This War Paint

Jane


I stood in the doorway, a ghost waiting for passage to a place I knew I wasn’t ready for. I was scared and nervous and about to overcome something I’d been avoiding since I was a little girl. I wasn’t Jane Hathaway in these moments; I couldn’t muster up her strength or confidence or will from anywhere. All that made me up was whatever that girl left behind.

One hand was clasping Fraser’s, the other fisting in my skirt, trying to simultaneously keep myself grounded and stop this boy from running away. I wouldn’t blame him for trying, I would have run away too years ago if I hadn’t had to become this family’s rock. But the calloused fingers circling mine told me wordlessly that no matter what, Fraser wouldn’t let me go. I squeezed back. I tried to tell him I wasn’t capable of letting go anymore.

The whole day had been a blur of heated moments and curled knuckles and almost fights. I was exhausted from holding up my head in the hallways, pretending I didn’t see the girls whispering behind their hands. By the time school had ended, everybody knew David and I were no longer together, if only for our physical distance from each other. I had no doubt he would start his tirade against me soon. As soon as he had recovered from the blow to his pride and his car.

I still couldn’t quite grasp that my boy had done this, while not directly, he had done it nonetheless. Although he had an alibi which was holding up sturdily the whole town knew that he may as well have carved those nonsensical words into David’s pride and joy’s bonnet. Fraser was the only person who could stand up to any Armstrong... well he had been until I had undermined the entire lot of them by telling David to stay the hell away from me.

It was only a matter of time before walls began crashing down due to that foolhardy behaviour of mine, but I couldn’t have cared less. It would matter tomorrow, undoubtedly, it would be the end of my world in a few days or weeks or months. But I had better things to conquer in my moments. I had bigger obstacles to overcome standing in my hallway, staring into my kitchen, knowing my mother sat in a chair staring passively out the window.

Fraser’s cool, calm breath brushed my hair from behind my ear, letting the red spill forth as he stepped into me. With just a small movement, he had my slow heart picking up and trying to race out of my narrow chest. I wanted to tell him to stop for a second, that today had already been too much, that he was making my heart far too heavy for me to carry, but then I didn’t have the willpower to push him away. I had been pushing that morning and been pulled into David as a result.

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Jane. I get it, you don’t have to tell your parents that we’re...”

He choked on his words then and I cast a glance back, finding us so very close together. If he tried just a little harder I was sure I could swallow his forgotten word whole.

“Don’t be silly,” I admonished, finding a smile from somewhere. “This isn’t about what they’re going to say. This is more about what you’re going to think afterwards.”

He looked perplexed because I hadn’t made much sense to him. He didn’t know that his opinion suddenly meant close to everything, making up the spaces where the rest of the town used to be. It scared me how dependent I was slowly becoming, dependent on simple things like his coal black eyes and the tattoos covering him and the casual way Fraser could make me feel like nothing mattered but him.

I recognised it with a jolt, staring at him in my shadowed hallway, the drapes obscuring what sun still shone outside. I was falling in love with him. I had been falling in love with him since sometime between his concerned question that day outside the counsellor's office and him telling me about the first of his tattoos. He was always trying, always attempting to draw me from the beautifully decorated, beautifully fake mask I had been wearing for years. I felt I could take it off for him, and he would still call me beautiful.

But I had it on now, not letting him peek for even a second at what this situation was really doing to me. It was bad enough laying out my first secret to him, the first of so many. I didn’t know or understand how he could give me so much when just this, just introducing him to my mother, was like a slow, drawn out plea for pain.

I lifted up the bottom of my shirt just before my heart managed to stutter and my hands to shake. I kept my eyes on him while I bared to him something much smaller than how sick my mother was. While I bared to him the tattoo I had gotten what seemed like forever ago on a sticky summer day with his very image in my brain. My motivation.

He gathered it all in and I watched his lips tip up into a smile. His eyes were back on mine in an instant, his hand cupping my cheek and rubbing a line from my hairline to my chin. He wasn’t surprised. He took it all in his stride. Just as he was about to open his mouth, I turned from him and bared my second secret.

We moved together into the kitchen. I saw Mom, sitting so still, in that damn white nightdress again. She was staring out of the window as she always seemed to be and didn’t look away when we entered. My mother did look mad there, like a mental patient who had escaped and taken refuge in between my fridge and the kitchen cabinets. I called to her and received no reply.

I was stuck, Fraser’s body blocking the exit and filling up what seemed to be the whole room. Here she was, the woman who was supposed to have been my everything and my fondest secret. I loved her, I was terrified of her but I loved her too. I wanted Fraser to know me, even the darkest deepest recesses of me, so I had brought him here for them to meet. Even if Mom wouldn’t remember this in a few minutes, I wanted her to meet the boy I was falling in love with.

“Mom,” I tried again, moving into her line of vision so the window was obscured. “I’ve brought someone home from school to meet you.”

After an eternity of her misty eyes clearing, she looked straight at me and blinked. I smiled because I knew she was seeing me, quickly tugging on Fraser’s hand and bringing him before me like an offering. So that he could be really seen too.

”You two make such a lovely couple,” she beamed “I knew that when I met him he’d be just right for you.”

I laughed lightly, giddy after being so heavy. The tension in me was lifting and Fraser’s arm around me felt like the only thing steadying me this time. It was his turn to keep me grounded.

“I’m pleased to finally meet you Mrs Hathaway,” he spoke clearly. “You’re very important to Jane, and anyone important to her is someone I want to meet.”

Mom twirled the hand he had just shook around in a spiral, lifting it up to the ceiling and smiling like a child. We were losing her and all I could do was grip onto Fraser. He didn’t understand at all, he just watched her pleasantly as if this was the most normal behaviour in the world. If he had been David he would already be pulling me away, rolling his eyes at how crazy she could be. If it had been Helen, she would have turned to the side, unable to look our mother in her eye anymore. But this was Fraser; kind, sweet, misunderstood Fraser.

“Tessa’s always talking about you, she tells me you’re doing an apprenticeship at a Law Firm. She tells me you have a kid with another woman, she’s always talking about that. Drama, sweetheart, drama’s what makes the world go round,” she nodded, suddenly so sure of what she was saying. “But you don’t look how I thought you would have looked. Better, I guess, taller than she described.”

I cringed, watching Fraser’s smile slip. He was confused now, he was wondering who the hell she was talking about and why on earth she was talking to him as if she knew him at all. Maybe I should have prepared him. It would have been smart to let him know about her condition, even just a little warning, but my tongue tied itself into knots every time I so much as thought the word dementia.

“She won’t shut up about you though, ever since she met you in that bar. Her ex boyfriend broke up with her that day, you know, that’s why she looked like she’d just crawled out of the sewers,” here my Mom laughed wistfully. “She’s normally a lot better looking than that. But of course, you already know.”

Instead of pulling away like I thought he would, Fraser resumed his grin from somewhere and slowly moved forward. He was pulling out a chair, sitting down and giving her his full, undivided attention before I had the chance to breathe. When I did, it was staggered and shocked, jagged as if the very air around me had gone and forgotten how to enter my lungs properly. As if it was just as confused as I was.

“I definitely know, Mrs Hathaway, she’s beautiful, even when I first met her she was beautiful,” he said. Mom’s eyes stayed on his, focused and happy in ways I hadn’t seen her before.

“She was always the beauty queen of our small town. Got voted most likely to be a supermodel in our yearbook. Do you know what I got? Most likely to end up married with four kids before I was 21. I sure showed them!”

I had seen photographs of Tessa with Mom, side by side, laughing or pouting or smiling. They were best friends, that much was obvious. They loved each other, that much was clear. I understood that it was better Mom couldn’t remember how she had been left so terribly by her, it was a terrible kindness, a wonderful curse. There were things I would like to forget too if I had the choice. She didn’t, though, she didn’t even understand what was happening to her anymore.

“You showed them,” Fraser agreed calmly, as if any of this was making any sense.

Mom laughed and turned to the window again, finding something interesting outside which nobody else ever could. It was just sunshine, hot and clammy. It was just our small town, eating itself from the inside, spitting the rest out. I kept myself focused on Fraser instead. He was a lot more interesting to me.

“It’s okay now. It’s okay,” my mother told us.

I nodded like I already knew this and Fraser joined me. We caught each other’s eye and smiled. There was no mistaking it now. My heart fluttered for a second, for a moment, and I couldn’t do anything but accept the plain fact that I was already in too deep.

He was a natural with her in a way I hadn’t thought anyone could be. Not even the psychiatrists who sometimes paid her a visit, not the doctors we paid most of my Dad’s salary to, not even my father who loved her unconditionally could sit like Fraser was, look her straight in her eye and speak to her like she wasn’t a complete moron. Hell, I couldn’t. I could barely hold it together most of the time when she addressed me as a woman I had only met once.

I’d laid this in front of him like a blockade, wondering if he’d find his way around it or just turn back around. He’d run right through it instead, taking me by surprise, taking me whole. Nothing mattered in my small kitchen right then with two of the most important people in my life. I couldn’t have cared less about David or his stupid father or the consequences of my foolish actions. My friend, my Fraser, was accepting of something in my life even I hadn’t quite accepted.

He reached out a hand to me subtly, obscured from my oblivious mother by a hard topped table. I went to him, reaching his side in a few short steps, and was greeted by that hand hovering over my hip. Over my tattoo. Another acceptance. Two down. One great obstacle, the greatest obstacle, still left to go.

In time, I told myself, in time I would tell him. When the time comes when I can remember that night fully without wanting to cry or vomit, I will let him know.

I already knew somewhere I didn’t want to look, though, that that day would never come. Some secrets were better left unsaid. Untold. And no matter how good Fraser was with my mother, I knew he would never be okay with that fact that David Armstrong had tried to rape me once, maybe twice. And the assurance that he would try again.