Eleanor:Part 5

The rest is a blur. 911 was called. A first responder arrived. I remember being there, just outside the door when he found only a small piece of twine holding it closed. That fact alone would be enough to haunt my mother for the rest of her life.  I remember seeing him cut it with a pair of medical scissors.

This memory of being there conflicts with my memory of the ambulance. Maybe after the first responder found her on top of the trash my mother sent Heather and I back to the house? I almost remember being told to leave – why don’t I remember being made to stay at the house in the first place? Was I really there, or is this a creation of my overactive imagination? My mother is the only person who could say for sure, and we don’t talk about this day.

By the time the ambulance arrived, the yard was chaos. When you call 911, you get police, paramedics, first responders, and firefighters. They all bring their own service vehicles. A rainbow of flashing lights littered the scene as I watched. It was like a silent movie. A tableaux projected onto the silver screen of the afternoon sky, her naked body the only bit of black and white in this colorized presentation. The stretcher was a liter carrying her to her chariot, her jet black hair the only bit of darkness on her pale grey body.

The chaos departed as quickly as it had descended, and soon I found myself alone with Usher and my own multi colored silk thread. I had a safety pin attached to a pillow on my bed and I was knotting the colors into a chord with rib spiraling up one side. My head was down, my jaw was set. My actions belied my anxiety, but my brain was set on convincing the rest of me that it was all going to be alright.

My mind raced. “Her sister, Dolores will come down from Baltimore. While Eleanor’s recovering we’ll get her house fixed. Eleanor will finally let us come in her house after this. We’ll watch science fiction movies and I’ll tell her all about all the boys I like. She’ll finally get to hear me play my trumpet. It’s all going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay . . . “ All the while, making tiny and precise knots out of colored string like her life depended on it. However, campfire crafts do not save lives.

She died in the ambulance.