Chapter 3 - The Shattering
Then it happened.
It wasn't a slow transition. Emily’s body went completely rigid in my arms, her fingers locking into the denim of my sleeves with a sudden, violent strength that ripped one of the metal buttons clean off the cuff.
Her head snapped back, her eyes rolling upward until only the whites showed beneath the yellow light. A sound came out of her throat—not a scream, but a low, wet groan like someone being hit in the ribs with an iron pipe.
Her knee buckled. Her right foot slid through the puddle of grey sink water, her weight dragging both of us down toward the linoleum. As she fell, her hip clipped the edge of the Formica counter, knocking a heavy stoneware plate—the last matching piece from her grandmother’s wedding service—directly off the drying rack.
The plate hit the floor three inches from her bare toes, exploding into a hundred white shards that skittered across the floor like dry bone fragments.
Crash.
"Emily!" I lunged forward, my knees hitting the hard tile with a force that sent a sharp pain through my patella. I caught her under the armpits, my arms straining against the dead weight of her eighty-month pregnancy, preventing the back of her skull from meeting the sharp iron corner of the stove door.
She was folded double on the floor, her face tucked into her knees, her hands clawing at her lower abdomen through the daisy-patterned blouse.
"It’s hard," she choked out, her breath coming in ragged, whistling gasps. "Ethan... the baby. Something’s turning... it feels like hot wire."
From the living room, through the quarter-inch gap in the warped door, the laughter didn't stop. It actually grew louder.
A woman on the television had just dropped a glass of champagne into a swimming pool, and Brittany’s high, musical giggle rose above the noise of the commercial.
"Did you hear that?" Kayla’s voice came through the wood, lazy and thick with grease. "She’s probably dropped the good butter dish again. That’s the second time this week. Ethan’s going to have to start buying her plastic cups from the dollar store."
"She’s clumsy because she doesn't move enough," Teresa’s voice followed, heavy with the authority of the sofa. "When you sit around all day waiting for the clock to turn, your ankles get loose. Go tell her to bring out some more napkins, Brittany. These chips are leaving grease on my sleeves."
A coldness that had nothing to do with the winter damp or the warehouse air settled into the center of my chest. It was a hard, white crystallization of everything I had been avoiding since I turned twenty-one.
"Turn off the TV," I shouted.
My voice didn't sound like mine. It sounded like the steam horn at the old grain elevator down by the docks—flat, iron, and carrying enough vibration to make the glass jars on the spice rack rattle against the wall.
The living room went quiet. Not the quiet of a house where people are checking on a disaster, but the wary, defensive silence of cattle when a strange dog enters the pasture.
The kitchen door was pushed open. My mother stood there. She was still holding the bag of chips in her left hand, her right fingers orange with spice dust. She looked down at Emily, who was lying in the broken stoneware, her face grey, her lips blue, her body shaking with an unyielding tremor.
"For God’s sake, Ethan," Teresa said, taking a slow bite of a chip. "What are you shouting for? You’ll wake the people on the third floor. If she’s got a stomachache from that leftover pork, give her some of the pink medicine from the bathroom. You don't need to make a scene in front of your sisters."
"Get out of the way, Ma," I said. I didn't look up at her. I was carefully clearing the large shards of grandmother’s porcelain away from Emily’s legs, my own hands getting cut on the edges without my feeling the sting.
"Don't you use that tone with me, Ethan James," she said, her voice dropping into that rhythmic, scolding register she’d used since I was seven years old. "I’m your mother. I’ve had four of you on this earth and I know what a practice contraction looks like. She’s just trying to get you to stay home from the weekend shift so you can sit by the bed and hold her hand. It’s a performance."
Brittany appeared behind her shoulder, her new phone still clutched in her hand like a small glass weapon. "Is she bleeding? If she’s not bleeding, she’s fine. My friend Jessica had these every Tuesday until her ninth month. It’s just gas from the cheese."
I didn't answer them. I slipped my left arm beneath Emily’s knees, my right arm behind her shoulders, and I lifted her off the floor.
The weight was tremendous—not because she was heavy, but because her body was completely rigid with a pain that wouldn't let go. Her head fell back against my shoulder, her dry lips moving silently against the fabric of my cardigan as if she were praying to someone who lived in the ceiling.
"Brittany," I said, my eyes locking onto my sister’s face until she actually took half a step back into the hallway. "Get the yellow bag from the closet by the door. The one with the baby clothes."
"I’m not your servant, Ethan," she muttered, but her voice had lost its high, musical finish. She looked at the blood on my knees—my own blood from the tile—and her thumb stopped moving on the screen.
"Get the bag," I repeated, and this time I didn't shout. The quietness of the words was worse than the horn.
My mother stayed in the center of the kitchen walkway, her wide, heavy hips blocking the exit to the main hall. "You’re overreacting, Ethan. You take her to the county hospital tonight and they’ll charge you five hundred dollars just for the admission sheet. Who’s going to pay that? Your sister’s car insurance is due on the fifteenth, and I told you the pharmacy wouldn't refill my heart pills until the balance from May was cleared."
I walked directly into her. I didn't stop, and I didn't shift Emily’s weight. My shoulder met my mother’s breastbone with a solid, fleshy bump that forced her back three feet into the living room rug.
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"Ethan!" she screamed, the chip bag dropping from her fingers and spilling its orange contents across the clean wool carpet Emily had vacuumed that morning. "You’re putting your hands on your mother? For her? After everything your father asked you to do?"
"She is my family, Ma," I said, my boots crushing the chips into the fiber of the rug as I moved toward the door. "The lease ends on the thirty-first. You have twenty days to find another place for the girls to watch television."
