“I’m not being rude, I’m being complimentary,” Liv answered, her voice calm and quiet, but hard.
“You’re prying,” Cassie insisted.
“It’s fine. No harm, no foul.” I ladled myself some soup, ate standing up.
Liv nudged Cassie with her shoulder. “So, are you up to going home today?”
Cassie nodded, not looking at her mother. “Sure. Just…don’t push things, okay?”
“Push what?” Liv asked. “I don’t push anything.”
Cassie snorted. “Um, yeah, you do. You want to talk about things. You want me to tell you how I’m feeling every moment of every day. You want me to get back on my feet. You want me to process and cope and make healthy choices and…it’s exhausting.”
Liv looked down at her empty bowl. “I just want the best for you. You’ve been through a lot.”
“And I just want to cope with it my way, okay?”
I kept quiet, knowing this conversation wasn’t about me, and wasn’t meant for me. I busied myself in the kitchen, not wanting to pry, but I’d admit to being a bit curious about Cassie’s past since I knew almost nothing about her. I was trying to make myself invisible—pretty much impossible—but I was surprised at how open they were with one another. It was almost as if I wasn’t there at all.
“I get that, Cass, but I’m worried your way of coping is to not cope at all.” A pause. “Or to cope through overindulgence.”
“Mom, god. Come on. I’ve been brutally strict about every aspect of my life, my whole life. You know how many Friday nights I stayed home and went to bed early instead of going to parties with my friends because I had dance in the morning? You know how much I missed out on? How often I sat and watched my friends have milkshakes and fries while I ate a salad or dry chicken breast? That was my childhood, my early teenage years, and my entire adulthood thus far. And it’s fine. I chose it. I wanted it, I wanted dance and I willingly sacrificed all that to get there. But now dance is gone, Mom. It’s gone. It’s never coming back.”
“You don’t know that, Cass,” Liv said. “Maybe—”
“I do know that. I have a hardware store’s worth of metal in my right leg, Mom. It took weeks of PT just to be able to use it at all. Weeks after that, I still can’t walk more than a couple blocks without it hurting. Shit, sometimes it hurts just sitting doing nothing, like right now. If I ever dance again, it’ll be…months, at best. And that’ll require a level of work I’m just not sure I’m up for. I worked so fucking hard to get where I was, and it was taken away from me in a matter of seconds. And now I have to start all over again? I don’t know. I just…I don’t know that it’s worth it.”
“You’re a dancer, Cassandra. It’s who you are.”
“It was,” Cassie whispered and then went silent for a long time. She got up and limped for the door. “I don’t know who the hell I am now.” She gave me a tight, small smile. “Thank you, Ink. For…everything.”
I didn’t smile back, because it wasn’t what she needed. I just gazed at her steadily. “Be strong, little sparrow.”
She swallowed hard, even as she pretended to laugh lightheartedly at me. “Weirdo.”
She left, leaving Liv and me alone in the taut silence. “Sorry, Ink. Family stuff is messy.”
I shrugged. “All good. Trust me, I know about messy family stuff.”
She left then, too, and for the first time in four days, I was alone in my home.
It felt weirdly, uncomfortably empty.
At two in the morning, a couple of days later, I was at the laundromat, washing my bedding and the rest of my laundry. Sitting alone, sketchbook on my knees, I was working on a landscape I’d started. Or at least it had begun as a landscape. A mountain in the background, the channel, a pier. Then, somehow, the focus had shifted from the landscape to a wooden post in the foreground. With a small sparrow perched on it. Wings fluffed, about to take flight.
I specialized in animals, so sketching something like this was not a big surprise. But I’d never done much with sparrows. Not really a heavy hitter in the indigenous tattoo world, sparrows.
I heard the little bell over the doorway ding, but I didn’t look up. Someone else coming in to wash clothes was none of my business, even in the middle of the night.
Except I felt a presence, and then someone sat down beside me. “That’s an incredible drawing, Ink,” I heard Cassie say. “I mean, really incredible.” She huffed. “Thought for sure I’d be the only one doing laundry at this dumb hour.”
I turned and offered her a smile in greeting. “Thanks.”
She met my gaze. “A sparrow, huh?”
I shrugged, nodded. “Just doodling.”
She frowned. “That’s a doodle?”
I nodded. “To me it is, yeah. Just something I’m working on to pass the time.”
She eyed the sparrow again. “It looks so real. Like, it could fly off at any moment.”
“I sorta specialize in lifelike animal pieces.” I flipped back a few pages, showed her the final charcoal drawing I’d done as a sample design for a client—a coiled cobra, hood flared, fangs bared. “That’s a piece I did for a client. Final version on him was full color, and was even more lifelike.”
She shivered. “Eew. Not a fan of snakes. But that’s…I can’t believe you can do that with nothing but pencils.” She peered closer. “Even in black and white and gray, it looks…slimy. And…angry.”
I laughed. “Yeah, he was a biker, and his gang nickname was King Cobra. So his tat had to be intimidating.” I flipped back to my work in progress. “Nice guy, though. That cobra piece paid for a good chunk of my house, too. Full back piece, nearly thirty hours over half a dozen sessions.”
“Thirty hours?” She sounded incredulous. “Of being tattooed?”
I laughed. “That’s pretty common for a full-size, detailed piece. Those full sleeves you see, from shoulder all the way down?” I swept a finger down my own full sleeve of tattoos, albeit most of my sleeve work was done in the ancient threading style rather than full-color needle gun style. “Those can take even more, because sleeves are typically many different individual images all woven together, so each piece can take several hours.”
She examined my arm. “Yours look different than the other tattoos I usually see.”
I nodded, tracing the lines and angles and dots on the outside of my right bicep. “It’s threaded.”
“Meaning?”
“Certain cultures, like the Polynesians, and my people—the various Inuit tribes from here in Alaska, Canada, Siberia, Greenland, places like that, we sorta invented the idea of the tattoo. The word ‘tattoo’ itself actually comes from the Polynesian word ‘tatau.’ They use small sharp sticks and an ink mixture and poke it into the skin. Like modern guns, except a lot slower and a lot more painful.” I twisted to show her my ribcage under my left arm, where I had a stick-and-poke piece done in the traditional style. “That one was done that way. I traded a threading piece for a stick-and-poke piece.” I tapped my arm again. “These are done in the Inuit way, with needle and thread and ink. Of course, if I’m doing it for a client, I use modern medical-grade needles, dissolvable thread, and tattoo-grade ink. But on me, I do it the ancient way, with whalebone needles and caribou sinew thread and soot.”