The Astonishing Color of After(49)

52





WINTER, FRESHMAN YEAR


It all ground to a halt. My questions, my investigating. The normalcy. The illusion.

It was a blustery February day, over halfway through my freshman year. I got home from school to find my mother horizontal on the couch. She looked tiny, like a rag doll.

“Hey, Mom.” I let my backpack slide to the floor.

No response.

“Axel and Caro are coming over later. Can we order pizza?”

Still nothing.

I wondered if she was in a deep sleep kind of nap.

“Mom?”

I nudged her shoulder and she turned her face up. Her features scrunched like she was hurting.

“Are you okay?”

She didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw her head shake slightly.

I nudged her harder. My mother shifted and something slid off the couch, thudding to the floor. Her cell phone.

I picked it up, searching for a clue. Her password was my birthday; I unlocked it with quick taps and the first thing that popped up was her call history. The last dialed number was 911—the call made just a few minutes ago.

“Mom,” I said more urgently. “What’s wrong?” I’d seen her like this before, listless and unresponsive, but this time it felt dangerous. It was an instinct that seized my body with fear.

The light in the room changed: The afternoon glow turned spiky. In stabbed flashes of red, flashes of blue. I spun around, my eyes shooting for the window. The first thing I saw was the police car. Then there was an ambulance and, pulling in behind them, a fire truck. I looked around the room, trying to take stock of everything around me. Nothing was burning. No alarm was blaring. Why was there a fire truck?

The knock on the door was a pickax chipping through my skull. I made my way toward the noise, but I couldn’t remember my feet actually touching the ground. When I pulled open the front door, the cop took up my full field of vision.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “We’re responding to a call from a woman by the name of Dory Sanders.”

“That’s my mother,” I said numbly.

“Is she here?” he said.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” I told him.

“Can we come in?”

“I guess, I mean…” I didn’t have a chance to say more.

She didn’t speak to them, and like a contagious effect, the cops stopped speaking to me. My questions went unanswered. They gathered her up into the ambulance and took her to the hospital, and I ended up sitting in the waiting room, wondering what the hell was going on.

I called Dad eleven times. He didn’t pick up.

The waiting room smelled toxic white but felt traffic-cone orange. I dug my heels into the floor, hoping to leave a mud stain, or grind away enough of the ugly carpet to make a mark.

Rain check on pizza, I texted to Axel and Caro.

“Leigh?” It was the first familiar voice I’d heard in hours, and it wasn’t at all who I’d expected.

“Tina,” I said. Axel’s aunt. Mom’s closest friend.

“Hey.” She gave me a weak smile. “Are you doing okay?”

“What’s going on?”

“I picked up some medicine for your mom, and I’m here to drive you guys home.” It wasn’t a real answer. “You ready to go?”

The nurse came out then, pushing my mother in a wheelchair. Mom wouldn’t look at me. She wouldn’t look at Tina.

“I got in touch with Brian,” Tina said. “He got on the first flight he could.”

My mother’s expression didn’t change. Her eyes were sunken, haunted, like she hadn’t slept or seen the sun in days. Like someone had wrung the color out of her complexion. When had I last given that face a real look? I felt hollow.

All the way home Mom stayed silent and ghostlike. The nurse had taken the wheelchair back, so Tina draped my mother’s arm over her shoulders and half carried her through the front door. I followed from behind, watching the way my mother’s feet dragged, how she couldn’t even hold up her own weight. She was like a puppet whose strings had snapped.

Tina had brought leftovers for us. She heated up a stew, uncovered a huge plate of rice and beans, chattering away with forced cheer.

“Jorge’s new thing is these glow-in-the-dark lizards. He keeps hiding them around the house, trying to scare me. I’ll go downstairs in the middle of the night for water, and at the bottom of the steps, there’ll be a plastic lizard glowing at me.”

I was relieved when she went home to make dinner for her own family. My mother and I sat in the dining room with the stew ladled out into bowls, the rice and beans served on the nice plates that we rarely used but had been pulled out by Tina’s quick hand. Mom didn’t touch the food. One of the bulbs up above flickered and buzzed. It was the only sound to be heard.

Mom closed her eyes and slumped forward onto the table, burying her face in her arms.

We sat there like that for hours. I didn’t do my homework. I didn’t pull the blinds on the windows. The outside world grew dark and the streetlamps bloomed yellow. The neighbors stepped outside with their dog, and that was how I knew it had to be at least ten o’clock.

We sat there until all the other houses on our street winked out their lights. The world was going to sleep.