She's gone

Mar 09, 2008 - 09:52 AM PST

Being twelve sucked, I thought. People acted around me like I was three still toddling around with a sippy cup. Random relatives would walk up to me and say in a voice that you use to talk to an infant.
“Don’t worry Kate, she’s up in heaven now” they would say pointing up to the sky hoping their faces showed an equal amount of grief and understanding. God, I hated their condescending tones as if I didn’t know what was going on. As if I was some fragile piece of porcelain sitting on top of a shelf just waiting to fall and crack into millions of tiny pieces. I was just as strong as everyone in this room. Probably more so because of the fact that I was there when they were off living their lives in towns too far away to even make a simple call to say hello to her.
“Yea, I know, she’s dead.” I would reply. It was all just so tiring, the dance that I kept having with my relatives being spun in circles by their selfishness of wanting to make themselves better by comforting me. Most of whom I hadn’t seen since my brother’s birth three years prior. Now that my grandmother was gone they acted as if they actually were part of my every day life. That they actually cared about how I felt, thought or cared at this moment in time.
What most of my relatives did not know was I was there when her body was found. It was a foggy Saturday morning around 10 o’clock. My mother was dropping me off for my weekly visit with her. My mother thought she was punishing me with these weekly visits to my grandmother’s house, but I actually liked going and spending some time with someone who could focus on me and not my younger siblings for once. I was really excited because this week she promised to show me how to make eggplant parmigiana like her mother showed her back when they lived in Italy.
Wearing my pajamas with the lucky clovers flying all over the place and my hair was up in messy pigtails because I had only woken minutes before we left. I was so impatient to learn the new recipe it seemed as if the wait between each floor on the elevator was years rather then seconds. I tapped my hand to the beat of the music that blared through the crackling speakers it was regular elevator music sung by five year olds. My grandmother lived in an assisted living facility so they tried to incorporate family in it in any way that they could. They figured if they heard young children that maybe they would call their families to come and visit them. Finally, there was a ding as I arrived at the fourth floor.
I didn’t hear music. Why didn’t I hear music? My Nanny, as I called her because when I was first learning to talk and couldn’t pronounce the Italian Nana, was famous for being the only person living in a assisted living community and receiving noise complaints. She loved to listen to Andrea Bocelli at full blast in complete Italian. I often wondered what he was saying in his lyrics, but the music was so beautiful that I dared not ask as it would take part of the magic of the sounds floating through the air away. She once got to see him live, and never before had I seen her so ecstatic. For weeks afterwards she would be caught daydreaming and singing in Italian. It wasn’t hard to imagine what she was thinking of.
I walked down the hallway to room 403. Still curious about why she wasn’t doing her daily ritual of listening to music, but she had been having a hard time getting to sleep at night and assumed that she was doing what I wished I was doing. Still sleeping away, dreaming sweet nothings. I stopped in front of her doorway and did my official two knocks before putting my key into the slot and turning the handle.
I slowly pushed the door ajar as to not wake her if she was sleeping. A lot of the time she would leave the door unlocked for me if she wanted to sleep in a little longer. The room was dark and stuffy. I turned on the kitchen light, switched the t.v. on, grabbed a bowl out of the cabinet, and a box of cereal of the counter.
“Hey, Nan don’t you think it’s about time to get your sleepy tush out of bed?”
I didn’t receive any sort of reply from her and just figured that I would give her another ten minutes. So, I sat and vegged out to the television. Saturday morning cartoons were on and I was watching Pepper Anne laughing at her silly antics while still waiting for her to wake up. Finally, out of pure boredom I decided to wake her up. I tapped her door a few times which usually always would awaken her from any slumber because she said my tapping was like an elephant stamping on the floor. Turning the doorknob I pressed open the door and switched on the light. I fainted.
A few seconds later I woke up in a frenzy looking for the phone. I was so freaked out I couldn’t find it searching all over the tiny apartment. How could the phone disappear I thought. It was right on the table where it belonged my panic caused me to not see it. This couldn’t be happening I thought. These things don’t happen to people my age, they just don’t.
“911 what’s your emergency?” I heard on the other end of the line.
“My, ummm, Grandma, is on the floor.” I said between gasps of breath.
“Is she breathing?” the lady on the other line asked in such a calm and cool tone it almost sounded bored.
“I don’t know. She doesn’t look right.”
“What do you mean she doesn’t look right? Do you see her chest rising at all honey?”
“No” I said as tears slowly escaped my eyes.
“Someone is on there way don’t worry okay.”
“uh huh”
“Is anyone there with you?”
“No”
There was a knock at the door. I just sat there looking at the door unable to move. The door was then opened and an EMT walked through it.
“Where is the emergency?”
It was such an easy question and yet no words would form. I slowly raised my arm and pointed at her door. A man, who appeared to be in his late twenties walked past me, followed by a woman a little older then him both with certain urgency in their step. They were in the room with her for what I would assume to be ten minutes or so, but felt like two seconds.
“Do you live here?” the lady asked.
“No I live down the road with my mom.”
“Can we have her phone number?”
“Sure, 5550238”
They walked into the hallway and called my mother. I slowly stood up and meandered into her bedroom. The EMT’s had pulled her sheet over her head. Even at my age I knew what that meant. I walked over to her and pulled the sheet down just enough to see her face. It was so different compared to any other time I had seen her. The color looked like it had seeped completely out of her entire body. My eyes were sore from sobbing so much, and nothing was left. Looking at her lifeless face and knowing that her life was over was draining and all I wanted to do was sleep.
My mom soon arrived looking as if a Mack truck had run over her face. The tracks where tears had fallen still remained criss-crossed her swollen red cheeks.
“Are you alright Kate?”
“What do you think? The one person in this family who really cared about me is gone.” I know that I sounded rude and callous, but couldn’t help it.
“Everything will be okay.” She said and tried to muster a smile that just didn’t work.
“Sure. Can we go now?”
“Yes, I’ll meet you in the car in a minute.”
For the last time I walked down the hallway with the peeling brown wallpaper to the elevator and out the front lobby to the car. I felt as if I was shell shocked. My whole world had shattered into pieces. Where would I be able to feel at home? This place was the only one that I could ever feel like myself without having to act differently than I wanted to. I know that I should feel at home in my parent’s house, but it just never happened for me. That was where I lived but, had never been my home. Her house was. I never did learn how to make chicken parmigiana.