"Look at her!" my dad would say, laughter in his voice. "She LOVES making people cry!"
What I loved was touching people. Making them feel emotions with my music, or my words, so strong that it would pour out of their eyes.
The following few posts are part of a project written for a short story competition. I didn't win the competition, but I think it's time to share my story.
Fourteen years ago today, my mama passed away, and we've all come so far since then. The next few posts are little windows into the past 14 years.
This is where my little family's biggest journey began.
***
She hasn’t yet opened her eyes, but knows it is the middle of the night. Opening one eyelid, she looks at the digital clock, glowing red by the bedside. Four-thirteen a.m.
She turns over, and suddenly realizes she is in her parents bed. Confused for a second, until the sleeping aunt beside her brings her to full consciousness.The days’ events come crashing down, flooding into her mind like poison.
All at once, she remembers the ambulance attendants, walking slowly up the driveway with a stretcher. Just another day on the job.
She remembers her Dad, crashing through the door, a paper cup in his hands. He brought Mom a coffee every morning.
Her dad yelling at the paramedics.
“Get ‘em in here!”
The coffee got cold sitting on the counter that morning. Eventually, someone poured it down the sink.
Amid the turmoil, she realizes her sister has disappeared. She walks up the stairs to their bedrooms.
“Gill?”
“I’m in here,” her sister replies. Her voice sounds cold and hollow.
Gillian is sitting on her bedroom floor, her arms around the family dog Cal, a yellow lab. He has the same stunned look on his face as his “sisters.” Every time a sound is heard from downstairs, his ears go back.
Kate sits down with her sister. Winnie the Pooh stares out happily from the wallpaper.
“She must have had a seizure,” says Gillian, almost inaudibly. She is staring straight ahead, her hand running over the dog’s coat again and again.
In her own little world, Kate thinks aloud.
“I wonder what she’s gonna say when she wakes up. Do you think she had an out of body experience? Saw a bright light?”
Her sister doesn’t answer. Just kisses Cal on the head. A tiny moment of comfort.
She remembers the phone call from the hospital. They’d been waiting all day.
“Kate, can you put Nana on?”
“Dad, is mom going to be ok?” she asks, her voice shaky.
Her dad doesn’t speak for a second. Weighing the pros and cons of how to answer this impossible question, he takes a deep breath.
That’s when she knows. Her life is changed forever.
She remembers her dad coming home, sitting her and Gillian down in the bedroom, while a dozen friends waited in the living room.
“We’re going to be just fine,” he says, his tear-stained face a portrait of pure, heartbroken sorrow. “We have to stick together. It’s going to be ok. I love you guys so much.”
In that moment, lying in bed at 4:13 a.m., pictures and sounds swirling around her head, she begins to cry. She’s only 15 years old, and her mama is gone. Her sleepy aunt wakes, rubs her back.
“Oh, darly girl. I don’t know what to say.”
The thing that sticks out most in Kate’s mind about that day is the colour of the sky. It was the colour of concrete, of unpainted drywall. As if the earth knew their pain.
She closes her eyes, and opens them again. In the bedroom doorway, backlit from a light left on in the kitchen, is her mother.
As she speaks, colours start appearing around her. Shining aqua blues, soft purples, calming yellows and oranges.
“I’m ok,” says her mom. “There was nothing you could have done.
“I didn’t feel any pain. Everything just went black, and that was it.”
Chalking it up to a dream, she goes back to sleep.
The colours are still swirling, in the back of her mind. Despite her broken heart, she feels warm, comforted. A little bit of hope on a dark, grey night.
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