Find The Melody
Trigger warning: this chapter depicts a pregnancy complication, maternal death witnessed by children, and intense grief. Reader discretion advised.
julian
eighteen years ago
I picked Zion and Tre up from the high school, then Simone from the middle school. Pops had asked me to get them because he was working and Mama had been feeling tired that day. He made her promise to rest and put her feet up. It was a regular Tuesday afternoon.
We pulled into the driveway and the bass was thumping out of the basement the way it often did when Pops and Uncle Reggie were in our home studio working on music. It was a sound we'd grown up under.
Simone hit the door first, with Tre behind her, while Zion held the screen door as I came in last with Simone’s book bag and a bag of groceries Mama had asked me to pick up in my arms.
I don't know which of us saw her first. I think Tre. He stopped in the living room staring at the kitchen threshold, frozen in place. Then, Simone screamed.
Mama was on the floor, on her hands and knees, trying to drag herself toward the basement door.
Toward Pops, the sound of music, and the only life in the house that meant help.
A trail of blood followed her from the kitchen sink, and her dress was soaked through from below the waist, dark red all the way down the back of it.
She was clutching her stomach, heavy with seven months of our baby brother or sister, the ‘surprise blessing’ Mama and Pops announced a few months prior.
Tre grabbed Simone by both shoulders, spun her around and pressed her face into his chest. “Don't look. Don't look, Simi. Don't look.”
She'd already looked. Zion and I dropped at the same time, run-sliding across the room to her. We were both pulling our shirts off our backs without speaking. Pops had taught us to do it once: that if someone is bleeding, press hard, and that part of our brains was working.
“Mama!” Her name cracked out of me.
She turned her head toward the sound of the four of us, our shouting and crying, her eyes looking up at me and Zion, then drifting past us toward the basement door.
I took her hand and pressed my balled-up shirt against the front of her dress where I thought the bleeding was, but there was no wound. There was no place to press.
“Where is the bleeding from, Mama! Where are you hurt!” I cried.
Her voice was faint and weak as her lips were trying to move around something. “Find…the…melody…” she barely got out.
The blood was coming from inside her and there was nothing in our kitchen that was going to stop it. Zion was on the other side, hands flat against her, asking where she was hurt.
“Tre! Call 911! Zion! Get Pops! Mama, stay with me. Stay with me.”
“Find…the…melody…”
“What melody?” I leaned in, my ear close to her mouth. “Mama? What melody?”
“Find…the…”
Zion jumped, tearing across the kitchen toward the basement door.
I heard him hit the stairs three at a time and scream over the music.
The bass cut off mid-bar. Then heavy feet pounded up the stairs.
Pops and Uncle Reggie filled the doorway, and when our father saw Mama on the ground, his face went somewhere I'd never seen a man's face go.
He was on the floor in half a stride. Pushed me out of the way without seeing me. Pulled her onto his lap, both arms wrapped under her, the front of his shirt getting wet against the front of hers, his hands cradling her head like she was made of something thinner than skin.
“Niecy!” he cried. “Niecy, baby, look at me. Look at me, baby. I got you. I got you. Stay with me. Don't you do it. Don't you do it, Niecy. Stay with me. Please, God, please. I got you, baby. I got you.”
He rocked her back and forth, kissing all over her face, and saying her name like it was a tether he could use to keep her in her body.
“Find the…melody,” she said again, barely audible, and a tear fell down her cheek.
“I should've heard you. I’m sorry baby. Shit! I was right here. I should've heard you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I should've—.” Tears poured down his face.
Uncle Reggie was on the phone with dispatch having taken the phone from Tre. Then he tried to peel my hands off Mama because Daddy had her now.
I let go, and sat back on my heels, both hands red, watching my father rock my mother on the kitchen floor begging her not to leave.
The sirens cut into the air at the end of the street. Pops heard them and he gathered her up, his knees almost buckling, stood up and carried her out the front door.
I followed him as the ambulance was pulling up to the curb, lights spilling across the front of the house.
The EMTs had just come around the back with a gurney when Daddy met them on the lawn with her.
They took her from him onto the gurney, rolled her into the ambulance and he climbed in beside her, never looking back at us or saying a word.
The doors slammed and the ambulance screamed away, and the air in our world went with it.
I stood on the porch, my hands sticky with my mother’s blood, in disbelief.
Behind me, Uncle Reggie was trying to move the four of us back inside.
Zion had blood on his cheek where he'd wiped his face.
Tre still had Simone wrapped against him, both arms locked around her shoulders.
Uncle Reggie looked at us. “Y'all stay right here,” he said. “You don't move. Don't go in that kitchen or hallway, you hear? I'm calling Lorraine. I'm calling everybody. Y'all stay right here.”
We didn't move. We couldn't have if we’d tried.
An hour or so later the phone rang and Uncle Reggie answered it. He took the call in the back with his voice low. When he came back out, he had a look I would carry the rest of my life and his voice was not his voice.
He didn't make us ask. “Your mama didn't make it,” he said to the room. “They tried, but...” His voice broke clean in half. “She's gone, babies. Your mama's gone.”
Simone screamed and began crying hysterically. Tre wailed. Zion shouted and hit a wall with his fist, breaking a hole in it. Then hit it again. Then a third time, until Reggie got behind him in a bear hug and pulled him back, not letting go, as he cried.
I fell to my knees right where I was standing. I wanted to cry, but nothing would come out. My chest was stone, my throat was locked, and somewhere underneath all of it, my mother was still saying find the melody in five soft syllables over and over in my head.
Aunt Lorraine came through the front door, took in the four of us in bloody clothes and went straight to the bathroom for towels.
She got us cleaned up one at a time. Pulling clean clothes from our drawers because none of us could move from where we were.
She mopped the floor until the Pine-Sol smell worked against the metal underneath it.
She didn't cry until she had us all clean.
Then she went to the porch and we heard her break down.
Cousins and other family started arriving. Folks from church. Neighbors. The pastor sat with us. A lot of hushed voices and hands on shoulders.
Uncle Reggie pulled me aside in the hallway about five hours later. “I'm gonna head up to the hospital. Be with your daddy. They got her in a room up there. He won't leave her.”
I nodded.
It was a quarter past midnight when the front door opened again.
Uncle Reggie came in first looking like he'd aged ten years since he’d left.
His hand was on Pops’s elbow like he was guiding a blind man.
Pops looked hollow. His shirt still covered in blood down the front.
His hands were trembling. His eyes were red and dry.
He walked into the room like he wasn't sure the floor would hold him.
None of us moved at first. Then Simone slid off my lap and ran straight to him, crying so hard again she could barely breathe. Tre followed, his face crumpling the second Pops’s arms went around him. Zion pushed up off the couch, and then I was moving too, though my legs felt made of lead.
We all ended up there. The four of us pressed against him.
His arms trying to gather all of us even though they weren't big enough to hold everything that had broken.
He cried into us repeating “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, babies. I should have heard her. I failed. I failed. I’m so sorry. My Niecy…” over and over until it sounded more like a prayer than an apology.
None of us said anything back. We just stood there, the five of us in the middle of the room, holding on to each other tight, like we could keep Mama with us if we just didn't let go.
Later I’d find out that Pops sat in the hospital triage room for hours holding her cold hand. Wouldn't let staff in. Wouldn't let the chaplain in. Wouldn't sign any paperwork. They had to call security to get him off her, so they could finally take her to the morgue.
People say time heals. For our father, time did the opposite.
The first thing I noticed was their bed.
He wouldn’t sleep in it. He left it the way she'd made it the morning she died, the comforter pulled tight, the four pillows arranged in the order she always kept them, two for him and two for her.
A throw blanket draped across the end of the bed.
He didn't move them, never pulled the covers back again.
He slept on the floor, on the rug beside their bed, on her side, with one of her robes bunched up under his head.
I went to wake him for the funeral and that's where I found him.
I went to wake him three weeks later, and that's where I found him then too.
He would never sleep in that bed without her again.
During the day he moved like he was walking through water.nNot really present. He'd sit at the kitchen table for hours, staring out the window at nothing. When one of us tried to talk to him, it was like he had to swim up from somewhere deep just to register the sound of our voices.