WHO: Lyra and Jem WHEN: Wednesday afternoon WHERE: Lyra's place WHAT: Jem's been making friends WARNINGS: Just... Jem
There were clear, obvious, citrus scented signs that something was up when Lyra got home from Will’s workshop. The kitchen table was totally clear, the benches were immaculate, there wasn’t a crumb or smear of jam or nothing on the kitchen floor. With a flush of the toilet, Jem came out of the bathroom in rubber gloves, and Lyra took a step back and folded her arms.
“You kill a man in here?” Jem never initiated cleaning.
“Yes, love, his head’s in the fridge, mind taking it out with the trash?” Jem shot back with a cheery smile, and threatened her with bathroom gloves and a laugh, forcing Lyra to duck out of the way around the kitchen table, though it didn’t make her lose her questioning look. “I’m having a friend over,” Jem explained, peeling off the gloves and dumping them in the trash, which did need taking out.
Not Lyra’s job, though. And she’d do it if it was Jocelyn’s turn but was getting tired of picking up slack for her mom – a clean kitchen didn’t make them even – so she pretended she didn’t see the trash. Besides? “A ’friend’” Lyra teased, though the corner of her mouth turned up in surprised relief. If Jem had a date, did that mean she was finally starting to trend back toward normal again? Jocelyn might be pissed she was doing it in the house but Lyra couldn’t get hung up on that. “I’ll just grab a few things, get outta your hair.” Wasn’t like she was gonna say no to the excuse to head over to Avery’s instead. She hadn’t had a chance to see him for days now, and he’d be cool with her staying over again (would Armaan, though?) especially since she didn't have a super early start in the morning. Avery wasn’t so great with mornings, though it all depended on how she woke him up…
“No! No, you have to stay,” Jem interrupted her, before she could follow that thought any further. “I want her to meet you.”
Her made Lyra pause, eyes wide at her mom. “Don’tchu look at me like that,” Jem scolded, hands on her hips like Lyra was rude to be surprised.
“Okay okay,” Lyra held up her hands, cuz sure, maybe it was a little rude. The pronoun was weird, but not bad weird. Just… unusual. Jem’s friendships tended to exist in groups, she wasn’t so great at holding onto female friends one-on-one (or male ones, for that matter; her mom hadn't ever really been just-friends with many men) so… yeah alright, Lyra’d hang around and say hi.
“Great! Great! I’ll put the coffee on— can you pick up Jemma’s things, sweetie?” Jem waved her hand toward the lounge and though this, too, was picking up her mom’s slack, she’d do it for Jemma. Apart from the kitchen (and presumably bathroom) the rest of the apartment was still a bit of a mess, but a lot of it was a basket of Jemma upended laundry on the couch, toys on the floor and colouring in scattered about. Lyra flicked the soft toys up onto the coffee table and bundled all the laundry into her arms, bussing it into the bedroom to haphazardly fold into overcrowded drawers.
There wasn't a lot of room to move in Jem and Jemma's shared room; two unmade beds crammed into the corner, stuff everywhere. Lyra paused for a moment there, and couldn’t help but think that even with rent going up this month… with the money she'd given Jocelyn, her family might still be alright if she left. She'd been thinking more about living with Avery since Armaan had interrogated them about the future and while it hadn't come up again… well, she wanted to. Not that there was loads of space as his place either but… nights alone sucked when you held them up against nights at his. Logistics? What did logistics matter when you were waking up next to a guy who adored you? It was so good, every bit of it, and when you started with something this good, everything else would fall into place round it.
Also, if she was over there, her mom couldn’t snag her for any last minute babysitting. Like, yeah, she loved her sister, but she had a husband now and honestly? It wasn’t selfish to want to be naked in bed with him rather than… okay, pretty much literally anywhere else. She was not Jemma’s mom, Jem was.
But then, if she was here, Rosario was just down the hall so— so there were reasons she hadn't said anything about it to Avery yet.
Anyway— thinking about it now wasn’t getting her anywhere, and flung over Jemma's bed was one of Jocelyn's jumpers; Jemma had a tendency to snuggle up in big clothes and fall asleep in them. Lyra picked it up to return it to Jocelyn's room just as Jem was opening the door to her friend, and she was about to leave the jumper on the bed and go but the book her grandmother was reading caught her eye. The True Life of St Patrick by Kleio Femouz.
Clio, the aunt that’d gone with Rosario to meet Merlin. Clio, her dad’s ex who’d helped screw his head back on right. With a deep and sudden exhale, Lyra sat down on the side of the bed and picked the book up. Her grandmother’s cardboard bookmark was a little less than halfway through and Lyra felt a sting of a tear pricking at her eye, which was so dumb but…
It just meant a whole bunch, is all, Jocelyn tryna understand. Lyra brushed at her eyes before anything else could happen up there, and put the book down very carefully, so Jocelyn wouldn’t know she’d been in here; Lyra didn’t wanna spook her by making her talk about it before she was ready. This was very mature and responsible of her, she thought, and not at all motivated by how much she wanted to avoid another strained conversation with her grandma about one of the men in her life.
She closed Jocelyn’s bedroom door behind her as she stepped back into the living room, and both of the women there turned to look at her. For just a moment no one said anything, then the stranger smiled hopefully at her, then looked back at Jem. “Is this her?” she asked, turning back to Lyra, whose eyebrows were creeping up.
“Yes, this is her, my girl,” Jem beamed, and Lyra smiled back, a lower wattage but still… “Lyra, this is Tammy. Tammy, this is my Lyra.”
Tammy was white, tall and skinny as a cigarette, her straight hair and tied in a ponytail tucked into itself. She was probably around Jem’s age, though Jem’s thick hair and shirt that ended about five inches before her jeans began aged her down. “It is so nice to meet you,” said Tammy, and Lyra flashed a grin at them both.
“Thanks, you too.” She meant it, it was nice, the whole ‘my Lyra’ thing. “Imma pour that coffee, youse want?”
Tammy’s eyes followed her around the kitchen. “Your mom can’t stop talking about you,” she said, and then laughed, but it was a laugh that didn’t quite reach her eyes which were, on second glance, lined with red. “I feel like I know you already.”
Lyra hit her mom with the edge of an appreciative look, focusing on her rather than the fact that Tammy had been crying. “Whatchu been saying?” she asked, pulling together three clean cups from the cupboard. She couldn’t help a little bit of pride, same as she felt whenever one of Jocelyn’s friends was up with her life, but it usually was Jocelyn’s friends who knew. Jem’s friends, when Lyra did run into them out in the world, barely knew who she was. One woman Jem’d tried to start a dance studio with a few years ago and now worked at a bar a few blocks over still called her Laura whenever they crossed paths.
“Just about some of the funny little things you’ve done,” Jem said, taking a seat beside Tammy at the table. “Do you remember when you were little and you fell right out of that window on the second floor and brushed yourself right off like it were nothing?”
“Hah, yeah! Gave Ms Myers a panic attack.” Lyra remembered the other kids at school all staring at her, remembered climbing up on one of the benches to give her audience a better view of her bows (and bleeding elbow) as Ms Myers’ panic turned into I’m-not-gonna-get-sued relief and then to what-the-hell-were-you-thinking fury. She also remembered being bruised up so badly everything hurt for a week, but everyone had been amazed that she hadn’t broken anything, and other people’s amazement was worth the pain. Kids at school had talked about her for weeks, it’d been awesome.
Lyra’d opened her mouth to join in on the story but Jem was a fast talker, Jem’d always been a fast talker, and she charged right on to the next story; another near miss then another, as Lyra poured coffee and Tammy’s pale face watched, taking it all in.
Tammy reached across as Lyra set a cup down in front of her, her bony hands round Lyra’s wrist. “I need some’ve what you’ve got, in my life,” Tammy said, and though there was a smile on her face it was hard to see behind the strain over her cheekbones and the too-bright look in her eyes.
“I told her,” said Jem, pulling her own coffee toward her and taking a long, luxuriously sniff. “I told her, my girl, she’s always been blessed. Tell her how you won the money, babygirl.”
Lyra slowly pulled her hand away from Tammy, shooting her an awkward smile as she did. “How does anyone win anything in Vegas?” she shrugged, trying to laugh it off. “Just the ways things turned out, y’know?”
“No, sweetheart, not that money. The first time,” Jem gave Tammy a significant look. “The first scratchie she ever bought, Tammy. Ten thousand. It was like God was speaking through her, because it led us to Mexico, and without Mexico, I never would have had my perfect Jemma.”
Lyra felt rocked, and she was glad a chair was right there to sit heavily down on. She’d never thought about that aspect of the whole Mexico … thing before. Jem wasn’t… wrong; if it hadn’t happened, Jemma wouldn’t have been born, and that thought made every bit of hurt Lyra’d ever felt about her mom leaving her behind turn to guilt. The thought erased the first stab of real alarm she’d felt when Jem had said God speaking through her, because: life without Jemma?
“And then again, she was called,” Jem said, reaching across the table and grabbing Lyra’s hand in both of hers. “Down to Tennessee to learn to build houses, and now she’s working as a carpenter, just like His only son—”
“Mom!” Lyra yanked her hand away like Jem had zapped her. There was way too much grabbing going on this afternoon! “Stop being weird!”
“Oh babygirl, it’s not weird to finally have my eyes open. What I’m saying is,” she turned away from the look scribbled all over Lyra’s face, and pressed her hand against her chest, and said to Tammy: “We can help you.”
And Tammy burst into tears.
She burst like a dropped balloon. It was explosive, the sudden raw emotion, and Lyra froze in her chair, pressing herself back. They were gutwrenching, appalling tears, tears that stripped a person naked, and Tammy let Jem pull her into her arms, and Lyra didn’t know how to be a witness to such naked pain, but when Tammy turned and reached out for Lyra, Lyra unstuck her arms from her sides and reached back.
She shot a near-frantic glance at her mother for support, and while Jem stroked Tammy’s sobbing head, she looked over at her daughter and smiled back, proudly.
“What do you want me to do?” Lyra whispered, even as her brain was figuring it out, even as she was hearing what I want her to meet you and tell her about the money actually meant.
And what was she supposed to do? Say no? To those tears? To that look on her mom’s face? Lyra swallowed the lump of misgivings collecting thick in her throat. “I don’t know if it’ll work,” she said, her own face creased with the stress of the truth of that. “But I'll try, okay? Please stop crying, it’s okay. Please stop crying.”
It’s okay felt so weak, umbrella-against-a-waterfall weak, torch-against-the-infinite-dark-of-space weak, but part of Lyra was freaked too much to think of better things to say and all of her, all of her wished that it was okay, because someone crying like that was awful, and if she could make it stop, she had to try, right?
It was nothing like how it was that night with Avery.
Lyra took herself down to the closest shop that’d sell her stratchies to start with, and sat up at a stool at the counter, scratching off dud after dud with a workshop-blunted fingernail. A ragged sigh escaped as she looked down at the five of them, and even though the final one had gifted her five dollars, that wasn’t gonna cut it. Okay, so she hadn’t always won at the casino either, so… she traded that five dollars in for a few more, but— but nothing. Shit.
Shit, maybe this wasn’t the way to do it, but there were no casinos in Bushwick. And what’d she know about the best way to do this anyway? Maybe the luck didn’t work if it was on behalf of someone else. That was stupid, if that was true. Maybe she only got a quota, and she’d already burned through it? Maybe she needed to have a bit more faith and drop a few more bills on a few more scratchies till her thumb and forefinger had turned silver?
That didn’t work, either, and Lyra couldn’t help but relive the sinking feeling when she’d lost their last chip back in Vegas. Losing was possible, and… right now? Felt likely. “Fuck,” she whispered softly, rubbing her thumb and her fingers together – they were tingling a little.
Just… one more try, then. Rosario had told her to set a limit, and that was way easier to do today, all by herself on a solid gray freezing afternoon two blocks south of home. So she set a limit: another twenty bucks, and that was the end of it. No more after that.
“C’mon, please,” she whispered, to the universe or the scratchies or whatever was in her own blood. “This isn’t fair, c’mon. Fuck.”
Nothing, again. Not even another five. Not even a two. Nothing.
She sat back, and with her jaw clenched in annoyance at herself, ripped up all the tickets. She couldn’t even do it all at once, there were too many, she could only do two or three at a time.
Okay, well… shit.
Plan B then, Lyra thought, sliding off the stool and back to her feet. Whatever the hell Plan B was.
Jem had been right to believe it; her daughter truly was a gift. “I told you,” she said to Tammy, after Lyra had gone. “I told you she was special.”
Tammy kept smiling at her, the kind of smile that’d found something to believe in after so long with nothing, and damned if Jem didn’t love the feeling it gave her. She held onto that smile till she heard the doorknob turn, and both women shot to their feet when Lyra stepped back into the apartment. Tammy was holding her breath and Jem could feel it, too, the anticipation building like the moment before Patrick had her bow her head and pray with him.
“I got you five hundred,” Lyra said, handing over the folded notes to Tammy, who stumbled, who stammered, who didn’t manage to speak but she closed both her hands over Lyra’s, around the money.
“Just five hundred?” Jem asked, confused, and Lyra glanced over at her as she pulled her hand away from Tammy’s.
“All I could do, mom,” she said, stepping away from them both to pull her backpack onto her shoulder. “I gotta run, okay. Gotta— gotta go. Tammy,” she said, hesitated. “Uh. Just. Good luck, okay?” She flashed a tight smile at them both, and disappeared back out the door.
Jem’s smile back at Tammy was much softer, and Tammy stepped forward and wrapped her arms round her, tight. “See?” Jem said, stroking her hair. “Blessed.”