The Missed Phone Call

THE MISSED PHONE CALL

by Linda Holbrook


I reached over to turn off the alarm clock. The intermittent ringing didn't stop. It was the phone. Never a good sign to have the phone ring at three AM. I stumbled over something that grumbled, the dog, on my way to the living room. It would really be nice to have a phone extension in the bedroom. 'Please don't let the ringing wake the kids I'll never get the little one back to sleep.'
Finally reaching the phone, I picked up the receiver and said "Hello," just as the line went dead and there was nothing but a dial tone. It must have been a wrong number.
I was the one grumbling as I made my way back to bed by the moonlit patches coming in through the windows. 'I hope I can get back to sleep.' I was just dozing off a few minutes later when I thought I heard the phone ring three times and stop. 'I hope someone isn't going to make a habit of this.' There were no more rings.
That was January fifth, the day my sister died.

#

Two days later, I was cooking a chicken dinner and my mother-in-law was up for dinner. She was playing with the kids while I was cooking. Our son was four and our daughter was two. My husband was setting the table for me. I always got nervous when my mother-in-law came for dinner. I was afraid that I would mess something up and she would think that her son, her only child, had married such a loser. I had very low self-esteem back then. This was in 1985.
Dinner was ready and we all sat down to eat. We were nearly finished when we heard a vehicle pull in the yard. My husband got up to look and said, "It's your Dad," so I got up to go greet him. When I got on the porch I noticed he wasn't alone. The town police chief, a family friend, was with him as well as my cousin. This was all very weird. My immediate thought was that something had happened to my Mom, as she wasn't well.
I met Dad on the porch and he put me in a bear hug and kept saying "she's gone, she's gone, Donna's gone." I looked at the police chief and he nodded. I was stunned, to say the least. I started shaking my head and keening the word 'no'. Dad just held me tight and we cried together.
When I could come up for air, I wanted answers. I'm that kind of person. "What happened?" I asked. I figured they'd say a car accident or something like that. But no, that's not what they said.
The police chief explained that she had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Her roommates found her today when they got back from a weekend trip.
I tried to process what he said but my head felt funny, everything turned gray in my vision and I thought I would throw up. My knees were weak. I collapsed onto the bench by the table... how did I get back in from the porch? My mother-in-law put a cold wet cloth on my forehead and the police chief told me to put my head down to my knees and take deep breaths. I guess I nearly passed out.
My baby girl knew something was not right and started to fuss in her high chair. My husband went to get her but she wanted Mommy, so he put her down and she toddled over to me and I swept her up in my arms and comforted her. Just holding my child did more to comfort me than anything else in the world could have at the moment in time.
I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of my little sister doing something like that to herself. We had talked on the phone about ten days before that and I hadn't picked up on anything being wrong other than she wasn't happy with her boyfriend and had thought she might break up with him. Maybe the breakup had happened and hadn't gone well and he had killed her and made it look like a suicide. I voiced this to the police chief and he assured me that it was a definite suicide.

#

The next day we left the children with a sitter and my Dad and I went to the police station in the city where my sister had lived to speak with the police officers who had investigated. Meanwhile, my husband, cousin, and mother-in-law went to the house where my sister had lived to clean up the scene as my Dad was adamant about going there. No one thought he should walk in and see that. I again asked the officers if they could have been mistaken, was there any way that could have been a staged scene and they assured us it was definitely a suicide.
I had been to my sister's place a couple times, but she had always entertained in the living room, I had never seen her bedroom. I did notice on the way in, two wine glasses in the sink and an empty wine bottle. I remember she had told me one time that her landlord, aka her boyfriend, kept a handgun in the house. I never dreamed she'd use it on herself.
Her room was neat and tidy, the bed was missing, otherwise, it looked like any other single twenty-four-year-olds bedroom. A George Strait cassette tape was in the player, her slippers that Dad had given her for Christmas were under the dresser right where she would have taken them off. Nothing was out of place. My mother-in-law assured me that everything was how they had found it except for the bed, which they had removed.
I didn't toss the room, but I desperately looked for a diary, a note, anything that would explain why she had done what she did. I just couldn't wrap my head around my sister and suicide. I came up empty, I found nothing. It was to remain an enigma that would eat away at me for years.

#

After all the arrangements had been made and we were riding north to the little town where Donna would be laid to rest, we stopped to pick up a couple newspapers for the obituary. We wanted to make sure that it had made it into the paper as requested. We had called it into the person at the obituary desk and had specifically made a point of saying that she had died suddenly at home. We did not want to announce to the world that she had died by means of suicide. We had assumed that since we paid for the obituary, our request for the wording would be honored.
When I opened the paper and read the words I grew sick to my stomach and angry. How dare they. They had printed that she had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. We were all stunned and my family looked to me as the guilty party as I had been the one to call it in. I assured them that it had not been called in that way and I did not know what had happened.
After the funeral, we called the Union Leader and inquired as to why this happened and found out that the person at the obituary desk noticed the age of my sister, and decided to investigate, found the police report, deemed it newsworthy and changed the obituary, then had the gall to bill us for it.
We went so far as to speak with a lawyer about suing the paper but decided not to as we didn't want to put the family through it all again and again. We wrote to the owner and asked for an apology, which we never got, but they did stop billing us for the obituary.

#

About two months after the funeral we got a late night phone call and it turned out to be Donna's boyfriend. I'd never met him and we'd never spoken before. How he got my number, I do not know. We talked about my sister for a couple hours. I think he was drunk.
After he hung up, I sat there in the moonbeams remembering that night when the phone had rung. If only I'd been quicker to get to the phone. If it was Donna I might have been able to talk her down off that precipice and back onto solid ground, so to speak. I would have dropped everything and gone to her if I'd known. If only I'd known...
I guess the moral of this story is never ignore a ringing phone. You never know who it is, well with cell phones now you do know, but you never know what they might need....