Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [39]
“What do you mean, ‘you all’?”
Chief Manning glanced at me. “You were with your mama. You and your sister. Your brother came home early in the morning and found you three in your parents’ room.”
The lasagna caught in my throat, and I grabbed for my water. The light that hung over the table seemed too harsh, reminding me of a light in a police interrogation room.
And then I remembered something. The sound of pounding. Far away, like the sound in a dream. It became louder, then louder still, until I’d had to leave the dream and wake up. And when I did, I was in my mother’s bed. She was asleep. Her head was turned to one side. Her sandy-blond hair fell like a panel over her face. The pounding again. It was coming from the door. I untangled my legs from the sheets. I noticed that I had slept in my jeans and my shirt with the big yellow flower on it.
I was almost to the door when I heard my name. “Hailey!”
I stopped. I looked at the bed. My mother was still asleep.
“Hailey!” I heard again. It was coming from the door. I walked toward it, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. “Hailey, it’s me!” I heard.
“Danny?” I said.
“Hailey, open the door.”
I stepped toward the door and reached for the handle. It wouldn’t turn. “I can’t open it. It’s locked.”
“Unlock it then.” His voice sounded mad.
I scrambled with the handle, trying to figure out how the lock worked. It still wouldn’t open. Why wouldn’t it open? We were trapped. “I can’t,” I said, scared now. Maybe I should wake Mom.
“Is Caroline in there?” I heard Dan ask.
I started to say no, just me and Mom, but I glanced around the room to make sure. And there was Caroline. Hunched in a corner, knees up to her chest. The same way she sat on the porch swing. It seemed she might be asleep, too. Then I saw her eyes were open, staring at me.
“You all right?” Ty said, leaning toward me now, jarring me away from the memory.
Bert jumped up from the table and refilled my water glass. Chief Manning, on the other hand, hadn’t moved, his eyes still on me.
I blinked a few times, focusing on the line of freckles over Ty’s cheekbones, unable to bring back that moment in my mom’s bedroom.
“Fine, fine,” I said. I took a sip of the water, then another, grateful for the cool slickness on my throat. “I didn’t remember that,” I said. I glanced at Chief Manning. “That morning, I mean, not until now.”
I tried to get my mind away from the image of Caroline, eyes wide, her back pushed into that corner. I tried to force myself into the detached clinical-questioning mode I went into during depositions, but I found it difficult to come up with something to say.
Again there was a hush at the table, and I considered changing the subject for good. Instead, I took a deep breath and asked, “And had my mother passed away? I mean, was she dead by the time Dan found us?” I tried to make this sound like normal conversation, but I already knew the answer.
“Correct,” Chief Manning said. His fork clanked on his plate as he cut a piece of lasagna. “She’d passed by then. Maybe she would have lived if she’d gotten immediate medical attention after she fell down the stairs.”
“Lou,” Bert said in a chastising tone.
He put his fork down and looked at his wife, then returned his attention to his plate. “That’s just speculation, though. She had a big head injury, and internal bleeding in the head can be nasty to treat. Sometimes there’s nothing they can do for it.”
“She died in her sleep then?” I found this concept oddly comforting.
“Seems so.”
“But how did she fall down the stairs?” I supposed people tripped and fell all the time, but my mom had been a runner, a graceful woman, and it seemed strange that she would accidentally fall.
Chief Manning turned his head toward me, a wondering expression on his face. “She just slipped. At least that’s what you told us.”
11
The alarm went off at 5:00 a.m. I staggered to the bathroom and stood under