My fingers tightened around my mother’s cordless phone. I stood frozen in the kitchen, unable to put it down. Somehow, I knew it was different that time. But there was nothing I could do about it.
The sirens grew louder. Flashing lights shined through the windows at the front of the house once again. Inside, there was nothing but silence. No one moved, it seemed. I don’t even think I was breathing.
Then I heard footsteps upstairs. They seemed to shake the house as someone came down the steps. Drew’s voice rang out, startling me.
“They’re here,” he called out.
“What?” I asked.
But he didn’t answer me. Instead, he ran back up to the bedrooms. Slowly, I walked out into the foyer. Glancing at the stairs, I moved instead to the window, parting the curtain. The ambulance turned onto our street.
“Move,” my father said behind me.
I never heard him come down. When I turned, he looked past me, out the window. I backed away and he ran a hand through his slick hair, something I had never seen him do before. Giving it a strange little tussle. Long clumpy strands fell before one eye.
Drew came next. He stood behind my father, reminding me of some loyal dog awaiting command.
“Go out and meet them,” my father said.
Drew never said a word. He just ran out of the house. My father watched from the window. I turned away from him and that’s when I felt the strange pull from upstairs. It drew me closer, inch by inch. At the bottom of the steps, I turned, expecting my father to berate me for being in the way. But he didn’t, so I continued up, shuffling down the hallway, closer and closer to my mother’s room.
The smell had changed. At first, it reminded me of the woods out back. When the leaves have fallen and it rained. Sweet and putrid, as the old decays under the new. The sour smell was still there, under this new layer. The two became a physical barrier, stopping me a few feet from the doorway.
I heard my father’s voice. At first, I wasn’t sure it was him. It sounded foreign, unnatural.
“She’s upstairs,” he said.
I’d heard that tone before. When Marci Simmons first visited. It was subservient, passive, like some mockery of caring. It unnerved me more than the smell. Pushing past the barrier, I moved forward, more to be away from him, this new him, than to see her.
“She was going to meetings. She seemed better,” my father said, his voice cracking. “I didn’t know what to do. Please help her.”
I reached the doorway. Footsteps rushed through the front door. My fingers wrapped around the cold door handle as the paramedics reached the bottom of the stairs. I turned it. The door swung open. The foul air struck me across the face. Behind me, my father continued to talk. Continued to snivel and whine like some terrible parody of a real human being.
My mother’s lamp was on. The light shined across her face at an artistic angle, deepening the contours of one eye and sharpening the bone of her cheek. Her mouth seemed set in a soft, embarrassed smile. I took a step closer, wanting to brush a wisp of dark hair off the impossibly pale skin of her forehead.
“The room at the end of the hall,” someone said behind me, maybe Drew.
I moved quickly, going to her, sitting on the side of the bed like she had asked. It was cold, and a darkness seemed to surround me, like the rest of the room simply ceased to exist. As my hand reached for her, I took in all the colors that painted my mother’s death. Her iridescent skin. The sharp contrast of the shadows. Red fingernails at the end of limp, skeletal fingers. A blue blanket I had never seen before covering her up to her exposed collarbone. The twinkling reflection of light across the surface of a clear glass bottle, upended beside a damp circle on the textured carpet.
“Son.”
I reached for her. Her forehead felt like a stone polished for centuries by icy water. My tears transformed the painting of her death, clouding the edges as if an impressionist painted over reality in soft circles of life and emptiness.
“Son.”
With all my heart I prayed that it was my father who had used that word. I imagined him standing in the room, his arms open to me, his eyes sharing my grief. But when I turned, a stranger in a dark uniform stood beside me.
“We need you to move,” the man said.
I did. I ran from the room. I ran from my father, my brother, and what I felt they had done to my mother. I ran, vowing never to come back. Never to subject myself to them. I ran to be free, but real life doesn’t exactly work like that.