Nails

I remember it like it was yesterday.


I was working in the dining room, my homework papers filled with crooked ten year old writing scattered the wooden surface along with my binder and pencils. I chewed on my bottom lip as I stared at a half-finished, grammatically incorrect sentence in front of me.


What was that word I was trying to spell?


After sounding it out didn’t get me any closer to figuring out the word, I let out a soft sigh and gave up. I placed my number two pencil on the table, strategically behind my pink eraser so it wouldn’t roll off the table as I made the track up stairs to my mother’s room.


The whole house was dark except for the light in the dining room, and the light streaming from under the half-closed bathroom door of my mother’s bed room. Mommy and Daddy didn’t sleep in the same house anymore, so it was just my mom, my brother and I. My mom was in the tub, I could hear the water running, and my little brother was in our parents’ bed.


Well, for the moment, it was just my mother’s.


I opened the door slowly, whispering to get my mother’s attention at first so I wouldn’t wake my brother. He was seven at the time, and grumpy when woken. But when the only thing that answered me was the sound of running water, I pushed the door open a little more, and called a little louder, “Mommy?”

Still there was only water.

Push a little more and call little louder, “Mommy?”


And still only water answered me.


By this time I was all the way into the bathroom; I couldn’t push anymore and I couldn’t call any louder. My voice was lost to the sound of the water. Hurrying; voice still caught in my throat, I kicked my way through the sea of empty pill bottles, to the tap and stopped the water. I would have been heard, if I could speak.


The water lapped at my mother’s nose and I reached to the bottom of the tub in a feeble attempt to remove the plug from the drain, but the chain was gone and I had nothing to grip. But I got my voice back “Mom!” I said a little more loudly, but not loud enough to wake my brother in the next room. I was the older sister; I couldn’t let my brother see his mom like this.


I moved to the other side of the tub, water dripping from my down my arm as I pulled on my mother’s shoulder. She moved, but her eyes didn’t open, and she didn’t say anything I could understand. “Stand up mom!” I ordered, pulling on her arm with all my might.


She moved, but still her eyes did not open, and she still couldn’t say much.


With my help she lifted herself from the bathtub and wobbled amongst the bottles I didn’t fully kick out of the way. I put her bathrobe on her, and she stumbled from the bathroom into the bedroom, and into the side of her bed.


I tensed, watching my brother chest rise and fall, rise and fall, on the opposite side of the bed. He didn’t stir, still fast asleep. I walked around my mother; half on the bed, half on the floor, with a pink bathroom tied around her and I grabbed the phone. My fingers flew into a pattern I knew well, not 911 but... “Daddy, something’s wrong with mom.”


He said he would be right over; so again my fingers flew to numbers I knew well, I called 911 and waited on the bed beside my mother’s sleeping form, nudging her whenever I thought she was getting too quiet. The lady on the other end of the phone was nice, she kept me calm, and when my father arrived she told me to wait down stairs for the ambulance so I could point them where to go.


They got there quick enough, and I pointed them up stairs.


My mother was gone in a matter of minutes.

I don’t remember biting my nails before that night.