Quarantine

Grim was already hearing about Mayra and how she made Meredith look like a fool in front of pretty much the whole town. There was something that he wished that he was there to have seen the look her face. He could slightly picture it, but he had never seen her as embarrassed as the people in the diners talked about it amongst each other.

He didn’t notice any look of fear about the hallucinations and the fear of the worst. It was something else. It was joy to see a person as bad as Meredith kicked of their high horse for a bit. They wouldn’t say anything about how they felt about it or even talk about the incident in front of her. They needed to talk to someone about it as if they didn’t believe that it actually happened. Most of them probably thought it was a figment of their imagination, but it was a little too real to be anything other than that.

Devon couldn’t help the urge to ask them to go into further detail about it, but he held himself back. He usually tried to make himself be as far from the gossip about it. He knew it was hard to not hear it when he worked at the gossip central of the town, and he honestly tried to forget most of it which was normally the case. There was always some sort of tale that stuck out in his mind every once in a while, and this was going to be one of them.

He didn’t even know why he was so excited about this. He knew that his mother would be telling him that he shouldn’t enjoy the pain of others even if the person was a terrible person like Meredith Jameson. His mother’s voice rang in his head, and he realized that he hadn’t seen his mother in a long time. He was avoiding her as much as he could, but he knew at some point he would drag himself to the nursing home down the street where the old man had escaped from to see her.

He sat down next to the entrance of the building. He was drinking a cup of coffee while he took his ten minute break. He only took them when Ramona forced him to. He watched her scurry around the restaurant talking to the customers. He turned his attention to the door when he looked up to see Blake Jamieson walking in. He was slightly confused to see Mayra’s partner walking in here.

Blake looked over at Grim as he walked to him. It was clear that this wasn’t just a visit to Avery’s Diner. There was something serious going on. “Grim… I mean, Devon, the nursing home that your mother is in was trying to get a hold of you,” Blake started nervously.

Devon was kind of confused why Blake would be the one looking for him, but he remembered it was his younger sister who ran the nursing home. It made a bit of sense for her to call Blake when she was looking for someone. Devon sat up and looked at Blake a little more closely. “Is there something going on?” he asked, more than a little nervously.

“Um, I think you should go talk to Maria about that,” Blake replied. There was something in his voice, and Grim immediately recognized it as pity. Something had gone very wrong, and he didn’t know if he was ready for it.

“Alright, I just need to tell Ramona that I need to step out and go over there,” Devon said, standing up slowly. He didn’t think that Blake was going to escort him to the nursing home, but who knew with this town sometimes?

Devon walked over to his boss and tapped her on her shoulder. “Ramona, something is going on with my mom. I need to go over there and see what’s going on. I’ll come back afterwards, alright?” he told her.

Ramona looked at him and then noticed Blake still standing at the door. She wasn’t an idiot to realize that it was something more than just small incident. “Take all the time you need to, okay?” Ramona said. “There’s no need to rush back here.”

Devon nodded and smiled at her. He turned and walked towards the nursing home. He was glad that Blake didn’t come with him. It would have been awkward to say the least. Blake and Devon had never been friends. Devon was a quiet guy who did his work while Blake was a football jock and preferred to cheat off the nerds during the tests. They just used common curtesy with each other—say hi, behave nicely towards each other, and avoid full conversations as much as possible.

Devon walked into the nursing home to see Maria Everett who was once Jamieson before she got married. She looked similar to Blake. They both had the tanned skin and dark hair that their mother had and their father’s green eyes. Maria knew better Spanish than Blake, but that was mainly because she had been to her mother’s home country of Puerto Rico more than Blake. Their father had grown up here in Four Trees his whole life who had gone on vacation to the small island and met Ana.

“Oh, good! My brother found you,” she said with less enthusiasm that Devon had hoped. “I have some bad news.” Of course, she did. She wouldn’t have made Blake to go look for Devon and not explain what was going on. This needed to come from her.

“Okay,” Devon said. He believed he already knew what she was going to say, but he really wanted her to confirm it for him.

“Your mother passed away a couple of hours ago. I’m so sorry, Devon,” she said. Pity was on her face. It was on everyone’s face. He was already starting to hate it.

“Was it peaceful?” he asked. That was all he could ask. He didn’t know how he would handle it if she was in pain when she died.

“Yes, it was,” Maria lied. She didn’t have the courage to tell him that it was during a seizure. She figured it would just make it worse for him if he knew that.

Devon nodded, knowing that she was lying, and said, “I think that I need to get some air.” He didn’t wait for her response before walking out of the room and shutting the door of the nursing home behind him. He turned left out of the nursing home away from the restaurant. Something told him that Ramona wasn’t expecting him back any way. He walked down the roads turning every once in a while until he was standing right in front of the wall.

He was on one of the roads that they closed off. He remembered saying that they were closing some of the streets to have few entrances in the town to help with the mountain lions. Now he wished that he had stayed on a main road. He wanted to walk to Alaska and be as far from this town as possible. Yet, he was trapped in Four Trees like a prisoner. He reached out and touched the wall. Touching it made everything more real. His mother was dead, and there was nothing that he could do to change it.

Then came the regrets and the ‘what if’s in a rush. What if he hadn’t avoided her? He should have visited her more and tried to make the best of this time while he had her around. What if he had stayed in Four Trees and not moved off to Alaska? There were all kinds of questions piling on one and another.

He knew that there was nothing that he could change now. It was just that he couldn’t help himself. He could have done a lot of things differently with her, but he didn’t. He had gotten a little selfish because he didn’t want to see her so sickly. He was sure that she wanted him around more to at least spend some time with me even if she wasn’t fully aware of it. He felt guilty, and the looks of pity that he was going to get for the next few days were only going to make it worse.