The alarm started blaring. The two men stopped, and their heads twisted to look at Mom. They didn’t even say anything; they didn’t shout or curse or anything like that—the one with the baseball bat just took a step toward her, and swung.
The bat struck the rear side of her head with a sound like an ax burying itself in a wooden log. She dropped instantly, as if a magician had removed her legs. She sprawled on the tiles. I started screaming then; I don’t remember this, but it was in a lot of witness statements. I screamed and screamed and screamed. One of the cops we spoke to afterward said a diner had described it as the worst sound he had ever heard. Said he hadn’t known a human being could make that noise.
The two guys left, running.
I moved, suddenly able to move.
Mom was lying on the white tiles. There was a halo of dark red blood around her head; her hair was matted. I knelt beside her—her eyes were open and staring, the eyeballs twitching, saccadic, as if she were reading something I couldn’t see, something hanging in the air above her. I could see blood trickling from her nose. I couldn’t see what had happened to the back of her head.
Apparently at this point I was screaming “Mom” over and over. I remember hearing someone dial 911 and ask for an ambulance.
And that’s when I did it. I didn’t realize. I swear I didn’t realize. I just wanted to hold her, I just wanted to make her okay. I lifted her up into a hug, and I held her tight, calling in her ear, calling for her to come back to me.
I lifted her head off the ground.
Do you see?
I lifted her head off the ground.
Because I wanted to hold her.
She died of a massive subdural hematoma. That means her brain bled all over itself, drowned itself.
I know this because I looked up brain injuries, afterward.
That was where I learned that the last thing, the last thing you do, if someone suffers a head trauma, is to move them. It can disturb the bleed. Make it worse. Hell, I may even have started the bleed.
I never said anything to Dad. I mean, he knew already. He was a goddamn Navy SEAL. He knows all about injuries.
So we both knew I killed her. We just never said anything about it.
They never caught the two guys either. Dad searched for a while. He used his contacts—his cop buddies from the restaurant. But nothing ever came up.
Probably a good thing. If he’d found them, I’d have lost both my parents. He’d have ended up in prison.
There was a voice, and the street by the bowling alley began to reform itself around me, patchily. A scrap of concrete, a parking meter, the 7-Eleven, slowly reappearing out of the fog. A Polaroid, developing.
“—ambulance?” said the voice.
I looked up. There was a middle-aged woman standing over me, kind looking, with a fake Louis Vuitton purse and a long red coat. She looked like a housewife out to meet her lover. That may even have been what she was doing.
“Excuse me?” I said. I was coming to the realization that I was lying on the damp ground. It had stopped raining. But no more than a few minutes could possibly have elapsed—it was no darker than it had been when I left the bowling alley. The sky was still ablaze with the setting sun.
“Do you need an ambulance? Are you epileptic? Diabetic?”
I seized on this excuse for my weird behavior; anything is better than saying you hear a voice and someone has just pointed out that it is probably you internalizing your own mother, because you feel guilty about making her die.
“Just … need some sugar,” I said.
I must not have looked like a meth head or a bum, because the woman nodded and ran across the road to the 7-Eleven. She came back with a candy bar, which she handed to me. “Here,” she said.
At that moment I didn’t think about my allergy at all; it was like it had been rinsed from my mind, washed away by the storm of memories. I just tore open the bar and ate it. Chocolate. With some kind of crunchy filling.
“Thanks,” I said. I sat up, to show that I had more energy now. “Thank you so much. I’ll be fine.” I smiled, as best as I could.
“If you’re sure …”
“I’m sure. Thank you though. Please, let me …” I started to take out my wallet. I kept it in my back pocket, with a chain to my belt loops.
“No, no,” she said. “On me. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
I saw the crucifix around her neck now—a true Good Samaritan. “Thanks again,” I said.
She nodded and walked off. I took a long breath. Paris, where are you? I thought.
Then my long breath caught in my chest, like my body had closed around it, vice-hard. I coughed. I coughed some more. I pursed my lips. My mouth was fizzing, tingling, electricity running through it. I felt my lips swelling. My tongue. My bronchioles were going to swell too, till I would no longer be able to take in any oxygen.
Till I would die.
Yep.
Just my luck.
Peanuts.
Paris parked and opened the door of her surprisingly ordinary sedan—a Prius I think—just as I was injecting myself with my EpiPen, counting down the elephants.
“What the—”