RHIANNON
The bad thing about buying a used textbook, Cooper thinks, is that most of its previous owners had felt totally free—no, compelled—to mar its informative pages with their scribbles and doodles. Ribbons of yellow highlighter overlay sentences that he may or may not consider pertinent. Triangular dog-ears and tiny chocolate stains curl his lip. Veiny phalluses drawn in fine black ink make him question whether this book is part of a Pharm.D. course or a junior high health class. The only second-hand feature in this text that elicits his fondness is the out-of-place poetry on the inside of the front cover.
Beware, beware, the pen 55,
for with it emerges both freedom and strife.
Cooper feels an eerie resonance whenever he reads the lines. They have clearly been put here with the express intent of guiding him. He spends the next six years being very careful what he writes, and being very leery of all writers. He only purchases Bic 4-Color pens, as if this specific inflexibility is in direct negation of the number 55. Despite the fact that people around him consider his protocols superstitious and off-putting, Cooper lives in a fizzy bubble of self-satisfaction. He heeds the warning from his old lab book, and as a result, things always work out for him.
***
Rhiannon is only seventeen years old. In the sunshiny, corn-fed Midwest, that isn’t old enough to vote, drink, or even play the Lotto. But in the gray world of diabetic grandmothers needing to be cared for and bills needing to be paid, the girl is old enough to drop out of school and assume the soul-sucking responsibility of adulthood.
Each morning, Rhia is ushered into her waking hours by the tinny scream of an actual alarm clock. Eight months ago, she’d still been courteous enough to drag herself into the bathroom and brush her teeth before interacting with her grandmother. These days, however, she enters the hallway, heels pummeling the disgruntled hardwood, and goes straight to the master bedroom. She feels like a piece of shit for greeting each day with boiled-over misery when her grandmother—the woman who raised her and whose body has been slowly but systematically ravaged by Type 1 diabetes—welcomes everyone and everything with the warmest of smiles.
“There’s my beautiful granddaughter!” Beatrice says, her mouth a doomed marriage of chapped lips and corn kernel teeth.
Rhia sighs. “Morning, Grandma.”
The first order of business is emptying Beatrice’s perpetually full bed pan into the toilet. One of the woman’s legs is amputated at the knee, and her constant need to urinate is a poor match for her inability to journey to the bathroom every twenty minutes. Next is refilling the bedside pitcher with cold filtered water. Worst is giving her grandmother a shot of pramlintide acetate.
Rhiannon moves on to her kitchen duties. She pours hot water into a mug of instant coffee powder, scrambles two eggs, and scrapes half a pat of butter across two pieces of crumbly toast. The refrigerator’s offerings are sparse, and she’ll have to go to the grocery store after work. It wouldn’t be that much of a drag, except she also has to pick up Beatrice’s medications from the pharmacy. These errands will take up two hours of her evening and much of her paycheck. Rhia brings the food to her grandmother’s room.
“Thank you, dearest. You’re so good to me,” Beatrice says.
“You’re welcome, Grandma.”
Rhiannon inspects the woman’s only foot. Thankfully, there are no signs of reduced blood flow or infection. She covers the foot with a special compression sock. Everything in this room is special. Special socks, special lotion, special bed, special pills… And if everything’s special, then nothing is.
“Where’s your breakfast, Rhia?”
“I’ll have a bowl of cereal before I leave.”
Beatrice beams lovingly. “You’re just like your mother! She never had a taste for anything but Rice Krispies in the morning.”
Rhia nods. She has no idea how Beatrice can talk about her late daughter (who died giving birth) with nothing but sparkling remembrance. Thoughts of the mother that Rhiannon never knew bring her only a bone-deep longing for the life that had eluded her.
***
“Sir? Sir. I need you to finish your statement. Please focus. We’ve got a missing teenage girl on the line. Trust me, you wanna keep yourself off the suspect list.”
“The suspect list?” Cooper balks. “I was on this side of the counter, for chrissakes. She was on the other. At least three people saw what happened. That girl vanished into thin air, and it had
nothing to do with me.”
Cooper can still feel the brush of her fingers against his, her skin shockingly dry for a girl of her age. He can still hear the crinkly thud of the pharmacy bag hitting the floor milliseconds after connecting with those slim, coarse digits. The girl had disappeared in an impossible flash, but the SymlinPens had remained. He’d stared down at the pink receipt stapled to the bag. It said Order 55.
***
Nothing wakes her. There’s no bossy alarm clock, cacophonous garbage truck, or urgent chore. There is only her body’s readiness to rise. Once she takes in her surroundings—the pretty quilt instead of her scratchy brown blanket, the clean, smooth walls, and the computer desk cluttered with girly trinkets—Rhiannon jerks into a seated position. This isn’t her room.
“What the…”
She swings her feet over the edge of the bed and lets them sink into a high-pile rug. A row of photographs, each 4X6 print dangling from its own clip on a wall installation, captures her attention.
One picture is of a woman smiling down at the pink bundle in her arms: Grandma the day Rhiannon was born.
There’s a photo of a toddler running across hard-packed sand. Rhia doesn’t think she’s ever been to the beach, but perhaps this is due to the amnesia of youth.
Most vexing of all is the photo of Beatrice posing with Rhiannon, who’s wearing a cap and gown. Rhia frowns. She knows for sure that she’s never donned the traditional garb of a high school graduate. She looks out the window. The trees are verdant with fluttering leaves and the grass forms a thick, even blanket across the lawn. From the looks of it, it’s summer. But how can that be, when just before Rhiannon had entered the pharmacy, she’d had to trudge through the dirty, mid-winter slush? What the hell is going on here? She unclips the graduation photo and studies it closely. The woman in it has brown eyes. Beatrice’s are hazel.
“This isn’t Grandma….” Rhiannon mutters.
She can barely believe her ears when she hears the faraway call, “Rhia! If you want it hot, you better get down here!”
The girl yanks her door open and is floored by the hunger-inducing aromas of bacon and French toast.
Rhiannon takes less than 30 minutes to not only accept this dream-like existence, but to claim rightful ownership to it. She revels in her mother’s delight at Rhia’s bottomless appetite and lingering hugs. She sees perfection in the charmingly messy interior of the SUV that they drive from errand to errand. Midafternoon, they pull into the parking lot of the pharmacy.
“What are we doing here?” Rhiannon barks.
Her mother regards her quizzically. “You know I pick up my insulin pens every other Saturday… Are you okay?”
Panic rolls over Rhiannon hotly. She knows that this is an opportunity—a nudge, even—to get back to her real life. A premonition of the events that would transpire over the next twenty minutes flash in her mind’s eye. She’d go into the pharmacy. The prescription would be ready at the same moment her mother was off to the side getting talked into a flu shot. “Rhia, can you get that for me?” she’d say, offhand, completely unaware that coming into contact with that white pharmacy bag would cast her daughter away. Perhaps a Rhiannon from yet another dimension is already queued up to matriculate into this one. Regardless, Rhia knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that if she allows herself to be shifted back into Beatrice’s world, the effect would be permanent. Her eyes land on the car radio. It’s five to. It’s a warning: Last chance to go back to where you came from, girl. Your
grandmother is waiting.
“Rhia? What’s wrong, sweetie?”
“I—I just don’t feel good. My stomach… I probably ate too much. I’ll wait for you here.”
“My poor girl,” the woman murmurs, resting the back of her hand on Rhiannon’s forehead.
“Well, you don’t have a fever. Maybe you did just have a little too much to eat. I’ll get some Pepto while I’m in there.”
***
Beatrice’s hands tremble in her lap as strangers swarm around the apartment. Are they social workers? Government officials? With Rhiannon’s disappearance, the eviction, and the state caseworkers, she’s lost track.
“Please,” she says. “Stop moving!”
Only one of the strangers acknowledges her plea and kneels before her. “Ma’am?”
“Please, please stop packing my things. I can’t leave here. There’s an open investigation to find my granddaughter. I know she’s out there somewhere. I know it. This is the place she’ll come back to, you see. If I’m not here when she returns…”
“Don’t you worry, Ma’am. We’ll leave your forwarding information with the police and the super. We can even make sure that everyone in the building has it, so they can pass it on to your granddaughter if they see her.”
Beatrice can do nothing but nod.
The kind-eyed man places a pamphlet on her bed desk. “Here’s the info for the center you’ll be staying at. You lucked out: The state one is full. This is the nicest one in the city; they have the best nurses and plenty of people your age. You can write this address and phone number down on these index cards.” He produces some lined, 4X6 cardstock. “And we’ll hand them out to the neighbors before we leave. I’ll make sure they take it seriously. People always listen to me when I wear my suit and tie.” He winks. He clicks his pen and rests it on her small desktop.
Beatrice smiles weakly, tears congregating in the pulled crevice that is her mouth. She still struggles under the unfathomable tonnage of her granddaughter’s disappearance, as well as her own daughter’s shocking departure in an age where even Beatrice had considered death during childbirth a thing of the ancient past. But her cobwebbed agony is slightly mitigated by the task at hand: Write information down on a card. This is one thing that she can approach with confidence in a deep, tumultuous sea of things that she cannot. She exhales and brings pen to paper. She watches her tightly-formed numbers furl onto the white card like stitches closing a wound.
Sophie Kearing is a writer of long tweets and dark fiction. Her work has been featured by Popshot Quarterly, Mojave Heart Review, New Pop Lit, Moonchild Magazine, Elephants Never, Left Hand Publishers, Ellipsis Zine, Lunate Literary Journal, and other publications. Her supernatural suspense story Between Wakeful Stillness and Bothered Slumber was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart. She lives in Chicago with her furbabies and a TBR pile that’s taller than she is. She would love to connect with you: https://twitter.com/SophieKearing