My father knocked the phone out of my hand when I called an ambulance for my mother. She’d been on the bathroom floor for eleven minutes. He didn’t want the neighbors seeing lights in the driveway. I picked it up and called again from the yard, and he followed me out. “You’ve made this a spectacle,” he said while they were carrying her out. Not a word to her. That, to me, said more than anything else.
She lived. She’s alive right now, and she has never once, in four years, said anything about that night. Last month she asked me to drive her to an appointment she didn’t want him to know about. She waited until we were halfway there before telling me what it was for. It wasn’t a regular doctor’s appointment. She had asked to speak to someone privately about something that had happened in our house years earlier.
She told me she’d been keeping a small notebook hidden behind the lining of an old purse. She’d started writing in it after she realized she couldn’t trust herself to remember certain conversations exactly. She said there were dates, times, and things my father had said when he thought nobody else was listening. Then she handed me the notebook and asked me to read one page. The date at the top was the night she’d ended up on the bathroom floor.
I read it twice because I couldn’t believe what she’d written. She said she’d deliberately stayed quiet that night because she’d been afraid of what would happen if my father knew she remembered everything. At the bottom of the page was a name I’d never seen before. My mother said the person attached to that name had contacted her recently and told her something she’d been waiting four years to hear. Then she looked at me and said, “I need you to promise me you won’t tell your father where we’re going next.”
