Treading Lightly. Elise Lanier
woman was a pain in the butt, but that wasn’t anything new. The minute she’d hung up, it was off her mind. This edit was important and she needed to finish it, so she’d worked all night. When Janine finally looked at her clock, she was surprised to see it was 2:23 a.m.
“Guess it’s time to call it a night,” she said to herself as she shut down her computer. The eerie light it had cast no longer illuminated the surrounding space, throwing her into total darkness. Taking a deep breath, she walked out of her room, not needing any light down the short hall toward Craig’s room. She’d done this a million times before.
A faint yellow band glowed from underneath his door, and she surmised that he’d fallen asleep with his light on again.
Opening the door slowly so it wouldn’t creak, she gazed at her son sprawled fully dressed across his bed. She crossed the room silently, thinking he looked like an angel in repose, and knelt beside the bed so she wouldn’t wake him. Carefully she untied the laces of his government-regulation black boots and gently tugged them off. God, his feet were huge. And they stank, too! Keeping those mammoth puppies penned up in those hot, festering, black leather encasements didn’t help matters. The boy’s feet needed air circulating around them.
With that thought in mind, she removed his wet, sweaty socks and threw a blanket over his prone body, kissing the top of his head and smoothing back his bangs as she did every night after he fell asleep.
“Mommy loves you,” she whispered. It was her ritualistic mantra that she uttered to the sleeping boy nightly.
She stood for a few minutes, watching him sleep, letting the sight calm her. When she felt her body relax and lose some of the strain that seemed to be ever present in her upper back, she reached over and turned the light switch off with a click.
Closing the door silently behind her, she left his room to do the other thing she did nightly. Raid the kitchen.
Heading straight for the junk-food cabinet to check out what was left, she grabbed a fistful of strawberry Twizzlers, and popped a stray purple jelly bean she’d found on the bottom of the shelf into her mouth before realizing what she’d just done. She spent a couple minutes trying to calculate when that uncovered jelly bean could’ve possibly been purchased, not remembering the last time she’d bought a bag of jelly beans, then quickly drowned out any possible contamination worries by scarfing down approximately thirteen licorice sticks, hoping that would obscure or perhaps overwhelm any bad pollutants the one measly grape-flavored jelly bean might’ve caused. She closed the cabinet door before padding back to her room to attempt sleep. It was hard for her to unwind when she was in edit mode. She held an entire novel in her head, and needed to make sure every thread, every action, every sentence fit perfectly. It took her almost two hours, but by approximately four in the morning she finally fell asleep.
As she’d tossed and turned, she had again been struck by the relative ease at which she could make things work out perfectly on paper, but in her real life, her existence was a mess. Try as she might, she couldn’t control things as she could in her books. And anyone who knew her would agree that she always tried. It wasn’t that she was a control freak. Well, maybe it was. But things just never seemed to work out for her the way they did for her characters.
For example when she woke up the next morning, she’d trodden into the kitchen, eyes crusted over with sleep, hair sticking out haphazardly on the right side and plastered against her head on the left, heading for the coffee machine. He was her only true love now—Mr. Coffee. At least at that hour. Ben & Jerry’s came in at a close second, but not first thing in the morning. Perhaps second thing. But not first.
On her way to her beloved Señor Café—she saw him as the Latino type, deep, dark, rich, fiery, and with a kick that woke her up quickly—she passed the kitchen table with the pad. Her heart soared every morning when she read the short note from her son, which had become a tradition they’d started when he was old enough to go to the bus stop each morning without her guidance.
That decision had been more of a negotiation than an outright decision. She’d felt he was too young to go to the bus stop alone, and he’d insisted he was “big” enough. After a few dozen extremely mature instances of “are not,” “am too,” “are not,” “am too,” she’d finally confessed in her most pathetic whine that she’d miss him. That’s when he came up with the note idea. “That way you’ll be able to keep me with you all day, Mom,” he’d said.
She’d almost cried when he’d said that because she was so proud of him. “Who’s the grown-up and who’s the kid?” she’d said to him that morning so long ago as she ushered him out the door before closing it. She remembered watching him through the peephole until she couldn’t see him anymore. When he was gone, she’d turned, leaned against the door, and cried because her baby was growing up.
Now her baby was well on his way to manhood. In some religions and cultures, he would be considered a man in a few short weeks.
She pulled the pad to her while forcing her right eye open by prying it apart with her fingers—ripping out a few eyelashes in the process. Thankfully, her left eye wasn’t also crusted shut. Just the right.
She squeezed her eyes open and shut a few times to get them to focus before trying to read his message. Nothing. Nada. The pad was blank.
So…he still wasn’t talking to her.
“Damn it! And damn you, Martin, for starting this little war!” Although she was angry at her ex, her heart sank because she hadn’t gotten a note from Craig. He always wrote something before he left for school, and she loved his sweet notes. They started her day and made her smile.
There’d be no smiling today. “Thank you, you rotten, selfish bastard!” she said aloud to her ex, hoping he could hear her.
On to Mr. Coffee. Once she was fully pumped up with high octane, she could begin her morning ritual.
Her morning ritual had changed dramatically these past few months.
It had all started when she hurt her back. Thinking it was a pulled muscle, she’d tried to ignore it, but within minutes it had gotten so bad she was crippled in pain. That’s when she’d figured it might be more than a pulled muscle. She didn’t have one ounce of medical training, but she didn’t have to be a medical genius to know that if one minute she’d been fine, and the next she could barely move, things weren’t right. When she could finally get herself out the door of her apartment to see the doctor, she’d begged him for muscle relaxers, hoping to ease the excruciating pain.
“Not so fast, little lady,” Dr. Harvey Rogers had said.
“What? No drugs?” she’d shrieked in panic.
“Yes, I’ll give you a prescription, but by the way you’re standing, I’d like to get some X-rays, too.”
“X-rays? It sounds expensive. Is it covered by my plan?”
“Yes, Janine.” He’d rolled his eyes. “But does it make a difference? If this were Craig’s back, would you ask that question?”
“Of course not! How could you even ask me that? If this happened to Craig, I would do anything he needed. No matter what the cost. And you know that!”
“Yes, I do. And you deserve the same quality of care. So don’t tick me off again by asking another stupid question, Janine. If I tell you I want an X-ray, just go get the damn X-ray!”
She’d smiled at him. He’d been her doctor for as long as she could remember. “Yes, sir.”
The results had come back a few days later, and instead of telling her over the phone, he’d made her come back into his office. She had no idea what to expect—and her mind had included a plethora of possibilities—but what he’d told her was the furthest thing from her guess.
If she’d been paying attention to the clues, she would have known before being told. She’d known Craig was growing, but it seemed her height was diminishing as well. Then she’d had that sudden pain—stopping her completely. It had hurt to stand,