Ethan had been rushed to the pediatric intensive care unit two days ago. The police had knocked on my apartment door, their faces grave, telling me there had been a “freak accident” near my mother’s house in the suburbs. They said Ethan had been riding his bicycle down the steep hill near her driveway, lost control, and struck his head violently against the concrete curb. The impact had caused a severe traumatic brain injury and internal bruising.dooom
I hadn’t eaten. I hadn’t slept. My clothes were wrinkled and smelled of stale hospital coffee. I existed only as a hollow shell, sitting in an uncomfortable vinyl chair, my fingers desperately gripping Ethan’s small, cold, unmoving hand, praying to a god I wasn’t sure I believed in anymore.
I was a single mother, and Ethan was my entire life. But in the grand, twisted hierarchy of my family, Ethan and I were merely background characters.
My mother, Patricia, was a woman whose narcissism was so profound it possessed its own gravitational pull. Her entire existence orbited around one sun: my younger sister, Sophie. Sophie was twenty-five, beautiful, entirely dependent on our mother’s wealth, and possessed the emotional maturity of a spoiled toddler. I, on the other hand, was the designated servant. The scapegoat. The daughter expected to show up early, clean up late, and never, ever eclipse the Golden Child.
As I sat there, tracing the faint blue veins on the back of my comatose son’s hand, my phone vibrated aggressively against my thigh.
I pulled it from my pocket. The caller ID read: Mom.
I stood up, my joints popping in protest, and stepped out of the dim room into the harsh, blinding fluorescent light of the ICU hallway. A desperate, foolish, pathetic part of me—the inner child who still craved a mother’s love—hoped she was calling to ask if her only grandson was going to survive the night. I hoped she was calling to say she was on her way to the hospital to hold me.
I answered the phone, my voice a ragged, exhausted whisper. “Hello?”
“Claire,” Patricia said. Her voice wasn’t thick with tears. It was flat, brisk, and entirely impatient. It was the voice of a woman managing a catering crisis, not a family tragedy.
“Mom,” I breathed, leaning my heavy head against the cold cinderblock wall.
“Listen to me,” Patricia continued, the sharp click of her heels echoing through the phone as she presumably paced across her hardwood floors. “Tomorrow is Sophie’s twenty-fifth birthday party. You know how important this milestone is to her. The caterers are arriving at noon, and the florist is coming at one. I need you here by nine a.m. sharp. There’s a massive amount of prep work to help with, and the string quartet needs to be directed to the garden.”
I gripped the phone, my sleep-deprived brain physically struggling to process the sheer, unadulterated audacity of her words.
“Mom,” I whispered, turning my head to look back through the glass window at Ethan’s motionless, intubated body. “Ethan is in the ICU. He has a brain bleed. He hasn’t woken up.”
