Chapter Three: Amy

Amy's daughter is deathly ill.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

AMY

( I )

            Amy Jo watched her daughter, Grace, run around the park from her spot on the park bench with a smile on her face. She didn’t know how long they had been out here, but she also didn’t care. Everything was going great. The sun was out, Grace was having fun, and she felt at peace. Still, there was a slight undercurrent of dread to her perfect day, but she couldn’t explain why. There was just a lingering feeling that something was wrong, or was about to go wrong. What was it though? This whole thing felt very familiar to her, like it had happened many times before. Amy tried to nail down the source of her unease. It was so close, like that feeling you get when something is right on the tip of your tongue, only in her brain. The more she thought about it, the more it eluded her, it was frustrating as hell. A gentle breezed sprang up and sent her brown hair whipping around and into her face. She brushed it back with her hand, and there was a rumble of thunder in the distance, a perfect metaphor for how she was feeling. It was a beautiful day on the surface, but the thunder was a sign of the storm lurking underneath, waiting for the perfect time to f**k it all up. Amy turned her attention away from the impending weather disaster and back to Grace, but she was gone. She had just been running around in the grass a minute before. She felt a mixture or terror and stupidity at the same time. She could just see herself talking to the police officer now, giving him the same tired line that she saw parents use on the news all of the time.

 “I only took my eyes off of her for a second,” she would say.

He would look at her while taking his notes with judging eyes.

 “Grace!” Amy screamed.

 “Grace, where are you?” She screamed again when she got no answer, panic evident in her voice now. She was about to go running through the park, regardless of rather her leg could take it or not when she heard Grace calling for her.

 “Mom, hey mom, look at me,” Grace yelled.

Amy turned around and felt a surge of relief when she saw that Grace was in the playground area. That relief was soon replaced with worry when she saw what Grace was doing. Grace was hanging upside down from the monkey bars. She waved enthusiastically with both hands, and had a big smile on her face as her long, brownish blonde hair dangled above the ground.

 “Grace be careful,” Amy said.

 “Oh I will Jo,” she replied.

She gave her daughter a stern look. She did prefer to Jo to Amy, and she had told everyone that, but she didn’t prefer it from her daughter. She was old school in her thinking that your kid should only address their parents as mom or dad. Also, Grace only called her Jo when she was mad at her or thought that she was being worrisome for no reason. Apparently being worried when your kid was hanging upside down over concrete and could fall at any time, busting her head wide open in the process was a silly thing to be worried about. Amy sat back down on the bench and tried to will her daughter to stop what she was doing. She looked back up at the sky and was shocked to see that it was now a deep, dark, gray almost bordering on black color. She couldn’t believe that it had happened so fast. It was definitely going to storm.

 “Alright Grace, we better get going,” she said.

She stood up from the bench and there was a crack of thunder so loud that she thought the sky itself must have cracked open, and then she heard another crack. She turned around to see that exactly what she had feared was going to happen a couple of seconds ago had. Grace had fallen. She landed haphazardly and wasn’t moving. Her upper body was lying flat on the ground while her lower body was tangled up in the lower part of the monkey bars.

 “Grace!” Amy screamed and started running as best as she could. It was raining now and it turned into a complete downpour by time she reached the monkey bars.

 “Grace! Grace are you ok?” Amy asked her daughter as she tried to untangle her legs from the bars.

 “What happened?” Grace asked.

Amy thought she sounded a little groggy, and she could see that she had cut her head but other than that she seemed to be ok.

 “Mom, what are you doing?” She asked.

 “I’m trying to untangle your legs from the bars,” Amy replied, having to yell to be heard over the storm now.

 “How are you going to untangle me if you don’t have ahold of my legs?” Grace asked.

Amy had been pulling on her daughter’s legs for the last couple of minutes now, but now she stopped in her tracks.

 “I have been, can’t you feel it?” Amy asked.

 “No.” Grace replied.

Amy was on the verge of tears now. Grace had looked okay, but she was obviously mistaken. She looked down at the ground and saw that the rain was beginning to pool. This wasn’t right; there was no reason the park should flood. There was nothing here to hold the water in and it was all flat ground. It made no sense and couldn’t be happening, but yet here she was, seeing it with her own eyes. She turned her attention back to untangling her daughter’s legs from the bars. It was harder than it looked to move dead weight.

 “Mom!” Grace yelled.

Amy looked down to see the water was rising over Grace’s head. She went back to working on her legs. She had to hurry, it shouldn’t be this hard to untangle her legs from the bars yet she was having all this trouble. She just wanted to scream out in frustration but she couldn’t because she had to get this done fast, or her daughter was going to drown.

 “Connor!” Amy screamed. “Connor help me!”

She didn’t know why she was calling out for her husband, he wasn’t there. She got Grace’s legs untangled, and they hit the water with a splash. Amy pulled her daughter up out of the water, and she emerged gasping for air as Amy put her up onto her back. The water was waist high now. She sloshed her way forward and after taking two steps her leg seized up. She screamed and instinctively reached down for her leg. As soon as she let go, Grace slid off of her back and into the water.

 “Mom!” She screamed.

Amy turned around just in time to see Grace’s head disappear under the water. She frantically tried to massage some feeling back into her leg but it wasn’t working.

 “Oh come on, not now,” Amy said through gritted teeth and tears of frustration. If her leg didn’t start working soon her daughter was going to drown. She turned around and forced herself forward. Again she only got as far as two steps before she lost her balance and fell beneath the water herself. She emerged seconds later, wiping water out of her eyes.

 “Grace!” She yelled and got no response.

 “Grace!” Amy screamed with everything she had.

Her daughter was gone.

( II )

            Amy sprung up out of bed and fought back the scream that was right behind her lips. She was covered in sweat and breathing heavily. She reached out to the left and felt for Connor, but he wasn’t there, his side of the bed was empty as usual. She swung her legs out and sat on the edge of the bed. Her right leg was killing her. She massaged it with one hand and felt around in the dark for something with her other, and a moment later she had it. She used her cane to get out of bed and limped for the bedroom door. She had suffered what the doctor’s called muscle death in her upper right leg. She couldn’t walk too well without the cane which made getting around a real pain in the a*s. This was her souvenir from a car crash she was in when she was seventeen years old. She couldn’t complain though, the doctors hadn’t even thought she was going to survive. It was actually a miracle that she came out of the coma at all. Her parents had stopped the life support but somehow she started to breathe on her own. A day later she woke up. She still had nightmares about the crash when she wasn’t having the one about her daughter drowning.  A moment later she was standing in the doorway of Grace’s bedroom looking at her empty bed. The car crash nightmare Amy could understand because that had actually happened. Grace, however, did not drown, so she didn’t understand that nightmare at all. She closed her eyes and took a steadying breath. She felt Connor’s arms wrap around her waist from behind, and she relaxed into him.

 “Which one was it tonight?” He asked.

 “Grace,” she replied.

 “You should take the pills Jo,” he said.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t feel like arguing about it right now. She wasn’t going to use pills to sleep. She already used pills to deal with everything else in her life because of her leg. He thought she was just being stubborn, but he didn’t understand. Sleep was her last bastion, the only thing in her life not controlled by pills, and she wasn’t giving it up. Nightmares be damned.

 “Do you want to go see her?” Connor asked.

She nodded that she did.

            Amy hated hospitals. They all smelled the same, like disinfectant with an undertone of sickness and death. She hated the way that everything matched, from the white ceiling to the white walls, to the white linoleum floors. It all made the place seem so sterile and uncaring. Each room had an identical sliding glass door and surprise surprise, a white privacy curtain. There was no individuality. Everyone was anonymous; her daughter was anonymous, and she was dying an anonymous death in an anonymous room. Amy felt hot bile rising in her throat and fought it back down. She swallowed once to make sure that it wasn’t going to come back up and leaned on Connor for support as they made their way to Grace’s room.

            They were greeted by the beeping sound of Grace’s heart monitor and the wheezing sound of her ventilator as they slid her door open and stepped inside. There were cartoons playing on the television. Amy didn’t know why they kept the television on in here. Grace hadn’t been awake to watch it for almost two weeks now. She sat down on the bottom of the bed and rubbed Grace’s legs.

 “Mommy is here baby,” Amy said.

Grace’s legs had been the first thing to stop working when the unknown disease hit. There had been no warning. One night she had went to bed just fine, and the next morning when she woke up she couldn’t move her legs. Of course they had rushed her right to the doctor only to be told not to worry, and that sometimes things like this happened. They told her to bring Grace back if she wasn’t walking again in two days. Connor agreed; the same thing had happened to him when he was six or seven years old. He just woke up one morning unable to move his legs, and he had to be carried everywhere for a couple of days, and then one morning he woke up and was able to walk again like nothing had happened. So Amy did what she was told and took Grace home, and by time the two day deadline had passed Grace could no longer move her arms either. That was three weeks ago now. Amy stroked Grace’s hair and remembered what the doctor had told her last night. It was time to start thinking about pulling the plug.

 

Author's Note

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