Chapter 3: The Fall
Sometime after midnight the flashlight dimmed.
I stood to replace the batteries and misjudged the wet edge of the kitchen tile. My foot slid. My shoulder hit the counter. The back of my head struck the cabinet frame hard enough to turn the room white for a second. I landed in the shallow water, cold soaking through my coat and jeans, and for a long moment I could not convince my arms to push me up.
The house tilted. The rain sounded farther away. I managed to drag myself to the sitting-room rug and curl onto my side, phone still in my pocket, battery icon red. I tried Troy. Voicemail. I tried my mother. Voicemail. I tried 911 and heard the call connect, heard my own voice report an address and a fall and no heat, and then the phone screen went black before I could confirm they had heard me.
I lay in the dark and counted breaths. The cold made the counting uneven. Somewhere in the walls the pipe continued its slow leak. I thought of James’s grave, of the foreign soil, of the airport employee who had knelt on the terminal floor when my family would not cross town. No problem. The words sat in my mouth like a coin I could not swallow.
I do not know how long I stayed there before lights moved across the ceiling.
A neighbor—Mrs. Keller from two doors down—had seen the front door slightly ajar when she took her dog out and had noticed the absence of the usual porch light. She pushed the door open, called my name, and found me on the rug. Her husband called emergency services. Within minutes the living room filled with the harsh practicality of people who arrive when something has already gone wrong: voices, a blanket, fingers at my wrist, questions I answered too slowly.
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They asked who they should contact. I gave them Daniel’s number before I remembered Daniel was not a person I could call anymore. I gave them Troy’s. The paramedic tried it while they loaded me onto a stretcher. I watched his face when the call went through and someone on the other end said they were busy and could the hospital call back in the morning.
Mrs. Keller, standing in my ruined kitchen, heard it too.
