Bond, Jamie Bishop [fiction novels to read .txt] 📗

too much. She had scrubbed her face for an hour that day, using scalding water, abrasive cleansers and finally Clorox wipes, resulting in redness that lasted for days. She hadn’t touched her hair products or makeup since.
She stared at the basket for a few seconds, and, as it always did, even that brief glimpse into her former life brought Jenny’s mood down a few notches. She sat on her bed, at a loss. There was literally nothing to do. No books sounded interesting, no movies called to her, nothing on television seemed worth watching. Stucco covered the ceiling above her; she laid back and stared at it, seeing nothing.
Even as she lay motionless, Jenny was acutely, painfully aware of the germs. They were everywhere. Tomorrow was wash day for the bedding, but it didn’t seem soon enough. She had showered the night before, nevertheless, her fuzzy, undone hair felt filthy. Touching her face, she was sickened by the amount of oil she felt. Not trusting conventional facial cleansers anymore, she reached for a Clorox wipe from the container she kept by the bed and wiped her face. The moist cloth stung as it touched areas of her face that had become so abraded by constant washing that they were raw. She relished the pain, for it meant that the disinfectant was doing its job.
Done with her face, she lay still again, literally paralyzed by fear. Any move, any turn of her head could bring her into contact with something dirty. It didn’t matter that she personally cleaned the room from top to bottom every day, sometimes several times a day. She knew the room was clean, but the OCD and the phobia didn’t let her believe it was clean. Perception, sadly, was reality.
She was crying when her mother got home. Not the long, drawn-out sobbing that often brought Gina running upstairs, but a silent cry; the tears were leaking from her eyes while her face remained emotionless.
She didn’t respond when Gina called up the stairs. Hoping that her mother would assume she was still sleeping and leave her be, Jenny laid still and envisioned, without trying, the millions of germs that were surely clinging to her mother’s clothing after a trip to the chiropractor’s office. All those chairs, shared by so many patients in the waiting room…lying on that table that the doctor didn’t sanitize, didn’t even wipe down, except for the headrest…it made Jenny shudder in revulsion.
Gina’s voice took on a shrill note of fear. Her mother was afraid she was dead. Again. It was, after all, nearly two in the afternoon. “Yeah, Ma, I’m fine,” Jenny called back. “Just lying down.”
“Can…can I come up? Top of the stairs, I mean?”
Jenny shuddered again. “I guess,” she managed to utter through clenched teeth, terrified.
Gina came to the top step and sat down. “So…what’s new?” she asked, by way of a running joke. Some days Jenny tried to laugh at her condition and joke back. Today wasn’t one of those days. “Shit,” she responded. “Good chiropractor?”
“Yeah, I think my neck’s getting a lot better,” Gina replied brightly. Her voice was cheerful, but Jenny heard the false note in it.
Sitting on the step, Gina wept silent tears to match her daughter. As she recalled her day, she had to stop several times to keep from breaking down completely. She didn’t want this to be Jenny’s life; didn’t want this for her daughter. She was willing to do all she could, willing to cater to every strange request, if only she’d get better. So far, however, with only a few too-brief instances, Jenny had done nothing but get worse.
Knowing what the answer would be but driven to ask anyway, Gina offered food. “I picked up a really nice-looking roast…doesn’t that sound good? I’ve got potatoes to go with it, and carrots - ”
“Ma, stop,” Jenny broke in, her voice pleading. “Just stop.”
Sighing, Gina talked a few minutes more, then got up. “You just call if you need anything,” she reminded her.
Alone again, Jenny’s tears flowed again. This time she gave in to them, curling into a fetal position, longing for the teddy bear she’d become afraid of months before. With nothing to cuddle, nothing to comfort her, she hugged herself tightly and cried herself into a long nap.

Three hours had gone by when she awoke. She didn’t know what had awakened her; the television was nearly soundless and there was no noise from downstairs. It was apparently sunny now outside, and piercing beams of light hurt her eyes as they slipped through the blinds.
She had only just turned her head to look at the clock when she heard the bark. A whine, really. A dog.
She rose up on both elbows. The whine sounded again. What the hell…
Using her cell phone, she called her mother on the house phone downstairs. “Ma, there’s a dog in here, isn’t there?”
Jenny could hear the excitement in her mother’s voice. It was heartbreaking. She realized how long it had been since her mother sounded happy without forcing it. “Jen, you should really come down. Or I could come up. Or send him up. You -”
“Ma! What’re you talking about? Is there seriously a dog here? How is there a dog here?” The words tumbled over each other as Jenny felt a panic attack rapidly building in her chest. She reached for the drawer that held her medications and quickly downed two Ativan pills. A dog? A filthy, drooling, crapping, pissing dog?
“Jen, I know. I know. Believe me. You just have to see him…” Jenny began to cut her off, but Gina countered her. “Okay, okay. Don’t see him. But I’ll come up and tell you everything, okay? I just got in the door…oh, you won’t believe it. I’m on my way.”
Jenny could hear her mother moving about downstairs. She heard the whining continue, heard her mother speaking to the animal in low, soothing tones, heard a door close before the footsteps started upstairs.
Half an hour later, Jenny knew what had happened. Knowing the full story, it had taken two more Ativans to calm her down enough to sit down on the bed instead of pacing her bedroom, her hands shaking and her breath coming in shallow gasps.

Gina Rado was sixty-two years old. Though she was in remarkably good health and took no medications for blood pressure, cholesterol, or any of the myriad afflictions that could accompany her age, she did have mobility problems. Due to several different sources…a pinched nerve in her spine, one leg that was slightly shorter than the other, constant stress over her daughter…she had continual pain in her back, hips and legs. Her knees would often buckle, and she couldn’t sit in any position for very long before starting to cramp up. It had been Jenny who finally persuaded her to see a chiropractor, and while the sessions were helping rapidly, Gina still had a lot of trouble.
Most of her friends worried about her. They knew about Jenny’s situation. Some of them had wondered out loud how Gina would manage if the worst happened. Could Gina carry her daughter out to the car if a hospital visit became necessary? Could the girl be of any help if Gina herself fell down?
Gina had always put aside their concerns. Of course she would be fine. Soon her chiropractic adjustments would show real results, and, of course, soon Jenny would be getting better and be able to help if any odd household accident occurred.
Apparently, her friends accepted her answers. They had been pushing for Gina to hire a live-in assistant for Jenny, sort of like hospice care. The high cost had not been the reason that Gina refused. To accept hospice care would be, like tossing out Jenny’s things, to accept that her daughter’s life was over at twenty-four. She would not consider it.
Giving up on the hospice idea, several of Gina’s friends had begun talking about companionship. A dog, they had come to reason, was ideal. Gina had owned a yellow lab for years. Honey. When she died, Gina hadn’t gotten another one, because of Jenny’s fears. Though she would never admit it to her daughter, living essentially alone downstairs was lonely, all the more lonely knowing that there was a living, breathing person just a floor above her. A floor above and worlds away.
Simply because one of her best friends was hosting it, Gina had attended a tasting party that afternoon. One of those gourmet food companies, with ridiculously delicious goodies that nobody could really afford. They had dips and cakes and salsas that were amazing, but cost blood. Gina had gone to sample the goods and see her friends.
After the gourmet representative had gone, the women sat around the kitchen table, scraping the last smears of dip out of bread bowls and talking about nothing in particular. Gina had noticed a few of her friends eyeing her strangely, but had said nothing.
She didn’t get it when a large dog had sauntered into the kitchen. She’d loved it on sight. Huge and fluffy and predominantly white, her friends told her it was a mixed breed, but that most of its blood was Great Pyrenees and Newfoundland. The dog had sat at Gina’s feet and looked up at her with placid brown eyes, panting softly.
Her best friend broke the news. The dog was hers. For companionship, they said. For home protection.
Gina was torn. The huge animal was unquestionably docile, but how could she possibly control such a big dog on a walk? It would have to be perfectly trained. A friend produced the animal’s “graduation” certificate from obedience classes, and together the group went for a short walk around the neighborhood, the big dog proudly showing off its good manners. Gina was won over. The dog was coming home with her. She hoped it would stay.

“Honey, you should see him,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how well he’s trained. For his size…you can’t imagine. It’s like having a person around. No barking or jumping or anything. And he was a stray, Jen. They were going to put him down. Everybody pitched in for the adoption fee, and the training…I couldn’t just say no. You see that, don’t you, honey?”
Jenny had nodded silently, and then remembered that her mother couldn’t see her from the stairs. “Yeah, I get it,” she called, wiping tears from her sunken cheeks. “How big is it? How old?”
She wished she hadn’t asked. A year-old, ninety-pound ball of germs was now loose in the house. “I got a gate, Jen, so he can’t get upstairs. The boy at the store said it’s the strongest one they make. He won’t come up here. I promise.”
“Okay. Okay, okay, okay. I get it. I…I just wanna be alone. Okay, Ma? Please?”
Her excitement gone, her small hope of reconnecting Jenny with her veterinarian dreams crushed, Gina nodded silently. “Okay, baby. Do you want anything to ea -”
“I’ll have a PowerBar, Ma.” Jenny hated to cut her mother off, but also hated to hear her offers of the homemade foods that had been her favorites. Gina nodded silently, and Jenny heard her descending the stairs.
Sitting on the bed, trying to force herself to pick up a PowerBar and eat it, she thought back to better days. Since moving out of her mother’s house after high school, she and her roommates had always kept animals. Usually cats, since most apartments didn’t allow dogs, with one exception. She had slept with the animals, taken care of them, fed them, walked