I was little, seven or nine, and staying at my grandmother’s for the week when I found her bag of pills, ready and waiting for her to take when she decided it was time to die. I had been looking places I shouldn’t, opening every drawer in her dressing table, standing on the kitchen counters barefoot, opening cabinets and flipping cups upside down before I closed them. It was a problem I had, some inability to feel comfortable in a new place until I was sure I’d seen it all. But it was necessary, and without it I was rotten. There was something about the idea that there may be secrets I didn’t know that made me unbearably lonely. When I felt that way, I would act out; it was a test to the people who cared for me, to see how much they would take before they would denounce me—to show how they truly felt.
The bag was on a shelf above the hanging clothes in her closet. I could only reach it standing on a red stepladder, stretching my body tall until my skin hurt. My grandmother was a fragile 5’2”, and thus kept a ladder in every closet (she boasted about having been 5’4” all her life, claiming that when I was born she gave two of her inches to me, but I knew better than to believe that). The pills were in a clear gallon bag, the kind my mother would freeze tomato sauce in for the winter months. They could have been jelly beans.
My grandmother was on the deck in the backyard reading the paper when I found them. I poured them onto the shag carpet floor of her closet and sat with my legs criss-crossed, sorting them by color, occasionally taking one into her bedroom to see the color in the sunlight before making my call. There was every kind of pill inside: some two colors, some disintegrating, some the size of my pinky finger cut in half. When I finished sorting, I returned them to the bag and brought them out to the deck to show her how much better they looked now, each shade blending into the next—a true rainbow.
When I brought them to her I was holding the bag in my arms like it was a baby. I thought it was funny how the bag was so big, twice the size of both our hearts combined. I carried them to the deck, cradling them like they were my baby, and stood waiting for her to look up from her book. My grandmother was not the kind of grandmother a child would interrupt, but I could have said something if I wanted to; she loved me so much. More than she had loved anyone her whole, bitter life.
By the time she looked up I had been waiting long enough to grow bored and was walking around on my tiptoes, bouncing the baby in my arms. The wooden deck was faded and splintered, but with all the green plants on and around it I thought it was better that way. A polished deck would be offensive, I decided, and embarrassing. Offensive because it would only seem like it was trying to compete with the shiny flora, and embarrassing because there was no competition, as the flora would always be miles more beautiful. Small as I was and soft as I made my steps, the deck still creaked under my weight at every movement. When I looked up to see if my grandmother was bothered, I saw she wasn’t, though she was peeking over her pages watching me. I giggled and shushed her, my pointer finger to my lips, the way my mother did with my baby cousin. My grandmother loved it. There’s a picture of me somewhere, an out-of-focus little girl, barefoot with long blonde hair, holding something you can’t quite make out in my arms like it’s a baby and laughing like a pretend mother. Real mothers never laugh like that.
All week, we took care of my baby. Whenever my grandmother forgot that when hosting a little girl you must entertain her—when she was watching the news or calling a neighbor, the way old people do—I would fetch my baby from the shelf and walk around with it on my hip, shushing my grandmother, bouncing on my tiptoes. As soon as she saw me she would put an end to what had been distracting her and smile, tell me I had the most beautiful baby in the world, say it looked just like me.
One day she brought me a blanket and taught me again and again how to swaddle the baby. Then I told her it was crying and needed another nap, putting my baby back onto its shelf. I came back without my baby and she was waiting for me to play or paint or read, whatever had been distracting her no longer of any importance.
On one of the last days of my visit I was sitting on a wooden stool in the kitchen watching her cook green beans and fried chicken, my elbows on the greasy counter and my chin in my hands. She was the only real-life person I knew who wore a real apron when she cooked and tied her hair up in a bun like she was going to dance class. My baby was on the stool next to me. I swung my feet around to sit on my knees and in this maneuver knocked over the stool that my baby was on. The wood hit the tile with a terrible sound, and the bag split open, pouring most of the pills onto the floor. I covered my mouth, ready to break into giggles at just the same time as her after a perfect moment of silence. But before they could escape she looked at me like I wasn’t her favorite granddaughter, but an awful stranger girl. Her eyes were mean, dark and empty, and the spite in her old-lady voice made me worry she wasn’t my grandmother but a witch. In that vicious voice she asked what was wrong with me, and before I knew it she was on her hands and knees, scooping the pills back into the bag. I watched her from the stool with wide, dry eyes, my mouth stuck shut. Even after she cleaned up the pills and left the room with the bag, I didn’t cry. At that age I screamed when I cried, sobbed like my mother was being killed right in front of me. But I couldn’t cry then; I knew not to, I was too afraid what would happen if I did. What it would mean if she didn’t come to kiss my wet face and run her wrinkled fingers through my tangled hair while I shook and screamed until my head ached too bad to do anything but sleep.
Instead, I climbed down from the stool, quiet as I could, and walked with soft, shameful steps out to the pool. I sat with my legs dangling in the shallow end for a while, dipping my finger in the water and drawing faces on the concrete, seeing how many features I could give them before they disappeared. I tried to figure out if she was really a witch pretending to be a grandmother, or if she was just a grandmother who sometimes pretended to be a witch.
I’d questioned it only once before, at a family dinner one night just before she moved to Miami. I was always in charge of getting our drinks when we went to dinner because, before baby on the shelf, that was our favorite joke. She got a kick out of the way I would climb onto the bar seat and raise my hand like I did at school, how when the bartender came over I would, like an actress, ask for “one double vodka in a tall glass filled to the top with ice, and one Shirley Temple with two red cherries, please.” If he asked to see my ID I would smack my forehead and point to the old lady who was always beaming back, proud to be the grandmother of such a confident little girl. Usually she would have two drinks, tell me extra-funny stories and fall asleep early, but that night we each had one. My teeth were stained red from mine and her eyes were dull and mean from hers. On the car home from that last dinner, my mother told me that too many of those drinks were what woke up the witch.
I didn’t like thinking about that dinner and my toes were pruned, so I went inside. My cheeks and shoulders were hot and sore and I had more freckles on my face than stars in the Florida sky.
The chicken was sitting in the pan on the stove, too burnt to consider. I ate one of the green beans, but the butter was stuck to it like fat and the bean itself was frozen cold. And I couldn’t find my grandmother. I assumed she left to get another chicken and more green beans. I couldn’t find my baby either, which scared me, but I didn’t know if maybe she thought she couldn’t trust me with it anymore. I understood that, but I was sad thinking we would need a new favorite joke since my mother said we couldn’t do the drinks anymore.
Just as it was getting dark and I was thinking about calling 911 to ask what they thought I should do, the chimes on the front door danced, and my grandmother walked in with key lime pie and grocery store fried chicken. She didn’t have the baby with her and I didn’t say anything about it. We ate the pie on the deck with plastic forks, and after looking at my sunburnt face, she told me red was my color, that it made my blonde even more beautiful. My mother would have yelled at me for not wearing sunscreen, but my grandmother knew that red really was my color.