“Oh shit!” Barry’s voice exploded above the general hubbub on the beach.
His attention had been caught by the squeal of brakes in the parking lot. A fire-engine red Trans Am slid to a halt on the gravel, and a tall, muscular teenager bolted from the front seat. The boy managed to kill the engine but left the door on the driver’s side wide open, key buzzing.
Hayden, my son, ran full tilt down the hill. As he neared the group of people, his knees collapsed like a jackknife under him so that he skidded to a halt in a kneeling position near the body. The toes of his sneakers marked the sand in deep grooves.
The movement was at once awkward and graceful, an accomplishment that seems reserved only for the young and naturally athletic.
I had once seen him slide into home plate in that position, judging, correctly, that such a slide would best avoid the catcher’s tag. He had put both hands on the plate and given the frustrated catcher a beatifi c smile.
There was no smile now. He was weeping openly, mouth open in a rictus of fear, tears dripping from the chin below.
“How the hell did you know about this? Does the whole fucking town know?” Barry challenged.
Ignoring the question, Hayden managed to sob out his own query. “Why? Why did she do it?”
“How the hell should I know? Maybe she came out here and decided to go for a swim. Maybe it was an accident,” Barry said.
Hayden shook his head in disbelief.
His uncle continued, “Probably because she’s crazy as hell.”
“Fuck you, Barry!”
My stable cocoon seemed to move ever so slightly. It was not like my easygoing son to say such a thing to his uncle.
The paramedics, except for a hasty glance or two, ignored the boy as they continued their efforts.
Hayden’s dark hair gleamed as he bent toward my body.
“Mom, oh goddamn, please, Mom, please, please.”
I seemed to be swaying slightly in the light breeze. I could feel my soul stretch long and thin in the air. Hayden’s words grasped at me in a way Barry’s could not, and I was being pulled downward, sucked into a tubular vortex, drawn up as a straw
gathers the pool of liquid in the bottom of a paper cup.
Oh God, I don’t want to go back, I thought.
But like the liquid drawn into a mouth, the last of me slipped inevitably away from the cocoon toward the inert body on the sand sucked up with a final gurgle.
The gurgling became a painful retching. Bile, water, and phlegm—all of it smelling rankly of vodka—spewed from my mouth onto the wet sand.
“Turn her over, turn her over!”
“She’s coming around, she’s coming around!”
Assholes, I thought, do you have to repeat everything?
I don’t remember much of what followed. There was more discomfort than pain, especially in my throat and nose where the oxygen tubes were inserted. But the sweet, cool oxygen was worth the trial.
I remember the vivid blue blanket they laid over me on the AmCare stretcher for the trip to the hospital. I remember being hauled onto the gurney in the hospital emergency room, and most of all, I remember Hayden’s warm fi ngers wrapped around my icy ones through the ordeal. Finally, I slid into a dark hole, created by exhaustion and Xanax fed directly into my vein through a plastic tube.
Now I can forget, I thought.
Little did I know how minutely I would come to examine the last twenty-four hours, both those few lucid moments as well as those erased by alcohol as surely and completely as a magnetic tape wiped clean.
©2008, Janet Taliaferro
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