…make you sleepy forever. But I don’t want you to sleep forever, Grandma.”
I held that drawing in my hands for a long time.
For three months, my daughter-in-law, Brittany, had been coming over every morning before work to “help me with my new heart medication.” She’d set up a weekly pill organizer. She’d made me tea. She’d insisted, sweetly, that I didn’t need to bother reading the labels, because she’d “handled everything with the pharmacy.”
And for three months, I’d been more and more tired. Dizzy. Confused in the afternoons. My cardiologist had said I might feel a little tired at first. I thought this was that.
I didn’t say anything to Brittany. I hugged my grandson, Noah, and told him he was a good boy. Then, after everyone went home, I took the pill organizer from my kitchen counter and put it in a plastic bag.
The next morning, I drove myself to my cardiologist’s office. I told her everything. Noah’s words. The drawing. The pills.
She looked at the pill organizer for a long time. Then she said, very quietly, “These aren’t all the pills I prescribed you.” She sent it to a lab that afternoon, and she ran blood work.
Some of the pills were mine. Some weren’t. Brittany had been adding a prescription sedative that wasn’t mine to my organizer every morning, and doubling one of my heart pills. My doctor said that at my age, with my condition, if it had continued for another few months, it could have been very dangerous.
She called the police herself, while I sat in her office.
The detective who came was calm and kind. She asked me who else knew. I told her about Christmas dinner. About Noah. About how my son, Josh, had told his son to “stop talking.”
It took two weeks for them to find out the rest. Brittany had been talking in her group chat with her sister about “how long it would take.” She’d looked up my house’s value online eleven times. My son, it turned out, didn’t know about the pills. He knew his wife wanted my house. He’d thought she was “just venting.”
Brittany was arrested in February. She’s facing charges for elder abuse and attempted harm. My son filed for divorce the week she was arrested.
Josh came to see me. He cried at my kitchen table and said he should have listened to his own son. “He kept trying to tell me something,” Josh said. “I kept telling him to stop talking.”
“He’s eight,” I said. “He knew more than all of us.”
I feel like myself again now. Clear-headed. Awake. My cardiologist says my heart is doing well. I set up my own pill organizer, and I read every label.
Noah comes over every Saturday. Last week, he drew me a new picture. Our family, in front of my house. And this time, I was in it. Right in the middle, with a big smile, holding his hand.
At the bottom, in crooked letters, he wrote: “Grandma. Awake.”
