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When Dad finds Mom unconscious on the floor in a pool of her own blood, it isn’t the first time.
Natalie remembers being there the first time.
She is eleven years old, her hair is long, she’s spent the past three hours practicing for an upcoming recital—three hours wasted, because she still has so much to fix, so really why did she even practice at all?—and she’s woken up in the middle of the night by a pair of extremely cold hands.
It usually takes her a long time to wake up, which is why she doesn’t try to go to sleep much anyway. She can function reasonably well for a day or two without good sleep, and usually that’s better than using up time she doesn’t have to get her brain working again. This time, though, the coldness of that touch mostly wakes her up.
The scared eyes and frantic pleading carry her the rest of the way. He’s saying her name over and over—Nat, Nat, Nat, please, please wake up, Natalie, please—so quickly that he’s stumbling over himself, the words starting to blur together.
She sits bolt upright in bed and fumbles for the covers, pushing them away. She’s never spoken to this thing before, not that she can remember; she usually tries not to acknowledge him. But the question spills out of her mouth before she can stop it: “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Mom,” he says. He’s taking her hand automatically, helping her stand, and Natalie looks down in confusion. He intertwines their fingers and starts tugging her after him with a complete disregard for the touch, a kind of disregard that would only come with real panic.
She understands when they get to the kitchen and one of the drawers is hanging open.
It’s the drawer that she’s not allowed to open. The drawer that holds all of Mom’s medications. Her mother’s back is propped against the cabinets, limp on the ground, her head lolling to the side.
“She’s still—she’s still a little conscious, I think.” Natalie feels him letting go of her hand. She glances over at him and sees him bouncing back and forth on his feet, eyes locked on Mom. He hangs back when Natalie walks up to their mother, like he’s afraid of getting closer.
Natalie checks inside the drawer and sees it’s completely empty. A hole opens inside her at that, and with her heart pounding, she examines Mom more closely. Around her are a myriad of pill bottles, over half of them open and almost completely empty.
“Oh,” she says. She hears the way her own voice shakes.
She gets down on her knees and looks into Mom’s eyes. She slaps her on the cheek. If she was less focused on the task at hand, she’d be thinking about how she didn’t want their first physical contact in three weeks to be something like a slap, but right now she only cares about seeing how bad things are. “Mom?” she says, grabbing her by the arms, lifting her chin. “Mom.”
Mom’s eyes open slightly, just enough that Natalie can tell the difference. She makes a noise in the back of her throat. It doesn’t get out of her mouth.
When Mom’s eyes close again, Natalie feels the temperature of the room drop a few degrees. She isn’t sure if that’s just her or the boy standing behind her. She looks up at him, eyes wide, and sees him standing completely still.
“Get Dad,” Natalie tells him. She isn’t sure why. She doesn’t know if it works like that—if he can wake their father the same way he woke her, if Dad will even listen. Natalie doesn’t want to think about how she’s depending on him for this.
The boy doesn’t move. His face is blank, a particular kind of blank that comes with shock and shutting down. He’s deathly pale. One hand drifting to his stomach, he murmurs, “She’s going away.”
Natalie recoils, pulling her hands away from Mom. They reach for her throat. She tries to breathe around the heaviness in her chest. “Get Dad,” she repeats, firmer this time, her voice echoing through the kitchen.
He jumps, stares at her for a moment. Then he’s stumbling up the stairs.
She’s okay. She’s okay. Mom is okay. She will be—she has to be.
“You can’t leave me,” Natalie tells her mother weakly. She shakes her once. All she gets out for her efforts is the sound of Mom’s head knocking against the cabinets. “You can’t leave me.”
She’s supposed to be at Natalie’s recital next week. It’s the first one that she’ll get to in—Natalie can’t remember now. A long time. She promised. She looked Natalie in the eyes and promised that she’d be there.
But I don’t want to wait that long to hear your playing, she’d said. Can you play the set for me tonight?
The piano’s kind of out of tune, Natalie had admitted. The ones at the school sound better. Are you sure you want to hear the set on ours?
Mom had nodded, and Natalie had played it, and she’d messed up the majority of it, and Mom had listened with the oddest expression on her face.
That’s good, she’d said, even though it wasn’t. Natalie couldn’t fit on both hands the amount of mistakes she’d made. That’s really good.
Maybe when she said didn’t want to wait that long, she didn’t mean she was too excited to hear it. Maybe she meant that she wasn’t going to last until next week, period. Did she know that she’d end up here tonight? Or did it just happen?
She’s going away.
She tugs at the sleeves of Mom’s shirt and picks one of her hands off of the tiles, lifting it to her forehead. Their family isn’t particularly religious, but Natalie prays. She shuts her eyes and rocks back and forth and zeroes in on the fading warmth in Mom’s palm, and she prays as hard as she can.
She doesn’t know she’s crying until she hears footsteps pounding down the stairs, looks up, and can’t see anything. Her vision is blurry. She blinks away her tears and makes out her father tripping over the last step in his hurry to get to them. His shirt is backwards and only pulled halfway on.
Smaller, lighter footsteps follow behind Dad’s. They take the stairs one at a time, falter at the bottom, stop at the last step. He stays back and watches, shaking like a fawn, while Dad rushes forward. He grabs Natalie by the shoulder, rubs her back, and moves her gently to the side so he can get to their Mom more easily. Natalie finds herself staring past him.
It was you, wasn’t it?
His eyes snap to hers as if he hears her. He starts shaking his head vigorously, holding onto the railing with a white-knuckled grip.
“I couldn’t get to her,” he blurts. Natalie flinches, but Dad doesn’t react. He gathers up all of the pill bottles and sets them on the counter. “I couldn’t get to her in time. She—”
He can’t seem to get past that. Natalie isn’t sure if she believes him. The terror in his expression looks real enough, but what if he’s lying?
“Natalie, go get my phone,” Dad says. He’s trying to stay calm, but his voice is strained. He doesn’t look away from Mom.
Natalie pushes herself to her feet. A pair of dark eyes stays on her as she runs up the stairs and throws open the door to her parents’ bedroom. She reaches blindly for the phone on her father’s nightstand. She’s dialing the number before she’s all the way downstairs again.
He’s already got his hand out for the phone when she gets to him. She drops it in his open palm and sinks to her knees as he speaks to the operator on the other end.
“Mom,” she mumbles, unsure who she’s talking to, since her mother clearly can’t hear her now.
“She’ll be okay,” Dad tells her when he finds a gap to tilt the phone away from his mouth. “She’s—she’s gonna be fine.”
Natalie shuts her eyes and nods. Someone sits down in the empty space next to her, and she shrinks away from him when he tries to hold her hand.