Chapter Text
“I’m going to move out at the end of the semester,” Luisa says, unable to look up and meet Rose’s eyes.
The move isn’t entirely out of the blue. Rose hasn’t expected this, but she’s expected Luisa to say something that feels like the shoe dropping for weeks now. Mia moved out of their little house last month without explanation, and when Rose sided with Luisa’s mother over Luisa herself, the other had taken it personally.
“My mother is unstable!” Luisa hisses at her, her hands clinching into fists. “Just because you’ve seen her get better by leaps and bounds since she’s been living here with us, that doesn’t mean she is better. You don’t know what she’s like living by herself!”
Neither do you, Rose wants to say, but she keeps her jaw clinched firmly shut. This isn’t about her. It never has been.
Luisa takes a deep breath and whirls away from her, pounding one hand on the kitchen counter. “I don’t want to lose my mom just because you thought she was better enough to live on her own.”
Her scars itch, and she can’t keep her mouth shut. “Your mother is an adult. She has spent the majority of her adult life locked away in a mental institution where they were giving her so many drugs that she couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. It’s perfectly normal for her to want to live on her own—”
“My mom tried to jump off a bridge!” Luisa interrupts, whirling back around to face her, grabbing Rose’s collar in her hands.
“When she was being drugged by the same institute!” Rose presses her lips together, but she doesn’t look away. “What you have done for your mother is good,” she continues, forcing her voice to be calmer, “but you have to trust that she’s going to be okay when she moves out. Were you actually planning on taking care of your mother for the rest of your life?”
“I don’t know!” Luisa drops Rose’s shirt and turns away, crossing her arms. She shudders once. “I don’t know.” She raises a hand and sniffs loudly. “I thought I could get someone else to help out. I thought—” Then she shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. She’s leaving. I don’t have a choice.” She looks back at Rose, glaring at her. “Why couldn’t you have at least agreed with me?”
“Sorry that your lying lawyer didn’t want to lie.”
There hadn’t been any way to explain how she felt without pulling up her sleeves and showing Luisa the scars etched into her skin, and she wasn’t going to do that just to force Luisa to see her side on an argument that, in her opinion, didn’t really matter. Whether she agreed with Luisa or not, Mia was going to move out – she had moved out – and as far as she knew, the older woman is still doing just fine on her own.
(Rose hasn’t told Luisa this, but she has visited her mother a couple of times. Mia’s house is even smaller than theirs is: one bedroom, one bathroom, and a tiny kitchen. It’s cute, though. There’s a lot of yellow, a lot of sunshiny colors, a couple of sunflowers bursting out of the ground in the front of the house, a few more flowers in the flower boxes that Rose knows Luisa planted. They’ll all die soon enough; the weather has been growing colder, and the first frost should come by the end of the month.
Every time she has visited, Mia has seemed to be doing just fine. Rose has prodded the older woman, making sure that she knows to let her know if something is wrong. She understands what it feels like when something is wrong. But Mia has assured her countless times that she’s doing just fine.)
“You don’t have to keep checking in on me, you know. Someone might think that you care.”
Mia has gotten better at speaking. Her voice isn’t as thin or raw or rasping as it once was. She still prefers to sign, and even now, she switches to her hands instead of continuing to speak. Luisa isn’t sending you, is she?
“She doesn’t have to.” Rose takes a deep breath, pressing the petals of one of the flowers between her fingers. “She won’t talk to me anymore. Might as well check on you myself.”
Mia’s eyes widen. What do you mean she won’t talk to you?
“She’s mad at me for being fine with you moving out. She’s mad at you for moving out, but she can’t rightly take that out on you, can she?” Rose rolls her eyes. “She thinks you’re going to be all crazy again.” Her eyes shift away. “She refuses to use that word. She thinks unstable is a better one.”
I was unstable. I’m not anymore. The best work a therapist like Luisa can do is to help me be good enough to stand on my own again.
Rose nods. “I believe that. I think she believes that. But it’s you.” Her lips press together. “If something happens to you, she’d never be able to forgive herself.”
It looks like Mia wants to step forward before she does, and she hesitates, her arms out, as though asking without words. Rose gives her a little nod, and Mia takes her face in her hands. “Nothing is going to happen to me,” she says, her voice soft but firm.
“I wish I could make her believe that.”
Where are you going to stay? Rose wants to ask but doesn’t. She simply gives a little nod. “I’ll have to see if I can find someone else to live here, then,” she says instead. “The middle of the semester is rough, but I can’t live here by myself.”
“Why not?” Luisa asks, one brow raising. “I don’t see you as the sort to get lonely, even if this place would be too big for you.”
Rose shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it.” She takes a deep breath and tilts her head over toward the living room. “We’re getting close to Christmas. I’m surprised you haven’t done anything yet.”
Luisa’s eyes narrow. “It’s still November. You don’t decorate for Christmas until after Thanksgiving. You’re really bad at this.”
“I don’t decorate,” Rose says with a shrug. “Why would I be good at this?”
Luisa rolls her eyes. “I’ll be back and decorate next weekend. Don’t worry about it.”
And she doesn’t.
Thanksgiving is a horror, but at least Luisa feels almost like normal again.
Rose expects Thanksgiving to be worse than it is, so it doesn’t bother her too terribly, but Luisa? She expects far more from it than what she is given. Truth be told, Rose thought Luisa would host her family’s Thanksgiving dinner at their little house, which wouldn’t have had near the room for all of them to fit and would have been absolutely horrible because Rose would have been stuck there with all of their family awkwardness.
Fortunately, Luisa’s dad hosted the entire affair. Rose stayed at their house by herself (except for when she left for some Black Friday shopping – and what even was the point of calling it Black Friday anymore, anyway, when the shopping and sales now half of the time started on Thanksgiving – on Thursday – instead of on Friday). To her favor, Luisa did offer to let Rose join them, but Rose was determined to have no part in that unless she had to.
And since Rose is not involved and doesn’t have to be there, she avoids the main brunt of…well, of everything.
It isn’t until she gets back to the house – sometime long after the last sales have ended – and sees Luisa’s purple PT Cruiser parked in their driveway that she begins to feel a little bit apprehensive about the whole thing. Most of the lights inside the house are shut off, but there’s one still on in the living room, which does not bode well.
Rose takes a deep breath, leaves her purchases inside of the car (she can move them in the morning, given that Luisa sleeps in really late; she doesn’t want Luisa to see anything she might want), and goes inside the house, prepared for whatever Luisa might tell her. She barely shuts the door before she can hear the other woman griping at her, but it sounds so much like how she used to talk to her that Rose felt herself comforted by the reaction.
“Where were you?” Luisa whines, turning over on her stomach and lounging halfway across one of the arms of the sofa. They’d discarded Rose’s old sofa when they moved into the new house, replacing it with a much newer one. Luisa had insisted – something along the lines of My mom is not going to hang out on a shitty threadbare sofa, so I’m getting us a new one, and you have to live with it! – and here it is, getting more use than – well, not more than Rose’s sofa had, because she’d slept on that thing, and no one really slept on this one.
Rose let out her deeply held breath. “Were you waiting up for me?” She stumbles into the living room – too much time on her feet in those stores, too much rushing around trying to find the best sales (and Rose normally doesn’t rush) – and collapses on the other end of the sofa, lips pulling up in a slight smile. “Did you miss me?”
“I wish you had been there.” Luisa groans and slumps back into the sofa, her legs spread out, arms wrapped around one of the pillows, brown hair splayed against the cushions. “It was horrible.” One of her hands tightened into a fist, and she pounded the cushion beneath her. “And it was so awkward. It was like Dad hadn’t ever talked to Mom before at all! And he didn’t remember any of his signing, so I spent most of my time trying to sign what he was saying—”
Rose squints at her. “Your mom can hear just fine.”
“Oh, she can, yes. Definitely.” Luisa waves one hand in the air. “But it’s just nice to sign with her, too, since she mostly signs back.” She shakes her head, lips pursing. “That was the worst thing, too, because Dad couldn’t understand what Mom was signing, so I was translating for him, too, and Mom talked so much that her voice started to get raspy and raw again – you know she’s gotten better at all of it, she has gotten better at all of it, we both know that – but Rafael couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just talk the entire time – and, look, he didn’t really know her before the accident, I mean, he wasn’t born until afterwards, and he hasn’t been around her trying to talk so he doesn’t know, and it was just….” She slumped down again, drifting down the cushion until she was almost on the floor. “It was so bad, Rose. So bad.” Her stomach grumbled, and she held one hand against it. “And I didn’t even get to eat much because I was spending so much time translating and signing and explaining and everything. And I’m so tired and so hungry and Rose, you should have been there because at least one of us should have been able to eat some of that wonderful food.”
“They didn’t let you eat?” Rose’s hand absentmindedly moves to scratch through Luisa’s hair, her fingers brushing lightly against her scalp. “The best part of Thanksgiving is the food, and they really didn’t let you eat any of it?”
Luisa lets out a soft hum of contentment. “Well. They let me eat some.” She opens her eyes and looks up at Rose. “How was your Thanksgiving? Did you get to eat any wonderful food?”
Rose yawns, covering her mouth with the back of one hand. “It was long. And I mostly had leftovers.”
“Leftovers?!” Luisa sits up in a shock and glares at Rose. “On Thanksgiving? That’s sacrilege!”
Rose yawns again. “Worse than not decorating for Christmas?”
“So much worse!” Luisa’s hands ball into small little fists again. She stares at Rose and takes a deep breath. “Fine, fine. I’ll do it for you!” She stands up and storms into the kitchen.
Rose pushes herself up from the couch. “Lu. It’s late. I’m tired. You’re tired. And you’re already upset. Please don’t start cooking right now.”
“But you had leftovers. On Thanksgiving!”
“Lu.” Rose places a hand on her shoulder and gives it a tight squeeze. “You can cook for me tomorrow. I can even help you cook. And then we’ll both have wonderful food. And it might be late, and it might not be Thanksgiving, but you shouldn’t wait for one holiday a year to have wonderful food.”
Luisa stops and turns around just long enough to give Rose a blank stare. “You would actually enjoy it more if we had Thanksgiving dinner on a day that wasn’t Thanksgiving, wouldn’t you.”
Rose grins. “I absolutely would.”
At her words, Luisa’s smile becomes smug. “So you’ll eat Thanksgiving dinner and watch Christmas movies with me tomorrow, then, right? And help me decorate? Since you’ve figured out how to get to the roof so easily.”
Rose stares at Luisa, blinking a couple of times. “I don’t know where you heard that. In fact, I don’t think I said anything about helping you decorate for Christmas. I’m pretty sure you were supposed to do that all on your own.”
Luisa’s grin brightens. “But if you don’t like decorating for Christmas on Christmas and you like having Thanksgiving dinner on a day that isn’t Thanksgiving, then you’ll be just fine helping me decorate now before it’s actual Christmas decorating day, right?”
“No,” Rose says without any hesitation. “I will never be happy helping you decorate for Christmas. Ever.” She ruffles Luisa’s hair. “But I’ll be happy to watch.” She leans down as though to give Luisa a kiss on her cheek and then stops herself.
Just because this feels familiar doesn’t mean that it is. Not anymore. Luisa’s moving out at the end of the semester – during Christmas break. “Are you even going to be here for Christmas, since you’re moving?”
Luisa’s face freezes. “I’d forgotten,” she murmurs. Her lips curl together, and she bites her lower one. “I’ll be here for Christmas – at least a little bit. I’ll need to be with family, too, but I’ll be here. And for New Year’s. But I’ll probably move out after that.” She swallows and nods once. “I know that feels abrupt.”
“Do you want to talk about why you’re moving?” Rose asks, her voice soft.
Luisa shakes her head. She looks like she’s deflated, and all at once, that thickness feels like it’s sprung up between them again. “I think I should go to sleep,” she says instead, and she doesn’t look up. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”