Mother’s Little Helper
Mother’s Little Helper
by David Michael
“911 Emergency Hotline,” the voice said. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
“My baby has stopped breathing,” Catherine said. “Send help.” She started to put the phone down, then put it back to her ear. “For both of us,” she added. Then she put the phone down on the dresser, slowly, carefully, as if she had all the time in the world. They could pull her address from her phone number, she knew, whether she hung up or not, but being calm, methodical, kept her from going insane.
And kept her focused on what needed to be done.
“Are you there, ma’am?” The voice from the telephone, now behind her, sounded almost as loud as it had before she put it down. It was that quiet in the house.
Baby Natalie was the quietest part. She lay on the bed, eyes glassy, mouth open, still. So very, very still. She hadn’t moved since Catherine had put her down, after the desperate attempt at CPR had failed.
“My baby,” Catherine said, her voice rising, “has stopped breathing.” She fought panic. “Send. Help. Now.” She pushed up the long sleeves of her night shirt, baring her wrists and their thin white scars. “For both of us.”
She looked the bottle of antidepressants on the bed beside Natalie, surprised to see them, annoyed at how useless they were. She had dropped them there in the first moments of panic. She moved the bottle of pills to the dresser, beside the phone.
“We are dispatching an emergency team to your house,” the voice on the phone told her. “Is this Mrs. Catherine Makkis?”
“Yes,” Catherine replied, softly, not caring if the phone could hear her or not. She forced herself to breath evenly, in and out, in and out, as she walked to the kitchen. She grabbed the santaku she had given herself for Christmas, and a metal bowl.
This was going to take a lot of blood.
She walked back into the bedroom. She didn’t look at Natalie while she arranged the bowl and knife on the edge of the bed. She could feel the panic, like a beating blackness that threatened to overwhelm her, fear that she was moving too slowly. That neither she nor the emergency team would be fast enough.
If she were back home, back where she should be, the Sisters would have already arrived, knowing exactly what to do. A Sister would, in fact, have been by almost daily to help her with the baby, and wouldn’t even have needed to be summoned. The Sisters cared for each other, a feminine support group that had existed longer than the United States of America.
But she was the only Sister here. As much of a Sister as any woman could be all by herself.
She had argued with Kevin about that just minutes before. How he had married her, moved her away from her Sisters, and then taken a job that left her alone, in a city of strangers. She hadn’t been fair to him at all.
Fairness hardly seemed to matter right now, though.
Catherine knelt by the side of the bed. She picked up the santaku with her left hand. She pressed the point against her right wrist. With a quick, practised twitch she opened a cut across her wrist. Then she transferred the knife to her right hand and opened an identical cut on her left wrist.
Both cuts leaked blood immediately, staining her sheets, but she remained in control, placing the knife down before putting her wrists over the bowl and beginning to collect the blood.
A deciliter of blood would be the minimum she needed. She feared she would need more, much more.
She didn’t wonder what the EMT’s would think. She knew. They would see the bottle of pills on the dresser, beside the phone and leap to the obvious conclusion: a mother with a history of suicide attempts had taken her own life in grief over the sudden death of her infant.
Wrong conclusions were, after all, always within easy leaping distance.
She had never attempted suicide. But she had needed blood before.
The hospital had refused to release her with Natalie unless she took the antidepressants with her, medication for peripartum, or postpartum, depression. The doctors hadn’t understood her particular, peculiar upbringing, but she hadn’t tried to explain it to them. Kevin hadn’t understood either. Even though she had tried to explain it to him, and he claimed he believed her, he had sided with the doctors and agreed that she should take the medication.
He had insisted, just minutes ago, that she take the medication. “You’re obviously unhappy,” he said. “You’re depressed, and when you’re depressed, Natalie gets upset and the two of you make each other miserable. You’ve got a cure for this. Just take a couple for today and see if it helps.”
“I wouldn’t be unhappy if you were home more than 2 days out of the week,” she had told him.
The old argument, with unfair accusations on both sides, had raged back and forth between them, via the phone lines, until he broke it off. “I have to get to work. Think about the medicine. I love you.”
“I love you too,” she had managed to say. And she did love him. Or she would have packed up both her and Natalie and moved back home months ago. But love didn’t always equate to happiness, and she wasn’t happy with him. Hadn’t been for a long time.
Happiness was another thing that didn’t seem to matter much right now.
She hoped enough blood had pooled. She couldn’t wait any longer. She dipped both hands into the bowl.
First, using the index fingers of both hands, she drew circles around her eyes. “Open my eyes,” she said. “Show me what I need to do.”
Power surged into her, replacing the strength she had bled into the bowl. The blood on her face burned hot, and her vision blurred, then came back into sharp focus.
Next she drew red lines of her blood on Natalie, gently, with a mother’s care. She didn’t have much time left, she knew. She could feel the last traces of life leeching out of the baby as she made her preparations.
“Stay with me, little one,” she said. “Mommy’s trying. Stay with me.” They were words of both prayer and power, fed by the blood and the ritual. “Mommy’s here. Show me what’s wrong, honey.”
The runes she wrote on the baby’s chest faded almost immediately, absorbed and consumed by the magic. She could almost see now what she needed to do. Her hands went back to the bowl for more blood, but scraped the bottom. What little she had managed to accomplish had used up all the blood.
Her hands trembled, but she didn’t hesitate. She picked up the knife again. She made new cuts on her wrists, lengthwise this time, running down her forearms. Now the EMT’s would be certain she had committed suicide, she thought, as the blood flowed into the bowl. No mere “cry for help”, these cuts.
She worked faster now, trying to beat the clock that ticked in her chest. A clock that already beat slower than it had before.
Red power filled her gaze, and she looked into body of her baby, seeing muscles and veins and nerves and the tiny, tiny heart that had simply stopped. She had tried to massage the heart minutes ago–a lifetime before–using the CPR techniques she had been taught. That hadn’t worked. Now she came at the problem with the tradition of centuries and the power of life itself. With all her will, she tried to force the heart to beat.
“Come on, Natalie,” she said. “You can do it.”
She had both of her hands on the baby’s chest. She could feel Natalie’s small life force begin to gather strength, but still the heart wouldn’t beat.
“Please, baby.” Her voice was a whisper. The power of the magic pulled at her. She saw that the blood on her fingers had disappeared. Her gaze fell to the bowl. It was almost clean now. She could see the remaining blood evaporating into the air. Then the blood in the bowl was gone, and the magic found her open wounds and began pulling strength directly from her. Fire ripped through her.
She wanted to scream, but she didn’t have the strength.
She collapsed then, leaning against the bed, her head next to Natalie’s, her hands slipping to fall to her sides, knocking the bowl to land loudly on the floor. With an effort, she turned her head so she could see her baby one last time, and found Natalie looking back at her, eyes focused. The baby face smiled.
The EMT’s found them like that, mother and daughter, both incredibly weak, but alive. They saw the unopened bottle on the dresser, the cuts on the mother’s wrists, and reached the obvious conclusion. But even though they could see the mother had lost a lot of blood, they couldn’t explain why there were only a few visible red stains.
The newspaper stories about what happened got it all wrong, but Catherine didn’t care. Kevin didn’t understand either, but he put on a brave face and stood beside her when it mattered. The Sisters, Catherine knew, would be so upset at her, but they would also be proud. And happy to admit a new Sister when the time came.
Copyright © 2006 by David Michael. All rights reserved.
Sande said,
February 25, 2006 @ 2:45 pm
“a feminine support group” makes me think of maxi pads and tampons, or girdles.
DavidRM said,
February 26, 2006 @ 8:38 pm
“… The Sisters cared for each other, a feminine support group that had existed longer than the United States of America.”
Yah, I need to re-word that sentence. I want the explicit statement of the Sisters being around for centuries. But I need a better way to say it. I’ll mess with it again later.
-David
A Short Story a Day » Best of ASSAD 2006 said,
December 27, 2006 @ 8:01 pm
[...] Best of ASSAD 2006 [...]