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“No.” Now she was whispering. “I told Mom that I got my period and my cramps were brutal, so she brought me up some meds and told me to go back to sleep.”
“Lying is a sin.”
“Well, falling asleep in church is probably a sin too. I only got home two hours ago.”
“If that’s right, half of the seniors who go to my church are going to hell.”
“Ha! True.” She paused. “So come over after church?”
I chewed on my bottom lip and glanced at the clock. We were going to be late if my mother didn’t get her butt downstairs. Dad had already left, the sofa in his office made up nice and neat with a blanket and a pillow.
That wasn’t a good sign.
“Sure. I’ll call you when I get back.”
I tossed the cell into my purse and walked out into the hall. “Mom!” But she didn’t come down. In fact, there was nothing. No creaks like old houses do when you move around, no water running, and no music either. She liked to play her old bluegrass tunes when getting ready for church, so the heavy silence was weird. And come to think of it, I hadn’t seen her when I got up or heard a peep out of her since I got back from my run.
I glanced out the front window and saw Isaac playing with one of his G.I. Joe guys. The doll was flying through the air like Superman and then crashing into his chair. We had maybe five minutes to spare or we’d definitely be late. And my mom was never late. Never.
I climbed the stairs, walked past my room toward my parents’ bedroom, my stomach tumbling and diving as the utter silence in the house weighed on me.
“Mom?” I paused outside their door and then gave a small knock, this time speaking louder. “Mom. We need to leave for church.”
There was nothing but more silence and the sound of rattling eaves as the wind blew outside.
You know that moment in a movie? The one where the heroine should leave but doesn’t? The one where she heads into the house instead of runs for the hills? You know how freaky those moments are? How stupid she is?
Yeah. Well, I was having one of my own moments, because I had a really bad feeling about what was on the other side of her door. Like, really bad. But this wasn’t a horror movie, and it was my mom, so I didn’t have a choice.
Palms cold and clammy, I wiped them down the front of my skirt and carefully turned the knob. My parents’ bedroom door swung open, the hinges a little dry and creaky, so the sound echoed into the nothing that surrounded me.
Clothes were strewn around the room in a way I’d never seen, and my first thought was that someone had broken in and tossed her stuff all over the place. The window was open, large curtains billowing in clouds of gray from the early morning breeze. They twisted and arced, almost like fingers that pointed toward her bed.
Outside, the birds were still singing, the sun was still shining, and from what I could see, the sky was still as blue as a robin’s egg. And yet as I took another step inside my parents’ room, I knew that nothing about this morning was the same as it was less than five seconds ago.
Nothing.
My mother was in bed, turned toward the window, her long hair a tangle of chocolate spilling down her back.
“Mom?”
Nothing.
I don’t remember moving to the bed. Or seeing her there, seemingly asleep and exhaling loudly as if it hurt to do so. The only thing I would remember later is the spill of pills on the floor, the half-empty bottle, and the realization that something was very, very wrong.
I might have screamed—in fact, I’m sure I did—but she only moaned, a soft sort of sound that bounced around my head, louder than rolling thunder.
Pills.
Oh my God, pills!
The summer when I was fourteen, my dad and I volunteered to work with street kids in the city. At the time I thought it was a way for me to earn some community hours and to hang with my dad. It was kind of depressing and a whole lot of eye-opening.
I learned that pills can kill, but more important, because of a twenty-one-year-old woman who’d taken too many, I’d learned what to do if something bad happened. And this was bad. This was really bad.
I slapped my mom. Hard.
Cell phone. Where is my cell phone?
