Chapter 4 - The Whispered Call at 10:40 P.M.
The floor seemed to drop out from beneath my feet.
The fluorescent lights of the hospital hallway buzzed violently in my ears. Around me, doctors were shouting orders, heart monitors were beeping, and an orderly was rushing past with a cart of sterile supplies, but all of it faded into a deafening, underwater roar.
"Nell," I said, my voice dropping an octave, razor-sharp with sheer panic. "Listen to me very carefully. Where is Aunt April?"
"I don't know," Nell whimpered. She was sobbing now, muffled, gasping breaths that sounded like she had her hand clamped over her mouth. "She left at five. She said she had an emergency catering gig downtown and she'd be back in an hour. But she didn't come back. Mom, the man outside... he keeps rattling the doorknob. He's yelling bad words. He kicked the screen door so hard the hook popped off."
A violent jolt of adrenaline shot through my veins, so intense it made my fingers tingle.
"Where are you right now?"
"In the hall closet," Nell whispered. "Under the winter coats. I have Max with me, but Henry and Abby are still asleep in their bunk beds. If I run out the front door, I can't carry all three of them, Mom. Am I allowed to leave them? What do I do? What do I do?"
*Am I allowed to leave if the little kids are still asleep?*
The question gutted me. My twelve-year-old baby was sitting in the dark beneath coats, weighing whether she should let herself be attacked or abandon three sleeping toddlers.
"Nell, do not hang up this phone. Do you hear me? Stay in that closet. Keep Max quiet. I am calling 911 on another line right now, and I am on my way."
I slammed the hospital landline into the cradle, whipped out my personal cell phone, and dialed 911 while running toward the staff locker room.
"Mercy Hospital ER, I need an immediate dispatch to 412 Maple Street," I barked into the phone as the dispatcher answered. "There is an active intruder attempting to break into the back door of a home where four children are completely alone. The oldest is twelve. The youngest is three. Send cars now!"
"Ma'am, officers are being dispatched. What is your relationship to—"
"I'm the mother! I'm driving there now!"
I didn't clock out. I didn't take off my scrubs. I grabbed my car keys, pushed open the double doors of the ambulance bay, and burst out into the freezing Pennsylvania rain.
The air outside was biting, sharp as broken glass. The freezing rain had turned the asphalt into an icy mirror. I slid twice just sprinting across the parking lot to my beat-up Honda Civic. My hands were shaking so violently that it took me three tries to jam the key into the ignition.
The engine sputtered, roared to life, and I slammed the transmission into reverse, the tires screeching against the wet pavement before catching traction.
Maple Street was seven miles away. On a dry afternoon, it was a fifteen-minute drive. On black ice, in the middle of a sleet storm, it was suicide.
I didn't care.
I drove with my high beams cutting through the driving sleet, wiping the fog off the windshield with the sleeve of my scrub top. My heart slammed against my ribs like a caged bird. *Please God, please God, keep her safe. Don't let that door break. Don't let that man get inside.*
As I sped onto the parkway, my phone connected via Bluetooth to the car’s speakers. I hit speed dial for April.
The phone rang.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Four times.
*“Hi, you’ve reached April! Leave a message and I’ll get back to you when I can!”*
"Pick up the goddamn phone, April!" I screamed at the windshield, slamming my palm against the steering wheel. I redialed immediately.
Ring. Ring. Ring. Voicemail.
Where was she? What kind of catering job lasted six hours when you had three babies at home? What kind of mother left an eight-year-old, a six-year-old, and a three-year-old in the sole care of a twelve-year-old girl in the middle of the night?
And then, like a lightning strike illuminating a pitch-black room, the ugly, horrifying truth crashed into my mind.
*Patricia.*
*“Nell isn't tutoring Gabe. Nell came to the library exhausted... She told me she could never finish her homework because the babies cried constantly and she had to bathe them.”*
The burnt food smell on Nell’s clothes.
The missing homework.
The purple bruises of exhaustion under her eyes.
The sudden panic when I brought up staying home alone.
April hadn't been watching Nell. Nell had been watching April’s children.
I had been paying my sister $350 a month—money I scraped together by skipping meals and working night shifts—to outsource her own motherhood to my middle-school daughter. And when Patricia Miller had offered Nell an escape, three hours of peace and a warm meal once a week, April had fabricated the tutoring lie to shut it down. Not because April was protecting Nell, but because without Nell, April couldn't leave her house!
A sob tore from my throat, raw and suffocating. The guilt hit me with the force of a physical blow. I had yelled at Patricia. I had threatened to call the police on a woman who had tried to save my daughter. I had forced Nell back into that house of unpaid servitude, scolding her for being ungrateful.
"I'm sorry, Nell," I wept as the Civic swerved across the slick lane markers, tires fighting the slush. "Mommy is so sorry. Hold on, baby. Just hold on."
I turned off the highway onto the steep, winding residential streets of our suburb. The trees hung low, weighed down by heavy ice, their branches groaning in the wind. The streetlights flickered in the storm.
Up ahead, through the curtain of sleet, I saw the flashing red and blue strobe lights reflecting off the snowdrifts on Maple Street.
Two police cruisers were parked diagonally across April’s front yard, their tires churning up mud and dead grass.
May you like
My heart jumped into my throat. I slammed on the brakes, the Civic skidding sideways before slamming its right tire against the curb directly behind the squad cars. I didn't even turn off the engine. I threw the door open and hit the icy asphalt running.
***
