Between the pictures, there’s supposed to be a mirror on the wall. Grand-Maman took it away when I was in the hospital. Nothing there now but its ghost. I open my eyes to beige. Close my eyes to beige. My body burning from cuts that are healing just fine, the doctor said, but I still feel them burning. And my heart broken. Shattered like glass. Over Mother leaving me, why did she leave? Something happened. Grand-Maman won’t say what. When I try to remember, all I see are flashes now. Broken glass. Red powder. A man smiling at me in the dark. Mother on the floor.
When I opened my eyes in the children’s hospital, that was my first word: Mother.
Cher, said an answering voice. Not Mother. Grand-Maman. Sitting beside me and dressed up in her black lace like she was going to bridge.
You’re up, she said in French. Thank god.
Where’s Mother? I asked. And Grand-Maman looked at me.
Gone.
Where?
You should rest.
Grand-Maman, what happened? As I asked, flashes came. Mother being carried away in a hospital bed. Red powder on my hands. A man in my bedroom turning to smoke. Tom, Tom—I started to cry. And Grand-Maman gripped my hand. Shhh, she said. All her gold rings were on her fingers and I stared at the different-colored stones. I stared at the stones because I couldn’t look into her eyes. Could never look at what I saw there for long. Listen, she said. Now is the time to bury. Now is the time to forget. We take what hurts us and we put it here. And she made a fist. She put it over her heart. The bright stones on her fingers flashed. And in my head, I saw a box. Like Grand-Maman’s jewelry box for her rings. It looked just like a tiny closet, a garderobe. It even had a little gold key like my red diary. We put it here and we lock it up. She pressed her fist to her heart. We keep it for ourselves. We keep it closed. We never open.
We never open, I whispered.
And Grand-Maman smiled at me for the first time. She opened her fist of stones. Put her hand on my hair, greasy and unbrushed. And then it can’t hurt us, she said. Ever again.
* * *
Now Grand-Maman leaves food for me outside the door. Leaves it with a little knock and then tiptoes away in her fuzzy socks. Cher, she always calls me. I don’t answer and she doesn’t make me answer. Mostly, I’ll leave the food at the door. Usually things out of cans and jars. Smoked oysters. White asparagus that looks like skeleton fingers. Beef consommé, which is a soup that’s clear, so I can see right through it to the bottom of the bowl, where an old-timey man and woman dance. I like that best, though to look at the dancing makes me feel strange. Mother sends me postcards from California. She lives there now with Creep, somewhere called Malibu. There, Mother will be making a movie starring Mother, produced by Creep, they’re just waiting on something called funding. Hope you are well, Mother writes in a looping black hand. She doesn’t sign it with love. She doesn’t even sign it Mother, just N for her name. She doesn’t call and I don’t ask Grand-Maman if I can call. Even though I want to know does she still love me? I want to say, I’m sorry, Mother. Whatever I did that made you leave, I’m sorry. Mother doesn’t want to hear it just now, Grand-Maman says. Mother feels some distance might be good for us, and Grand-Maman agrees. More than agrees. Let her try this movie thing, get it out of her system. She’ll leave that producer soon enough. Once they’ve made that movie, anyway. If they make it. But yes, of course Mother loves me, Grand-Maman says. Even if Mother doesn’t say.
* * *
At night, I come out of the beige guest room and go into Grand-Maman’s beige bedroom, where I watch Wheel of Fortune then Jeopardy!, while she sits in her chaise and eats pastries from a box with the prettiest ribbon. Sometimes we watch Murder, She Wrote after. Grand-Maman and I always know who did it before Angela Lansbury does. Or maybe Angela Lansbury knows all along and she just doesn’t say until it’s time. I lie on her sagging beige bed watching television upside down, my head hanging over the bed’s edge and filling with blood.
Grand-Maman looks over at me a lot. Worried, I guess. Sometimes I’ll still burst into tears for no reason. Like tonight. She’s just flipping channels like she does during commercials and there’s Tom Cruise talking to David Letterman. And she looks at me and smiles, thinking I’ll be happy. But I’m crying suddenly, I don’t know why. My scars and cuts are burning again like they haven’t in a while.
“What’s wrong, cher?”
“I don’t know,” I say. Though somewhere inside me I feel I do know. Looking at Tom Cruise’s face, I’m seeing roses, why am I seeing—？