Madison Cumbee

9

Madison Cumbee

Lila

My name is Lila, and I died in my bed when I was twenty-five. The syringe was still in my arm when the guy I was hanging out with at the time found my body. I didn’t OD on purpose; I didn’t have that bad of a life. My childhood wasn’t that great, but whose is? My mother was nineteen years old when she had me, and my father only stuck around long enough to crush her spirit. According to my grandmother, my mother was a happy, curious girl until I was born. We lived with my grandmother in her white, brown, and peach house in the city of Why Would Anyone Ever Want to Live Here. The front porch swing was broken, and even though Grandmother said she would fix it, she never did. But when she said I’d get the belt or have to skip school and meals to help in the one-room salon she had added on to her house, she always kept her word.

Oh, and my mother left went I was six. I don’t tell my story often, so forgive me if I mess up a time or two.

I grew into a pretty girl. Everyone said so. By fourteen, I had long, straight blonde hair, brown eyes that the boys told me sparkled at night, and a naturally thin frame. Most of the girls were jealous, eating their rabbit food while I ate fries and honeybuns because they were the cheapest options in the high school cafeteria. God, I can’t believe I ate that shit.

From third grade to ninth, my best friend was Bethany. She would invite me to sleepovers, and I’d get to spend almost all of my weekend with her and her family, Mr. and Mrs. Seagers and her older brother John. Their house didn’t have a single peach-colored thing in it, except for peaches. They had a big leather sofa, soft tan carpet, and the lamps weren’t covered in plastic. The house always smelled like chocolate chip cookies and nutmeg instead of hairspray. I wasn’t allowed to sleepover anymore by the time I was fourteen.

“Why not?” I asked Bethany in the school parking lot.

“I dunno,” she said. “It’s just something my mom decided.” I could feel the muscles in my face tightening, and Bethany noticed. “I-I don’t think I can have anyone over. It’s not you.”

I left her standing in the parking lot and started spending more nights out with different friends at house parties with cheap beer, stale cigarette air, and sketchy older guys. But that kinda became my thing. The guys part, not the cheap beer. Maybe the cigarette smoking part too. For the rest of my life, when I had the money for them, I smoked.

When my grandmother finally snapped at all my late nights, she hit me. With a curling iron that was already hot. Before the scar on my shoulder healed, I ran away. I was seventeen, and after doing a few hours of google search and waiting a few days for a response to my email, I gathered all of the cash I’d lifted off the drunks at the parties for the previous three years and bought a one-way ticket to Paris.

The plane ride was awful. My first. I hadn’t planned on using the passport I’d purchased in secret the year before, but I did like the picture of me. I studied French on the two plane rides: one to JFK with a four-hour layover until the seven-hour flight to Charles de Gaulle. Thank God they sent a car for me because in spite of listening to used How To CDs the whole way there, I don’t think I would have been able to explain to a taxi driver where I needed to go in the seventh arrondissement. The black Mercedes was waiting outside the airport with Pierre leaning against it, holding a square of white poster paper with Lila Madklin written in red sharpie. Pierre had a gray mustache and spoke English very well, with an endearing French accent he couldn’t get rid of. We didn’t see each other often, but we were always friendly.

He drove me to the Ashworths’ three-bedroom, two-bath apartment, where I was left from noon to five, Paris time, to empty my single suitcase out into my new bedroom. It was small, but the view was breathtaking—I could see the fucking Eiffel Tower from my bed. (Apparently, the room was too tight of a fit for a king-sized bed, and that’s why I got it instead of my employers.)

I stepped into the position of au pair easily, like I’d grown up with three younger siblings, which as far as the Ashworths’ knew, I did. The Ashworths were an American family, two young, traditionally attractive parents with one brown-haired, blue-eyed little girl, who moved to Paris for John’s advertising job. Patricia began working at a local university teaching English. They let me have two weeks to explore the city so I wouldn’t get lost while charting Katie around. She was six when I moved to Paris. So, I learned the metro system, getting lost several times, and memorized how to get to Patricia’s favorite local brasserie, market, and park. After the two weeks, I picked Katie up from school around two thirty, and we played in the park Patricia picked. It was spring, and soon, the daylight lasted until nine and then ten o’clock at night. “Lilaaaaa!” Katie would squeal, running into my arms every day after school, after only a month together. She loved me. And I grew very fond of her, brushing her hair, playing checkers, reading bedtime stories, teaching her the basics of pretty much everything. It was intoxicating, being the authority.

I played with a few French boys, but it didn’t take long before I was consumed with thoughts of one man in particular. Throughout the day, and night, my mind would wander to the way he shook out his heavy coats when he got home before hanging them in the entrance hallway closet, to how he got up early before work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to go for a run around the neighborhood, to the way he smelled when he got back from those runs, to the way I could feel him watching me on the living room floor while I played Go Fish with Katie.

John Ashworth.

By November, Patricia got fed up with my tight t-shirts and jeans. But she was a classy dame. So instead of huffing and puffing (aka bitching), she took me shopping for new clothes. We shared a pot of tea and ate two strawberry tarts that Sunday afternoon between shops. Talked mostly of Katie. I got blouses, knee-length skirts, sweaters, a dress, a few pairs of pants, and a heavy coat of my very own. They must have cost a fortune, and I made sure to only get items that didn’t look like her style.

I was wearing the black skirt that hugged my bum and sort of flared out before stopping at my knees and the red blouse that tied in a bow across my collar bones, barefoot, cooking supper when John walked in one Wednesday night to announce Patricia was eating with some of her students before their finals. I pretended to be sad, said something about the wasted portion of food and how it wouldn’t taste as good re-heated. After he shook out his coat and hung it up, he stood behind my right shoulder and breathed deeply.

“That smells nice,” John said.

He smelled nice. I turned my face toward his, lifting my shoulder up toward my chin, and raised my eyes up from his neck to his eyes. “Thanks.”

His jaw muscles flexed, and I got wings in the bottom of my stomach from the thought that I was making him tense, making his blood pump faster.

We ate with Katie at the dining table, like we always did. And then I put her to bed, reading from her favorite story: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. John was sitting on the couch when I got done, and I waited for a moment at the end of the hallway, just looking at him while he was engulfed in a mystery novel. His brown hair was slightly askew, the hair product from early in the morning not able to handle the whole day; his black-framed reading glasses almost hid the tiny wrinkles beginning at the corners of his bright blue eyes; and his thin lips were pressed together in concentration about a line or paragraph he’d just read.

I sat down beside him. “Figure out who done it yet?”

He grinned at my wording and slid a bookmark into the crease of his pages. “No, not yet.”

I bobbed my head, waiting for him to steer the conversation.

“Your new clothes look nice on you,” he said.

New Year’s Eve came around. I’d gotten a ticket back to America for a holiday trip as my Christmas present, meant to be used to bring in the new year. Patricia and Katie went back to Connecticut to visit the grandparents, but you know what, John just couldn’t get away from work, as much as that pained him. When the clock struck midnight, it was my lips he was kissing, and the next morning, it was my bed he woke up in.

Our affair lasted three years until Katie asked Patricia why daddy slept in Lila’s room only when mommy was in London or Italy. He chose her. I didn’t really want him to do differently. I wasn’t bored with Paris, but I wanted a change again. Without my au pair job, I had to return to America.

John had been paying for all of my expenses, so I got to save up all my wages. Well, the ones I didn’t spend on cigarettes—something John never liked—or wine or coke, which I only did on my days off. I may not have been the role model au pair, but I was never tweaking when I took care of Katie.

I chose Raleigh, North Carolina for my next adventure.

There was a problem, though. I didn’t know what to do. I arrived at RDU airport and checked into a motel while searching for an apartment. I was at some God-awful sports bar when I finally met a man who knew his way around the city and its available residences. He convinced me that a small house was better to rent than an apartment. After I found a great little place with a landlady who let me paint the walls and whatever else I liked, I created a mini paradise, rooms wrapped in blood red and plum purple and gold and a little herb garden in the backyard.

But I needed more than a house to do over. So one day, I walked into a coffee shop with my man for the month and met this deliciously broken woman, not five years my senior, working behind the counter with a manager nametag.

Lexi Moore.

She’d married an older man right out of college, and then he cheated on her. So she didn’t know how to be happy anymore, didn’t have any flair. I took her under my wing, and from the start, I could tell that she wanted some of my je ne sais quoi to rub off on her. But I do know what it is. It’s life. I was full of life. Those high school and college boys called it a sparkle; the men afterward called it a glow. The word effervescence was thrown around a time or two. Lexi saw it.

She had tied her future up into a pretty bow, thought she knew exactly what her role in life was—to be the asshole’s wife. Of course, she didn’t know he was an asshole when they got married and blah blah, but after the divorce, I could see that it was going to take more than just a rebound. She needed more than a girls’ night, a spa weekend, and/or a good fuck. She needed to learn how to have passion again and how a woman can be desirable.

“What are we going to do today?” Lexi asked me this almost every time we hung out.

“Whatever we want,” I told her.

She helped me out too. I only knew dudes in Raleigh, so Lexi was how I found out a lot of necessary things, like where to go for a haircut. We went in together one day when the weather was getting warmer. I got all of my hair chopped off for a really short pixie cut and pink tips dyed onto the ends of my blonde locks; she got layers in her long brown hair. It was all she could manage at the time. We got massages together and went to a wine tasting seminar, a pre-sommelier thing. She wasn’t very good at it, but she knew people who owed her good deed favors, so we got discounts a lot. She often asked me about the men I came into her coffee shop with, and we would talk into the night, at her ex-husband’s house she now owned or my little place, and drink wine until one of us fell asleep on the couch.

I told Lexi a lot of things, but I never was good at opening up completely. Mystery is part of a woman’s charm.

After a year or so, she met a man who gave her a book, and she stopped hanging out with me. I actually missed her sometimes, but I began thinking a bigger house might be nice. Raleigh has a lot of nice neighborhoods with big, nice houses. I began imagining how many more herbs I could grow in a bigger garden. I partied with richer men and started doing harder stuff.

I know why John couldn’t say no to me, why Lexi fell as in love with me as her sexual orientation would allow, why Bethany’s mom couldn’t stand me being around Bethany’s dad anymore, and why it’s so easy to get what I want from people. I have an addicting personality. I also have an addictive personality, which is why I’m dead now.

But I guess it’s time to move on to my next adventure.