Whisper to Me(70)

The two guys left, running.

I moved, suddenly able to move.

Mom was lying on the white tiles. There was a halo of dark red blood around her head; her hair was matted. I knelt beside her—her eyes were open and staring, the eyeballs twitching, saccadic, as if she were reading something I couldn’t see, something hanging in the air above her. I could see blood trickling from her nose. I couldn’t see what had happened to the back of her head.

Apparently at this point I was screaming “Mom” over and over. I remember hearing someone dial 911 and ask for an ambulance.

And that’s when I did it. I didn’t realize. I swear I didn’t realize. I just wanted to hold her, I just wanted to make her okay. I lifted her up into a hug, and I held her tight, calling in her ear, calling for her to come back to me.

I lifted her head off the ground.

Do you see?

I lifted her head off the ground.

Because I wanted to hold her.





She died of a massive subdural hematoma. That means her brain bled all over itself, drowned itself.

I know this because I looked up brain injuries, afterward.

That was where I learned that the last thing, the last thing you do, if someone suffers a head trauma, is to move them. It can disturb the bleed. Make it worse. Hell, I may even have started the bleed.

I never said anything to Dad. I mean, he knew already. He was a goddamn Navy SEAL. He knows all about injuries.

So we both knew I killed her. We just never said anything about it.

They never caught the two guys either. Dad searched for a while. He used his contacts—his cop buddies from the restaurant. But nothing ever came up.

Probably a good thing. If he’d found them, I’d have lost both my parents. He’d have ended up in prison.





There was a voice, and the street by the bowling alley began to reform itself around me, patchily. A scrap of concrete, a parking meter, the 7-Eleven, slowly reappearing out of the fog. A Polaroid, developing.

“—ambulance?” said the voice.

I looked up. There was a middle-aged woman standing over me, kind looking, with a fake Louis Vuitton purse and a long red coat. She looked like a housewife out to meet her lover. That may even have been what she was doing.

“Excuse me?” I said. I was coming to the realization that I was lying on the damp ground. It had stopped raining. But no more than a few minutes could possibly have elapsed—it was no darker than it had been when I left the bowling alley. The sky was still ablaze with the setting sun.

“Do you need an ambulance? Are you epileptic? Diabetic?”

I seized on this excuse for my weird behavior; anything is better than saying you hear a voice and someone has just pointed out that it is probably you internalizing your own mother, because you feel guilty about making her die.

“Just … need some sugar,” I said.

I must not have looked like a meth head or a bum, because the woman nodded and ran across the road to the 7-Eleven. She came back with a candy bar, which she handed to me. “Here,” she said.

At that moment I didn’t think about my allergy at all; it was like it had been rinsed from my mind, washed away by the storm of memories. I just tore open the bar and ate it. Chocolate. With some kind of crunchy filling.

“Thanks,” I said. I sat up, to show that I had more energy now. “Thank you so much. I’ll be fine.” I smiled, as best as I could.

“If you’re sure …”

“I’m sure. Thank you though. Please, let me …” I started to take out my wallet. I kept it in my back pocket, with a chain to my belt loops.

“No, no,” she said. “On me. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

I saw the crucifix around her neck now—a true Good Samaritan. “Thanks again,” I said.

She nodded and walked off. I took a long breath. Paris, where are you? I thought.

Then my long breath caught in my chest, like my body had closed around it, vice-hard. I coughed. I coughed some more. I pursed my lips. My mouth was fizzing, tingling, electricity running through it. I felt my lips swelling. My tongue. My bronchioles were going to swell too, till I would no longer be able to take in any oxygen.

Till I would die.

Yep.

Just my luck.

Peanuts.





Paris parked and opened the door of her surprisingly ordinary sedan—a Prius I think—just as I was injecting myself with my EpiPen, counting down the elephants.

“What the—”

“Shh,” I said. I finished counting. “—six elephants, seven elephants, eight elephants, nine elephants, ten elephants.”

“Elephants?” said Paris, in a hysterical tone. Like she was freaking out but hard. She was fully human now, the stony tone gone from her voice, and I almost forgot about how she had been on the phone earlier; I had other stuff on my mind.

I was a terrible friend.

Anyway.

I took another deep breath. Better. No hitching in the chest. I took another.

Okay.

My airways were clearing. The epinephrine was doing its job. My mouth was still sore though.

“You count to ten,” I said, as I massaged my thigh. “Because the spring keeps squeezing the drug through the needle. If you don’t wait, you lose some of the injection. They teach you to count elephants, because it makes sure.”