“Everyone but you,” my mother said, tiredness etched in the lines on her face. “End of discussion.”
I glared at my mom. She was a pitiable figure in a wheelchair, her body bowing under the weight of a spinal degenerative disease. Shecould no longer move her legs and was slowly losing the use of her upper body, the pain a constant, unbearable curse.
But why did my life have to stop simply because hers had?
“You can watch TV with Nurse Sourface,” I said. “I’m going to my room.”
Ignoring my mom’s defeated expression and the smothering layer of guilt settling on my shoulders, I stomped to my room and flung myself onto my bed in a self-righteous sulk.
I woke up hours later to discover it was pitch black in my room. The house across the street was also in darkness. Power failure. How irritating.
I toyed with the idea of going back to sleep, but the niggling urge to check on my mom refused to leave me.
Groping my way to the door, I knocked my knee on a bed post, the pain leaving me breathless. I shouldn’t be doing this. My dad hired a full-time nurse to assist my mom. Let her be the one to take out her kneecaps.
But the worry lingered so I gritted my teeth and fumbled my way down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom, the nurse’s room right opposite. It was unnervingly quiet.
“Mom?” I whispered at the threshold. “You okay?”
There was no answer.
I called her name louder, hoping to rouse either my mother or the nurse. The darkness was so black I could barely see my hand in front of my face.
Silence.
With the stirring of alarm fluttering in my stomach, I ventured cautiously into my parents’ bedroom. My bare feet stepped into something wet on the carpet and I recoiled.
What on earth? Had Mom spilled something? A glass of water?
I forced myself to pat the area. This didn’t feel like water. It felt sticky, not smooth, and there were clumps of...
I sucked in a horrified breath.
No, oh no, please no.
With my heart bursting in my chest, I tried to scramble backward, to get to the nurse, to get to anyone who could help me, but the darkness was disorienting.
The instant my arm brushed against cold silk, I knew with a sick kind of certainty that lying only a few feet from me was the dead body of my mother.
I screamed, needing noise to chase away the silence, the darkness, the images in my head. But no one came. No nurse, no neighbor, no one to help me.
A modicum of sense eventually pushed through the hysteria, and I managed to crawl to the alarm panel in my parents’ bedroom to press the panic button linked to the security company contracted to our neighborhood.
After that followed a blur of security guards and police officers swarming the house, voices asking me questions I couldn’t answer, hands preventing me from scrubbing off the blood that seemed to be everywhere.
Finally, my father arrived, but he was too late to shield me from the sight of my mom after a bullet had carved a path in her head.
Suicide was the official verdict. I learned my mom had dismissed the nurse for the evening and used the gun my dad kept in the safe to carry out her plan. A few words in an elegant scrawl was all she left us, the note revealing that although she loved us, she could no longer carry on living like this.
It was all my fault.
Grief and guilt ripped into me, the agony so great I had to double over so it didn’t tear me in half. I pushed her over the edge. I was so self-absorbed I made sure there was no room in my life for a disabled, suffering mother.
It took two years of therapy before I was able to sleep in my room again. Another year before I could see a drop of blood and not become hysterical. But no amount of therapy could cure my terror of the dark. Because that’s what I remember most about that night. The darkness that never seemed to end.
For nineteen years, I’ve used every trick to avoid being trapped in the dark, to outrun my nightmare, but it’s finally caught up to me. Now here I am, lying on the floor and panting like a whipped animal, my sanity unraveling, wondering if my father will get to me in time.
34
