[01] Shock

SHOCK

This chapter contains scenes of suicide and imagery that may be triggering for some readers

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It began with a scream.

Blood curdling, it came from outside. The last kind of sound you'd want to hear on a night when your parents are out for a date night. There was nothing ever comforting about a woman's screech, but the sound of it jolted chills down my spine.

What was the natural reaction to something like that? Hide under the coffee table until the screaming stopped? Turn up music until it drowned out everything else while guilt ate me up inside?

I did none of that. Instead, I ran to the front door, throwing it open and from my front step, I could clearly see the commotion next door.

Mrs. Driscoll crumpled on the walkway between her front gate and her front door, her screams dissolving into sobs. Her voice cut through the thin fog hanging in the night air. Fog was nothing. It cut through my soul. 

Mrs. Driscoll, wailing into her hands, framed in the yellow light pouring out of the house.

Caught in the shadows between pools of tungsten street light, Natalie Driscoll drooped over the wrought iron fence, her fingertips reaching toward the ground.

My heart tore itself between stopping and pounding. All the late night snacks and home-alone pizza I had for dinner threatened to churn back up. I fought the urge to double over and give in to the nausea.

Mrs. Driscoll was disintegrating next door. Like the way mothers are able to lift whole cars off of their children to save them from death, I had the ability to think about nothing but what had to be done.

I pulled my phone from my pocket, dialing from my front door. I told the 911 dispatcher my emergency quickly before I got too close to Mrs. Driscoll. It wouldn't do her any good to hear the words. They meant something; they weigh something especially one like dead.

I stayed on the line, my phone pressed against my chest as I walked from my house to the Driscolls' gate.

Beneath Natalie, the dark pool grew wider and wider, dripping off her fingertips down the path that was her outstretched arms on one side of the fence, and leaking down onto the leaves of roses on the other side. 

Her loose hair entirely obscured her face, leaving her in shadows.

The longer I stared, the harder it became to separate this Natalie from the neighbor I saw in school. Unassuming Natalie with her dirty blonde hair and her neutral face, rarely expressing anything more than disinterest in her eyes. My pace quickened past her body. 

I imagined her eyes still open, staring at me as I knelt next to her mother. Mrs. Driscoll didn't care that for the year that I lived next door to her family, we didn't really talk. She only cared that someone walked past the limp body of her daughter to hold her. Salt tears soaked into my shirt while I held my phone up to my ear, murmuring answers to questions from the emergency dispatcher.

"Mrs. Driscoll, where is your husband?" I tried.

Nothing. She erected a glass wall around herself and no one could get through it.

"Mrs. Driscoll, I called 911. They're on their way."

It turned out when you call 911 about someone dead out in the open, the paramedics and police came quickly. Maybe they hoped I was wrong, that Natalie could still be saved, but when they arrived to see the wrought iron spires jutting through Natalie's torso, I figured they agreed with my assessment.

The gated front yard flooded with uniformed men and women, swooping down on us, pulling Mrs. Driscoll away from her daughter and ushering me near a cruiser, wrapped up in a blanket, asking so many questions, saying that I was very brave. I sat in the back of the car, door wide open, feet still outside the vehicle. A Ford Crown Victoria. Most of the police cars in Maine were Fords.

"What's your name?" a woman crouched next to the car.

"Jane Madarang. I called 911. I live next door." I tucked the blanket under my chin.

"Did you know Natalie long?" the officer asked, not exactly in an interrogating tone. She lacked the urgency.

"My family has lived next door for about a year," I said.

"Right. Where are your parents now?"

"Date night."

"You didn't call them?"

Why would I horrify my parents by calling them home to watch emergency crews grind through the fence our neighbor impaled herself on?

"I didn't think about it. They'll be back soon." Or the police would do it for me. 

Then, for the first time, someone asked me properly how well I knew Natalie Driscoll, if she ever said anything to me about wanting to die. 

How was I supposed to answer that question? I lived next door, but I did not have the answers. I couldn't tell them the why of it. 

I couldn't look at her face. Instead, I locked onto her name tag. Schuttman.

"We ran in different crowds," I told the her, but that did a disservice to Natalie, suggesting that she ran with a crowd at all or that I did, for that matter. There were better people than me in town to explain how Natalie didn't really talk to anyone, not that I ever noticed. For the year I spent in Cullfield, I don't think I saw her eat lunch or walk to classes with anyone.

By that logic, that whole night could be so easily dismissed as the tragedy of a very lonely girl who had no one to reach out to. That could close the case. The window on the topmost floor creaked as it swayed back and forth an inch or two on antique hinges.

Officer Schuttmann finished her questions. 

"You're in shock," she explained.

Shock didn't begin to describe the hollowness. Instead of terror or melancholy, my body felt numb as a whole. The first dead body I ever saw was a girl I knew. I was not a jogger on a morning run coming across a rolled up rug on the side of the road. That would be a shock. I was not a property manager hammering on a door to collect overdue rent only to find cats nibbling on someone's ears.

Shock was a word that stretched itself thin trying to encompass that night. The coiled springs that kept me from collapsing like Mrs. Driscoll into the front yard absorbed the brunt of the force.

Then I remembered that springs only store energy. They do not absorb or dissipate it and what would happen to me after the vehicles all left, no longer whirring their sirens?

"Could I grab my own blanket from my house?" I asked. There were probably more questions, but I wanted a second to myself.

The police let me slink back to my own house. All the lights were left on, the TV, my laptop.

But before I headed up the walkway to the house, I noticed my mailbox wide open, an odd silhouette. Mail on a Saturday night?

Framing myself between the nearest cop and the mailbox, I pulled out the package inside, a rectangular thing wrapped in plain brown paper tied with twine. Before anyone asked anymore questions, I took it inside.

Outside, the flurry of activity continued, neighbors from across the street peeking out of their houses to investigate the police tape, the cars, and the squeal of a grinder chewing through metal. Where were they while I called 911? Hiding under their coffee tables and turning up their music to drown out Mrs. Driscoll's despair?

There wouldn't be an investigation, not right away. A girl threw herself from a window onto a spiked fence, leaving a mess to clean up, but not a mystery to solve. Teenagers killed themselves sometimes. Adults did, too, but they also died of strokes, of heart attacks and other things that teenagers weren't prone to having.

When I tore through the thick paper off the package, an envelope fell out first, sliding away from the top of the book beneath it.

Jane

Letters crunched together across the letter, it was still undoubtedly my name. My heart finally decided what it wanted to do, pounding against my ribs like they cage they were.

My nails slid under the flap, pulling it loose from the glue.

Inside the envelope there was a card and there was a key.

Watch the house

The same crammed letters strung together three words. That was it. That was all I got as an explanation for the envelope, for the book, for the night. 

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A/N Hello! If you took the time to read, you're already on my list of new favorite people. 

//kc

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