“What?” she said sleepily.
No concern.
No question about where Emily or Noah were.
I gripped the phone harder.
“We’re at the hospital.”
Silence.
Then, “Why?”
I almost laughed.
It was the kind of laugh that comes when anger is too large to fit inside your body.
“Why?” I repeated.
“I found Emily unconscious.
Noah has a fever.”
My mother exhaled sharply.
“She was fine yesterday.”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“You weren’t here, Ethan.”
That sentence stunned me.
Exactly.
I wasn’t there.
I had depended on her.
Behind my mother’s voice, I heard Ashley asking something.
Then she came onto the call.
“Is Noah okay?”
“You heard him crying for four days.”
“He’s a baby.”
“He could barely cry when I found him.”
Ashley went quiet.
I closed my eyes.
“What did you do while I was gone?”
Mom took the phone again.
“Don’t start accusing us.
Emily wouldn’t listen.
She wanted to stay in bed.
The baby kept crying.
We did what we could.”
I remembered the living room.
The pizza boxes.
The Coke bottles.
The blankets beneath the cold air-conditioning.
Then I remembered the bedroom.
There had been no pile of takeout containers beside Emily.
No bottles of water within her reach that I could remember seeing.
Only stale diapers, damp bedding, and that terrible smell.
“The doctor called the police,” I said.
My mother’s breathing changed.
It was tiny, almost nothing.
But I heard it.
“Why would she do that?”
“I think you know why.”
I ended the call.
A police officer arrived not long afterward.
He did not storm into the hospital or put anyone in handcuffs.
He simply asked questions.
That almost made it worse.
Calm questions leave nowhere for panic to hide.
He asked me to describe exactly what I had seen when I entered the house.
