Part 3 — One Frame Later
The deputy pressed play once more, and the next frame showed a hand and an arm, and then a face. Crystal. In the cream-colored cardigan she wore to church. Her hand was on my back, but not in the way I had feared in my worst nights. It was spread flat between my shoulder blades, steadying me, and her other hand gripped the sleeve of my nightgown as hard as it could.
I watched my own bare feet on the screen. I was sleepwalking, eyes open and seeing nothing, drugged to the gills on whatever she had put in my pill organizer. At the top of the stairs my knees folded. Crystal tried to hold me. She tried with both hands, and she was not strong enough. I saw my body slide out of her grip like a sack of flour.
On the screen Crystal ran down those stairs faster than I would have thought she could move. She knelt beside me, put her fingers on my neck, and took out her phone. Her voice came through the little speaker, thin and shaking. “Please send someone. My mother-in-law fell. I did not mean for this—” Then she stopped and wiped her face on the cardigan, and the clip ended.
Dale put his face in his hands. “You told me you were at the casino in Mulvane,” he said. “You told me Mom fell by herself.” Crystal did not answer. Her mouth was open and nothing came out. I understood then that this woman was not a monster in a story. She was an ordinary frightened person who had done terrible things in small steps, and the staircase was the place where the steps ran out.
The deputy was careful to explain what the video proved and what it did not. It did not show a woman who had pushed me. It showed a woman who had drugged me, left me in danger, and then lied to the doctors about how I came to be on the floor. The pills in the blue organizer had been tested at the state lab on Thursday. They were a strong sedative, never prescribed to me. The county attorney had already filed the charges.
A small glass eye had remembered every night that I was too drugged to remember myself. Opal came and stood beside me while the deputy talked. She was eighty years old in a flowered blouse, with her purse held in front of her like a shield, and she did not say I told you so. She only put her cool hand on my wrist and left it there.
Crystal pleaded guilty in January to mistreatment of a dependent adult, to theft, and to giving false information at the hospital. The judge sentenced her to three years in a state facility, followed by probation, and ordered full restitution: the $41,600, the Bronco, and the casino winnings she had hidden in a sock. Her friends from the salon did not write.
Dale moved out of my basement the same week. He came back on Saturdays to mow the lawn and fix the gutters, and he did not ask me for anything. Once, over a glass of iced tea, he said, “Mom, I should have asked why you were so tired.” I told him that I should have asked why I was so tired too. We sat on the porch and let the afternoon go by.
Pastor Glenn announced from the pulpit that every dollar in the offering plate would be returned to the giver. People came up after the service, some of them embarrassed, to get their twenties back. Most of them said no. They asked him to give it to Meals on Wheels instead, and he did. The total came to $2,340, and I think it was the happiest collection that church ever took.
My doctor weaned me off the sedatives slowly, over six weeks, with the patience of a woman who has seen it before. By Thanksgiving the fog had lifted. I could read whole chapters of a book without losing my place. I could remember what I had for breakfast and the names of the children who rode my bus in 1996. I could feel myself coming back, one room at a time.
On a clear morning in December I drove Route 9 one last time in my own car, just to see it. The elevators and the fields of stubble. The yellow stop sign by the creek where I never once missed a child. I pulled over at the old turnaround and sat with the engine off, and I let myself cry for the woman who drove that road for thirty-one years and for the one who was still learning how to be old.
The owl still sits on my bookshelf. Opal told me not to dust it, but I dust it every Saturday now, with a soft cloth, and I have decided that a woman is allowed to change her mind about a bird. Its glass eye is dark. I like to think it is resting, the way I am.
