“Fuck you,” she snarls.
“Suit yourself,” I say, standing up from my chair.
“Wait!” she cries.
Tears run down both sides of her cheeks, mixing with the sweat. She clutches the front of the hoodie, pulling it away from her chest as if that will ease the pressure.
“Tell me his name,” I say, quietly, relentlessly.
She’s groaning and writhing, pulling at the shirt.
“Tell me. You don’t have much time.”
“Arghhhh!” she groans, rolling on her side and then on her back again, thrashing around in the blankets, trying to ease the pressure any way she can.
I’m colder than ice. I feel nothing but the relentless drive to squeeze this secret out of her. The one thing of value she could tell me, but she always refused.
“Tell me,” I order, my eyes fixed on her face while she twists in a rictus of agony.
She makes a mumbling sound, drooling a little at the strained edges of her mouth.
“Tell me!”
She shakes her head like a toddler holding its breath, eyes slitted, hatefully obstinate all the way to the end.
“TELL ME!” I roar, and I slap her hard across the face.
The pain jolts her. Fear replaces stubbornness as she finally realizes I’m not fucking around.
“I DON’T KNOW!” she howls, her voice strangling in her throat. “I NEVER KNEW! Are you happy, you fucking cunt? I never knew who he was! I don’t even remember it happening.”
She rolls off the couch, shoving the coffee table with her hip as she falls, toppling the bottle of wine so it tumbles on its side and pours the liquor onto the floor with a steady glug, glug, glug.
I make no move to right the bottle.
I don’t touch my mother, either.
I watch her squirm and buck, her face the color of brick, her hands twisting into claws as she grasps at her chest.
Her mouth moves silently, her lips trying to form the word antidote.
I look down at her, pitiless.
“There is no antidote,” I say. “There never was. Nothing can save you. Just like nothing can change you. You are what you are … dead to me.”
I leave her lying there, twisting and croaking out her last breaths. I won’t even give her the comfort of my company. She can die alone, like she was always going to.
Instead, I carry both glasses of wine back to the kitchen and dump them down the sink. I wash the glasses and return them to the dishwasher, wiping my fingerprints off every surface I touched: the Dawn bottle, the faucet, the handle of the dishwasher, the interior handle of the front door … Every place I touched while inside the house.
By the time I’m finished, my mother has stopped moving.
I don’t bother to clean up the wine, but I remove my prints from the bottle, laying it back down on its side.
I put the drops directly into her glass. There won’t be any trace in the bottle.
I doubt they’ll even autopsy her body. The effects of pseudoephedrine are similar to a heart attack. Even if they run a full-panel blood test, the cornucopia of drugs in the house will muddy the waters. She was trying to kill herself long before I helped her along.
Leaving the house feels much better than entering.
The warm sun bathes my face, the fresh breeze reviving my lungs after the stale fug of the house.
A handful of cherry blossoms float across the lawn, blown from the trees in the neighbor’s yard. A single petal lands on my palm, before fluttering away again.
I feel as light as those petals, alive on the air.
I meet Cole in Yerba Buena, where the party is already in full swing.
INDUSTRY BABY – Lil Nas X & Jack Harlow
Spotify → geni.us/no-devil-spotify
Apple Music → geni.us/no-devil-apple
I’m showing my new series, The Other Gender. This one isn’t drawn from my past. It’s an examination of female empowerment through the iconography of the ages. I’ve painted gender-swapped versions of Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent. I’m showing the history of the world if women were the only species. Marilyn Monroe sings happy birthday in her see-through dress, dancing on the lap of a female JFK who smokes her cigar with all the same lust in her eyes, but a sense of playfulness too, mutual enjoyment.
The music blasting from the speakers is nothing like my last show: it’s boisterous, confident, triumphant.
Because that’s how I feel.
I’m on top of the fucking world right now. I don’t need to wait to hear what everyone thinks of my show. I fucking love these paintings. I loved every minute of making them. I put them out with overflowing pride, with confidence that everyone who saw them would feel something: they’d feel what I felt painting them.
Every woman who walks the galleries is laughing and pointing out their favorite images to their friends.
I’ve deliberately invited every woman in this city that I admire. I want them all here, celebrating who we are and what we can accomplish.
It’s not about wishing we were JFK. It’s about planning how we WILL be, in the not-too-distant future. The next person who stands behind the presidential pulpit and gives a speech that enlivens the heart of the nation won’t be an old white man.
I put Sonia in charge of the whole thing, from the guest list to lighting to marketing materials. This is Sonia’s gallery, a new space she’s rented on a 12-month lease, primo real estate in the heart of the east end. The palatial galleries are already filling with her favorite female artists, some local, some international.
This is her debut as much as mine. She is slaying, holding court in a stunning black gown, closing deals faster than her newly-trained assistant can keep up.
I hold my glass up to her across the room in a silent toast to her future success. She grins back at me, letting Allen Wren believe that he’s getting some kind of deal on the hottest new artist out of Mumbai as he signs the purchase agreement.
Cole is just as busy, arguing with Marcus York at top volume. Marcus is trying to rope him into another sculpture, this time for Golden Gate Park.
“No fucking way! The last one almost killed me.”
“What, from a little snow? Come now, we’ll build this one in the summer!”
“We won’t build it at all, ‘cause I ain’t doin’ it.”
“You need time to think.”
“I need time to drink,” Cole says, seizing another glass of champagne off a passing tray. “I don’t know if I’m going to work at all this year.”
“You don’t mean that,” I say, slipping between him and Marcus York and stealing a quick kiss. “You love working.”
“I used to love working,” he says, grabbing a handful of my ass, not giving a fuck if York is still watching. “Now I’m distracted by more interesting things …”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear you say that,” I pretend to pout. “Because I heard about an opportunity opening up in Venice …”
I pull the plane tickets out of my purse, fanning them open dramatically in front of him.
“I need a hot young artist to accompany me … I could write you a letter of recommendation if you’re interested?”
“What’s gotten into you?” Cole says, pulling me into the adjoining gallery so he can kiss me deeper and harder. “Whatever it is, I like it …”