Authors: Shelley Bates
Then she took a deep breath and went out to the kitchen. Moving like a robot programmed to elegant efficiency, she began to
clear up. First the condiments—including olives that the kids used to love to stick on their fingers like puppets. The cranberry
sauce—her favorite, especially on turkey sandwiches later in the week. The potatoes and casserole, the gravy, the vegetables,
and finally, the turkey. That took thirty minutes to deal with all by itself, and in the end she used every single Tupperware
bowl she owned for its final resting place.
The dishes followed, then the pots, then wiping down the counters. Two hours later, you’d never know a family had sat down
to Thanksgiving dinner except for the extra leaf in the dining room table and the lingering scent of roasted meat.
Two days of preparation, twenty minutes of meltdown, two hours of cleanup. Had it been worth it? She wasn’t sure.
But in its own way, making order out of chaos was therapeutic. Mindless and sheer drudgery, yes, but therapeutic in that her
sadness and anger and despair seemed to have leached away with every brussels sprout that went down the disposal. And she
was left feeling empty and resigned and, well, kind of numb.
Numb was good. Numb might get her some sleep tonight, because she sure hadn’t had much since the story of Kate’s dramatics
in Tuesday’s paper.
Numb might get her through the talk she had to have with Anna. She couldn’t let her poor darling go to sleep believing that
Nick thought she was a murderer, or that Laurie was so clueless that she had no idea what Anna was going through.
So, before her comfortable calm wore off, she walked past the living room, where Colin and Tim were watching
Robots
, and climbed the stairs to Anna’s room. The door, naturally, was shut, but despite the seriousness of her visit, a house
rule was a house rule. She knocked.
Anna, as she might have expected, didn’t answer. “Anna, it’s Mom. Can I come in?”
No reply. She pushed open the door and flipped on the light.
No Anna.
Oh, no. Not the window again.
A quick check told her that the window was locked from the inside, so Anna hadn’t risked extending her punishment into the
New Year by running over to Kyle’s for comfort. She must be in the bathroom.
Sure enough, a strip of light showed under the bathroom door. “Anna, I want to talk to you.”
Silence, except for the sound of running water. “Anna?” she called a little louder.
Well, this was just rude. There was no excuse for the silent treatment—something her grandmother Tremore had dished out with
regularity and which Laurie hated and refused to allow.
She pushed open the door and for a moment, her brain couldn’t frame what her eyes were telling her.
The medicine cabinet was open.
A bottle of Tylenol lay on its side on the counter. A couple of capsules lay beside it. There were more on the floor.
Next to Anna.
Who was unconscious and barely breathing, with half a dozen capsules still locked in her hand.
“Colin!”
The scream that tore from her throat gave her a flash of pain, as if it had shredded flesh on its way past.
Colin came pounding up the stairs, Tim on his heels, and they both skidded to a halt in the bathroom doorway. One look was
all it took.
“Nine one one.” Colin did an about-face and dashed into the bedroom, where Laurie could hear him giving details to the emergency
operator with grim precision.
“Mom, what’s the matter with Anna?” Tim’s lip began to wobble again, and from the bathroom floor, she reached up for him.
“She took too many Tylenols and they knocked her out,” she managed.
I will not cry again. I will not. I’ve got to keep it together.
“We learned about that in Health. People do that to kill themselves.”
“Anna did not try to kill herself.” She hoped she was lying firmly enough to be convincing. Against Tim’s warm body, her heart
pounded with such force she wondered that he couldn’t feel it. She couldn’t get any air into her lungs. “She just made a mistake.”
A mistake.
Please, Lord, let it just have been a mistake.
“They’ll be here in a few minutes.” Colin appeared in the doorway, his face gray and drawn. Already the siren wailed in the
distance, the sound like the keening of a bereaved parent. “Tim, go outside and flag the ambulance down.” When Tim bolted
out of the room, he asked, “Is she still breathing? Did you give her CPR?”
Laurie put a gentle hand on her daughter’s chest. From where she knelt on the linoleum, she could see the slight—dangerously
slight—rise and fall.
“She’s breathing. Oh, Colin. I’m so sorry.”
He knelt, too, folding his height so he could slip one arm around her shoulders and hold Anna’s wrist with the other hand
while he felt for her pulse. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“I should have seen it. Jed should have told us. We could have done something before it came to this—before she thought this
was the answer.”
“Shhhh. It will be okay.”
The siren penetrated the very walls of the house, then shut off. In the ringing silence, they could hear Tim’s voice downstairs.
“My sister took too many Tylenols. She’s in the bathroom. Up here.”
The EMTs pounded up the stairs, and in less time than Laurie would ever have expected, they had Anna intubated, strapped to
a gurney, and loaded into the back of the ambulance.
“I’m going with her.” Laurie already had her coat on and her purse over her shoulder.
“I’ll take Tim to my mom’s and meet you at the hospital.”
She nodded and climbed into the back of the ambulance. Then she hung on for dear life—in more ways than one.
Susquanny Medical Center moved like a well-oiled machine, where every part knew exactly what it was supposed to do—every part
but the mother of the patient. Finally, a nurse took pity on her fluttering around outside the locked door and led her away
to a waiting room, where she sat her down with a cup of something hot that might have been tea or coffee—it was hard to tell—while
Anna had her stomach pumped and her electrolyte levels balanced. Laurie had been to the emergency room before, of course—with
a boy as curious as Tim, there were bound to be things like the fishhook incident last summer, and the broken leg when he
was learning to ride his skateboard. But it wasn’t the same as coming in an ambulance, where triage was immediate and you
didn’t have to wait for two hours while your child suffered.
“Laurie.”
She looked up at two voices calling her name. Colin came in from one direction and Dorinda Platt from the other. She stood
and gripped her husband’s hand as she searched Dorinda’s face for a sign of . . . anything good.
“Anna is going to be fine,” Dorinda said in response to that look, and Laurie’s knees buckled. Fortunately, she hadn’t moved
far from the vinyl-covered sofa, and she collapsed into it like a marionette with severed strings.
Dorinda sat on one side of her while Colin took the other. “Thankfully, she underestimated the number of capsules it really
takes to shut down the human nervous system,” she said. “Her stomach has been pumped, and we have her on a drip so she won’t
become dehydrated. The ER doc is having her admitted for observation overnight, but you should be able to come and get her
in the morning.”
“Can we see her now?” Colin asked. Laurie couldn’t speak. Her throat was closed with the effort to keep from bawling and waking
up everyone within three floors.
“They’re not quite finished, but I’ll see if you can see her for a few minutes. Then I recommend you head home and try to
get some sleep.”
That’s easy for you to say
, Laurie thought.
“We’re required to report suicide attempts to the police and to Child Protective Services,” Dorinda went on. “I just wanted
to prepare you. You’ll probably be getting a visit from both agencies after they get the reports.”
Laurie’s throat cleared with a vengeance. “CPS won’t take her away, will they?”
“I can’t speak for them, but I can’t imagine they would. They’ll do a home inspection, though, and the police will be interested
in the whys and hows.”
“They already know the whys and hows,” Laurie said, unable to keep the rasp of bitterness out of her tone. “It’s this whole
town thinking that she killed Randi Peizer, and no one being able to find out who really did it.”
“God will make all things known,” Dorinda said softly.
“Yeah, well, I wish he’d done it before Anna got ahold of that bottle of pills.”
“Laurie,” Colin said.
“Don’t
Laurie
me. I can’t believe it’s God’s will to take both Randi and Anna away.”
“Seems to me it’s not,” Dorinda put in. “Your girl is going to be fine. Maybe it was a—”
“If you say
wake-up call
, I’m going to get up and walk out,” Laurie warned. “God doesn’t use innocent girls’ lives as wake-up calls.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” Dorinda said calmly, and in some distant part of her brain, Laurie wondered if too many hysterical
parents had given her the ability to be so unflappable and objective about the things they said. “I was going to say maybe
it’s part of his plan to flush the guilty party out.”
Laurie didn’t think much of that theory, either. Speculating about the will of God was a pointless exercise—like an ant trying
to figure out why humans didn’t want him at their picnic.
Dorinda glanced at the swinging doors to the ER. “They should be finished by now. Come on back.”
Anna was in the third bay, behind a set of yellow curtains. Laurie’s heart squeezed in distress at the sight of her slender
body on the bed with its backdrop of plastic tubing and monitoring instruments and flashing lights. Laurie had no idea what
any of the equipment meant, other than it was helping to make her baby better.
Anna’s eyes fluttered open when the rings on the curtains clashed as Dorinda pushed them back.
“Hey, sweetie.” Colin touched her cheek while Laurie took her hand. “You’re going to be okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Anna whispered.
“It’s all right,” Laurie said softly. “Everything is going to be fine. You’re going to sleep here tonight, and we’ll come
and get you in the morning.”
“Nice way to get out of being grounded for the night.” Anna smiled at her father’s gentle joke, and her eyelashes slid closed.
Laurie looked at Dorinda, who said, “She’s on a mild sedative. She’ll probably sleep now. You folks should go home and try
to do the same.”
“I want to stay here with her,” Laurie said. “Who should I talk to?”
Dorinda shook her head. “I’m afraid not, Laurie. Please. The best thing you can do for her is to get some rest.”
No matter what Laurie said to convince her, Dorinda wouldn’t budge. In the end, Laurie let Colin walk her out of the room
and down to the hospital parking lot, where he held the door for her while she buckled herself in.
“Dorinda’s right,” he said as he pulled out of the lot. “Things will look better in the morning.”
Their daughter had attempted suicide. How was ten or twelve hours going to make that look better?
But she managed to put a lock on her lips and simply nod instead of just blurting out every rebellious and angry thought that
flickered through her brain. Great. At the advanced age of thirty-eight, it took an appalling week like this one to teach
her discretion.
Hardly any traffic moved on the streets, some distant part of her mind observed on the drive home. Everyone was settled into
their postcard-perfect lighted houses, the only thing on their minds whether or not to raid the fridge again before bed.
The silence yawned between them like a physical entity, and Laurie couldn’t bear it for another second. She was doing it again—using
anger and sarcasm to beat away the darkness of fear. But this was not the enemy. This was Colin, her best friend, her partner,
her lover. She’d known since the day they’d first kissed that he was an analytical, practical kind of guy. She was an emotional,
dramatic kind of woman. Most of the time there was a time and a place for all of these qualities, and they worked pretty well
side by side. But lately she’d seen his efforts to be reasonable as attacks on her.
Maybe she was the one who needed counseling.
Colin turned into the driveway and parked with the engine running. “I’ll go over to Mom’s and get Tim.”
She should say something. They needed to talk out the fear and worry so that they could both sleep. But she was so tired it
was an effort to lean on the passenger door and open it.
“Okay,” was all she said as she left him and stepped into the house.
I
t wasn’t often
their place was empty at night. Laurie moved from room to room, taking off her coat, dropping her purse on the counter, making
sure the kitchen light was on for Colin when he got in.
In their bedroom, she undressed and climbed into her flannel pajamas, as though even her skin needed something soft and comforting
lying against it. Then she sat on the bed and, with the swiftness of a pouncing cat, the grief ambushed her.
A soft pillow against her stomach was small comfort, but she toppled sideways and curled around it anyway, weeping her sorrow
and fear and regret into the dark, feeling the pillow’s velvet cover go from fuzzy to damp to slick under her cheek, wishing
Colin hadn’t gone to his mother’s, wishing he was there to hold her. And still she couldn’t stop. It was as though every tear,
every shriek, every molecule of defiance she’d been bottling up for the last two weeks rolled out of her in a wave, pulling
her in, sucking her under in her own maelstrom of emotion.
And the problem with catastrophic waves was that they held you under, churning and somersaulting and out of control, until
their energy was spent and you could swim out.
Laurie wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to swim again.
It was just too hard. Death had brought this upon them all, but life was just too hard.
Then the proud waters had gone over our soul.