. Manny was dead for a while before she buried him. And she’s not talking about the three days between when the white van showed up at her house and Michelle Yan introduced herself as the progressive undertaker that they’d already arranged with, months prior.
Michelle Yan wore the kind of well-tailored suits that reminded Camila that she wasn’t entirely sure she was entirely straight, and Camila wondered if Manny would laugh at the thought of her ogling the woman who’d come to take his body away.
Michelle Yan had the kind of toned biceps that peeked out from under her blazer when she moved right, the kind that Camila assumed came from hauling other people’s husbands, too. And out of more awkward situations than the bed that Manny died in. Stuff like wedged between shitters and bathtubs and not found for six days. Manny had been dead for forty minutes when Camila had called, because she’d already done her weeping.
Michelle Yan sat at Camila’s kitchen table, and pointed to details on paper that Camila doesn’t remember, and she’s sure that she wasn’t any help, but Michelle Yan talked her through it, and didn’t care that Camila put the pen between her teeth when she needed to think, or asked her to leave before Luz came home from school. Michelle Yan didn’t end up selling a mid-century modern urn to Camila, but she’d smiled softly as she told her that she could call about anything, and Camila never did.
This isn’t a story about Michelle Yan being a bad mortician or even Michelle Yan being hot. Michelle Yan was better than the bastard that took care of her father, and Manny had looked dashing in his casket while her father had looked like a swollen, half-rotten banana that you’d tried to stuff into a condom, with a strange glistening sheen against his cheeks that made them look more plastic than man. The issue is that Michelle Yan was Michelle Yan—she wasn’t Michelle.
And she talked about death like she expected Camila to be reeling; as if Camila hadn’t gotten a good head start on her mourning, and was already finishing up her first of what would be eternal laps, around a truly shitty track. It’d pissed her off.
She tried to be a friend of Camila’s, even though she didn’t know the basic fact that was Camila was actually glad that Manny was finally dead. If she’d known anything, she would have asked Camila how long it’d been since Manny spoke to her, since she thought that he could hear her.
In a moment of weakness, Camila had asked Michelle Yan how long Manny could have heard her for.
“Well,” Michelle Yan had parroted off some bullshit pamphlet that’s peddled by overworked hospice nurses, “We have evidence to prove that hearing is one of the last senses to go. MRIs and stuff.” And that’d just made her feel shittier, because it’d implied that other senses had gone, and she hadn’t been talking a lot, during Manny’s final days. She’d only really hissed obscenities when she couldn’t open some kind of medical thing with her fingers due to her nails being bitten down to the quick and had to stray to using her teeth again.
She didn’t dare ask Michelle Yan about something as terrifying as touch, and how long Michelle Yan thought that’d stick around.
Why couldn’t he just have stroked out in the hallway and saved her all this heartache etched into her very being and she could have been done with it. She could have wept in a hospital hallway once and she could have pulled the plug after learning how you diagnose brain death and she could have been done with it.
Make no mistake—if she could die and be sure that he would live, she would do so without hesitation but the world doesn’t deal in such hypotheticals and she’s stuck wondering whether he’d have preferred for her to shoot him dead when he stopped responding to his name.
“I thought that it would have felt better,” she confesses to Eda, bottles scattered around them.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Camila gestures around the room, at everything and nothing, everyone and anything, “All of this. I mean, taking down a tyrant. Beating someone up. I thought that it would make me feel better, because well… I thought I’d feel like I actually had power.”
“Hm,” Eda suggests, “That’s probably because it’s a completely different thing. Belos is simple. Belos is just a piece of shit. All of that rage simmering inside of you is complex. It’s like a potion. You can’t use a simple potion to substitute something that actually takes work. Sometimes, you just have to stay up all night.”
And it’s terribly rude for Eda to be so fucking profound and so fucking good at hitting the nail on the head, because she lets it hang in the air for a moment, and then chugs straight liquor straight from the bottles.
Anger is a simple emotion.
It’s the kind of emotion you know where you have it. It’s not going to surprise you. You’re always going to want to split someone’s head in two, Eda and Camila are always going to think about puritanical pieces of shit and think about how they should have died quicker, and Camila’s always kind of going to hate the Allie Johnsons of the world, and that’s fine.
Camila’s always going to know that she got really fucking drunk on the first night Luz went to a sleepover after Manny died and set a bunch of old shit on fire in her backyard, everything from photos to medical bills, to clothes and sheets. That’s something she’s maybe going to regret, but she still feels the wrath settling against her skin, the anger that had nowhere to go because really, it was just grief in a heavy coat.
There’s no one you can punch or sue if your husband dies of cancer. There’s no one you can yell at and mean it. There’s rage rooms full of printers and pottery that you can smash to smithereens, but Camila wants to invite someone over for dinner and feed them rat poison and watch their airways constrict, their face go blue as she tells them of the hurt they inflicted upon her. She wants to do something that’d get her thrown in the clink, and of course, she doesn’t.
She’s not going to. She’s got responsibilities. But it doesn’t mean that she didn’t revel in the fact that in the Boiling Isles, no one gives a shit whether you beat a tyrant to a bloody pulp in front of everyone, after he’s already defeated and weakened. They won’t even put you on trial. Someone’s going to whip out their equivalent of a smartphone and they’re going to take a video that’ll go viral.
People are going to comment shit like “good for her” and “wow, look at those biceps and that bat swing”. And it’s not going to make her feel any better, because even though that piece of shit deserved it for hurting her kids and she wouldn’t be against doing it again, that’s not where her rage started. And like when she tore the house apart looking for black mould, sometimes, the only way to put something to rest is to follow it back to the source.
And Belos isn’t the source of anything, he’s just a consequence.
A pathological liar who deserves to die slowly, and doesn’t deserve to have anyone left in the ashes of his passing wondering how the fuck they’re going to go on and where she’s going to put all that love that doesn’t vanish in the blink of an eye like corpses do when Michelle Yan hauls them out on a gurney, with a fat Mexican gesturing to her from the van, probably saying something about the fact that she’s about to send the corpse flying if she goes to hard down without a curb-cut.
Manny, to her, is:
- a fever she is learning to live with
- an eternal date with an alchemist
- a butterfly fluttering against her windowsill
- a knot in her heart she is both desperate to untie and bound to hold
- every minute and every hour
- a sailor
- a cigarette that burnt her finger because she forgot she lit it
- bliss on bliss on bliss
- the great love of her life