Gray Rock

I never watched the video, but I might as well have. My brain reconstructed it for me, over and over, always in that muted palette of a surveillance video. I saw her clinging to the window ledge before losing grip, plummeting to the slate gray rocks below. I heard the splintering of her bones as one femur burst outward and the other shattered to dust.

I didn’t need to watch the video. The surgeons were thorough, describing the injuries like they were giving a lecture on the anatomy of a catastrophe. They didn’t realize I hadn’t known about the incident before they called. All they said was that she had no advanced care directives, no power of attorney. She was intubated, and I was the emergency contact. They needed consent for emergency surgery.

I gave my consent.

Then I called my brother.

Adam answered the phone with an flat hello, and I immediately wanted to cry. Not because I was sad but because I was angry. Maybe annoyed. It was Adam’s birthday. That alone told me she wasn’t in her right mind when she fell (jumped?) out of that window. Of her two children, she would never have done it on his birthday.

“Mom had an accident,” I told him. “She fell out of her window.”

“Was she trying to kill herself again?” He was a bit more matter-of-fact than I was. He had the right to be. He was the one who found her the first time she’d tried to kill herself. I wondered if those images played in his head the way that video I had never watched played in mine. “Had she said anything about being depressed or suicidal?” he asked.

“No. She was just being her usual self. Paranoid.”

“About anything in particular?”

I scrolled through my memory of all her texts. She'd made declarations that her neighbors were harassing her. They pounded on her ceiling in her bedroom, she said, and sometimes followed her down the halls of the apartment building to pound on the ceiling above her. She was pretty sure management was filming her through the smoke detector. “I think she might have jumped on purpose,” I finally decided. The anger crept in again, making my chest tight. “Why couldn’t she just die this time?”

Adam thought for a minute then said, “I wonder that, too.”

He let me cry for a bit. When I was done, I wiped my eyes, annoyed with myself. I couldn't help the feelings, though. I couldn't help those intrusive thoughts that felt as heavy as the images in my head. “This happened because I left, didn’t it? I wasn’t there to stop it, to intervene before it got this bad.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered if you were here or not.”

Maybe. But when I’d left back in April, she was fine. After I left, though, and over the months, her texts got more chaotic. I’d call her to figure out what was happening, and she’d scream at me about the doctors trying to force medications that didn’t even work. They don’t know what they’re talking about! Do the research!

She’d hung up after that last call and fallen out of contact. She even forgot my birthday.

Then my brother’s birthday arrived, and we got the call that she was found on those rocks.

***

“How did it happen?” I asked mom over the phone, when she was no longer intubated.

The pain meds made her sound groggy. “I don’t remember. I think I was cleaning the window? I must’ve fallen.”

The surgeon and the social worker believed she had amnesia from the fall. After a lifetime of learning her cues, however, I felt less sure. I knew what she sounded like when she was trying to present the image of a regular person who never did irregular things. I tried to be gentle, though.

“You hit the ground feet first,” I reminded her. “If you’d fallen by accident, you would’ve fallen head first. I think you jumped out.”

“I wasn’t suicidal, though.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“Well, I’m trying to be positive,” she said in a new tone, rosy and resolute. “You should think positive, too.”

***

She moved to a transitional care unit after the hospital. She had physical therapy a few times a week, and each time, she’d call me, confused as to why she wasn’t walking yet. Come January, she needed one last surgery. We’re implanting a donor bone graft in her femur, the surgeon explained. In my mind, I saw that donor bone reaching its gray tendrils out to envelope the shattered femur, slowly morphing into zombie bone.

My mom was unimpressed. “All that matters is I can walk on it soon,” she said.

“They’re putting corpse bone in your leg,” I replied. “I feel like you’ll need to stay off it for awhile”

“Corpse bone,” she chuckled. “You’ve always been so imaginative.”

***

The infamous April showers pattered outside my window. I curled under my blankets in the dark, my mom’s texts glaring up from my phone screen.

“Things here have gotten serious here,” she texted. “I’m scared to death.”

“Why?” I texted back.

“The other residents want me out. Their families are calling to complain about me! I’m an American. I can’t be treated this way! I want this place shut down!”

“Why would strangers care so much about you?”

“That’s what I wanna know!”

“I wish you would accept that this isn’t really happening. You are safe.”

“Call 911!”

I didn’t call 911. But she did, a day later. She sent a few more texts from the emergency room, each more cryptic than the last. Then she stopped communicating entirely. I called the hospital, and they said she refused to talk to me.

Up until that point, I had delayed going home. Adam was there. He was trying to help. He'd just kept running into every barrier mom set up. She would only engage in small talk when he was around. She'd refuse to sign authorizations for him, deciding she didn’t want to “bother him”. It was perfectly fine to bother me, meanwhile.

But between the recent texts and the new silence, I decided it was time.

I flew in a year to the date since I’d left town and went straight to see her.

She looked small in that hospital bed. Her face was pale, her under-eyes dark shades of purple and blue. The sun shone outside, sending a dusty orange glow through the drawn curtains. She saw me, and though her expression was flat, she did talk to me.

“I think I was hearing voices in my apartment,” she said abruptly.

I took a seat in the nearest chair. She’d never admitted to hearing voices before. “I think so, too,” I said. “You told me you heard a lot of things. Like your neighbors upstairs and the smoke detector.”

“I told you about that?”

“Yes.”

“Did I tell you–” She paused, visibly thinking through her next words. She picked at her cuticles. “Did I tell you I thought I was a spy?”

I fell into a practiced, unengaged look. Flat and unreadable as a stone. As a kid, that's what helped me survive. “No, you didn’t tell me that. Do you still think you’re a spy?”

She nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

Her feet were in constant movement under the pale yellow blanket, hidden with the rest of her otherwise motionless legs. “I thought the government was sending me recordings. And that night…I thought someone else was in the room with me. I never turned around to look, but I felt them there, and I wanted to escape. I think that’s what happened. I was trying to escape.”

I'd imagined the scene so many times it was like a memory. I’d run every scenario through my head, and suicide had never matched. Escape did.

Two men walked past the open hospital door, chatting with one another in hushed tones. My mom shot a venomous look their way. “No one listens to me,” she said, staring at the door. She wasn’t talking to me, but she was working herself up, shaking. “Nobody listens to the truth, you know? THE TRUTH.” She practically spit out the last word.

I didn’t say anything.

I was a gray rock.

***

Adam and I arrived at mom’s apartment building late on a Friday evening. The whole week had been a perfect Minnesota spring, with early green buds sprouting on trees, a light breeze flitting through the pale branches. Today, though, it was cold as hell. The wind whipped at my hair as I pulled boxes out of the car.

We headed upstairs, weaving through newly painted hallways. They’d paired a deep indigo with a cream paint on my mom’s floor. It still smelled fresh.

The apartment itself looked the same as it had when I last saw it. Maybe a bit more dusty. From the front door, I turned into the kitchen and glimpsed the calendar on the wall. It was set to October. A cereal box sat open on the counter, ready to pour. The cheery yellow box was jarring. A few dishes rested in the sink. Across the small apartment, in the living room, a plush floral chair sat with its back to the window. Resting against the chair was a window screen.

“Yep, that’s the window,” Adam said, following my line of sight. He set the empty boxes on the ground. He started piling knick-knacks and multiple brand new phones into those boxes. Relics of paranoia past. “I never thought it opened, to be honest.”

I wandered over to the window and tried to open it myself. It was surprisingly hard. Adam hopped up to show me, pushing one pane aside, allowing a cold blast of air into the apartment. I leaned out the window, noting the air conditioner sticking out to my left. Each window on the next two stories down had an air conditioner as well, all of them silent.

“I’m surprised she didn’t hit them on the way down,” Adam said. I saw his expression darken for just a moment, a slight droop to his shoulders. Then he went back to packing.

I glanced back out the window at the rock garden below. A giant boulder sat just to one side of that garden. She'd missed that, too, apparently. Which meant the very specific patch of rocks, directly beneath me, was where she’d landed.

I stared down at those rocks. They weren’t slate gray at all. Some were, but others were white, and yet others black. A few were brown. They were a mix of earthy colors, with small shoots of grass sneaking up between them. They looked innocuous as they sat down there in the cold.

I pictured glistening, red blood spilling over them, and I squeezed my eyes shut against it. Everything went black for a moment.

With a deep breath, I turned my back to the window and grabbed a box to start packing. A mug sat on the coffee table, remnants of months-old coffee blackening the bottom. The mug itself was salmon pink. It had flowers on it and bubbly words printed along the side in white. A pithy platitude.

This is going well, it said.

The mug went straight in the box.