Page 16 of Lift Me Up

If I want to make this look real, I will have to take the elevator down.

“Please, don’t let me die in here.” I say out loud, closing my eyes and releasing my hand at the same time, letting the door slide shut.

I hit the ground floor button, and the elevator slowly moves down, it still groans with each set of tracks it clicks onto, or however the elevator car of death works this time. I try to hide the view from the camera as I shakily press the call button.

Silence. The trip down 4 flights seems to take forever. With every second that passes, my chest tightens.

“This is the elevator monitoring station, is everything alright in the elevator?” The voice is one I recognize, but it is not him. It’s the girl who answered the second time I called, her high pitched nasally tone echoes through the metal death trap.

“Sorry I-” I panic, but then I realize this is my one shot. The second I leave this elevator, I will never return. “I pressed the button by accident.”

“So, everything is alright?” She sounds… annoyed.

“Yes,” No. Say something!

“Okay, thanks for letting me-”

“Wait!” I say, just as the elevator dings signalling the ground floor.

She sighs, “Yes? Is the elevator stuck?”

“No, I… I was the one stuck a couple weeks ago. We talked, I’m… sorry for the way I spoke to you… Val, right? Your co-worker, he stayed with me.”

“Oh,” an indignant sound echoes into the car. I take that as an acknowledgement of my apology.

“I know there are rules,” the elevator signals again for me to get off, but I have to stay. I have to know. “But I have to try. Can I just know the company you work for, or his name, or something? I just want to thank him-”

She huffs into her phone again, cutting me off, and I wonder how it is that she got this job. Aren’t people in a customer service position supposed to be… I don't know, friendly? Approachable? Everything this person is not?

“Listen, lady. I hate to tell you this, but he doesn’t work here anymore.”

“What?” I say as if I haven’t heard her right.

“He was fired.”

CHAPTER TEN

GEORGIE

Fired. He was fired because of his kindness to me. I feel sick. The moment I leave the elevator, I think it will feel like I can breathe, but all I feel is dread and guilt. Val hung up on me shortly after she broke the news, and if I didn’t know that the calls were recorded and video footage saved, I would try—and fail—to call back or find the company’s name to tell them to bring N back and get rid of her.

The moment I show up at my Mom’s home, she’s out front watering her hyacinths. I called her on the way over, and she told me that a fresh pot of tea was on the warmer and waiting for me. That’s the other thing she always instilled in me: you always greet your guests with tea and coffee and treats. I know she was just trying to remind me to be courteous and a good host, but when I was younger, I liked to think that this was her rule to make people love our home so much they’d never leave.

My mom was always the one to entertain, it was like our place was the home base for parties and tea and dinners. She loved it. She got to take care of people and make them happy, and I never minded because I had a plethora of friends who would come with their gaggle of mothers, and we always ended up in my room playing with my Barbies, making forts, pretending we were the moms. As I got older and the parties lessened, it was hard not to notice how much my mom missed it. I always wondered what changed, why they stopped coming over, but I never asked and she never told. The reason still remains a mystery.

Retirement makes some restless, and that is the case for my mom. I try to visit her at least once a week for dinner, and even though I argue that I can cook for us, she insists on going to the nines and setting a whole family dinner for two and I come home with all the leftovers. When I come to spend a weekend like this and she gets to spoil me and take care of me all weekend without complaint (well, mostly no complaints), she’s in her element.

“Hello, sweetie.” She says as if she didn’t just see me last week, like I have been away for forever.

She touches my cheek, eyeing up and down to take me in. To anyone else, it would look like just that, a child coming home for the first time in forever and mother protectively inspecting that her child is indeed alright. But I know she’s inspecting to make sure I am taking care of myself, to make sure that things haven’t got bad with my health and me hiding it from her. Again. I only did that once, and yet she never forgot about it. That may have been because I ended up in hospital with an infection over it, but that’s beside the point. It wasn’t like I wasn’t taking care of myself then; it just happens with HS sometimes.

“Mom,” I whine, and she tuts at me as if to say, ‘I am your mother, don’t even try it’.

When she’s done, she kisses my cheek to say hello again and leads me inside to the promise of tea, hot or cold, however I’d like it. She and I settle into her sunroom on the back side of her bungalow, the afternoon sun shimmering through. This was always my favourite room when I was growing up, all glass walls with a walkout screen to the backyard, the well-loved wooden table, chairs and the rocker in the corner has seen better days, and my hips would barely fit in that seat now without popping out some of the wood dowels on the sides, but I still wouldn’t change a thing about this room.

“So, what are we escaping this weekend?” My mom asks as she stirs sugar into her teacup, and I nearly choke on mine. Leave it to my mom to know.

“What makes you think I am escaping something?”