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July 2003
I have no idea why I was home that day. I’d been avoiding my house as much as possible ever since I saw Knight outside my bedroom window, but for some reason, I was upstairs in my room, chain-smoking and sketching out a drawing of the Eiffel Tower that I wanted to paint for Ken’s wall of French art, when I heard the phone ring. And not my phone—not some cute little doodle-oodle-oodle-oo. No, this was my parents’ loud-ass home phone that made me feel the urge to duck and cover with every successive ring.
“Mom!” I yelled from my bed. “Will you get that? I’m busy!”
RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!
“Mom!”
Goddamn it.
I set my pencil down on the edge of my easel and waded through the piles of Hans’s bullshit strewed about on my tiny bedroom floor until I got to the plastic cordless phone anchored to the wall next to my bed.
“Hello?” I huffed.
“Hey, Scooter,” my dad replied. “Is your mom there?”
“Yeah, hang on,” I said, stepping over a guitar amp and hitting my head on a brass pot hanging from the ceiling. Stomping out into the hallway, I cupped my hand over the receiver and yelled, “Mom!” as loud as I could.
All I heard in response was a tiny cough from somewhere downstairs.
Then, a grunt.
“Dad, hold on a second.”
I flew down the stairs, phone in one hand, railing in the other.
“Mom?”
Turning the corner in the foyer, I swung my head left and right until I spotted a pair of feet lying sideways on the linoleum kitchen floor.
One Birkenstock on. One off.
“Mom!” I rushed in and found my mother splayed out across the kitchen floor.
A barstool had been turned over during her fall, and her head had landed in Ringo’s bowl of dog food.
I dived for her, picking her head up and moving the plastic bowl away, as she swallowed and coughed and stared at me with wide, frightened eyes.
“Mom? What happened? Are you okay?”
Her mouth opened and closed in labored movements, but nothing came out other than frustrated gurgles and coughs.
“Can you move? Squeeze my hand.” I grabbed her cold fingers and felt a gentle squeeze. “What about this hand?” I reached for the arm pinned under her side and extracted her hand.
Nothing.
“Mom, squeeze my hand!”
Nothing.
Shit!
I laid her head back on the floor and leaped up to call 911.
“Scooter?” my dad said from the cordless phone I’d abandoned on the kitchen floor. I had already forgotten that he was on hold.
I grabbed the phone. “Dad! I think Mom had a stroke!”
