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She screamed I guess. Like she would every other night, “Oh God, we’re going to die.” Her voice is my lullaby. Or it was anyway, when she would sit with me before bedtime during that brief two years before my brother was born, and cover my feet and sing me to rest. I used to dream about the bed spinning and wake up to the glow-in-the-dark horses strung to the tops of my four-post bed and feel them encircling me, entrapping me. I was on a pinwheel and there was a gust of wind through my open window. So I flopped onto my belly and clung to my covers. The room kept spinning, but if I held on, the bed wouldn’t capsize, I wouldn’t be launched into the air out the window and onto the front lawn. I screamed, and she came running in, unwrapping me from the sheets that strangled my legs. She picked me up and brought me to the bathroom and sat me on the toilet. “Put your finger down your throat, like this.” She gagged, then I put my finger down my throat and I gagged, and we stayed in that bathroom, the two of us, coughing and gagging with our tongues hanging out until the weight in my chest, that steam engine in my ribcage, relaxed, and I freed myself from that pinwheel.

No one could tell what was wrong, so she says. My heart would flutter at night and a steam engine would travel along my spine and weigh down my insides. A phantom ailment; the doctor could not identify a cause. All he said was to stick a finger down my throat and gag myself until my heart slowed down. He recommended I use a no. 2 pencil if it happened during the school day.

Her voice did not move me. I felt the vibrations of her footsteps pounding down the hallway and I shifted my covers. Heard her open my brother’s door and tell him, “Alex, honey, your mother is having a heart attack”, and I sank into the mattress. When the blue and red flashes hit my eyes, I pulled the comforter up well over my face and hummed over the siren. “Your mother is going to the hospital now. I don’t know if I will be back.” My stomach crept up my throat. I didn’t breathe until I felt her footsteps pound down the staircase to greet the white uniforms at the front door.